You take the test among the ferns and rosebushes
and breathe the aroma as around the pond the music plays,
the piano sonatina that propels your thought patterns
to the speed of turbochargers. Happily your nerve-ends
do not fuse as they might had you been attacked with nerve-gas.
The rapidity with which the manuscripts
will be returned, the envelope flipped open
and the pages stuffed into the self-addressed
stamped envelope supplied with the manuscript.
How often does this take place at a given hour.
Whenever the light turns green, not most of the time.
The flowers in the park more often bloom than
someone finds fault with what you've sent them.
O sorry, this doesn't suit us now, good luck elsewhere.
A police car flashing lights at a southerly exit.
They're catching reckless drivers. Yesterday, two days ago,
an accident occurred, with at least three vehicles
near the sign shop on a corner across from this place,
and they swept the curb after the cars were towed,
no evidence of teh safety glass that broke into even,
predictabler fragments, like oversized sand-grains
and from a vantage of four stories the bent hoods
looked like the parts of Marx toys or folded tinfoil,
not the kind that would be used on foil cylinders
for recording brass bands (piano in those days, the 90s,
was impossible). In fact, the curb where the accident was
has never been cleaner since. Happy accident then.
Without the accident, the curb wouldn't have been so clean.
They missed the ink jet printer with the eight-foot carriage in the shop,
which can print giant signs and billboards or decals
at the customer's specification. A medium without the message.
Idleness, apathy, envy, contempt--these are the emotions.
Scorn engenders indifference. Bad fortune engenders envy.
People can live together, even understand one another in conditional ways
when they're relaxed, watching television or arranging flowers.
A man with an earring and gray hair discusses the war
with my mother at the check-out counter and mentions how
his masters degree in science cannot get him a job.
In which ear did the gray-haired man with the masters
degree in computer science wear the ring?
What kind of ring did the man wear? Was the hair
a salt and pepper gray or did it border on shocks of white?
Mountains of mail that accumulate like corn-stalks
which belong in the compost. A compote being
suspended between a gelatin dessert and a jam.
An opium compote a variant of dessert
distilled for paragoric or cough medicine.
The redness of poppies on the Aegean from the blood
spilled for them.
As the gold of the ears of wheat that carpet the plains
and make the people, descendants of pioneers armed with little more
than spelling primers, wary of the ten-diollar word.
Don't let them infect my garden, no sir. Get the Raid
from the shed, which will outlive me, as the equity will climb
sky-high.
What the counselor wished to say was
all the effort leading to sterile or negative results
plainly resolves itself into something good eventually
that you can tell your grandchildren if you have them
as I do. Make sure to insert the term successful everywhere.
Fill the larder with canned goods before the siege.
Water the wine. Draw buckets from a well.
Don't touch your bank account and freeze your assets.
Of course she is free to say that brighter skies are coming.
A journal exercise reduced to spleen-venting.
The ponderous writer whose face seemed frozen in a frown,
even as he disembarked from a motorbike, and whose characters
when lost in thought bit their upper lip--
a housewife, her father, the newspaper boy with the Huffy bicycle flinging Grit over the fence--
when confronted with a moral dilemna (shall I tell or no?)
they bite their upper lip as if they came from the same family, a family of men perhaps,
who in a remote past clubbed one another, pillaged the caves and groves of the enemy,
stomped demonstrably upon their hunting grounds, but now, almost hairless and refined,
their skin like alabaster or parchment and their brains enlarged,
bite their upper lip when in anxiety, whereas others, from other planets perhaps,
scratch their heads or wring their hands. But those gestures are for other authors, other tribes. Swig the glass by the pool, Henry, and bring me another one too.
She's just a kid but she's sure sweet and delicious, I'd like to get a hold of her and squeeze, he said, under the influence of another double bourbon.
He love wrecking his brain and blurring the detail, breaking into a sweat
adn losing eyesight and hearing wouldn't detain him--he loved the feeling as the numbness and the warmth crept over him so he could sink into himself like an anumal will sink into his burrow, having eaten either his offspring or his feces.
God damnit, it sure feels good--don't knock it until you've tried it, son.
