theater of eternal recurrence

An Opinion

2010-01-27T13:18:00.005-05:00

for Jess

I am perfect
in the presence of

your throne: Your
neck set to let

the twist of my own
encircle it, your kisses

as my own, soft
and stallion and gold

set before an evening's
moon: The sweetness

of divine love cloaks
my heart with devisiveness

only as long as your
soft arms and open legs

and full embrace
bring forth from all

that I intend to
the carnality of act,

whence the annihilation of
unity is just another way

of building some unity
of a different order

as our disjunction, for we are
not the same, but in

appreciation apprehend
the workings of nature

and of novelty in each
our bodies, that we fit

together in ways that
flirt with opprobrium

yet skirt its edge
to opt for sapientia,

that sophia be the home
for my tongue, as

your love, my truth
is the almost permanent

shy and emboldening
glance by which my

wide forehead divides
your jungle palms

like gentle Ganesh
whose trunk then

caresses the full length
of your pussy with

several feet of
rippling muscle, while

in the interim of new
sensation, the curious

mouse of my middle
finger squirms a knuckle

deep up into your asshole
and is chosen your

disciple: No way. Or way
up under your cotton

clutch, up near the high
canopy of trees, I

smell your nipples getting
hard, what the villagers think

are stars: I know how
to make their brightness

burn even more
brilliantly: Just to taste them

and attest their
sweetness to the assembly

of selflessness, and bite them
with my deer's teeth,

pinch them with my scales
of golden carp: See how I

decorate you with sense?
We are fated to be

annihilated by love, then
only return to the place

where we left off: Me rubbing
the rough camel's fur of

your crotch, and you
watering down the sleekness

of my dolphin's cock: Ordinary,
temporal life. If for a moment

I could not make the glow
of my marrow clear to you,

my life will not have been worth
the years of keeping it.

Fate forever rests its finger
on the soft lip of a laughing

set of teeth. The happiness
of throwing open the palace

doors to behold a lover
who to you is slightly

foolish, yet loveable for his
quickness, and his ability

to control his own shadow
is itself the City of God,

my intellect and your deep
soul that can never now

be separated. Ill temper?
I doubt it. Even at my end,

for me to have the audacity
to turn from you toward

the scythe, would be fickle,
stupid and immature, for

in my life with you, I see,
unavoidably, no mistake.

Thus, should I not live
forever, as my cock in great

glorious push clothes your
pussy in the sash of

its own incarnation,
and lets me to be in it?

The lover obedient, always
to the one s/he loves?

*

Basileus

2010-01-25T18:11:00.004-05:00

for Jess

Our graces who may
call to mind all that is

not mind are they
for whom the spaces

between all things
are residences of'

love which we can
feel surrounding

and invading our
total silence when we

do not speak, by
choice or accident

it does not matter:
Surroundings are

of inconsequence
in the first and final

kiss that's realized
forever in the only

place close enough
to know this real

intimacy as, yes:
The very thing

to which the body
rises and sees

the ripples of its
hunger, taking not

the bait, or baited
by no trap, but

simply breaking
the surface of what had

previously been
the looking glass that told

perfection to rest easy:
There is no easy rest.

Even wet lips take
all the effort as to lift

an arm flawlessly in
dance or abiding gesture,

as your face, or mine, also,
are flushed by

all we cannot name
and thus feel, totally

"in mystique", as black
moths smothering

vast midnights where we
sleep, entwined

of wings, of fins, birds,
fish, beings without

rational symptomology:
I am a small white

stone that expands your
pussy, you are a ball

of gold that makes my
heart more dense

than my tongue in
your cunt is currently

able to tell: Delicious
knowing that we will

"never have to start in
with the erotic stuff"

since it already is, the pure
weight of your breast

in my hand, or fiber
over fiber under palm,

your lovely calves,
the top of your foot,

your arch that I pledge
to kiss until desire

finally stops my heart
and brings my subtle

art to its unreasonable
end. But need we

think of death? No.
We need think only of

blackberry juice
smeared on your buttocks

and licked off by
the only tongue capable

of leaving in its path
the clear outlines of

Egyptian representation,
the Ra boat of your open

pussy: Sunshine
superman. I like

Thomas Vaughn's sense:
I think it were more plain

and to comely capacities
more pleasing if I

express myself in this
popular, low dialect.

In the Temple of
Nature, I join your

doctrine. You are
green, and never

wither. On your knees
spread slightly, you

take my cock in
your mouth, let down

your panties half upon
your lovely thighs,

and play your fingers
over your clit

and pussy, sucking on
my cock to draw me

forward onto the bed of
Active, Intgelligent life:

Your vessel waters,
and then it is

water, itself, as our
legs and faces go

twisted and unnatural
as from some magical

equation: Fear not.
You pass through my eyes

into the eternally here,
and I see through them

as they see me: I love
your riches, of course,

in each and every
manifestation. But I

cannot covet, neglect,
corrupt or assault

in opportunity, but that we
construct a room,

a house, a life
together in which

through my heart is,
passage to the you who knows

the room there is for
her, the luminous, the numinous,

toward which always
I remember, and am glad.

*

Steve Miller Band / Jet Airliner

2010-01-16T11:06:00.001-05:00

Diamond Hard

2010-01-11T17:21:00.004-05:00

for Jess

Be soft and pliable
openly, without

a carapace, always,
yet know the shimmer

of the sword
you must immediately

draw against intrusion:
Not bronze or brass,

not decoratively held
aloft in the usual

male threat mode, but
know your silver

and have it: The moon-
reflected lake,

the slow gravity of
river deep emotion:

The flow of blood
through your body,

quickened, gives
piquency to your

delight: Your best
defense is your

sensuality, which is
not in your body as much as

it is a condition of mind:
Visual imagination

you call it. Image-
driven, you are

a lovely complex of
occasions, none of them

easily named. This
is what I love, first

and foremost, of course
with all the rest.

Your regard for the world
yields all the surplus

one could ever need
in order to feel that

their body is a house
to which one can be invited,

in which one can live,
simply, with another

as themselves: Me,
myself and I, or, I

and thou. As simple as
drinking a glass of water.

*

Rehabilitation

2010-01-10T11:19:00.004-05:00

Disraeli, Gladstone,
Balfour, Churchill:

Even Roosevelt
and Stalin, the whole

Fabian socialist
group, who are not

socialist, but fascist:
Prescott Bush, Joseph

Kennedy, Averill
Harriman, et. al.

And of course, John
D. Rockefeller. Even

John Stuart Mill,
enthusiast for individual

liberty, thought that
colonial intervention

was not only okay, but
necessary, in cultures

in which his own concept
of western individualism

and its attending
liberties, did not pertain

to the extent that these
peoples could be fully

thought of as a functional
part of human society.

*

Adoration

2010-01-10T10:41:00.003-05:00

for Jess

The childhood round
of making the rounds of

each secret spot
made magical, just that

no one knew either
where or what it was,

is now in memory
an analog to how my

neck twists down and in
on your own, to smell

your fragrance, to feel
the line of your jaw,

lick the lobes of your
ears, not that different

than the childhood militancy
visited upon Big Rock,

Little Rock, the Hollow Tree,
the Place Where Only Moss

Can Grow: All that can be
in perception of the land

is all that can be in
the touch of my hand

on the surface of your
body, and beyond, as you

show me, yes: Suck my
fingers, lick my palm,

open your legs, that
I may rest my palm on

your sweet pussy,
and rub it, so that, like

Aladdin's Lamp, it gives me
three wishes, maybe

a second three, and even
three on top of those

so long as my fingers
do the right thing, one

on either side of your
lips, opening them so I can

begin kissing your clit
and deeply licking the wetness

from the throb of your
bright cunt: I want my

head in the fernbeds of
your lowlands forever,

darling one, darling apple
that when halved

shows itself to be possessed
of the five-pointed star

we all know as Aphrodite,
aphoros, bright, white,

as the foam of the sea
from which she emerged,

as frothy as the creaming
energy that shakes your

thighs and belly when you
come: Foam up around

my mouth, Padika, and push
your pussy hard against

my lips, that they be
dressed by your elegant

honey: I want to feel
the gravid storm of

your tide when your quim is
in my mouth, to nip it

with my teeth, hear you
moan as my finger

snakes its way a full
knuckle up your ass.

How literal and childish
and beautifully inventive

is this way of speaking
of the light that only love

can bring forth! For you,
my balls are moss-covered

rocks, and tall grass
spurts out of the end of my

cock: I want only
to nibble the spore

from the underside of your
fernbed, each sticky

leaf, and every spore
that sets my soul on fire

and makes me want to
feel you come on every

part of my body that I can
put inside your cunt,

or rest on its open lips
in order to feel you cream.

Exploration, we call it:
My hands are those of

the man that grew from
the boy who learned

every ounce and hidden
piece of land, who could

divide the grass, that
the sun might lightly touch

the ground below, who
found the cicada in

the leaves of birch, who
basked in the dappled

light come through
the forest's dense canopy.

You, too, have a dense
canopy: It is your psyche,

resilient yet thick with
its own insistence, to be

naught but who you are:
You are glorious, a beautiful

flower, and among the smallest
cosmic particles: You do

exceed my mind, but
in light of immediacy and my own

desire, I remain overwhelmed,
knowing where to touch you.

*

Reminiscence

2010-01-10T09:32:00.003-05:00

for Jess

I always thought
that any world lived

with others would be
as problematic as

certain veins in my
arms or the backs of

my hands that rolled
under needle: Sometimes

I had to give it over
and have Muhammad

press the spike down
hard onto the vein

or hold it in place with
his thumb while

slipping the needle
in. But that's

somewhere deep in
the past, foreign city,

foreign substance,
conduction in a language

as familiar as hieroglyphs:
Someone's got their

hand on my belly, I'm
not on a bed, I can't even

see the ceiling, yeah:
All of that. I never

thought of it as trouble
until the convulsions hit:

How sweet it always
was, to be blasted

and dream of sex,
or the alalog to sex, more

drugs: How hungry
for replacement can

a person get? As long as
the replacement replaces

who you most literally
are, then replacement

goes on forever. I
died of it. But not quite.

My soul died, but
my body superceded

life's necessities
and pretended to have

survived. And so
it survived. That it

survived life's joy
is the one grim aspect of

getting clean that nobody
can either understand

or stand. It's just
too easy to want to feel

good, in the simplest way
available. No. Or

yes: You have to be
bearable to yourself.

First you have to
survive yourself, then

you have to have your
survived being become

bearable to yourself,
and then you have to

live lightly and tenderly
with all of it. How I am

with you is, how I am
with my own being.

For all the years of
broken life, now I know

consistency, as painful
as it sometimes is.

I discovered this
on May 20 with you,

and I've felt and known it
at every waking

moment, from 2 PM that day
through every passing "now"

all the way to these words
and this present writing.

That it will go on and on, is
that it has gone on and on:

Lay back with me, and let me
listen to your heartbeat:

The consistency of your rhythm,
the permanent light of stars.

*

Herm and Therm

2010-01-09T11:23:00.004-05:00

for Jess

If "eroticism" is
all that sexual

and sensual designation
that is outside

all previously
established "comfort"

of being housed,
fed, clothed: That is

if the erotic is
not as essential

in being as these
other things, then

what is it for, if not
the most literal

drive to achieve
some harmony with

the world at large,
not something

that can be "judged":
There are no "good"

or "bad" lovers, just that
such acts are not

qualitative at their
outset, but are pure

quantity, the stone
weight of each of us is

each our own erotic
gravity, drawn this way

and that, even straight
up, as stars are

the most erotic thing
of all: What else is it

that sings between
your legs and sends

its invisible light
all the way to one's

tingling fingertips?
Eros has gotten a bad

name: Intellectuals are
embarrassed by it,

politicians make it
illegal, the common

person shivers in terror
at the thought of

wanting to be possessed
by it as much as they do,

but it remains
fundamental to art.

My point is that rubbing
my palm on your pussy,

aside the attending
blue electrical sparks, is

the sole way to swim
beyond the fundamental

religious backwaters of
repressive America,

and emerge in yellow
Egypt, where your legs are

high and open
and my tongue licks

the sweet, conflictual
ooze whose scent

helps me move stepwise
up the imaginal ladder

from the plainness of
Kansas, to the wonderment

of Oz: Be a Queen, and let
my tongue, my fingers

and my cock each
crown you in their turn,

for this royalty is
the only belief you need ever

yield to: I am yours,
and I am a trap on your

personal voyage, just as
anyone might be, not

a negative, but a puzzle
through which you may

discover just how you can
include me in your perfect

goldenness: Ask me the right
questions, and I will be

erudite: I, your woodpecker
who equally is Zeus.

*

Does Your Husband Know You're On The Run?

2010-01-09T10:57:00.003-05:00

for Jannis Tsipoulanis

1

Back in the day
when I kept him

in my pocket
he might have

suspected something,
but now that I have

dark streaks
in my blonde

eyebrows for
contrast, and now

that my lipstick
and nail polish

completely match:
Now that I can

confuse the world
and my husband

and myself by
living a life by

analog, pretending
to by alive for

style, and the style
of being sexual

and attractive,
yet only sexual

as an animal
based on the soft

light hairs that
wreath my face,

I know in my
impossible escape

from my husband,
from the society

that wants to
enclose me with him

for safety's sake,
and from myself,

that I exist solely
for others to make me

mean whatever they
please: This is

the bottom line:
I am alone in the midst

of the clamor
that others make

in order to have me
be still for them, but

no: I must make
my own noise,

and move formlessly
and without image

through the night
to jubilate and despond

without good company
yet never on my own.

2

Not hard or cold,
sad perhaps, yet also

filled with intent
to make my way

into some state
beyond any which

fulfill your easy
words: Eyebrows

as dark and thin
and unruly in their

perfection as
the night clerk

in an antiquated
Syrian hotel, or a

boyhood Sicilian
assassin: We mean

business. Why else,
the upturned furniture,

why else do we
smoke in the midst of

clutter with our small
red mouths, emerging

out of an 18th century
double row of

fashionable buttons
either side of

some gauzy, embroidered
bodice, turtle-necked

in white: Nice hands
and legs. Nice steady

gaze. What would you
like to say? I hunt

the undersides of things.
I am a lizard.

3

The chaos around me
is just that I am

present: I make thing
happen, and fall

apart: I, too, fall
apart, but this can only

be seen in the devastation
the surrounds me:

It does not exist.
I am only pretending

to be running away
from my husband.

He knows where I am:
Anywhere that he is

not. And I mean
every word of it:

See the tail lights of
that car behind me?

Stop. But I don't stop,
I have to brakes

and I'm not interested
in your laws. Do you

see my nails resting
on my belly? Blood

spots. I've been
shot in one life, so I

pre-exist my pain
by becoming a woman

who was alive before
anything bad

happened to her.
That's why I'm

on the run: She has
gotten lost,

and needs me
either to find her

to be her. I'm always
unsure which.

4

Dark stockings,
garters, high leg

exposing a white
slice in the night,

my head, too,
my neck, the white

garb of my
exposed chest:

I wear dark
clothes to not be

seen after dark,
but I split my own

darkness open
that my pure white

skin be seen:
I don't want to be

seen by all of you:
I ache to be

seen by those of you
who will tell

everyone else
that I was seen

sitting on an antique
table with curved

legs that no one
will notice because of

my own curved legs.
Obviously, you all are

vain, to think you could
think of me as if

I were just a replacement
part for you.

5

Strapped in by
black lace, shoulders

free, arms free (though
how free can one

be with clothes?):
Garters, stockings

to the knee, I reach
between my legs,

not for what you
think, feeling for

an extra, I know
you'll ask, an extra

what? Never mind:
My head is thrown

back, not in ecstasy,
for I am not in

“feeling” mode:
It is thrown back

as I am: Thrown back
in hurt, pride

so I do my best
to try and confuse you.

The twist of my
shoulders, the sky

set of my childish
mouth, the mild arch

of my back: These
are the ways I mock you.

*

Taking Genius Sips at the Ocean

2010-01-08T17:03:00.003-05:00

for Jess

Love is like
Jack-in-the-Box,

Jack Sprat,
Jack and Jill,

a summer's
jackknife,

but never
simply a matter

alone, of jacking off:
Dig it, why

bother to do
alone what

has to be more than
simple relief?