Innumerable subplots murmur here for the asking. Tireless kobolds can be faintly heard,
cobbling the plots together--crises, seizures, sweaty rages, monologues of love or agitated set speeches. A smell of soup, cologne, and musty body odor.
Let me drink kerosene from a glass slipper: let every liquor that burns my throat purge me of my hubris.
Clusters of fragmented glass swept carefully
towards the curb from teh same street
A cotton wad, a long cloud frowning
the unsightly lavender of the setting winter sun
.....................
1/31/04
How dry the weather has been; my fingers crackle from the static electricity: there hasn't been snowfall in over a month. The salt and mud on the vehicles has become clay-like, kaolin-white dust. The clouds are elongated, icy looking. In the sunset they turn lavender. Fewer starlings appear on the ledge: one or two I shoo away. But fewer than last year. Nightfall must arrive at 4:30, or even later? Mars looks like desert without the amenities of the prickly cactus. Before I begin work I must watch a film on safety. The mid-winter doldrums. An uneventful stasis.
Landscape, the human figure dethroned, decentered. On Mars, an undifferentiated flatness, dust, some bedrock, more often miles and miles of iron-ruddy rocks smaller than the ones stonesmasons call dog-killers. So in that case there aren't even geographical landmarks unless the explorer probes a mountain or the ridge of a large crater or perhaps that canyon that lashes across the surface like a scar. So the landscape available is even more denuded of possible focal points such as nymphs, dryads, shepherds, crotches of streams, groves, single trees, cattle, fences for cattle, things that cross or intervene, or mark a threshold, or suggest a possible direction to be taken, say a road or valley.
Mars is the ultimate landscape because the eye isn't being called to attention towards anything, and thus it looks computer-generated-- a band of sky, a band of red soil with small rockss with little to distinguish one from another, their fractures random, uncalled for, there only because they can be there, just as those desktop screen-savers generate uncountable geometrical shapes from an algorithm, Rube Goldberg pipes or Piranesi rooms or Rubik's cubes that gradually fatten into parti-colored basketballs.
(Two complete journal entries dating from late January 2004.)
Saturday, September 26, 2009
1/24/04 (more worthless crap)
The conductor had a reputation for a salty tongue
which he used to lash performers on occasions.
Andante, the violinists were as busy as bees,
African ones, crawling up the noxious corridors
of Galveston or Louisiana, or straddling derricks,
the multiple shafts pounding the soil to agitated
molecules resembling those upon a tea-cozy.
He ripped the ornaments from the cheap suit of this fantasia
and for free! From the goodness of his heart. Are you
kidding? Think of the emotional-psychological price paid.
That nothing has happened doesn't mean that nothing
will happen. Disappointment is unmet by pleasant surprises.
Check the hardness of the coin by clamping it with your teeth.
The faint canine markings will indicate a counterfeit.
Night music that ushers in a weekend afternoon. You've slept
too late for all your life. The sun's been up, the shoots sprouted.
People have come together: they own and don't rent. A blob
of semen seems to become ash within seconds (meditations).
The manure becomes the fragrance of perfumes and aerosol sprays.
Soon the flower garden's a salad strewn upon
someone's flagstone steps. Keep out, says the white sign,
the picket fence beside the sign. But I hardly go
there anymore anyway. All your life the sun's been up
and you never knew it. When did you leave the yard?
When did you ever have one?
which he used to lash performers on occasions.
Andante, the violinists were as busy as bees,
African ones, crawling up the noxious corridors
of Galveston or Louisiana, or straddling derricks,
the multiple shafts pounding the soil to agitated
molecules resembling those upon a tea-cozy.
He ripped the ornaments from the cheap suit of this fantasia
and for free! From the goodness of his heart. Are you
kidding? Think of the emotional-psychological price paid.
That nothing has happened doesn't mean that nothing
will happen. Disappointment is unmet by pleasant surprises.
Check the hardness of the coin by clamping it with your teeth.
The faint canine markings will indicate a counterfeit.
Night music that ushers in a weekend afternoon. You've slept
too late for all your life. The sun's been up, the shoots sprouted.
People have come together: they own and don't rent. A blob
of semen seems to become ash within seconds (meditations).