If there's no
gold stretched over

the skin of
perception, forget it:

Study the life of
The Prophet

until love makes
evident s/he

with whom the most
elemental jointure

can take place,
for if there's no

exchange, its like
the moon's

light that no one
sees: Having

seizures is just
a table for one,

with candlestick.
When you finger

yourself, your fingers
become my tongue,

and the wetness of
your pussy becomes

the liquid in my
mouth whose noises

increasingly entertain
all the ways in which

you're about to explode:
The silent O of

your stiffening mouth,
its quickened

breath: Doing anything
alone never really

makes it in this way,
like talkin' to

a statue or a statute,
no way. But your calves,

they're so lickable: Let's us
proclaim a silent

revolution, by drowning
the world in sound.

You can start by
coating my palm

with your saliva,
and laving my fingers

with warm light from
your wildly creaming pussy:

Let us load the earth
with streams, and let us

stream completely around
the empty space

that all believers know
as the ever-present Grail.

*

That Moistness Ever Remain Our Fact

2010-01-08T12:10:00.003-05:00

for Jess

The desire to see
desire in another

is the ability to
feel desire for

the other in one's
self, for as I

desire you, and feel it,
so I feel your desire

for me, rise within
mine for you, that we are

already making
a kind of love, feeling

desire enclosed by
desire surrounded by

desire eternal.
If I didn't desire you

truly, why would I
wake up with my shoes

on my head, my heart
hanging in a sock

and my cock gliding
between each of my

toes? In deed, these
"reasons for pure

joy" are so sublime
and so strangely evident

that we in our happiness
barely notice them.

Naked in public? Simple:
Just do it. Someday

I'll slip my middle finger
up your slit during Act 2

of your favorite opera,
and then cup your pussy

with my palm during
the coda, and grand finale

and the curtain call:
You'll be able to moan

openly in the din,
and it will be almost as if

they were cheering
for us! Nothing like

being made famous by
a subtle act of sex:

Stick your neck out,
so I can give it tender

kisses: I like to feel
the stretch of your

muscles under tongue,
just as I love to put

my hands under your
thighs, hold your legs apart

and feel your upper
muscles tense as I

lick you, just before you
come. These are

some of the teachings of
Shams: Interpret truly,

strive to do good,
stay fresh. Open to

the light. What can
"heart's fire" be

without dragging along
the vanity that you or I

or he, she and/or they
suddenly own it?

No way, but that
my whole budy gutters

like thin tinder
before the elegant

match flame in your eyes
that show me how

your heart burns,
and sets me then to

raging with all the heat
it takes to core

your streadily seeing moon,
your consciousness

that watches your own
pussy shove itself down

upon my lips, over my cock,
drags itself up and down

my thigh, fucks my
face until its waters run

high and overspill
the container of your

elegant cup: Liquid
and clear you are,

as you unlock me from
my fingers, my tongue,

my cock, to swarm upon
swarm of hotly coming

stars that spiel forth
from your depths that are

endless: My right hand
searches out your buttons

while my left goes under
to seek out those spots

of you in which reside
your daily sensitivites:

Hearts, diamonds, clubs
and spades: Spring, winter,

summer, fall: North, south
east, west, and Yes: All

the rest: Make a noise
when I pluck the proper

string. The eternal
governing of all that cannot be

governed: This is
the history of the invisible

sounds love makes, when
calling the beloved to order.

*

Abdulbasit Abdussamed / Surah Shems

2010-01-05T16:45:00.001-05:00

Abdulbasit Abdussamed / Surah Infitar

2010-01-05T16:40:00.001-05:00

Abdussamed

2010-01-05T16:35:00.001-05:00

Qari Abdul Basit

2010-01-05T10:30:00.001-05:00

Fatihah Abdul Basit

2010-01-05T10:29:00.001-05:00

Shejh Abdul Basit Abdu Samed Suretu-l-Fatiha

2010-01-05T10:26:00.001-05:00

Abdulbasit Abdussamed (Ra'd Suresi) الشيخ عبد الباسط عبد الصمد

2010-01-05T10:21:00.001-05:00

Shi'a Adhan

2010-01-05T10:16:00.001-05:00

High Skirt

2010-01-04T09:31:00.004-05:00

for Jess

In the nightmare
and the dream

there is solace:
What we know

when they drop
away is, that

there will always be
more. Of

everything: Fear
not. In each day

of human life
the forms of active

values continue
to decay. Yet

in this midst
the simple Rose

grows again into
fullest wholesomeness:

It is the nature of
joy, that it will

go on forever. Not
that we hope that it will,

but that it does, rise
like the lips of

your pussy around
the stiffness of

my cock: Your
crimson body rises

through my feeling for
you and it, up

out of the green
bed covers, like the moon

out of the damp
cover of green rushes

at twilight: I lick
from you my language,

eternal letters and sweet
pussy juice that hold up

the trembling
structure of our world:

Joy out of mind, sex
out of heart, and above all,

sovereignty felt deep
in my gut as I give to you

the immediate
manifestations of my

hard temporality
that rises deep into you

like a swollen river
after storm: I will

drive you wild
in your softness,

for I have a sword
that is sharper and more

silent than the song
of a fish, stranger

than the lips of a bird,
and more powerful

than a blue moon in cool
January, yet you

and your kitty have
the power to make my metals

bend, that when my plow
furrows your earth,

ashen leaves and amarylis
will sprout up from

my head, my heart
and from my middle to

embrace you: I want
only to hear you moving

in my room and in
my bed: Spiral nebula to

surround me and tell
our fortunes arm interlocked

in arm and belly lightly
rubbed by belly, that

by decree and light
confession of shared

love, we may become
galaxies unto ourselves.

*

Wildlife Management

2010-01-03T11:35:00.003-05:00

for Madison Grant

Just say No. Animals
can't say "no":

Saying Yes by
not remaining still

is saying No to
those who would

prevent you.
Shut your mouth

and move your
hairs: Stay with

everything that
moves, and move

away from all that
will not rise

in substance
to all occasion.

*

Praxis

2010-01-03T10:10:00.003-05:00

for Jess

As you are
the beloved,

your center is
everywhere:

When I touch
a cup I equally

touch you
in my mind, in

your heart,
in mine: I hear

our combined
rhythms

at the center of
the star

I see and feel
even at noon,

invisible yet clear,
to tell of

the opening of
the heart's own

eye: You are
as transparent as

a diamond, yet
as plush as

the petals of
a rose: When I

touch you, I sometimes
feel a sharp edge

that tells me you are
you, and other times,

my touch is drawn
in to your yielding

which is as tender
as a flower's petals

and as multiple as
the limbs of

the tree neither
Adam nor Eve could

figure out what to
do with, but eat of

its fruit and experience
the initiation of

time, and the work
required to move

through it: There is
no (original) sin.

There is only enough
for us each to do,

individually
and together:

This is the subtle
alchemy of

the star that illuminates
the creases of

your pussy: The gentle
stretch of being

entered upon
that answers to

the question of what
the cosmos is, by

exceeding "all this
talk" and simply feeling

the pulse of
the pleasure that

there are such questions
to lead us further

toward and into
one another: So you

make me gush,
and I am unafraid of

your acceptance,
as you are not, of my

tender aggression.
You are the center

and I am with you,
in you, around you,

to protect and open
you, from and to

the wider world
of geometrical snowflakes,

blue grass, unicorns,
thieves, prophets,

dolphins, hookers,
and unidentified weirdos,

mountains and skies,
stars, suns, moons

and sparking water
flowing over cool white

stones: All of that.
In benediction, I pull

a rainbow from your
pussy while kissing

the dark silk in the crook of
your neck: Potent

bull, green lion, bearded
snake of time, yeah:

Sit up on the altar
so I can lick your

priestess legs, bite
your tail and stick my

tongue high up
past your opening

and deep into the wedded
wound that is

the brilliance of your
hieroglyphic moon:

Open your legs, and let us
make subtle dents on

the surface of
each other, as we begin

our mutual penetration
as willow trees that weep

into the fine powder
and scent of our daily

airs, mixed with all
our pollinating souls are,

driven together,
spreading, filling

and dissolving in
each other's force

combined, whose purity
is as we are, guest

upon guest within guest
as I pull down your

sleeves and feel
your perfect harmony

encircling
in beautiful rhondos

that press in seduction
your nave gone against mine.

*

The Beautiful Letter

2010-01-03T09:19:00.002-05:00

Dearest Jess,

Thinking of you, and the recent pictures of you that you sent, makes your beauty that much more evident, makes my mind, thinking of you, beautiful, makes my heart, beating with yours, beautiful, makes my gut instincts about you, sexual instincts, loving instincts, beautiful, and my desire to embrace and hold you, beautiful, and my happiness in thinking of you and I as beautiful, beautiful, O happy days, beautiful, O beautiful day with you in it, in me and with me, beautiful, and everything, beautiful, your voice, beautiful, my love for you, beautiful, and you just you, beautiful. I love you, beautiful. You're beautiful. We're beautiful. Love is beautiful. Yes.

XX

*

Hysteria

2010-01-02T10:40:00.004-05:00

In the first Gulf War
(1991), the USAF's

bombing raids
destroyed 20,000

Iraqi homes, with
a combined

explosive power
seven times that of

the bomb that was
dropped on Hiroshima.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan
send the USS New Jersey

into Beirut harbor,
ostensibly to protect

the recently arrived
French and Italian

UN peacekeepers, but
more likely in support of

the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon. In the weeks of

bombardment that
followed, the equivalent

of seven two-story houses
of explosives was dropped

on every resident of
Beirut: The aftermath

made the city look like
Berlin in 1945.

In 1999, ten tons
of uranium depleted

ammunition was
used against Serbia.

Depleted uranium
has a half-life

of 4.5 billion years:
All regional

agricultural activity
and water supplies

were almost
completely destroyed.

The mortality rate
among post-war

Iraqi children
was extremely high,

mostly because
Nestle company

representatives
convinced Iraqi mothers

that Nestle formula
was better for

their children than
their own breast milk:

The mothers mixed
the formula with

contaminated water,
their children grew

sick and died,
while Nestle scored it

as a minor cost of their
profit margin. Business

as usual, saith Jahwah.
We are told that

Saddam and Milosevic
were inhuman demons,

while Bill Clinton, both
Bushes, Madeleine Albright,

Generals Wesley Clark
and Norman Schwarzkopf,

banking cartels, munitions
manufacturers, etc.,

all get to go free. Why?
Because there is no

transparency. Without
fact and evidence,

hermetic tendencies of
expression tend toward

trickery, usury and outright
lies: He who has money,

attains more easily to
power and control: But

money is not "a language."
Or it is language. Either way,

we lose. When Iraq
invaded Kuwait on August 2,

1990, Daniel Schorr
conducted a five-hour show

on NPR: The bottom line
was, that Iraq was going to

destroy the American
way of life. How a nation of

twenty million people,
already depleted from

an eight-year war with
Iran, that was 7500 miles

from America, was going to
do this was never

addressed. Schorr's
five "expert guests"

included three Jews
(one of whom Schorr

had managed to drag
from the Israeli Knesset

to be on his show), and two
white Christians.

The manager of
the NPR affiliate

in San Francisco (KQED)
that was broadcasting

the piece, on being asked
why the panel was not more

representative,
said, "we couldn't find

an Arab." The National
Headquarters of

The National Association
of Arab Americans is in

the same building as
NPR. And Bosnia was

carpet bombed in order
"to protect the human

rights of Muslim women"
[Albright]. Believe

whatever you wish:
War is always assured.

*

Foxfire

2010-01-02T09:44:00.003-05:00

for Jess

Only the foolish fear foxfire.
- from a Deckmaster Magic playing card found on the street

Like love, it is both
large and small,

but utterly brilliant
in either case: The aurora

borealis like
a shimmering robe

that gathers your body
in its folds

and totally illuminates it
and sets itself (with you

enclosed) firmly, yet
lovingly in my eye,

is if my seeing were itself
the night, and you, your

body, your name, your
"self" were the resolute

speck from which
starlight glows and extends

its illumination forth
upon the world, and love

a form of surplus,
that there always be

a sufficiency on which
we each can rely

individually and together,
the course of light

upon light within
light throbbing in order

to make a world
clear, and to stand for

all of it, by simple
touch: Yes, and then

yes again. Bioluminescence,
or that such things

grow, that are possessed of
inexplicable light: Honey

mushrooms that illuminate
the density of forests

of dense passion just as
passion's enactment

makes stars stream
and leave behind

the brilliance of radiant
faces, the sperm trail

through your pubic hair,
your scent on my

fingers and my neck:
The Japanese call

this radiance
kitsune-bi, glowing

balls carried by little
foxes through tales of

regional folklore: Shine
on me, please, little fox,

and rub your pelt
along my thigh, for we

match: In Chinese,
"red fox" = "red panda,"

and if your are bright
aurora borealis, then I am

the Big Bear, readied
always to ascend

the shimmering thighs of
your own night sky

and slide my cock
between your legs

from behind, through
the slit of your pussy,

over your clit, across
your belly, between

your breasts and beyond,
to stroke and massage

the tender flesh of your
neck: Stars circulate

in this way, all around
each other, and art is

nothing more than
the matter of these

ecstatic circumambulations,
their tender regard,

our intense appetite
to feel all of this together:

Is divine inspiration
anything other than

the speck of light
that appears on

the surface of your
deeply evolving eyes?

And if it is there,
is it not also resident

between the points of
your hips, your kneecaps,

elbows, earlobes. simply
everywhere you can be

touched? And that
in praising you, I raise

no opposite but more
praise? The "other" side

of love is more love. Life
can be simple in this way:

Heaven will be just as
happy if no one

goes there, and, being
happy, there is no need

to strive for what is
already true. To be

happy is to have embodied
all that not wanting

entails: As we are
happy, there is no need

for a rationale: We need
hope for nothing more,

but what we possess:
The ability to feel

increase, and act on it:
All will always be all.

You are totally you,
as I am I: To love

is the revolution,
and the revolution is

here: Who but a fool
can be afraid?

*

Orpheus

2010-01-02T08:40:00.000-05:00

for Jess

Is it true that everything we know
is wrong, or are we simply left
in the dust of time's passage,
a passage and a time of our own
making? To be sensual in perception
is to forgo the teleology that makes us
look whole, but which also removes
the now-alive life we have from us
in order that it be better seen.
I don't want to see anything unreal
that I can't touch: I want to feel you,
as simply as I feel the night air in my nostrils,
its sustenant scent as that whole toward which
I'll never have to guess

*

Altars

2010-01-02T08:32:00.001-05:00

for Jess

Three smooth
conch shells,

fifteen elongated
spiral conchs

looking like small
Grecian urns,

five small, round
dimpled snail

shells, two
fluted clamshells

and one small
piece of white

coral, shaped
like the letter “Y”:

You give me
everything

all the time,
in every moment,

no matter what it
is, the glow of it

and you being “all”
is what absolves me

of ever wondering
“why,” simply

then to become
progressively

closer to you,
around you, within

you, moving
to the score of

your fingers
along my arms,

down my back,
around the bend of

my neck: I
no longer can

spell your name
but with my own

drifting fingers
across your belly,

your abdomen
and down into

the wetness of your
pussy: I pledge

always, to write
my poems, only

with the juice of
your quim: I will

write them across
your lips, so that

when you speak,
the words will always

be yours, but
will be laved and loved

by the words
that I have traced

there, words neither
mine nor yours,

but belonging to
the gold depths of

love, sex, sky
and the blue waters

upon which we will
travel, that slakes

our thirsts, that
courses our bodies

and gives us sweet
quench, completed by

our kissings, bathed by
light's blaze,

the darkness of your
shining eyes,

the sheen of your
golden skin, all

wrapped up and pressed
softly in upon me:

You make my nerves
sing, your sweet

curves, and the conch
that weeps between

your legs: Our bodies,
heavy always with

the perpetual increase
of Time, find release

in surrender to
each other, dispensing

with the passage of
new minutes,

and hanging for
an eternity in each

other's arms, feeling
one another throb,

locked in solidarity
for companionship

and flame, and constantly
repossessing the grace

to express this brim
of sex and heart, to keep

as we do, the soul-enforcing
memory of our kiss.

*

Background

2009-12-26T15:21:00.004-05:00

for Jess

Water is the feeling
that flows between us

that when thought,
becomes electricity:

Our fluids are all
there, along with

the fluency of saying so.
Everything is

silver: Water, the rocks
along the streambed,

electricity, like a silver
dollar, a spurt up

out of the earth
like the one Isma'il

unconsciously brought
forth in a waterless

desert to slake his
thirst. One has to

learn to be a magician
to begin to combine

"all things" each
according to their

nature. Water is
the moon. I imagine you

wearing a flowing
dress that is the color

of the moon. Deep
orange harvest moon,

light pink-orange
almost sherbet moon,

rich full vanilla
lick-lick moon, pale,

palour of a thin disk
moon, all with a dark

side. But we don't
reverse things, we kiss

the front head-on,
as in our turnings

the dark side ends up
glowing by the time

in comes to the front.
Lightning blast through

high green summer
trees. That kind of

thing: You bring
the brilliant glow of

the Chinese garden
spring moon out of

the background
and into your body,

which glows, always,
with an uncanny

light: I eat you like
I eat cottage cheese,

without a spoon
and gone deep in

the cup. Silver
tarnishes into black:

That is the backdrop
through which gold

begins to ooze
every time we touch.

The stream we put up
each other's middle

leads to a thigh-
deep pool in which

we wade: The inner
gate that opens out its

waters leads to the wide
courtyard, the proportion

of whose walls, like
your ululating pussy

and my trembling cock,
lock the tumbers of

our sex to rhyme with
the trace of night's

constellations. No matter
how hard you try

you only see them
with your fingertips

across my back: When
we come, we expell

something larger than
a glacier. Hearts melt

into baby Jessi gold
gone blended at the lip

to something like honey
that warms

the cool girth of my
waist, hips, legs,

shoulders, Jupiter,
Mars, Mercury, Saturn:

Name me as you will.
Wake up, out of torpor:

Your eyes are lined
with the black

shadows of tree limbs
reflected by the moon.

You dream of corn silk
and dragonflies. You are

the beautiful silver backing
of a perfect postcard of

Florida cypresses. I am
the goldleaf background of

a Persian miniature. I have
some purple in me,

and you have full, ripe
florida oranges for me to

peel and suck on
through the heavy downpour

of your moans. You can
pull down my purple:

It is my vanity. I prefer
to be visible in my

entirety to you. We
each have our cypresses:

Florida cypresses,
Iranian cypresses. we know

that our roots are
tangled in the greater

chloroform fields of
heaven: Come, my darling

and preserve me
and watch my limbs change

from the tendril of
a gourd vine, into the claw

of a hawk, and into the leg
of your favorite chair.

*

Darkling Aspiration

2009-12-23T16:49:00.004-05:00

for Jess

So that words can be
on the page: Art is

a form in which
ideals can be worked

with what is, so that
the result can

mirror itself back
on this world, that

we might have some
new idea about

who we might get
to be. It all starts

with intent: There is
no indecisiveness

that can prevail upon
this ordinal

troubling to make
a world in which

a "person" might
arrive, full blown

like all babies,
exactly the size they

are. Fred said
art is all about

the cunt, its ready
tightness, the pressure

upon one's own
actualizing intent, yeah,

feels good, doesn't it?
That's what sex

and touch are for: They're
foundational.

Without them, the internal
human weather clock

stops us dead in our
tracks: We need drift

parsed. Hear the music
yet? The heartbeat

of one's intent lingers
in the aftermath of being

decisive, finally, about
almost anything.

Never say, "I don't
want to talk about it."

Always ask, "What's
for dinner?" And get on

about it: Make yourself come
true. The truth is,

if you're not putting these
abstract things to bed

in some form of art,
where their dreaming sleep

can be potent, then
you're letting them leak

through an unrepaired
crack you don't even

know about (because it's
real), where, like all

undecided things, they
begin to fall apart

and out of the flimsy
enclosures we suppose

for them, and change
from the rich earth of

raw possibility into
a formless substance

that is so toxic, that it
paralyses everything it

touches: When your
concept of a thing is

bigger than the thing,
you're definitely in the dark.

*

Not All That Much

2009-12-22T17:39:00.003-05:00

I can't tell who's
fucking with my measure:

God or Mother Nature.
But I guess being "off"

a little bit puts you
in tune with the Universe.

So that everything's okay.
But not quite yet.

*

A Commingling

2009-12-22T16:28:00.004-05:00

for Jess

Every path I could
make and take

with my hands
over your skin

and over every
curve of your body

leads directly between
your legs. No:

Your lips. Your eyes:
Your temple, the side of

your head, your soft
hair. The narrows

of your waist, the wide
sea of your hips:

Your belly, how it
curves back away

around your waist
to the small of

your back, rounding
out circumferentially

into your ass, the backs
of your thighs,

the moist declivity
behind your knee

and just talking
about you in this way

I'm already licking
every part I mention:

Your lovely calves,
your well-turned ankle

and then, the complexity
of your foot. I lick

your arch: Look at me,
so I can love your eyes.

What is "the whole
self"? Is it any more than

the glow that possesses one,
being desired by

another? Or then,
feeling desire, suddenly

your presence is
absolutely necessary

present currency
through which I need

to spend myself.
What a backwards way

of saying I need you,
want you, love you:

Skin is for that. To be
direct: We wade,

thigh deep in each
other, feeling the pressure

of the ocean's depths
in every pore. Move me

in slow motion. Paper
airplanes, cardboard boats,

crepe paper panties:
Burn them up with love's

sweet grace and leave your
mark on my pubis with

the red match head of
your clit, burning

all pathos into the hard
outline of the horizon

of your whole body,
mine: We share the world's

sweet sadness, not as mute
witnesses, but as

the flood that the bowls of
neither of our bodies

is capable of completely
holding: This is why we

share, talk, fuck and feed
each other: To hear

the continuous sound of
each first kiss forever:

The dark luminosity of
inner life shown in the body's

creases when it moves
to gesture in its goldenness,

that we would constantly
disprove our former lives

by pressing always into
each other's clear presence.

*

Gold

2009-12-21T17:05:00.005-05:00

for Jess

When I think of
you, I imagine you

walking through
some small and ancient

Catalonian town
in a simple

but elegant
pale orange dress

which you wear
like the sea wears

a stain of moonlight
on its swells.

I can hear
through the material

as if it wasn't even
there, the soundless

rub of your pussy lips
as you walk: From here

it sounds like thunder,
and draws me

to its inclemency.
You are as chaotic as

a bar of gold,
and four times as

valuable: I will
have you at seven

times the price of
myrrh in 750 BC,

and swear I will never
trade you. You are

the brick of Red Leb
hash I pressed my

tongue against in
1969 and swore

from then on that I'd
never have another.

I've had many others.
Now I want no others

but you. You are all
others, combined

and dispersed: You clear
the stage, even though

there is no stage: You
make one. Stage an

event, a revolution
a happening. Come on,

baby: Happen to me.
I'm not trying to

commodify your pussy
or deconstruct love:

I can never be that
objective, or lay down

my noble intent just to
suck your sweet thang

(though nobility is
arete, to have backbone

and resolve enough to
stiffen my tongue

and slide it up your
slit, to open it

and widen it and feel
your juice on my lips,

coniunctius the King
and Queen go, conjoined

in every conceivable way.)
I love you. Or saying it

here is to dash the hope of
literature, that to make

analogy and rhyme for
amor, as cor, flor,

our hearts, their
flowers, and all that

could ever take the place
of simple touch, is

why everyone
attempts it: Saying

what doesn't represent
the actual thing one's

doing, or what one
wants, must have, yeah:

Everything. The rose,
your rose, your heart,

mine, how we open
and empty one another

into each other is
why you have to just say,

yeah, baby, your pussy
has what it takes.

I don't want just
"a taste": I want

everything that
surrounds it, all that

throbs and vibrates
to my touch, your lips

to taste, your eyes
to drown in, your

nostrils to breathe
rhythm into my dreams

as we lie "belly to
hot belly" after sweet

pleasures, sex, nubile
conversation: You know

how it is with me.
Lay back, sit up, roll

over, kneel above me
or stand and simply bend

over the whole
earth. The way your

breasts hang, the way
your hair grows,

the way you are
pliant yet stiffen completely

when you come:
These, yes, are

where the noiseless
sound of your

sandalwood thighs
carry me: High,

way up high, straight
into the bush of your sky.

*

And Then Some

2009-12-21T16:58:00.001-05:00

Everything else came later.
I was always on my way.

*

Maybe Not

2009-12-21T16:57:00.000-05:00

The last
gin and tonic I had

was 1974.
I'm pretty sure.

*

State Synecdoche

2009-12-21T16:54:00.001-05:00

The Borgias were descended from Julius
Caesar, and he, from Aeneas, no Jesus
in the jism of that line, his progeny
would have had to come from a perhaps
non-existent Mary or the Mary Magdalene
suggested by Leonardo as a feminized
disciple, the one next to him at the Last
Supper, seated, whose robe reflects his
in position and is complementary in color,
is it Peter? No, perhaps it is John, certainly
favored, though my point is that his line
is nonexistent and toxic in its abstract
tendency to coercion: his body thrives
only that secret suppression can survive.

*

Playing the Horses

2009-12-20T09:36:00.005-05:00

for Jessi

That you and I
are contained

in our grasping limbs
conjoined, is just

the thing needed,
like a vegetating

spectre that grows
out of problematic

metaphysical puzzles
that exist only

because one can't
or does not possess

the physical analogy
to mind in one's daily

life: Listen, baby:
You are to me my own

ta'wil, the substance
of my own exegesis,

not any projection of
my own, but an instructress

who accepts into
the tender heart of

her sweet basswood
the hard drill of my oaken

desire, and no, these
sexual references aren't too

quick, for we must be
quicker than our own time

in order to come
outside of it, in that form

of eternity whose sole
purpose is to give us each

the vantage point
from which to "see"

the energy roll out of
each of us and into

the other, as well as
"feeling" and "doing" it,

coming first to be
"of like mind" while

at the same time
enjoying this increase as

the ability to see
what our doing is

doing: Only thus
can love advance from

what it just was,
through what it is (doing)

toward what it may
become: The celestial

city-making activity
that for love and the finesse

and raw nakedness of
its ordering goes

uninterrupted by
King David or Lord

Nelson, who would
drain off the cash of

coitus interruptus:
No way. Our own

eternal ice has a flame
at its middle: For love

to advance upon
the furtherance of

itself in each of us
requires both poles to be

absolutely present,
not only my male

in contrary motion
to your female, but

invocations of sun
and moon, red ant,

black ant, whatever sets
heart and mind

in motion, one against
the other, the friction

like that of any of
our parts that fit then

together forms
an intimacy that

prevents either of us
from being strewn

like hungry harlots
or stern and ugly warriors

through midnight's
freezing streets:

But to be in heated
rapture about your

sleeping bosom and hind:
The whole works:

You a woman, and I,
a man, and each of us

like condensation and cloud
conversing across

our closeness bright
like simply living creatures.

*

Kissin' Cousins

2009-12-20T09:25:00.001-05:00

The right to vote
is not exclusively

an entitlement:
When you register

to do it, you automatically
register with

the Selective Service
and a possible future

draft. Those it will be
possible to vote for

are the ones who
designed things

this way: Don't vote.
They're all just

a bunch of
duplicitous creeps.

*

Complicity

2009-12-19T12:27:00.002-05:00

The only past
you need is the one

the public knows
about: Let them

keep whatever
flame exists for them

in what they believe
you were. The only

time you get to keep
is the one you're

currently giving away
with each deceptive

yet entirely clear
regenerating gesture:

Forgive me for saying so, but
just live with it

*

Rush

2009-12-19T11:01:00.005-05:00

for Jess

The Hermetic Project:
Is it really any

different than
Baudelaire wandering

Paris in winter
in a tattered coat,

imagining he's
wearing the mantle

of the kingdom
he actually rules?

Do any of us really
"know what we're

doing"? There is
always in the intelligence

the clear sense of
opposition: That to

clothe ourselvers
we should get naked,

or to sate our hunger,
fast. And then

the reverse, direct
method to satisfaction:

Dress for warmth,
eat when you're hungry

and all that. And literature:
Is it really just

an aesthetic embodiment,
nothing dressed up

in an alphabet, just
a bunch of words?

Rumi said he
recited poems because

people seemed to
want it as an entertainment,

yet he lamented that
his poems were in fact

incitements to act,
yet as far as he could see,

no one was doing
anything. The sufic

and alchemical projects
are quite alike:

To generate heat enough
to know the feeling of

what it's like to feel like
moving in accordance with

so being moved: It's
magnification. Call it

concentration. Call it
intent. It is what

hangs in suspension,
ready to do two things:

To drop via gravity, and/or
to rise to the occasion

so that your participation
reverses the sum of

your inclusion: The end
is always the opposite of

its means, that a blast
furnace may produce

the ice on top of
a mountain 12 kilometers

away. This is like
you sitting on my lap,

your pussy hanging
in the balance between

my thighs, about to
drop into the abyss

but for the earnest
press of my palm

against it, which buoys
your entire "self":

That a single hand could
make a beloved's body

rise: This is the occasion
through which magic

becomes almost like
a magnetic operation

of poles versed
and reversed, male

and female gone
beyond their social

definitions in the initiation
of sweet fucking,

private, intimate
and beautiful throughout,

yet sex, relieving much
still resolves little

as long as it is left
in eros: Closure only

comes with socia,
that aspect of public

discourse that is
itself a constant evil

or at least astringent
on living freely in choice

and in one's body,
that must constantly be

reopened, time within
time within time,

"vertically" (integrated)
and forever: Decide always

who to shut the door on
as well as who to leave

the windows open for:
Know of your own permissions.

*

Mass Graves

2009-12-19T09:22:00.005-05:00

Most probaby
they will be vacant:

Evidence is unnecessary
for preordained

theories: Flight 77
is said to have

vaporized from
the heat of its

exploding fuel
when it rammed

into the Pentagon
on September 11.

How a fire that will
burn maximally at

1100 degrees Celsius
only with a steady supply

of fuel and only after
twenty minutes

can vaporize
tempered steel, whose

melting point is
1600 degrees Celsius

remains unanswered.
Just say no. March 18, 1999:

A US State Department
spokesperson said that

upwards of 100,000
ethnic Albanians remained

"unaccounted for"
and were feared to be

victims of the demonized
Serbs. A month later,

the ante was upped to
500,000. Soon after,

the number hovered at
225,000. As the NATO

air campaign over Kosovo
drew to a close,

a British Foreign Office
spokesperson

made a claim that
10,000 Albanians

had been "massacred"
by the Serbs.

An FBI team was
dispatched to recover

the evidence. After
several months of

forensics, they came up
with 200 bodies,

not many of whom could be
said to have been

victims of mass killings.
French forensic experts

unearthed what was
widely reputed to be

one of the largest mass
graves, and found it empty.

A Spanish team found
187 bodies. One of

the Spanish team said
they found no mass graves

at all, and that rumors
of them were simply

part of an overall NATO
propaganda machine.

NATO, for its part,
in reprisal against Serb

resistence to the open-
border western capitalism

that Croatia and Slovenia
had initially embraced,

used ten tons of uranium-
depleted ammunition

in shelling Serbian infrastructure.
Depleted uranium has

a half-life of 4.5 billion
years, and Serbia's

agricultural fields
were pounded with it.

Naturally, electrical
power grids and water

supplies were among
the first to go. The Danube

was permanently
contaminated with

toxic chemicals and heavy
metals to an extent

impossible to clean up.
What does objective evidence

look like? It isn't
just a story for show-and-tell

or a way to play hide-
and-go-seek with

the public. Evidence is
useful, because it

decries propaganda.
We know who is doing

the killing: The killers,
who are dual: Those who

originate and order,
and those who follow

through on the conduction.
The Maronites knew

who in west Beirut
they wanted dead,

and the Phalangists
did the dirty work.