The manure becomes the fragrance of perfumes and aerosol sprays.
Soon the flower garden's a salad strewn upon
someone's flagstone steps. Keep out, says the white sign,
the picket fence beside the sign. But I hardly go
there anymore anyway. All your life the sun's been up
and you never knew it. When did you leave the yard?
When did you ever have one?
Friday, September 18, 2009
Mar. 27 03 draft nota bene
Christine Amanpour
Real-time mastery of battle-space
segues to glittery, bejeweled beauty
of green auras around the dimmest lights
exploded views of incendiary devices
concealed in cane-brake, depth charges
that bring the river-trout to surface
a fountain without exactitude
of spigots trained on one illuminated point.
Reporters aren’t poets armed with Guggenheims
to write about Italian fountains
or art that tames the wild
rocking on flat-bottomed boats,
their gear intact among the bulrushes,
the satellite dishes
pinging their missives to the anchorman
in invisible binary bits and bleeps,
a dish that trains all scattered impulses
into glowing ash-heaps or emerald brilliance
An ice queen with a faintly Persian resonance
to her surname, but still assimilated
to Occidental values, opposes Ostrogoths
below the tan-line, their Hammurabic practices–
From whence comes her faint smirk
other than from scorn for those satrapies
who blew their rams'-horns or sacrificed their sons.
Real-time mastery of battle-space
segues to glittery, bejeweled beauty
of green auras around the dimmest lights
exploded views of incendiary devices
concealed in cane-brake, depth charges
that bring the river-trout to surface
a fountain without exactitude
of spigots trained on one illuminated point.
Reporters aren’t poets armed with Guggenheims
to write about Italian fountains
or art that tames the wild
rocking on flat-bottomed boats,
their gear intact among the bulrushes,
the satellite dishes
pinging their missives to the anchorman
in invisible binary bits and bleeps,
a dish that trains all scattered impulses
into glowing ash-heaps or emerald brilliance
An ice queen with a faintly Persian resonance
to her surname, but still assimilated
to Occidental values, opposes Ostrogoths
below the tan-line, their Hammurabic practices–
From whence comes her faint smirk
other than from scorn for those satrapies
who blew their rams'-horns or sacrificed their sons.
Feb. 20 03
(In Other Words, Everything I Touch Confirms My Flaws)
Power cables leap above access roads upon which live the pious
among yards of rusting flat-bed trucks brushed by ferns in early spring,
the ground beside them spongy with spaghum moss or pine needles.
The wind through the trees is very damp, and deep within the woods
are conceived yearlings that will leap into the roads by June,
while cables that pylons bolster cross rural counties
connecting to transformer stations coils of lovely copper wire
wound more precisely than buns of hair on fastidious church ladies
from which the cables travel to and fro above the humble abodes
with their canoes and rusting trucks with plastic pools or swings
or abandoned school buses with windows broken and punctured tires
slanting into bogs or marshy soil. You also think of spring
as you watch those vehicles corrode, the layers of paint
unpeeled by neglect or fire, surfaces scaled and coruscated
as walls of abandoned foundries on which constantly trickle
from corrugated tin roofs and rotted beams the aftermath
of rain or melting snow. It’s already spring in one’s head:
you melt as does the snow. But the thaw has been postponed,
the salty flats [covered] with a layer of half-ice, half-slush,
the pylons leap-frogging one another above grass either
golden as Illinois wheat or dull-brown as an unwanted mutt
baying at full moons in a junkyard, its proprietor lost
in deliriums of drink inside a shack concealed behind empty barrels
and the zinc-scaled disconnected parts of a ventilation system
that in its prime breathed upon its tenants the mold-laced air
and dust of space that, regardless of origin, swirls desultorily
before the faces of matrons with someone over for tea and fruit-cake,
the woollen chair-backs trapping dander beneath ancestral portraits
and die-stamped seascapes in which the breaking waves defy physics
as they race the land, a promontory absent picnickers bedecked
in 19th century finery and toting baskets more suitable
for balls of yarn and darning needles than the food one takes
to the seaside. Someone has painted himself in a corner here,
and wishes a window could be cracked, that the radiator
wasn’t adjusted so high, wilting the wild-flowers and Joe Pye weed
on the windowsill, the junkyard dust spinning in discrete columns
of sunlight, more than several motes instead of dried-up apples
to the eye. So one has written oneself into the circumstances
one has begun and filled in to the very last detail.
Power cables leap above access roads upon which live the pious
among yards of rusting flat-bed trucks brushed by ferns in early spring,
the ground beside them spongy with spaghum moss or pine needles.
The wind through the trees is very damp, and deep within the woods
are conceived yearlings that will leap into the roads by June,
while cables that pylons bolster cross rural counties
connecting to transformer stations coils of lovely copper wire
wound more precisely than buns of hair on fastidious church ladies
from which the cables travel to and fro above the humble abodes
with their canoes and rusting trucks with plastic pools or swings
or abandoned school buses with windows broken and punctured tires
slanting into bogs or marshy soil. You also think of spring
as you watch those vehicles corrode, the layers of paint
unpeeled by neglect or fire, surfaces scaled and coruscated
as walls of abandoned foundries on which constantly trickle
from corrugated tin roofs and rotted beams the aftermath
of rain or melting snow. It’s already spring in one’s head:
you melt as does the snow. But the thaw has been postponed,
the salty flats [covered] with a layer of half-ice, half-slush,
the pylons leap-frogging one another above grass either
golden as Illinois wheat or dull-brown as an unwanted mutt
baying at full moons in a junkyard, its proprietor lost
in deliriums of drink inside a shack concealed behind empty barrels
and the zinc-scaled disconnected parts of a ventilation system
that in its prime breathed upon its tenants the mold-laced air
and dust of space that, regardless of origin, swirls desultorily
before the faces of matrons with someone over for tea and fruit-cake,
the woollen chair-backs trapping dander beneath ancestral portraits
and die-stamped seascapes in which the breaking waves defy physics
as they race the land, a promontory absent picnickers bedecked
in 19th century finery and toting baskets more suitable
for balls of yarn and darning needles than the food one takes
to the seaside. Someone has painted himself in a corner here,
and wishes a window could be cracked, that the radiator
wasn’t adjusted so high, wilting the wild-flowers and Joe Pye weed
on the windowsill, the junkyard dust spinning in discrete columns
of sunlight, more than several motes instead of dried-up apples
to the eye. So one has written oneself into the circumstances
one has begun and filled in to the very last detail.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
1/31/05
1.
Dorothy, lost as Ruth among the alien corn,
weeps beneath a sign that points to Oz or Kansas,
Toto in her arms. In this generic city background
of building blocks, every window-ledge is blank--except
that flower-pots sprout generic flowers without leaves.
2.
The lion metamorphosed into some gentle-giant biker,
a golden mop standing in for his lion’s mane.
His beer can crushed in one paw, he sports tattoos
on the uniformly golden skin of his human forearms.
Lions are nothing but miserable in their cages.
What leonine eye in a zoo is not rheumy?
3.
The gold that blows away
with stocks and bonds becomes the straw
that fills the scarecrow in the cornfield
who is the artist and whose name sprawls
across the brick road in the painting
scuffed with the feet of pilgrims.
Jokers in cornfields have hoisted
ski-masks on scarecrows in Freddy Kruger pranks.
Real guignol theater begins with the animals:
the Orinoco croc that chews on gator
down-scales to mites infesting honeybees to death.
Take the Serengetti then. Take real-time lions
who cannibalize their dead once downed
by gunshot wounds or greed that drives them into trees
to steal an eland a solitary leopard caught rightfully,
then fall to break their backs. All that effort.
Property-as-theft's the way of gods and wizards.
Get the blood and body of another, consume its virtue.
Across from the Oz sequence, a giant lobster
drops tinier humans in a roiling pot:
kill the meat yourself. Why not drag children
through abattoirs after the field-trip to the dairy?
4.
Lions kill, don’t eat hyena. Not a hyena in sight.
Scary shit-eaters to this day, the oldest creodont,
whose grin is our human smile's remotest ancestor,
their stomach acids eat through cartilage and watch-spring.