To be the triggerman,
sure: This is a crime.

But what is thinkable
is do-able. Or, what was

done, had to have had
a plan. And the plan

always has a defense
through which no one

can clearly see. Except
the plan is the body,

insanely hid. The insanity
is that anyone would

agree that it is hidden.
Clinton should be

on trial in The Hague.
And General Wesley

Clark, and Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright.

And George Soros,
who invested up to

50 million dollars a year
in the Serbian opposition.

Money burns away
the bodies of those

who fall victim to
the necessary wars

that produce what we call
privilege, or "the economy."

All of the major wars of
centuries 20 and 21

have been financed by
international banking cartels,

notably the Federal Reserve
and the Bank of England,

both of whom drained
the US Treasury to the extent

that by 1933, Roosevelt
declared the nation

insolvent, the government
was put into bankruptcy,

and rule was transferred
from the president

and congress, to
the Secretary of the Treasury,

who operated under
Emergency War Powers

to manage the bankruptcy.
Of course the "bankruptcy"

is not real: It's just another
empty mass grave:

The Treasury steals 9.7
trillion dollars for

the bank bailout, just to
make room for us, since

we, too, can't help
multiplying that much more

meaningfully and intelligently
yet with a total lack of grace.

*

1244 AD

2009-12-19T09:18:00.000-05:00

The telephone.

Yes: They're landowners.

My name is Jihad.

*

Respite

2009-12-18T13:52:00.003-05:00

1989 Bulgaria:
Retirement pension,

105 leva. Westernized
and under capitalism,

in 1999, 46 leva.
"Yesterday

my brother-in-law
told me he had seen

the former headmistress
of his son's school

digging in a garbage can."
[Blagovesta Doncheva,

arrested in Sofia
for protesting the visit

of US President Bill
Clinton, on November 16,

1999, taken to
a mental hospital

and held there
incommunicado.

Bulgarian infrastructure
was destroyed

in less than ten years
by the "open borders"

policies of

[ left uncompleted ]

*

Lush Life

2009-12-16T15:34:00.005-05:00

for Jess

Is the Hermetic
Project really anything

other than
Baudelaire

wandering Paris
streets on a wintry

afternoon
in a tattered overcoat,

knowing it needs
replacing, but

doing nothing
about it? One

receives their
proper mantle without

ever seeking it,
perhaps not even

realizing its
necessity. Desire

works through
the fibers and organs

of the human
body in this way

and its opposite:
To be clothed, get

naked, or to sate
your hunger, fast,

is the half of it:
The other side is

doing the contrary
thing, dressing,

seeking after food
"just because" one is

cold or hungry: Yes,
there is reason

that moves one
enough to be "ridden"

by the entire
necessity of an act:

This is what people
stop before: Literature

is not just an
aesthetic entertainment.

Rumi said he
recited poems because

people seemed to
desire it as

an entertainment,
yet he lamented

that his poems were
incitements to act,

and as far as
he could see, no one

was moving.
The Sufic project is

to act in accordance with
how one's moved,

either with it, or
against it,

[ to be continued ]

*

Tony Curtis

2009-12-15T16:14:00.006-05:00

for Jess

Let us be a thousand
weeds, whose juice

will write epics even
Apollodoros never

imagined: The simple
life of singular passion,

tempo, and big blue
circles drawn around

our eyes with chalk
held in the fists of

babbling Chinese
midgets: Live life

above your head
as well as below

and make your navel
a pair of binoculars:

The sight in as well as
out, and without

that trick of making
close things distant

by looking through
the wrong end: There are

no wrong ends. Or
right ones. Why do I

suddenly feel that we are
wading thigh deep

through the same sea
water? Why do I suddenly

want to say "seaweed"?
I speak before you

and my words are green.
Our tongues touch

and we are suddenly
stoned, by the same

drama in different ways,
Clytemnestra, Menelaos,

Osiris, Nephthys: Not quite
wives, not quite sisters,

or that I am "married" to
the sister of the woman

whose reality answers back
when I speak. Lovers

over distance must regard
the elegant manifestations of

these "differences"
and proximities as they

change and reorder our
intelligences: I'm never

getting off of any phone line,
baby: The powers of

the present are their
presences. What we share

are bellies that rise
and fall against each

other: Acceptance of
all we were, creation in

all that we are, and faith
in all we will become.

[And now the remainder
of the poem has been

stolen via a technical
mistake. No sense trying

to recreate all of what
previously got said:

My hands, your hips,
your waist, your spine,

your weeping pussy,
beloved by me, my

tongue, my lips, or
(and now, interrupted

again, by a political
dissident: Those guys

never shut up, like
they have a nervous

disorder. Patience
has gone hard on Goofus.

I need your scorpion
sweetness to sting me

back into place, there
in the wide blue of

your giving heart,
and in the ecstatic

throne of your spread
legs: There, my psyche

falls and feasts on
the bareness of

the climbed stairwell of
this borrowed night:

You taste like peaches
in early September.

*

The Library

2009-12-15T15:43:00.002-05:00

Upon having his wife
Helen stolen away by

Alexander (Paris),
second son of Priam

and Hecuba, Menelaos
begs his brother

Agamemnon to raise
an army and storm

Troy, to recover her.
(This may have

more to do with control of
the Dardanelles, but

that's another story.)
Agamemnon agrees,

and over the next two
years, assembles

a company of men
and ships and sets sail

for Troy. But according to
Apollodorus, no one

knew how to get there.
By mistake, they put in

at Mysia, and instead sacked it.
Sailing home to Greece,

they encountered
a violent storm, which

blew them in many
directions, each to his

own home port. After
eight years, they

reassembled to
try again: Argos, Aulis

Tenedos, Troy:
Ten years to get there,

ten years to fight:
As usual, the drama

is in the preparation,
to make literature

out of many deaths,
with a big fire at the end

(which comes, not
with Homer, but with

Vergil), and in addition,
lies, seduction and sacrifice:

Agamemnon securing
Iphigenia for sacrifice

by promising Clytemnestra
that she was departing

to a marriage, instead of
being the agent whose

death would set wind
to sail, on into Troy.

Artemis, for her part
had a doe killed in her stead,

and, some say, made her
immortal: And there is

always fool for prize.
Protesilaus, the first

to disembark, and killed
by Hector, was so

desired by his wife
after death, that she had

a statue of him made
with which she had

intercourse. Hermes
pitied her, and brought

Protestilaus back from
Hades: When she saw him,

she rejoiced that he had
returned from Troy,

and when he was carried
back, as fate would have it,

she turned her back on the dark
and killed herself. Men

forswear much, in war,
and take it out on love.

Philoctetes, with a stinking
wound that wouldn't heal,

was put ashore on Lemnos,
and survived by shooting birds.

*

Meditation

2009-12-13T12:14:00.002-05:00

for Jess

The day is conditioned
by all we otherwise

would not notice: The world
as the mystery that only

secular touch can love:
This is the trick

that Maya plays,
and Mary, and Myra

and all the homologues
that suggest that

source is an illusion.
Your Mother is the world

after you've cut
the apron strings and begun

to grow your own,
whether uterus or penis

it is a matter of
assimilating time

physically, in order to
begin to recognize

separation and devotion,
and to recognize

moira, the given, and your
portion. Know the weather

and dress accordingly:
Unity only operates

when the One that one
makes of it does not

presuppose the repression
of any part of its making:

That I seek to make you
not a unity to myself,

but to see you through
the Unity you make yourself

as part of my own, that
my heart feels full, yet

my eyes know never
enough of: The stone

that represents the earth
and comes from

the earth but is not
as large as the earth,

just as the Self that is
in me, and that is

the me that is larger
in its movement in my

being than I can know,
is what you spread your

legs for: The whole man
that includes every

speck of his invisible
yet motivating energy.

Otherwise, what mortal
woman could fall in love

with a rigid paradigm of
manhood, or some

bag of blood with a nice
moustache? No way.

I do not come and go:
These are the actions of

the tributaries, what
is absorbed at my

fingertips toward
the total conduction of

heart's care. The preliminary
spark of sense

that burns more deeply
in our eye-holes as I

tenderly press my cock
into the groove of your

pussy: The tributaries
rise and gush toward

the embodiment of
the celestial river

whose light will soon
stream through our

limbs: Come with me
into this complex state

simply, willingly,
for without willingness

there can be no
simplicity, where all

must be licit. No:
In the waning

moonlight, birds
connect our ears,

break into song
and wound the target

night's silence
which has seized us.

*

A Dram, or Drama

2009-12-13T10:02:00.001-05:00

Blake's mercy
against

Nietzsche's
bad faith

Dionysian
stoicism:

Blake can tell us
where to find

Pearl: Beneath
the veil of

Ahania, who
Nietzsche

would complain
was only

human, all too
human.

Jerusalem
can never be

in the past
or the future:

It must be
a living presence

profaned
for just that sake.

Bad faith
and sensual moments:

Both confuse
sex for sex

and create prophets
out of snails.

*

Unity

2009-12-13T09:57:00.003-05:00

Don't let your
imagination

send you
out from yourself:

Be as a mountain
unfolding beneath

the roots of
the tree that is

surrounded by
the heavens.

The imperceptible,
inaudible, incomprehensible,

and the incommunicable
comprise the whole:

Symbolic allusion
is beneath the voracious

heart that alone, is
majestic and beautiful.

It is the inheritance
of the human

to be consumed
in avoidance of

the annihilation
of all that subsists

outside of the veracity
of the heart's clear

conquering power.
You must learn to live

its love, not in its
essences, for it has

no essences, but
from its attributes.

*

Sex

2009-12-13T09:53:00.001-05:00

Butternut squash soup
in a pastel green

ceramic cup glows
on the table, its

off-cut color rhyme
off just enough

to impair assumption
and improve

the mind: Feng shui
thus is principle

and not just some vacant
if sensual combination.

*

Fire Mountain

2009-12-12T13:06:00.003-05:00

for Jess

The crow, the dove,
stars against yet within

a night sky, white sand,
blue water, the woman

and the man: We deal
in contraries rather than

outright oppositions.
Cover me with your body

so I can feel my own
covering of skin:

Parched and thirsted,
drenched and then

satisfied. Your eyes
are brown, your tongue is

blue: Water, and water:
There is (no) difference

between the two. What
we will be about to

accomplish forever
is complex: A true

thing between us,
always, whether

a table or simple
touch: The mythic

books tell us that we
are: Just that. Not

that what we think
needs correcting.

Growth is self-
correcting. To harvest

the corrections as
fruit is something

else, again: Set aside
your genius and use

your talent alone, to
please me. I will

use my fingers on
you, and my tongue:

There is in ceremonial
magic, the necessary

mechanism of
sense and nourishment.

I like it when you
play with your pussy

on the phone for me:
Life's even flow. We are

neither hedonists nor
ascetic, neither master

nor servant of anything
but this bowing down

to all that in the Other
sometimes builds,

sometimes hurts, sometimes
even brings destruction

and the initiation of
new time. Birth,

death and taxes. No
way. Your full weight

pressing down on my
hips with the centeredness

of your own will
never be a burden,

just that I will always
rise in you to a height

at which we each are fed
by our own acts: Alchemy

is the genius for
discrimination, knowing

who is who and what
each is for. What we will

do with and about
each other, but gather

and darken at the mouth,
and feel our lips press

against each other.
Do you feel the water's

overflowing force
circulating in deepening

waves around your
farm? I love you.

You can see me, and are
my scholar whose real

skill I trust: Bring
your rains down upon

the happy plants of
sincerity, honesty

and the tiny dwelling places
of ant's feet! Hallah!

Our love's practice
is like a thousand-petaled

lotus opening whose
brightness is of such

magnitude, that to
look and try to understand it

with the mind, only
blinds the senses

to their bottomless
passions in which

one can fathom
only nothing.

*

Oslo II

2009-12-12T09:39:00.004-05:00

Isn't all this
just a slightly

elevated form of
affirmative action?

To give a peace prize
to a president

who has just mustered
30,000 troops

for a war that has
no reason

or justification
ought to

ramp the attentions
of the public

enough for them
to realize

that Obama is just
a patsy for

the bankers
and warmongers

and the Nobel
was awarded him

by the blue blood
bourbon and ginger crowd

for being their
good house nigger.

*

Obedience

2009-12-12T09:39:00.002-05:00

You may be of
seven different

minds, but you
still have only

one heart. This is
a given, and

the truth called
God that no one

can agree is
real. The truth

never says that
it is the truth.

That is left for
humans to claim,

but it is just
an expression of

astonishment
and wonder,

to be so put upon
by one's own

belief. Innocence
leaves one open for

the workings of
experience.

Only a servant
would say that.

*

Oslo

2009-12-11T18:19:00.002-05:00

If the Accords
are any indication,

this is not a good place
from which

to hand out
a Peace Prize.

And the guy
hasn't even been

President a year.
What "peace"

are they referring to
in so rewarding him?

The message is
that war is peace,

that peace requires
war, that the international

project is simple
turbulence. Unstable

societies are easier to
control. As usual,

justification of
unjust violence

like an incipient
slice to the neck

is life, which I confess
gives me the jitters.

*

The Beginning of Alchemy

2009-12-11T17:04:00.003-05:00

for Jess

Of all the available elements with which to begin the work, I chose love and cordiality, always.
- misquote from Jafar al-Sadiq, who taught Jabir The Method.

In the Twelve Steps of
the Emerald Tablet of Hermes,

where does one begin?
Does a tree begin at the root

or in the canopy, where
photosynthesis

takes place? Or that
one needs to feel rooted,

yet feel free to move with
the wind: To be liberated

from the former, while
binding the latter:

These processes are
as loving, and making

love, their paradoxical
imbalance that ballasts

the phenomenal world.
Sense happens in

the sensible, just as
love requires a beloved.

We begin in the middle.
We may speak of

the heart, or its supple
rhythm that I hear

when my head is on
your breast and my lips

are gently sucking on
your nipple. Sex:

Yes. Or how fingertips
inscribe new ways

across your skin,
your face, your lips,

or simply wiggle
at you across the room.

Alchemy is gestural.
No: It is numerical. No:

It has to do with
the cusps of intersecting

planets. Will you have
some tea? Jafar was

right: Cordiality
before and after

sweet fucking and then
a long walk along

the edge of some water's
shore. Up and down,

"as above, so below":
Jafar means in and out

but doesn't easily
say so. Of the red stone

at the end of The Method,
what the Chinese called

cinnabar, or Dragon's Blood:
It is very like the Rose,

mercurial yet well-
formed, and not in reference

exclusively to the Heart,
the quim, the act of

exchanging fluids, but
of some retinal dearness

in which the whole
world applies, that

could by the subliminal
Eye of the Heart,

or could almost be
unsayable, or sayable

but simply left unsaid.
But to grasp it: Yes,

I love you. This
is where it begins:

The labor of unknowing
all you think you've

learned. We are
embodied by the shining

masters of our senses.
I was told to say this

by something beyond
clear sense. Love is

a divine cloud in which
mind can find itself

(re)covered by its own
goldenness. This is

the way: To explore
the beloved's body

as equal to all
the scholarship it takes

to know who
and how and what

an Other is,
and what to do

about it when it is
time to do anything

about it. This is
where to begin.

There is no
"first and final

cause." Jafar says,
first, to love the Prophet

and his family,
and the Book that was

dictated to him.
This matters for naught,

yet means everything:
Take hold of the world.

Do not shake it. Use it
to guide yourself

deeply into it, until
the bedsheets become

as spring leaves, with you
and I, as intersecting

clouds in pajamas
to the end of being

a couple of hedonistic Hottentots
close in the shock of silk.

*

No

2009-12-11T16:31:00.005-05:00

Better people. - anon.

Obama's road to
re-election

doesn't run just
through Kabul:

It runs north
from Shiraz to

Tehran to Tabriz,
all the way to

Azjerbaijan
and beyond, as if

capital reform
over a non-existent

USSR were still
possible, by

conducting wars
against such

new states as were
carved from it.

Yes: Obama's
Wall Street backers

like to threaten
everyone. I hear

that even
the Cimmerians

are quaking
in their boots.