Their grin reminds, and flashes teeth back.
Try to find the stuffed hyaenid in Toys ‘R Us.
5.
?
Dorothy, lost as Ruth among the alien corn,
weeps beneath a sign that points to Oz or Kansas,
Toto in her arms. In this generic city background
of building blocks, every window-ledge is blank--except
that flower-pots sprout generic flowers without leaves.
2.
The lion metamorphosed into some gentle-giant biker,
a golden mop standing in for his lion’s mane.
His beer can crushed in one paw, he sports tattoos
on the uniformly golden skin of his human forearms.
Lions are nothing but miserable in their cages.
What leonine eye in a zoo is not rheumy?
3.
The gold that blows away
with stocks and bonds becomes the straw
that fills the scarecrow in the cornfield
who is the artist and whose name sprawls
across the brick road in the painting
scuffed with the feet of pilgrims.
Jokers in cornfields have hoisted
ski-masks on scarecrows in Freddy Kruger pranks.
Real guignol theater begins with the animals:
the Orinoco croc that chews on gator
down-scales to mites infesting honeybees to death.
Take the Serengetti then. Take real-time lions
who cannibalize their dead once downed
by gunshot wounds or greed that drives them into trees
to steal an eland a solitary leopard caught rightfully,
then fall to break their backs. All that effort.
Property-as-theft's the way of gods and wizards.
Get the blood and body of another, consume its virtue.
Across from the Oz sequence, a giant lobster
drops tinier humans in a roiling pot:
kill the meat yourself. Why not drag children
through abattoirs after the field-trip to the dairy?
4.
Lions kill, don’t eat hyena. Not a hyena in sight.
Scary shit-eaters to this day, the oldest creodont,
whose grin is our human smile's remotest ancestor,
their stomach acids eat through cartilage and watch-spring.
Their grin reminds, and flashes teeth back.
Try to find the stuffed hyaenid in Toys ‘R Us.
5.
?
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
9/1/02
He wakes at night to write his verses down,
and then he shares them with the Rotarians.
His rhyming ineptitude can still amaze.
The local papers do a feature on him.
From this he gets more engagements, opines
on Catcher in the Rye (just about a spoiled brat).
The notebook in which he scribbles
his verses is pocket-sized. He memorizes quotes,
telling his students to do the same,
but do you think they really listen?
Sometimes he's forced to take the dolts from shop class
and make them do a proper business letter.
There is little hope they will ever leave
a roughly ten-mile perimeter.
Sure, the quarterback will get a break
and live to sell cars at the local Ford dealer.
Otherwise everyone is a total disappointment.
and then he shares them with the Rotarians.
His rhyming ineptitude can still amaze.
The local papers do a feature on him.
From this he gets more engagements, opines
on Catcher in the Rye (just about a spoiled brat).
The notebook in which he scribbles
his verses is pocket-sized. He memorizes quotes,
telling his students to do the same,
but do you think they really listen?
Sometimes he's forced to take the dolts from shop class
and make them do a proper business letter.
There is little hope they will ever leave
a roughly ten-mile perimeter.
Sure, the quarterback will get a break
and live to sell cars at the local Ford dealer.
Otherwise everyone is a total disappointment.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Backward Masking Unmasked (11/27/01)
3.
How many messages have I missed, beamed back to me,
because I haven't been here, and the answering machine
wasn't plugged in? Systems of the leaf, of powerlines,
unmediated woods beaten back. Why do they pipe the milk
to dairies like lymph? Wouldn't that be easier
than trucking it in? Where are those rivers of milk
we were promised? Fruits that surprise us
dropping into our hands? finding themselves there,
which never need to be peeled, or plucked from the vine?
How almost voluntarily the flesh segments itself,
allows itself to break with hardly a tear of tissue
or slicing of rind? as if surgery could be done with bare hands,
every ailing organ manipulated to re-assume its harmonious
position in the system? Rivers of milk supposed to pour
above us--we can bathe in it. Look how it breaks on rocks
on which maybe a grey owl peeks, looking for rats or voles,
fanning out in counter-currents on the other side to rejoin itself.
The reign of felicity is when all this will happen.
2.
With an audible crack I slap the receiver in the cradle
whenever the taped message repeats itself about the time-share
or the lakeside two God's-little-acres. I crack the headset
in the cradle when the taped message repeats itself about
the time shares, two weeks a year for the rest of your life.
I calculate what this time-share would be like could I live forever
then dream that I have come for my time-share at the end of time.
And haven't I paid for the privilege? The lodge has gone through several managers.
Only I was left, amid the ice and mist, or was it after fire?
For two weeks of the year I'd made plenty of friends there.
We kidded the live ones about health scares, or said how good we looked.
I'd gone through enough, seen a city vanish in a plume of water,
witnessed its facades become unrecognizable, and the friends
who'd been strangers became familiar ghosts from lengthy unacquaintance,
but at least I had lived in a world of constants, a single high-rise here,
a hillside with well-groomed paths there, the same hedges or their descendants,
or two brothers, one who followed the other a polite distance during anger
but walked abreast in reconciliation, no matter how long had lasted the grudge,
love must have lasted longer. Would they die in one another's arms?
1.
I am somewhere on a high hill, counting the daisies, and am happy,
happy that I count the daisies, and that I live on the high hill.
Sometimes I go to my friend's house to play. Sometimes they are gone.
Or they are in their house at dinner time, but are not friends anymore.
Sometimes they are there, and when they are, they tell me go ahead and eat.
I will work on a dairy farm someday although I am afraid of cows.
In the road around the house is a deer, some bulldozers, and the sun
telling everyone to be happy, and plants that are special
just as I am special. Special is to not be with the others.
How many messages have I missed, beamed back to me,
because I haven't been here, and the answering machine
wasn't plugged in? Systems of the leaf, of powerlines,
unmediated woods beaten back. Why do they pipe the milk
to dairies like lymph? Wouldn't that be easier
than trucking it in? Where are those rivers of milk
we were promised? Fruits that surprise us
dropping into our hands? finding themselves there,
which never need to be peeled, or plucked from the vine?
How almost voluntarily the flesh segments itself,
allows itself to break with hardly a tear of tissue
or slicing of rind? as if surgery could be done with bare hands,
every ailing organ manipulated to re-assume its harmonious
position in the system? Rivers of milk supposed to pour
above us--we can bathe in it. Look how it breaks on rocks
on which maybe a grey owl peeks, looking for rats or voles,
fanning out in counter-currents on the other side to rejoin itself.
The reign of felicity is when all this will happen.
2.
With an audible crack I slap the receiver in the cradle
whenever the taped message repeats itself about the time-share
or the lakeside two God's-little-acres. I crack the headset
in the cradle when the taped message repeats itself about
the time shares, two weeks a year for the rest of your life.
I calculate what this time-share would be like could I live forever
then dream that I have come for my time-share at the end of time.
And haven't I paid for the privilege? The lodge has gone through several managers.
Only I was left, amid the ice and mist, or was it after fire?
For two weeks of the year I'd made plenty of friends there.
We kidded the live ones about health scares, or said how good we looked.
I'd gone through enough, seen a city vanish in a plume of water,
witnessed its facades become unrecognizable, and the friends
who'd been strangers became familiar ghosts from lengthy unacquaintance,
but at least I had lived in a world of constants, a single high-rise here,
a hillside with well-groomed paths there, the same hedges or their descendants,
or two brothers, one who followed the other a polite distance during anger
but walked abreast in reconciliation, no matter how long had lasted the grudge,
love must have lasted longer. Would they die in one another's arms?
1.
I am somewhere on a high hill, counting the daisies, and am happy,
happy that I count the daisies, and that I live on the high hill.
Sometimes I go to my friend's house to play. Sometimes they are gone.
Or they are in their house at dinner time, but are not friends anymore.
Sometimes they are there, and when they are, they tell me go ahead and eat.
I will work on a dairy farm someday although I am afraid of cows.
In the road around the house is a deer, some bulldozers, and the sun
telling everyone to be happy, and plants that are special
just as I am special. Special is to not be with the others.
10/13/01
You were something of a village outcast, but you were sweet,
and brought me figs in the morning and grapes and cakes in the evening.