*

Stay Fresh

2009-12-11T16:15:00.001-05:00

Where there's
a thorn, burn it.

That's following
Noah: An ark

fulfills the curve
that goes from

prick to burn.
But it is not

wanting to reveal
openly, the manifestation

wrought by words:
To drift in life

is not enough.
But to give yourself

pain and put yourself
through severe trial

is following Moses.
There is some

good taste on this
path: It is easy

to be like this.
I am a man with

two aspects: One
different, and one

more different.
It does not matter

whether you are
thwarted at home

or in some other
place: The point is,

you are thwarted.
I hear there is a place

somewhere north of
the Caspian, where

they don't play like this.
They think like the sky

around a bird's flight,
like water around a fish.

What good is a sack
of books on the back of

a donkey you may have to
eat when times get

tough? Muhammad says,
the best speech is

brief, but deep in meaning.
Perhaps the best city

has but the one house
you give yourself

permission to occupy
and joy to burn down.

*

Valmont (1-13)

2009-12-07T16:27:00.001-05:00

On-Going Project for Jannis' Paris Sex Club Photographs

2009-12-06T13:42:00.013-05:00

1

Left to my own devices, sensually dampened yet exaggerated for focus, the mind of Jennifer Jones goes coquettishly to double as Our Lady of Lourdes, there after midnight on top of the uniformed judgemental plaza under the ornamental gaze of those hungering after false charges, and evidenced before them as plurally as possible: I mourn myself as I was once beside myself: A rural fig dressed down as a professional servant girl, with her master's cock acquiring traits of delightsome awkwardness from between my gratuitously parted lips: But let us hasten away from the gold of frustrated memories: He is too strange to even generate examples. I prefer a sunny afternoon, a ten-spot and a tour about town squired in a royal automobile to reimburse for bending over backwards: I like it outre, in supreme acts of sacrifice, that I may become foreign yet locally bound by the federalized apron strings of the kitchen help. Lachrymose, darling. And sylvan streamlining to cloak passion's desire toward something excessive, not just another half-shod soiled fad of personal recanting: Leave that for Himmler's lawyers: I'm off to Flamingo Fields to get my tongue in some Chinese scrollwork, jealous lotuses and ravishing boyish hearts: What a draggy vigil impatience toward self-satisfaction is. Or, mendacity: One of the better words to keep locked in the dictionary. Ah, it's another second-floor Sunday and the stimulus of a hard, honest priesthood to keep Mother on the strait. Give me long freight passage, foreign travel and complete southern exposure, and I shall be happy. Pants down to duck waddles and the cloistered discipline of some stranger's fingers: I am a traitor to all that I can keep in my arms. My mouth can speak, but my heart is still lined with cork.

2

Can an anal tusk make a man more than just pirate's treasure? We are a new breed of surrogate agencies, come Japanese beetle clones, slipped beneath the bench and the incipient trial of Josef K that has yet to happen after a hundred years. Excuse me for being obscure, Gucci: We wear rubber in order to prove that we also wear leather, and that we can huddle over a plate of Chinese dumplings with the best of them. Skin? No, we are dressed in the voice of the Virgin, which feels a lot like Kansas State Fair chicken sauce. Why is it when we kiss, all I taste is wasabi? It is because you are a Japanese knock-off of an American man everyone ought by rights to desire. Yet you have an empty after-glow, despite having legs like the wings of a swan, and we share your caviar, crackers and sherry, worship you: Even grant you a coronet of diamonds to make your forehead bleed. Your beautiful dreams destroy me: I can go no further, except toward the classic rendition of some unknown boyishly athletic golden girl I feel throbbing up at the top of the stairs. Wrap your heart in an oriental rug and roll your cock in latex: You can't tell me, darling, that there isn't the lingering threat and use of power among the aesthetes and faggots in the Castro. I know that I work myself up those beams of starlight to the nave of the universe by trying to sleep with the right guys. Wouldn't you? This is the way of the world: I'll never be able to manage trams and buses after being chauffered through translations of Sappho in the European version of Vogue: A taxi? Do you really think I care about transport? Just bring me back to paradise, it's instants, dreams and years: I am in a still-life, still-borne, looking only for you.

3

Pay no attention to that red mark on the vein in the crook of my arm: It is the mark of Hamlet, whether speed or horse, does it matter? I just don't want to have to listen to the pale ghost of my father's voice. Pay attention instead to my red suit, pay attention instead to my multiple zippers, pay attention to my exquisite, teasing (non-) availability: The idea of a heart is angled to achieve a world with little effort, but a real heart is made of meat, and remains small, if essential: Unzip my upper pocket and suck my tit and I'll cry like a Phoenix arisen. I will love your insurgence, and that you might carry me, as I you, into the upper echelon of sexual privilege in order to resort to the malnutrition of totally mutual immolation. The room is full of whirling phalanxes. I smell cordite, and hear the sound of incipient helicopter blades readied to transport us to zones of heaven. How do you work the latch on this door? I am placed unusually amongst citizens of a nation completely stoned on capitalistic profit, inundated by fey drama, beholden to the occult arts in which I dress myself, whose sanity is hardly commonplace, where sexual wars continue to beckon between both nations and persons, assaults, felonious theft and suicides the common fruits of eternity to come that already swindles the present, the vanity and snobbism and simpering kisses that clearly tax you when I run my hand over your cock and you gaze at me like just any indulgent hearer: We will create heaven on earth. I was raised to be a loyalist. Superficiality was the cargo assigned to me, a pirate role, forced on me by my father the British Ambassador. Hindu Yoga, Tibetan snow: Nothing out of the ordinary. Pajamas, afternoon palaces and the Panama Canal: Heavens! The neighborhoods Mother must've had on her mind!

4

An empty glove, early dawn, when there are only two choices, absolute black and perfect red, neither of which can be grasped because time is its own element, and passes, as night's passage earlier on had revealed stars, which then bleach out, and disappear for lack of contrast. Some say sex is about this, pre-Socratic empress Queen of 100,000 millionairess pores in the skin across some young man's untried rose hips: Let us brook no swindle in playboy's vice or under the pardon of assassination's vented indulgences: Yes, you may keep my black flame and the blush that rises up my neck, yes, you may give me international renown and 17 objets d'art made from the petals of red and black roses, and yes, you may prong me through the evening as your all-night hotel whose ballroom is deserted, in which I hear the empty echoes of exhaustion come of perfect wisdom, fellatio and trust. Is it possible to be wealthier than the world's hermaphrodites? They dance and sing with more mutant judgement yet in absolute wholesome joy. The detritus left behind as trash after magnificent sex has brained an area the size of a one megaton nuclear device is evidence of the supernal idiocy of informers against committed prosperities and the uncurtailed freedoms that are our birthright. This is our legacy: The plum stains of two pairs of lips, and sweet memories, having been so leased, to existentiation: How could I indulge any treason without at the same time using it to undermine its hold on my loyalties, to sever me from emptiness and eternity, and become ever more ingenious toward further inquiry to all mercy and love that is now outlawed?

4 [ lineated, titled, and slightly revised ]

Survivors

An empty glove, early
dawn, when there are only

two choices, absolute black
and perfect red, neither which

can be grasped since time
is its own element, and passes,

as night's passage earlier on
reveals stars, which then bleach

out, and disappear for lack of contrast.
Some say sex is about this,

pre-Socratic empress Queen of
100,000 millionairess pores

in the skin across some
young man's untried rose hips:

Let us brook no swindle in playboy's
vice or under pardon of assassination's

vented indulgences: Yes, you may
keep my black flame and the blush

that rises up my neck, yes, you may
give me international renown and 17

objets d'art made from the petals of
red and black roses, and yes, you may

prong me through the evening
as your all-night hotel whose ballroom

is deserted, in which I hear the empty
echoes of exhaustion come of perfect wisdom,

fellatio and trust. Is it possible to be wealthier
than the world's hermaphrodites? They dance

and sing with mutant judgement yet
in absolute wholesome joy. The detritus

left behind as trash after magnificent sex
has brained an area the size of a one megaton

nuclear device is evidence of the supernal
idiocy of informers against committed

prosperities and the uncurtailed freedoms
that are our birthright. This is our legacy:

The plum stains of two pairs of lips, and sweet
memories, having been so leased, to

existentiation: How could I indulge
any treason without at the same time

using it to undermine its hold on my loyalties,
to sever me from emptiness and eternity,

and become ever more ingenious toward further inquiry
toward all mercy and love that is now outlawed?

5

That we are one as part of two, or another, that I am one among several, that we are single among the many. That we are too many, but never enough. Dress in black, against a tiled wall, or dress in black, lying back on a red sofa: Half the world at any one moment is adjusting his or her cufflinks. This venality is what the State Departments of every nation watches for: The attempt to be neat, stylish, fashionable. No majestic Norman state wants their citizens to be visited by sexual satisfaction, so we make it like work, in black clothes, or joke work and mockery, dressed in red. As long as there are slits and openings through which fingers can slip, treason is alive and well. Otherwise, it's all text and copy for legerdemain of infidel mufti harmony deconstructed through the inability to get it up, except via ordinal ventriloquism through which one stands at attention, but only to Swiss incontinence. To flutter before fascists and then throw them down the fire-escapes: That is my desire. The self becomes the film of another self in another person's mind. No wonder there are so many of us. We're “them.” We need to be edited. Be careful of any coelescent crusade toward “unity.” There's certain to be a dirty bang in that byline. Timmy gets weird when the walls begin to sing. Sunshine spies through a window you thought was safe from harm. I will never forfeit the honor of my visions, or dampen them with any but highest love's fluencies and fluids. Milk by moonlight. Can I have a glass of water, Mummy? Could I be more “up” than this? That there are five of me? Or course, when you're this “multiple”, they're probably gonna hold it against you.

*

Inspiration

Ascending stairs to Oz
or hills and valleys of Calamus,

the tower of progressive
play and unity is the rise

to power in the flush
reflected on the walls

and shining through
the clothes the body

wears, as well as the body
itself, which is nothing

if not clothes for all
that remains visibly

desired throughout
the short length of

an evening or a life:
This natural resource

recombined, talking to
strangers to spite our

dissimilarity nevertheless
invoking through the even

square of pride, a humbling
transport to pollution's

pledge or seeing elation
shriveled, despite we

ascend the stair for nothing
else, the good of

happiness and perpetually
unfolding charisma, yes:

For this our hopes
chew the furthest end of

our intestine, despite
exciting shares of naivete

and beauty's elegance, grace
and the sweet fucking

one had thought, held so,
to be a sufficiency toward

permanent satisfaction. But
no. One must always

climb again one's selfless
difficulty: Naturally

I still love you. Do I?
At very least, you are still

important. And I suppose
my endless agnostic ascents

to a heaven in which
I have no stock, constitute

a retaliation for never
demanding enough excess,

a madonna of wet grey
streets, some ranch hand

no one any more admires,
or even a eunuch

by decade's end, who knows
what hopes further

blossoms will bring? Neat,
orderly and in well-applied

competition always, I
can't say I will win, but

at least I'll always have
my stairwell to climb.

*

Pure Phoenix

Like a ghost of real
blood, I coagulate

out of a wall that becomes
less real the further

I move from it:
My background is

where I arrive from
and it is silent

yet writhing with
possibilities for

the present: No need
to be any more stylish

than that one good curve
deserves another.

I am chase, and any
object that catches my

eye defines pursuit.
To this end, I am already

a-glow, a coterie of
foreign realization,

the color of the carnation
that in Firenze would

double as a sign of
potency in the domain of

trust, cut with a modicum
of unsuspected animosity.

The anima. That we may be
animated by jealousies

with which we can
walk through walls

and do things like make
a sudden appearance in

Red China in seconds:
Yes: Deshabille crimson

in Narcissus peacock decor
plumed out in

the Elizabethan syntax of
an unknown friend

in Constantinople pantaloons.
At least I still have

my Greek dignity to
preserve me. It's all

very slick. I know
I'm not worth the money

that I've got, but
after all, that's the tragedy:

That I've got it,
impersonating a beloved

to feel stiff, the past
gone before bliss, back

through the wall
with sexual blossoms

rightly taken with
a strong hand, a steady

stare and benighted
passion's never-ending,

thinly disguised yet voluptuous,
desperate kiss.

*

Low Heels

The black shoes of heaven
grace the back of

a headless man: There will
be no trouble: We enjoy

the burden, for desire
has a graceless candor

like the edge of a coin
or how a boot's edge is

cut from substances
that evoke great emotion

but for which we have
no name, except that we are

synthesized by tiptoed
rapture: Just try

and find me, step on
the knob of my neck

as if it were a small
white pebble in some

innocent barnyard.
The brave do it with

words. It is easy
to feel emaciated

when your pants are
up but your boots are

off: You owe me
for being the best

you ever had. And
despite time has

stopped, sex continues
his saintly work

in my headless self,
twitching in platform

heels while hungering
in some foreign land.

The man who lets himself
be stepped on is an

acquired taste, an alien
being, a forbidden

drug: We all come out of
the vault with the same

bossy fears and desires:
Get your boots off me!

But please, stand on my
neck for a minute.

I've been lying down for
weeks now, while these

rough yet able workmen
reconstruct the fantasy

version of Route 66
upward from the base of

my spine. I am
suddenly uncovered

and long for a matching
outfit with a lovely

Neanderthal person
in some luxury cabin

in a well-lit glade.
A briefcase without

pants, a forgotten
umbrella: Forgotten

blossoms whose deaths
mark the beginning of

an epic sleeper
passing for drama:

Listen to me, darling:
Shoes on stage

are not the same as
shoes in our living room.

*

Ikaros

He didn't fall, despite
the evidence on

the bed, the white
plastic sheet, the landscape

of the vagrant
imagination perfecting

itself to no end. No:
Ikaros did not fall:

The evidence of his fall
fell. All that one

leaves behind is all
that can possibly fall:

Everything else
you bring with you,

and it stays with you
because it's you.

But not a long-sleeve
rubber glove, or,

it looks like maybe
two of them, a small

white bottle, a leatherized
or rubberized phallos

and random patterns of
black stains, all of which

must have been used,
spent, broken off

in mid stroke, it matters
not at all, for this is

the stuff of history:
Stories are all made of

trash, not acts. The acts
are what drive you

away from them
in the wake of all your

leavings. Where did you
leave your pants

last night, or your
phallos, or the container

for your contact lenses?
And the black leather

bracelet with studs
I forgot to mention.

Orificial and violent,
or tender fingers

grooming the hairs of
some desirable belly,

who can guess what
acts trash portends

but that the morning
after is just another

morning, not the end of
the story trash has to

tell, for trash is what
buoys us, just that it

exists, always
and everywhere

for no sake than to
remind us that our

desire and each our
imagination of it, like

Ikaros, is in mission, always,
impossible to fall.

*

Avatar

The first time I ever
saw your face, it was

your waist graced
with a strap, the first

time I saw your face,
it was a buckle in

the cleavage of your
ass: There is no

difficulty, but that
anonymous bulges

are hard to identify,
though they need not

be: No, not hard, not
difficult, but that they

and we needn't be
identified except by

what we are about
to do: Acts need no

faces, not need not
be faced. To have

readied pouches
and haircuts: This is

everything: To be
a tree dwarfed by

the throbbing stars
in the sky, yet still

erect enough to
attract the twining of

some mystic snake.
Sex binds us to

the earth, so we can
show off to one another

our subtlest dancing
tricks: By the time you

realize the lamp of
lust that burns in you,

you'll have no hair:
We unfold ourselves

in latex in celebration
of this: A demimonde

in the day's
new youth strokes

the library stockings of
some old male gash:

To eat the lotus
dehydrates all that,

living, drives us to it.
The first time

I saw your face, it was
tuck-and-roll trysting

up a male waist.
How I love finally

getting out of burlap
and becoming dolphin

sleek for an evening,
penetrated by some harpooner's

luscious knack for scandal.
If I ever make it home,

I'll have to refinance
Lana Turner as pure male

triumph. Your rubberized
pleats are my hypnotist.

All my kind, compassionate
delusions: I always

lose them to the flesh
in a place like this.