We watched the river undulate through apple orchards and overstep the canals.
Once,you handled a little toy elephant and made its trunk move with your fingers.
I suspended my disbelief until it seemed the real thing, lurching down to me
through the canebrake. But you just giggled and threw yourself into my arms.
We knew the old religion had died into embers barely aglow,
that the severity of its terms had fought the silver-haired apostates to a standstill.
Once, with a rifle, a gift from the most high, I charged a parapet on my own
and stumbled into a gaggle of mice. Pink and almost blind, they had nested in the gun-mounts.
There were little cubbies in the walls where the prisoners were taken
and doused with brine and crabs, as in the old days: the more
it changes, the more it stays the same. I can only guess
how many casualties we had. I saw the wheelbarrows and the trenches.
A limping elder dressed in brown rags touted firewood in a wheelbarrow,
the amazing thing: it had no wheels upon it.
The premium for peace I thought was a paper flower in a buttonhole
not wads of cash. Surely a phase of collective incrimination will follow.
and brought me figs in the morning and grapes and cakes in the evening.
We watched the river undulate through apple orchards and overstep the canals.
Once,you handled a little toy elephant and made its trunk move with your fingers.
I suspended my disbelief until it seemed the real thing, lurching down to me
through the canebrake. But you just giggled and threw yourself into my arms.
We knew the old religion had died into embers barely aglow,
that the severity of its terms had fought the silver-haired apostates to a standstill.
Once, with a rifle, a gift from the most high, I charged a parapet on my own
and stumbled into a gaggle of mice. Pink and almost blind, they had nested in the gun-mounts.
There were little cubbies in the walls where the prisoners were taken
and doused with brine and crabs, as in the old days: the more
it changes, the more it stays the same. I can only guess
how many casualties we had. I saw the wheelbarrows and the trenches.
A limping elder dressed in brown rags touted firewood in a wheelbarrow,
the amazing thing: it had no wheels upon it.
The premium for peace I thought was a paper flower in a buttonhole
not wads of cash. Surely a phase of collective incrimination will follow.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Offerings (8/3/09)
A conference room doubles as a tomb for public offerings. You'd think there'd be an altar where the victim-initiate-corporate counsel-or-principal stockholder would have his commodious member pierced with the quill of a porcupine, his blood to flow down a groove in a pink granite trough to pool into an inkwell for the final signing, the fainting victim ushered on a stretcher to recuperate in the finest of hospitals, assuming trauma from excessive blood loss didn't kick in, impairing the faculties of the man-god. No fear: before the ceremony he was well-feted, wined and dined.
His bold decisions and thoughts-outside-the-box were advertised in several self-help books, and in paler imitations and one-offs that are the highest kind of flattery. His name had been attached to a weight-loss and exercise book, and a cookbook for quick but healthy nouveau cuisine. The Aspen Institute had contracted him to utter platitudes about saving the African poor via market innovation; Charlie Rose had stared across the roundtable like the maitre'd he was.
Yet nothing had prepared him for this ultimate challenge. Now he lay in his hospital bed, blanched and withered violet, such an unsuitable end to this executive-cum-corporate raider-cum mountain climber-sky diver-daredevil-philanthropist. In the semi-retirement he'd thought he'd been entitled to enjoy, he'd opened a chain of gyms and a discount furniture store.
Where was the mystique now? his member swaddled in cotton gauze changed all too seldomly by the male nurse practitioners chosen to preclude any life-threatening tumescence. Here he was, Prometheus without a liver to peck. Then yes: idea, light in brain! A personal memoir about his crawl to recovery, although some details, the more embarassing ones at least, would need to be suppressed quietly.
His bold decisions and thoughts-outside-the-box were advertised in several self-help books, and in paler imitations and one-offs that are the highest kind of flattery. His name had been attached to a weight-loss and exercise book, and a cookbook for quick but healthy nouveau cuisine. The Aspen Institute had contracted him to utter platitudes about saving the African poor via market innovation; Charlie Rose had stared across the roundtable like the maitre'd he was.