*

Carpe Diem

Desire apprehends
the surface that forms

the misapprehension of
what lies underneath.

Whose eyes are blind?
Those that misunderstand,

or those that have gone
blank and are waiting to be

filled? I have no
eyes, I have no mouth,

I have holes, I have
black night and a possible

cosmos where my
brain should be,

yet with all these
blanknesses, I am still

capable of looking
astonished. Like

the Tin Man in Oz,
waiting for someone

to oil him: It is not
difficult to reduce

human life to
an oil slick. But

I can be reached,
touched, moved:

My chest is covered
with tears as real as

my eyes are blank:
How pretentious is that?

Maybe I'm just
in a sweat. It is

frightening
when cosmic night

enters one, and one
dresses the part

for the sake of
human liberation:

I can see you
as fully as a star does,

from 10 million
miles away, yet

as close as being on
the other side of

your skin. You look
at me, yet your looking

is only you seeing yourself
through the astonishment

of the eyes you have
assigned to me. I am

not you: It is true.
But let's us have

silence reign, and take
thought: You tell me

which of our eyes are
more like shriveled dates.

*

The Conversation

One must at all cost
defend heresies of

every sort. The poet
says this as we

stick our upper lips
and tongues out at

him: He deserves
a salute, a bit of idiocy

and a forceful denial of
all he says, to give him

something interesting
to push against. But

enough of him. The room
is ours: We are moon men.

We are milkmen. There's
a lot going on outside

the world of words.
Touch me. Or if you

touch me there again,
I'll just scream, and move

four inches closer. We prosper,
grow and make uncertain

turbulence our blessedly
ingrained betrothal.

We accept defensive posturing
with erotic weekend trysts:

Boots on, pants down,
and laws against consent.

You know how it is, too,
with these middle class

married men: They
play hate around male

nipples til after dark
and then they come around

like pay-per-view and cash-
and-carry when

the old lady ain't been
puttin' out: They still have

an ache, not for some
lovely male counterpart,

but the matter of power:
How'd you like to make

a hundred dollars? Well,
I wouldn't. You know

I'd do it, always, but not
for anything so sublime as

a “reason”, but favored by
how it is with human

animals of any stripe:
When two of them fall

in love, that's really something
to talk about, not just

some guy who from 9 to 5
wouldn't open a bank account

for a hermaphrodite
in need, like who wants to

get off on refusal? Listen,
we tell these hands-on

blue bloods who don't know
how to handle a blank stare:

Why don't you just go
sit in the anteroom,

and read The Rich
and the Super Rich,

and come back
after you've figured it all

out, and then
we'll explain it to you.

*

Full Poverty

The trace is first by
the image of leaf, as

skin is, gold, applied
by atmosphere, or

that it grew, as the tattoo
does, talons, hooks,

horns and every other
sense of threat and capture,

from within, that
attracts even as it

defends against all
it would draw to it,

claw against the touch,
yet sensuality

remains, in the image,
in the pale thinness

of the body that carries it
forth into the night

pierced by the shine of
an eye, slightly

wanton, slightly sad
for peering over its shoulder

for just what?
Would there be hands

reaching around
the blasted vegetation

in blossom and thorn
up his back and piercing

both his psyche
and your own? Thin

chest, and the real flight
of hands as imaginary

as birds who will not sing
until tomorrow: But

palms on the sharp points of
his ribcage, his lean

waist, the martian crest of
his hips, and the hand

the slides down an almost
absent belly, down, down,

and there, the cock
that even LSD cannot

impersonate: Pleasure
for pleasure's sake hurts

the body politic: We do this
not as ill-bred felons,

but as ambassadors to
adventures that retaliate

against mendacity: Yes,
we shall have a new world,

not a brave one, not one
less common that our presence

in it can make it: No,
there will be in it kitchen tables

and some form of crusade
guided by plants

and the touch that traces
these tattoos, or that being

touched from the inside,
blood will grow ink and we will

finally be able to say
something more about

who we are, what we
desire, what food we have

to share, where the bed is,
all unplanned happinesses

to spite serenity and suspicion,
but congressed in your

Grand Canyon, inviting
treasure from the Keys

and knowing always which
numbered bus will not

get you where you want to go.
While I'm waiting,

lean me against a random wall
and lean intensely into me.

*

Jimmy the Horizon

They're trace-marks of
a symphony of touch,

or to be slightly
sentimental about

the whole thing,
it's wire by which

one's bound, but
to what? The Self?

Or they're wires
that hold skin to

muscle to bone,
a lot like an alphabet:

Words bind us, we're
into bondage, shadows

that an alphabet makes
are what live on my

arm, striations
on the surface of some

unnamed planet,
birth pangs, the age

rings in the heartwood
of a tree: The point is,

it matters all for naught:
The point is: To make

the mark. To put
marks on everything:

To rub, scour, pit,
roughen, dent and make

unalterably shine
all that you desire, with

all that you desire.
In the process, there is

a shift: Show me
myself, for I, too, am

scarred by recent
pressure of others

upon my being: Love:
Such as it requites:

The ennobling of
love's founder through

the pain of first
practicing and then

transcending it.
The point is, that it's not

anonymous. Go
to room 504 to learn

the legend of Orpheus.
No: He will never

come. I write on
my arm to release

the dead strings
at the center of my

brain. The underground
is beyond the life of

the soul, which
nevertheless, savages it.

My tongue is a moral
comedy cut with seaweed

gone speechless
in your tides. The word

is dromena: The seeing
of the doing of

things that are done.
Embraces under the sound

of a zipper gone forward
from their founder

find themselves
better off for it.

*

Departure

2009-11-29T07:27:00.004-05:00

for Jess

Necessities pull us
in different directions,

but we'll be together
again in a matter of

weeks: Hardly necessary
to say goodbye but for

the opportunity of
further kisses. And I

still have your fingerprints
and your body heat

remembered to keep me
"up" as well as the scent

of you in my beard, plus
your gift of your own

black panties with white
lace that are now my

funkadelic relic. I will be
transported to linger

in the illuminated humanity
of your high scent. These

strive against all that I could
say, for touch extends

beyond my ability to say
how grateful I have been

to spend these days with you,
and that your gentleness in me and to me

is the vain song that proves
this closure, as the opening

of feeling a single teardrop
that I cannot account for

but that I give it the name of
my love for you, as it falls into

the elixer, which boils up
and out and overflows

in whirling trance, accompanied
by daisies and a simple

sparrow's song: These elements,
this momentary sadness thus

gives us a ladder to climb,
for soon this desire will

return to me and my arm will be
around you and we will be

walking arm-in-arm
up from Place du Republique

along Rue Magenta, past
Gare du Nord and toward the

white temple of Sacre Coeur,
which looks rather like

the Wizard's Castle in Oz.
These hopes are a spectre beyond naming

at the moment, but to say
the magic names "wind", "fire",

"star", give us the grace notes
from which a full symphony of

life can't help but follow after.
For now, the sun, moon and myriad

stars will have to do, and without
mere rhetoric that they may appear

as guides and inspirations: Every
"I" that longs for you

awakes in me the still dark
morning in which to prepare

for the harvest of your
indelible presence, and to do

and undo, various of the charms
by which I (re)lease myself to you.

I will lease myself to your love,
and I shall be released in it:

To liberate each other, and bind
to the freedom of being

close: This is the impetus
my desire for you brings up in me.

*

Arousal

2009-11-28T22:26:00.003-05:00

for Jess

That you like to have
your fingers gently

pulled, your hands
massaged along with

your arms, shoulders,
back: That you like to

kiss in the most fulfilling
way, or the way your

tongue moves in my
mouth: That you like to

have your nipples
kissed and licked

and sucked in ways
forceful yet tender,

and that you like to have
your pussy licked

that way too, that
makes you come so

beautifully: With one
hand under a thigh

and the other on your
abdomen, I can feel

your muscles tense
as if this jointure

were a prime creative
endeavor: Bees

fly out of our love-
making, and make honey

under the bed. The guttering
fire of your orgasm

reveals a deep canyon
that is yourself, which is

filled with your desire:
An analogy of the honey

the bees come of our
love-making make.

Love needs a canyon
to keep it from spilling over,

yet no landform is
large enough to hold

that heat at bay: Only
the human heart possesses

the tender stretch
than can accomodate

endless lunar estrangement
and endless restless

seas while remembering
to kiss The Beloved

each passing instant
to keep any instant from

passing: We accumulate
in order to grow into

something foreign
compared to what and where

we each are now. Embrace me
by forcing me to go

on my way, to discover
in time how to change vanity

from merely personal taste
and incidental rule from

the shadow of a king, to
the song of what is, and how

I want you to be in it.
Our keys commingle,

always. Your face is
no longer to me my own

imagination of some
swarming sweep of stars

in a night sky. You are
Jess, and your night calls to me

are drawn of all that is
as natural as earth, air,

water and fire. I am now free
to love you, just that

the configuration of your
movements has unlocked me:

You are simply you. Forever
part of the tale of my unfolding.

How could I not forever
come back "here"? Here,

then, simply wherever you are.
And although neither of us

will outlive the rhyme
we each make of the other,

this momentary illusion
that yields a moment's rest

still has the value of
a few short hours' sleep,

before the indelibly
delightsome imprints of

each of us on the other
appears again, as common

as weather, and as
consistent and surprising.

Fear is a scab, afraid of
its own crimson eruption.

To prevent it would be
to disown some link

in the chain by which
we remain conscious.

If our love began with
an imaginary heave of

words to build the lintels
of a doorway to a future,

then the future has come:
Who could have imagined it?

Stars, moons, meteoric
metaphors that stoked

the secret flames of
rocks, trees and streams:

Yes, very nice. From this
I learned to walk

through the door, and
enter a world where both

of us could actually be,
embodied without words, so

my eye could finally dwell
on the horizon of your face.

*

I Am with You What I Imagined Myself to Be

2009-11-28T11:03:00.003-05:00

for Jess, in Mt Holly

Lust moves into
the lustre of the glow

of your face, and moves
my memory as

the medley of crevices
through which my hand

gently passed, the melody
of enhancement to

know your every bend
and stretch and arch

as if you were a sistrum
and I simply the presence

to whom you sing of
illustrious petals blossomed

and lost and reblossomed
over the years through which

human time and hope
can have its fear, while

the mortal tenderness
as my fingers in trace

through some part of you
is a music that stays

and drifts, like some
perfect cloud seen moving

on moving waters,
or my own face, reflected

in tranquil outline in
the darkness of your eyes.

*

Intoxicant

2009-11-28T01:57:00.002-05:00

for Jess, in Mt Holly

Now that I finally have
your scent in my beard

and bracing my throat
and my chest: Now that your

face is tattooed under
my eyelids forever

so I can't see
anything but you when I

dream, and see always
your residue in each

daily object and event,
I want you to bond me

as one of the many
bail bondsmen of this

town might bond
a suspect of love: Let me

go loose in you, and leave
in me the emotional

equivalents of your
scent and my memory of

your loveliness and let me
lie in the domain of

your perfect touch: Let
my finger run down

the wetness of your
opening crease, let me be

the hard Tibetan
diamond sutra whose

only wisdom is to act
and do everything

in its power to carry you
along with me, across

High Street to the library
steps, or to some silly

downtown American
gazebo, even Paris or

whatever points in any
direction, to be made

perfectible so long as
you're there, even beneath

this longing I feel, that
you've been gone a whole

four hours, but that I
at least have on me still

your fingerprints,
and the delicious fragrance

of your lips on mine,
and the smell of your

pussy still burning in
my beard and the feel of

your body against mine:
The wheel has turned

in me and against me
and for me for many

years, and whose turning
has between us been

the cause for much
erotic friction, the pleasure of

rubbing hearts and minds.
I will never want to

stem those tides, but
want simply to address

the question of gold
upon the darkness of

early morn: When shall we
find harvest in this

endless circling? My mind
about you is constantly

made up and undone
as you come closer, as you

reveal yourself to me
and as you reveal me to

myself more than anyone
has ever done, as I discover

myself in-dwelling in your
earth hold, or then to be

held in this way of which
you are so capable, even with

your eyes alone: To be so
regarded swells my equinox

and I rise to the ripening
scent of your radiant

smile, and yes, these point to
some higher resolution

for again I arrive at
the simple wonder at

your heartbeat when my
head lies on your chest:

O yes, my accomplice
in all things beautiful, this,

in you that sings sweet
out-of-tune songs

yet also knows how to
roar: It is glory, not

"imaginary" love, but
our actual selves in

the adventure of love's
imagination of itself

through us: The thrill of
the cup that cannot hold this

overflowing, whose flood
comes ever more into

its flooding that pours
through us with such

tender force
that we blush.

*

Jasmine Lovers

2009-11-23T13:32:00.003-05:00

for Jess

The architecture of this
invisible circuitry of

desire I feel for you:
The beauty of your

moans when my palms
approach to the sensitive

shades of brightest temper,
for your body is a leafy

bower under which to
linger and in which to

pass the hours by our
touch: It has the effect of

annihilating all I thought
to bring to you, but

fuel for your further fire,
and some lines to evoke

the power of your laughter
that stuns fate and makes it

stream with golden honey
from which creation may

arise, as I rise to you,
my face a royal cushion

in a house of stars
for you to sit upon, and I

with my tricky tongue
to help you drink more

deeply of their light, for
I shall be your adornment

and will teach you to
see yourself in a mirror of

divine signs: In the night,
your body will be as stars

the brightest of which
I will suck close to me,

and press my face against
their brilliance, for you are

the gateway of licking,
swallowing, darkness

and lechery, you are
the sensuous Persian lilac

embrace of lovely midnight
indigo blue, come sweetest

between your legs, as
your hands run across

the movements of my body
gone deep in you, like magic

shuttles, the French navette,
which also means

incense-boat, your fragrance
I want on me always

and have always at my side,
to lift my dreams into

the country of your
countenance, even as I

sleep and dream with
my fingers entwined in some

bit of you drawn close:
In India, is a mountain called

Lilaeus, that breaks
into a black stone called

clitoris, which the local
woman use to adorn their

ears. Turn your head
that I might lick your lobes

and gently stick the tip of
my tongue into the hole

from which you hear,
so that our love language be

as the sea, poluphoisboios,
the sound of the sea

slopping against the shore
which gave Homer

the rhythm for his epics.
And you are epic, O primal being

moving thus through water
and a moisture all your own,

patronness of marriage of
all the elements, gateway

to love and life and even
the death of all I ever thought

to be, seeming now non-
existent without you wrapped

around me as if to give
everything I am, the form

of love's embrace: And thus
I worship you with

mysterious nights and great
processions of lanterns,

by which to see you, know
you, as self-sustaining,

unknowable yet all-pervading.
Bestower of love and joy,

you nevertheless have
an unblinking cobra eye

in the middle of your
forehead, mark of unceasing

attention, and wisdom.
I hear that you can bring

from it, a scorpion's tail,
but I am quick enough

to snatch lightning right
out of the sky, so I am

not afraid. I come to you
for nourishment, Celestial

Mistress: I am just a humble
thief who will be honest

with you, if you will only be
for me, the lovely sycamore,

many-breasted, and with
figs between your fingers,

your toes, under your armpits
and behind your ears, but

especially between your legs.
You carry with you

a load of sweet milk
and the chaotic darkness of

an even sweeter nectar:
The creativity of the Creator

becomes his creature, you,
and now that I have seen you,

every pistachio shell I find
in the marketplace turns

immediately into a pearl.
I've been storing them

in my mouth, so that
when we meet, and my lips

first touch yours, I'll
push them through your lips

and press them into
your mouth, as a gift

and a suggestion to you
that you squeeze

your milky nectar into me
in any way you can.

*

My Neighborhood

2009-11-21T15:25:00.016-05:00

Streetlights in the evening, and then in sunlight, either way, there are trees. Are there trees? Something on the other side of the window partially blocks my view. Tree branches. Or arms, hanging down from the roof. I can see those sequences of painted white lines at two intersections that constitute crosswalks. Across the street and up at the corner of King and Church, the Wilson Hotel shines on having been transformed from a derelict hotel of the 70s to a rooming house for derelict men run by the city's housing authority. Next door is the Waystation, a homeless shelter with twenty beds in a single room. And further up King, and on the corner of Winooski Ave, is the Daystation, which is where most of the homeless people from the Waystation hang out during the day. Some also go to the public library, the university library, or some also wander aimlessly about the downtown, commercial area.

There's another house next to my house, and then, I have been able to determine this mostly from window views, so I'm unsure of compass directions: Perhaps it's east. And then southeast, another big white apartment building done up nicely with a whole series of escape ladders and emergency stairways and safety decks in case there's a fire or a hurricane or a sudden attack by the French Foreign Legion. Get out of town, baby. The voice inside someone's head repeats this often. Four to six weeks to renew your passport by mail, or, pay extra and get them to process it right there! That's more my speed: Always pay more and get them to process it right there. Forget sending out for anything. Signals get too easily crossed. And besides, who really knows what anyone wants, intends, or will do: Watch a man's face until you can see his beard grow. Then you'll have evidence of a certain degree of honesty.

I really love the house across the street. It is sort of by itself, an empty lot to the right, and then another house (I think I may not be remembering things correctly), and to the left, a big driveway into a flat parking lot, and beyond that, a two-tiered parking lot, and then at the corner of St. Paul and King, some sort of former office building that I think has a bar downstairs, and . . . the upstairs of these buildings have always confused me. I just figure they're full of "papers" of some importance, papers of misfortune that must be saved, tax records from a former planet that exploded 5000 years before Thera. Valuable shit.

And above that, over at Main and St. Paul, the glorious former Hotel Vermont, its brick elegance, or is it marble? Attenuated memory, dutiable perception, I don't know: I'm not paid up. Anyway, this house across the street, whose bottom door at the top of a high cement stairway is always open so you can see its two mailboxes hung at to different angles just inside the door: And the middle window on the second floor in the evening is lit with such a beautiful, elegant saffron glow, it makes me weep. The tiny third floor window is dark. I don't know what's in there, but I want to live there. I have a predilection for small, third floor rooms. Brown grass. A discarded suitcase. The guy who wears a kilt begging change on the corner of Church and Main.

The bodies of the three dead martians from Roswell preserved in the basement of the US Treasury Building are acting up. We nationalists who as poets are concerned over our republic, as forms like sovereign governments need difference over which to conduct attempts at agreements of various sorts, as trade, immigration, peace and all of that, listen on the other side of our inner ears for the demonological throb of animating truths disguised under the questionable value of human political policy.

And the news from Davos is troubling. Istanbul. The Hotel California. The Soviet "invasion" of Afghanistan in 1979, Southeast Asian wars from 1964, begun through the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, Mosseddegh in Iran in 1954 and the wholesale import into the United States of Werner von Braun, Josef Mengele and the like are moved directly through the Rockefeller-funded Council on Foreign Relations (founded Manhattan 1921, in lieu of international rejection of the League of Nations), the Zbigniew Brzezinski-founded Tri-Lateral Commission (the same guy who "ran" Carter and who is now high up in the Obama administration) and, at the peak of the triad, the Bilberburg Group, founded by ex-Nazi Prince Bernhard of Holland, and whose purpose, according to long-term member David Rockefeller, is to break down sovereign nation-states and institute a form of worldwide rule that would make any war or conflict that one or another of these gruops couldn't direct and control . . . an inconvenience. Boys will be boys. Or, the girls just want to have fun. Swiss banks, the beginning of offshore banking services. The new "state." A friend recently wrote and told me about Swiss husbands. She said they operate at temperatures somewhere below absolute zero. Whatever. Any hypnogogue should be able to see trouble in the making: Its names are legion: Just say a word, and you are there.

So, let's say we're in the basement of a small, private hotel in Holland, in which a number of men, mostly, are seated around a large oval table. Well, and so: They have on suits, with red ties, you know: Blue bloods. Richard Holbrooke is telling how easy it has been to get Osama bin Laden - who's been living in the basement of the White House since 2000 - to switch from calling Bush his "white slave" to calling Obama his "house nigger." There's a little laughter about teaming them up again, until there's a call for silence, and a somber Roman prayer, during which time Etienne Davignon, former chair of the Bilderburg group, removes his trousers, pulls down his underpants and, having gotten up on the table, proceeds to ceremonially shit a brightly colored pigeon's egg on the plate of each of the participants. Upon closing the prayer, the eggs are eaten, with a few remarks: "Too salty," complains Carl Bildt. "Tastes like pussy," smiles Franco Bernabe, and "did you make all of these yourself?" [James Wolfensohn].

The table, meanwhile, is loaded with cold cuts, rabbit, pheasant, sauteed vegetables, sweet potatoes and squashes, pickled herring, cheeses, breads, hummus, jams and jellies and various desserts. But the main course is over to the side, a barbecue pit, where two headless Iraqi children's corpses turn on spits and are beginning to ooze rather nicely.

A handcuffed Iranian boy of maybe 17 is brought into the room by guards, and David Rockefeller - beyond himself with lust after watching the boys on the spit - goes up to him, slips the boy's pants down and begins to lick the boy's cock, which stiffens against his will, partly out of fear, yet partly from the stimulation. David finally has had enough licking and slips his lips over the boy's whole member, laves it with his tongue and slides his lips back and forth along its length. Meanwhile, Hilary Clinton his dropped Rockefeller's drawers and shorts and has begun fucking him up the ass with her clitoris, the next stiffest thing in the room. David moans around the cock in his mouth while Hilary humps him, until a jealous Queen Beatrix - daughter of Bilderburg founder, fascist Prince Bernhard - tries to shove Hilary out of the way, yelling, "Let me have a throw at Wimpy's crack: I'll have him creaming into next week: My clit's as big as a Dutch Cleanser Can!" When the boy cums, Rocky holds the jism in his mouth, eyes shining, while Timothy Geithner presses his mouth against Rockefeller's to try and suck some of it out, lapping at his lips to get at least a drop or two. Rockefeller, speechless for his mouthful, takes out his pen and writes across the tablecloth, NO! I WANT ALL OF IT!" The youth is laid out on the table, and the whole crowd goes at him with knives, stripping bands of meat from his arms and legs and chewing on them raw: The mission to invade is on. Amything else would be less than delicious, and who could bear up under the weight of a denial like that?

What would Goebbels have said? Fabians! One shot from a German flame-thrower would put an end to all this nonsense! I don't entirely disagree, but would prefer a more Rwandan strategy: Hack them all up into bits with machetes, and leave a pile of hands on the table, for it is said that the twitch of a dead man's little finger is a sign of some lingering virtue. That might be interesting to determine.

The opinion is, finally, that the world must be returned to a feudal system so that it (and us) be saved. China is the model. Rockefeller has always lauded China as the one successful model of a social and cultural revolution that has been worth whatever it has taken to establish and maintain it. During Mao's reign alone, 60 million Chinese peasants were exterminated. They call this "systematic ideology."

Eric Pianca gets a standing ovation during his speeches whenever he talks about ebola as being effective and necessary to wipe out the bulk of the world's population. His students go him one better, and say that every living human being on earth should be eliminated. That would be ultimate power, and absolute control, but with no one to weild it. But these population reduction plans that fall under the guise of "environmentalism" . . . they simply destabilize the Local. I don't know. Environmentalism, like the idea of the police, makes me jittery. Who decides who gets to live? In 1911, in some states in America, poor grades on a report card could've resulted in arrest, a trip to the hospital and immediate sterilization.

But this is all from Malthus and his "catastrophism", and subsequently also Darwin and T.H. Huxley, and the actual founder of Eugenics as a movement, Darwin's cousin Sir Francis Galton. T.H. Huxley's famous sons, Aldous and Julian were adamant Eugenicists, as was George Bernard Show and H.G. Wells, whose lover, Margaret Sanger, founder of what became Planned Parenthood, wrote to a fellow Eugenicist that they would have to find influential negro conscripts who would be able to help them convince the bulk of the populations in black communities to agree to sterilization.

These ideas came to the fore in the late 19th century, during the era of the Robber Barons, Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc. Edison and Ford were also significant fascists. Such attitudes come from a combination of Big Science (proofs) and Enlightenment rationalism. Racial classification. The size of the head of an "idiot." Etc. But identification of this type is just more means toward control. And control is just the fear that everyone else is lying to you as much as you lie to them.

Story: When Napoleon was trying to escape the pincer movements of the dual forces of Wellington and a Prussian brigade, a spy of Nathan Rothschild - an agent for the Bank of England - saw that Napoleon was going to lose the battle, and thus, the whole war. He sped back to London, and, arriving 20 hours before news of Napoleon's defeat would reach England, told Rothschild what he had seen. Rothschild immediately spread rumors that Napoleon had won, the London Stock Market fell 98%, and Rothschild bought up the whole British economy for pennies on the pound.

The US hasn't had a real president since 1933, the year the country was declared bankrupt by the Federal Reserve, which is not a part of the government, despite the name, but is an independent "offshore" bank, a large proportion of whose shareholders are foreigners. Social Security was put in place to pledge those citizens, their children, their children's children, as collateral for the national debt to the Federal Reserve bank (a private bank), and, since 1933, the US government has operated on the basis of emergency powers, that is to say, the Secretary of the Treasury runs the country, because he is the one who manages the bankruptcy, and also because he is always recommended by the Federal Reserve, is then "selected" by the president, unquestioningly, and is confirmed by congress. So now, we have Geithner, former head of the New York Federal Reserve . . . as Secretary of the Treasury. Treasury is the agency through which the banker bailout money was transposed. As of today, 9.7 trillion has disappeared. It was not ear-marked for anything specific. It was just supposed to "help the economy". The banks, actually. And now Treasury is telling us that where it has gone "is secret." Someone actually said that: "It's secret." [The Treasury Secretary under Bush, Henry Paulson, who said, after the banker bailout had been passed by Congress, that they weren't going to use the 800 billion to correct the sub-prime mortgage market. Privately, he even admitted that that had never been the real problem. Saying that it was was simply a ruse by Treasury and the Fed to get the bailout bill passed. Paulson admitted - again, privately - that the real problem was with what are called "derivatives." Which are rather like the junk bonds that caused the massive bank collapses in 1988 that we now refer to as the S & L Scandal. It was a similar situation, with a smaller government bailout, with which the owners of many failed banks simply bought back their revamped institutions (after the government had paid them up) in accordance with the program, sometimes for as little as a dollar.]

And look at the nature of the Obama administration: It's all about money and investment: Everyone comes from Wall Street, from banking, from investment firms. They're all bankers. There is no one from heavy industry or manufacturing, no car makers, no one from the beef, pork, wheat and corn sector, there is no one from the steel or rail or trucking industries, there is no one from big oil, or natural gas, there are no fruit growers or truck farmers, no retirees, no youth groups, no councils on the status of women, or hispanics, or blacks, or orientals, or any minotiries: The is no one but money oligarchs. What has happened to the beef, pork and grain markets of Chicago? What determines price? Quantity of some real thing, or an abstract prefigurement related to the derivitives market? Oil recently topped out at $150/barrel of sweet crude: Maybe a pound of nicely marbled flank will soon come close to that.

Some say JFK was our last "real" president, and that his assassination was a coup d'etat. But the coup had already taken place, in 1933. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy did sign Executive Order 11110, that began to take away some of the Federal Reserve's absolute power to put money into circulation. His assassination is likely related directly to that. It didn't have to do with angry nationalist anti-Castro Cubans, or the CIA, or the mafia, or the military-industrial complex. Who suddenly changed the parade route in Dallas? The secret service. Who decided not to use the bullet-proof protective bubble? The secret service. Who called off extra Dallas city police protection for the motorcade? The secret service. Who decided to put Kenedy's limo at the front of the motorcade, where usually it would have been second or third? The secret service. Who drove Kennedy's limo? James Greer, former chauffer for Henry Cabot Lodge, ex-Ambassador to pre-war Vietnam, and, an agent for the secret service. Who waved off the agents that normally run alongside the presidential limosine to provide even further protection, even though a couple of the agents initially protested? The head of secret service directing the motorcade that day. Who gave the order that agents not respond when the firing began? This same secret service head. Who shot Kennedy? It wasn't Oswald. It wasn't some shooter up on the Grassy Knoll. It wasn't the man with a gun spotted behind the picket fence by the railroad yard. It wasn't anyone on the first floor of the Daltex building. Sure, they all fired diversionary shots. But who fired the lethal shot? It was Greer. The driver of his car. Greer shot Kennedy. Watch the film. The car slows (his foot moves off the gas pedal as he turns and fires), and he shoots with his left hand, over his shoulder. The first examining physician at Parkland Hospital to see Kennedy (before the secret service got to him) said that the entry wound in his head was up near the left-front temple, which would be consistent with a shot from the driver. An entry wound from any other possible location could not have occurred there. Any shot from that side from outside the car, would've gotten Connelly's wife. And how was it that John Connelly, a Democrat, was picked by Nixon to be his Secretary of the Treasury during his first term, in 1971? And what was Nixon doing in Dallas on the day of the assassination? In fact, what was George H.W. Bush doing in Dallas that day, apparently seen standing on the overpass that JFK's limo sped under on the way to Parkland? And why did J. Edgar Hoover summon Bush to his office two days after the assassination? Ostensibly, it was to find out what the CIA knew about Oswald's Cuba connection. Oswald was a CIA patsy, and also a part-time FBI informant. We all know these basically inconsequential names. They're used to cover Treaury. Everyone's heard of Ferry, Shaw, Bannister and that whole rather sinister New Orleans crowd officiating out of the same office at Camp Street. But can anyone name the Secretary of the Treasury in 1963? I can't. But we should all be able to. Because he did it.

So: The secret service. In 1963, the secret service was a division of the US Treasury.

Now we know what a secret is. There is always part of your neighborhood that cannot see you. You can't at any time, see the entirety of your own body. You cannot know everything that is going on in your own neighborhood, let alone control it. Policy is a kind of idiocy. It works against perception, which is wholly partial, because there's always more to look at. Isn't this probably one of life's simplest joys?

The part ex-Mayor Peter Clavelle played in transforming Burlington from a working-class town whose industrial base had rotted out from under it into a tourist's lakeside paradise replete with condos, banks and business offices replacing old but still functioning working-class neighborhoods was ill-considered though pardonable as such offences go, urban development, human development and all the error and difficulty these bring. But what current mayor Bob Kiss and City Treasurer Jonathan Leopold have done is reprehensible: Selling a city out to foreign landlords. There's even a portable psychologist in the Marketplace, to make sure none of the homeless or mentally ill people get out of hand, and upset the shoppers. They've done to Burlington what Americans generally have let themselves become: A nation of shop-a-holic idiots, who think they can buy whatever they or someone else deems necessary? A new identity? A different Middle East policy? A different mate? You name it. Where can I get it? What do I have to "do"?

No one has to "do" anything. Just keep your ears open for biplanes over the former dump, and your eyes open for the French Foreign Legion, who are always approaching the outskirts of town.

D.H. Lawrence, Bud Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia.

The Baron Hotel. Imagine. Meeting the biographer of English painter Francis Bacon in the downstairs bar. Imagine the peeling wallpaper and the crumbling ceiling plaster. I don't have to: It's still under my eyelids.

Okay, this is it: C. Douglas Dillon. Another little known who's who.

I do not need to have "what's there" pushed on me always, overtly and unambiguously.

I do not know, for the time being, who the Under-Secretary of the Treasury was in 1963.

Partly cloudy, high 53 degrees. The Xmas tree lights have yet to be lit. Meanwhile, we enjoy the dark.

In Les Saintes Maries de la Mer, I am most recently known as a serving-maid named Sara, who is nevertheless still a divinity to gypsies.

Bury me standing. But burn me first.

*

Aware America

2009-11-20T22:22:00.004-05:00

Be political
and correct

the body politic
by slashing open

its corpse
and letting out

the worms
that constitute

the determination
of its movements

*

Mandala

2009-11-20T17:26:00.003-05:00

for Jess

What happens if
the snake you've

charmed turns around
and bites you?