Yet nothing had prepared him for this ultimate challenge. Now he lay in his hospital bed, blanched and withered violet, such an unsuitable end to this executive-cum-corporate raider-cum mountain climber-sky diver-daredevil-philanthropist. In the semi-retirement he'd thought he'd been entitled to enjoy, he'd opened a chain of gyms and a discount furniture store.
Where was the mystique now? his member swaddled in cotton gauze changed all too seldomly by the male nurse practitioners chosen to preclude any life-threatening tumescence. Here he was, Prometheus without a liver to peck. Then yes: idea, light in brain! A personal memoir about his crawl to recovery, although some details, the more embarassing ones at least, would need to be suppressed quietly.
Untitled (8/28/09)
These harmless spindly winged creatured
dance and scuttle on the bathroom walls
lacking pincers or appendages for harm --
would be better off among the plant kingdom.
Alas there's bath-water, but where's food?
A mystery how they dance about, their legs
barely landing on tile, machines more intricate
than any time-piece, but bound to pass
within the hour, ephemerids after all
spawned among dank stones of the crawlspace--
too swift to be identified in a field guide
before they're flushed limp down a drain.
dance and scuttle on the bathroom walls
lacking pincers or appendages for harm --
would be better off among the plant kingdom.
Alas there's bath-water, but where's food?
A mystery how they dance about, their legs
barely landing on tile, machines more intricate
than any time-piece, but bound to pass
within the hour, ephemerids after all
spawned among dank stones of the crawlspace--
too swift to be identified in a field guide
before they're flushed limp down a drain.
Yes, you that's who (8/29/09)
Your computer sound is on
and I can hear its voices
or perhaps they do not come
from your machine at all
you are writing some code
that to me is cryptic
I can hear the speakers beep
as you press ENTER
and press several times
in the space of a minute
how many events occur
in a single space alone
one encounters insight
another great dejection
as an ephemerid crawls
cut are the grass-blades
that fall on the ephemerid
and that lawnmower noise
drowns out the one next door
until the lawn care stops
and the bus rolls to the curb
as you bite into a sandwich
and alas the ride is free
alack you've missed it.
and I can hear its voices
or perhaps they do not come
from your machine at all
you are writing some code
that to me is cryptic
I can hear the speakers beep
as you press ENTER
and press several times
in the space of a minute
how many events occur
in a single space alone
one encounters insight
another great dejection
as an ephemerid crawls
cut are the grass-blades
that fall on the ephemerid
and that lawnmower noise
drowns out the one next door
until the lawn care stops
and the bus rolls to the curb
as you bite into a sandwich
and alas the ride is free
alack you've missed it.
C (8/29/09)
Carol Secunda, wasp-waisted,
where are you? Do you perform
in public school plays,
or after-dinner theater?
Are there car commercials
where you stand in lots
with a sign that claims
insane price cuts, act now?
And do you smile in them,
or scowl insatiably,
lights and cameras off?
where are you? Do you perform
in public school plays,
or after-dinner theater?
Are there car commercials
where you stand in lots
with a sign that claims
insane price cuts, act now?
And do you smile in them,
or scowl insatiably,
lights and cameras off?
Din (8/29/09)
Remember S&H Green stamps? I won a toaster
but haven't picked it up yet. Not a gambler by nature,
I lose in lotteries, at Bingo, even get hammered
at Scrabble. By the way, is "Din" a word alone?
Useless knowledge come too late in life.
Who in this world will let me win something--
spare change, free balloon-festival tickets,
discount coupons to shop in creative economy zones:
which chamber of commerce can I call, cajole?
What literary prize can I reward myself
for writing half prose about losing, not loss alone,
but a way of life, will to power buried in a will to lose?
but haven't picked it up yet. Not a gambler by nature,
I lose in lotteries, at Bingo, even get hammered
at Scrabble. By the way, is "Din" a word alone?
Useless knowledge come too late in life.
Who in this world will let me win something--
spare change, free balloon-festival tickets,
discount coupons to shop in creative economy zones:
which chamber of commerce can I call, cajole?
What literary prize can I reward myself
for writing half prose about losing, not loss alone,
but a way of life, will to power buried in a will to lose?
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