More likely
it will wrap its

red night coils
around your trunk

and drape itself
in your upper

branches where it will
suck your eggs

til the sun comes out.
Or even more

likely, it (or "I")
will steal away with

one of your eggs,
sit on it until its

transcendent enegies
rise up my spine

and feel it realized
in the center of

my brain as your own
full moon, one brilliant,

transluscent and made
of pliable white wax:

Your feminine principle
in the masculine vault of

my cranium, where,
now your outcast heat

blazes up my spine,
melts it, and makes the milk of

our conjoined fluids,
a nectar that lubricates

the joints of our
love-making movements,

which, as they cease,
and we fall into a close

embrace, stiffen again
into hard wax that

stiffens our joints,
and keeps our embrace

solid and as immobile as
the sleep that overcomes us

each, as we share, together
in this way, the lotus of

our subtle bodies, touched
by the bliss of our dream.

*

Elusive Horizon

2009-11-18T16:02:00.004-05:00

As usual, I've dumped
nearly all my friends:

I don't care about
nobody, right? Is it true?

Dennis is downstairs
talking on a cell phone

and turning the pages of
A History of Photography:

Of course I care about
almost everyone! I just get

pissed when no one
talks to me! All right, you

guys, etc. I always forget
what mother always

suggested I best remember:
Never drool excessively

on your friends. Ah, yes, well:
Too late, maybe, already,

for three or four of them
on that score. Their damp lapels.

Fuck 'em. They can all go
belly up in a wheelbarrow

for all I care. What sense of
pleasure might I derive from them?.

What wind, what heart,
what fire? People! Life

goes on and then it rains,
maybe after you're inside,

if you're lucky enough to have
an inside to go in. Self consciousness

has basically eliminated it,
and made the surface of

things appear so that it doesn't
rattle anyone. Silence

for the masses that are
no longer even there. So,

why do I love them as I do?
The fucking little creeps.

*

The Real Thing

2009-11-17T18:02:00.003-05:00

for Jess

To be let out of
Purgatory for two

days, to visit
my baby, somewhere

east of Philadelphia,
walking some

imaginary park
or seated in an unreal

cafe: Neither of us
knows a thing about

"place", but
everything about

proximity and it could be
Kansas City or Kokomo

for all I care, as long as
those are your

dark hairs my fingers
finally entwine: Allahu

Akbar, it's true,
and your lips, neck,

breasts, belly, thighs
and the dark swatch of

your pussy are, too
in the hands of a God

who cups every heartfelt
beat that makes my cock

throb for you, as
we will be, in some small

hoteleria above the pines,
entangled like roots of

some swamp cypress,
your chi-chi glamour

as a matter of inqury
for trusting Libra,

and my judicious
Aquarian erotic spark

to put smoochie prints
along your inner thighs

while holding stars aloft.
It is no trick for one

whose skin will never be
too tight. People

aren't supposed to be
as real as we're about to be,

but you prompt me past
ordinal deliverance

to effect adversity by
burning it into the light of

the stars you see: All
the world a lovely error

we can always both
believe. Our actual love

in Oz will be sung by
tin birds whose voices are

animated by gentle
winds across the tops of

golden wheat, gleaming
in the sunlight of Kansas.

What is passion, but what
hides behind blue bushes

at dusk, and what is paradise
but a worn marble counter

in a hotel lobby, bank
or imitation Chinese tea room?

And what could love best
get to be, but the ordinary

fall of familiar snows, or Mondays
for undertipped waitresses?

We have always known
who we are and what this is.

Your body is a warm supper club
at 10. Memories of your

garden invade my appetite:
I cannot but eat everything

you are. Such dreams exposed
are the offered faces of chaos.

To order them is my desire.
Meet me in the Pit at midnight.

*

Anointed

2009-11-16T16:16:00.002-05:00

for Jess

To have become a story in my love for you, no longer telling the stories of others' loves.

Dream within dream
within dream that all

has some light in it
against the dramatic

shades of what it all
might mean. We continue

the prophetic life of
love against outrageous

politicians, or that from
their ledgers, our responsibilities

will be erased and we will
become the rightful owners

of outstretched hands
and a tender kiss that verges

on salvation, to restore
love's mysteries, from far

and close, it matters not,
they are like transient

storms that always return
to earth: It is not

a matter of choice, but
a matter of simply

jazzing around with blue
griffons under the boardwalk,

and listening to the slap
at the shoreline, as much

ease to my ears as my body
slapping against the way

you splay, close or curl
around my movements

that nevertheless make
the sound of sweet hard

fucking, high tide
in the act and in the moment

no dreams at all, but
the spiritual rush of fresh

lovers and a radio
500 feet down near where

they pull taffy. It used to
cost a dime. Those were those

days: These are these.
Blue glass drawer pulls

on the miniature bureau.
All things sexual have to have

a lark in them. Your wrist
braces my encircling fingers:

My cock makes of your slit
a rose blush that blossoms

as your breasts shimmer,
nestling like swelling whitecaps

and the smell of your garden
and your sea invades

my nostrils. Will you
walk this ground with me

without uncoupling?
And pause, where I touched you

yesterday? Ah, Sacred
Woman, refresh my soul,

hidden as you have, my
crown jewels under your throne

so obviously, they could be
ripe tomatoes in the depths

of your bush. To me, it is
your form that dictates all

things: Whatever I can put
my tongue against: Clover,

for justice, because it's
round. Or better,

how about your moon?
Divine your text by

letting myself be
intoxicated by its thrall

in me? Shall we sprawl?
Beneath the shade of

the lily bower, to stir
what's latent when stars

come out at night?
Best in life to occasionally let

something neither of us know about
guide us through each other,

whose boundaries rest
within our temporary illusions.

*

Ex Animo

2009-11-15T11:09:00.003-05:00

for Jess

"Bluer than midnight magnetic fields of touch."

Gold comes from the body
in a radiant state

of happy desire, that it is
a sign that cannot be used

for anything else: It cannot
be troped or coined beyond

what a human person is,
or what s/he can do

with herself or make of
herself in the public domain.

Abd al-Malik tried to wrest
the coinage of gold from

Justinain II, who refused,
for Byzantium must have

its own methods and measure
of exchange, just as we

who lie together ought not
be spotted via the value system

of one who speaks of the best
ways to make love. Gold

light streaming up your
thighs needs no manual,

nor the remarkable hurry
known in such men as

andrarion agoraion kai
banauson, just some guy

who wants to get into
your pants, for greed

ceases to be mutual
increase, as there is need for

a victim, and thus
there can never be

agreement over the proper
price of bread, for

the grain has been
hoarded, against the gold

along the stems, its seed
gone sun-drenched

for the glory of Ceres,
or as in the wild animals of

Artemis: For every women,
in the fibers of her heart

and acts of her being,
there is much goodness

where wind sways
or where we hear the slop of

water along rock-laden
streams. Is ravishment

any more than resisting
all the application of what men

prefer as "meaning" over
the governance of a woman

from within herself? She will be
inclined by her power, first,

in creation, to have men
around her cease to be

destroyers: Then it is
nature takes us: Can I charm you

with a milkweed pod? To enter
your underworld? Or would you

prefer I wear a garland of
celery? For the rituals are of

the essence, black branches
clattering at the window,

home from the amusement of
Rigoletto, e mobile, I'll

whisper in your ear, just as
you will have me, once, maybe

twice, then andiamo, Superboy,
after my swift, brave and imperious

hands have soothed you
and my cock has flown up your

pussy time in time in time,
incorporeal, so that our hair is

inextricably tangled. Love
is tangible, as its glow,

brass made in the heat
that melted iron and bronze

at Corinth: We will claim
this city by the run of

saffron light from all our
pores, and the acorn now

between your thighs will grow
the cybernetic oaken prow of

the boat that will take us
through the future it already

knows the way of, would we
simply lie in its hold together,

and hold together. Magnanimity
grows rich fruit, from

the tree that is a human body,
so long as we do not surrender

perception and the love of
what it gives us to: We can lift

ourselves to this: Love is not
a "falling", but always a rise

to the occasion of. The prow
of the ship I speak of is

simply a new set of stairs, cut
and taken one at a time.

Join me: The blue light of
the living body enclosed in

the gold light of the mind's
beating heart: The beautiful.

the true, and the good are just
a handhold and a single

star step away. The possible
is the splendor of the known

that we may achieve.
The unknown is possible, too:

We need only wait for it
to overtake us, for in harmony,

always, we exclude nothing
that also has not some mastery.

*

Leisure

2009-11-15T11:02:00.002-05:00

At rest with a multitude
0f selves and non-selves,

Under a steep shade tree,
take the time and space

to decide What
you can never be.

*

Love

2009-11-15T10:49:00.002-05:00

for Dutch

When you finally realize
there is no justice,

the inequity
sets you forward

to act to create
even more imbalance

by insisting that
justice is for everyone

and in the hands of
all those who can begin

creating it in
the lives of every one

around them: Stop
believing that it is not

the most contagious
creative imbalance

known to man, and help
your neighbors

charge the world with it
through you and through

them, these acts that break
down, by giving more

of the building up it takes
to be true to the True:

To raise roof beams, so
a roof can rest on them.

*

The Crest of Your Saffron Skin

2009-11-14T14:17:00.002-05:00

for Jess

That our love were
a fragment of rock

broken from the mountain
on which the heavens

rest, yet still alive
deep within its core:

As in a room, in some
strange corner, one

discovers a multitude of
beautiful detail,

and beauty not temporal
yet always in each moment

passing, as solid
as the mountain -

the mundus, the mound,
my mouth and the time of

your month - in which
the brevity of this

starlit flash of full regard
remains secured: That is to say,

love is secure. Or is
the quiet house

our two bodies make
conjoined along the narrow

passage into your rock
that is only permitted

by the fact that you can
refuse, not to be wet,

but to perform the upper
regions of the rite of

Red Temple Sex: There are
times for eros to be socia,

to drive the prow of intent
with a strength performed

among others, not for
love, but for a like

plentitude of sowing,
that you may reap

both all that you intend, plus
every accidental bean

or cherry that falls
your way along the road:

Let us stay simple
and kaleidoscopic,

with all the varying
types of flight that fall between

the falcon and the moth.
We will make the double arch

of a window facing both
inwardly and out

with our eyes, paired,
and doubled by intent,

and of our bodies, without
jealous regard for propriety

the colonnade of a beautiful
temple infused with

wide boughs, deep roots
and endless illumination:

There in my palm
the wet star from your

pussy, a stain or baptismal
commitment, uneffaced

yet worn over time,
and just as touch is forever

instant, the instant to us
will spread in our

bodies like that lovely
knowledge of limit

that seems like that of
dying, and gives to each

small house a sense of
peace that is active

and never final: Exult
of an oval moon

over high rock maples,
and your voice

I hear always, and your
fingers calling out to be

taken, and the just
combination of rapt

thighs that give to mind
their thin, high trace:

Stars along the horizon
and the changed shapes

of our bodies nested, one
twilit against the other.

*

Asylum Poems

2009-11-09T16:45:00.007-05:00

written during a stay on a locked psychiatric ward at Fletcher-Allen Hospital, Burlington, VT, October 8 - November 3, 2009.

[ PRESENCE ]

That certain
girlish someone:

Carl Gustav Jung
or a sweet speed freak

lost
in the Green Mountains

where you can't
buy no shit

*

ijtihad

have a whole hog's head

*

[ PEACE ]
for Puerto Rico

It's 4:09 AM
in San Francisco

and I'm on the moon
dreaming of some

ancient Spanish mission.
It is 1959:

Oceanside in Ocean City:
Deserted parking lot,

salt air and bright
clusters of stars:

The rattle of
a chainlink fence

and some whispers
500 feet down the beach.

*

[ DEED ]

Black marks
fire blancs

for blanket
world flambe

(Juhamhariyya

XTC

or that other state,

SAMADHI

*

rub spore and honey across my lips

ittisal fi'l-khayal
mushahadat khayaliya
[Corbin, p. 156]

[ the creative prayer that becomes dialog (bilocation between
rationalist reflection and spiritual [ E X T A S Y ?

OR

sunlight is the sickle sunk
in the carbon of her ass
that bears the human pencil:

things will become unstuck
and fly about uncontrollably
when I get to the other side of
the bitter necessity of knowing this.

*

[ RATIO ]

I've convinced my heart
to be content,

for when it is content

it perceives Everything
and understands Nothing

*

[ HUMILITY ]

My heart is swollen
with its own collapse:

Which is greater:
The devotee or the slave?

Which will arrive to
a good outcome:

The greater, or all
that remains less?

Which is the Imperishable
One: The cloud,

the river reflecting it,
or all the wetness in between?

*

[ KNOWLEDGE ]

Knowledge up, knowledge
down: Knowledge

ahead and knowledge
behind: Knowledge

to the left and to the right:
All good things. But

my knowledge don't go
any of those ways:

I just possess it
as it possesses me

and together we don't do nothing
but just hang around.

*

[ PUZZLE ]

Stars that appear
in the fabric

from the loom:
You think you put them there?

No. Or believe
that God made them appear for you?

Get back to work,
my darlings, and complete

something, anything,
without worrying so much

over what its source
is all about: You cannot

dress yourself in your past.
Come, naked and useless

into the present,
and do some good about yourself.

To be idle and evil:
These are good things, too:

Throw your loom in the river
and swim for it.

*

[ PIECEWORK ]

I wove the words
of my devotion to you

and in return, received
no grain, no butter,

no salt, but instead
your highest regard

and the distinct favor
of a homeless dose of

eternal vision, malnutrition
and 24 hours of cotton fever.

*

[ BAYT LAHEM ]

In the body
that is not a body,

but a black hole
giving birth to

a star, the heat
is spontaneous

corruption and completion:
Layer upon layer

of matted straw to clothe
the wet smoke

that is the color of
fire and mud and honey

and smells like
the beginning of Time.

*

[ MONKEY MAN ]

Poppy fields in Afghanistan are the cornfields of Ohio. - Staff Sgt. Jeremy Stover of Marion, Ohio

The Taliban cut
Afghani opium production

94% by 2000, to 185 tons
(UN Office on Drugs statistic).

Following US occupation
in December 2001, production

increased to a peak of
6,100 tons in 2006

(an increase of 3200%):
The US Marines were sent

to Afghanistan to fight
the Taliban, yet

by protecting the poppy
fields of the locals

tp “keep them on our side”,
they only feed the Taliban,

since the opium trade is
conducted by the ISI

(the Pakistani Secret Service),
the original underwriters

and primary financial support
for the Taliban, who anyway

simply want to hack away
opium proceeds from

western profiteers, and keep
enough to regularize

the Afghani economy
and keep themselves in power.

Richard Holbrooke, top envoy
to Afghanistan, maintains

that poppy eradication remains
a cornerstone of US policy

in the region, and that local
farmers are being

encouraged to grow
such replacement crops as

wheat, corn, and pomegranates:
Show me the local

who will prefer harvesting
potatoes to diamonds

in light of some abstruse,
western sense of morality,

and I will eat
four dung beetles between

laughs: We call in
air strikes against insurgents

while pledging to protect
the poppy fields and win

the hearts and minds of
the farming communities of

the Helmand River Valley.
If I weren't in a locked ward,

I might be on some
uptown streetcorner, making

a buy, ya dig, for, like, foreign
aid: Help is on the way. Why

do we put up with these
motherfuckers? Holbrooke

is just another chaste
ex-UN figure on the take,

like Kissinger, a small time bagman
for the Rockefeller clan

and a coup d' etat plan
that is all about eugenics.

The question is, which of
the people of the earth

are the ones to be designated as
among the “too many”?

Who gets to decide? It is not
in the nature of the human

species to move against
one's won self-interest,

and I'm not, of course,
at all against this.

It would be wrong
to murder those “in the trade”

toward any political destination
without first redefining

their assassination as
“prolonged detention.”

What would a dictatorship
of the proletariat look like?

The details can be
worked out later. For now,

continue to be mad,
and buy government surplus:

Utility grade and “canners”
are prime

as long as no one knows
what you're gonna do with them.

*

[ UNTITLED ]

My friends all die
with passing notice.

I have never been a friend
of my own life.

*

[ THE BLUE HOLE ]

The murmuring people
in the hallway

are, that there are now
more murmuring people

with the first ones.
They are all murmuring.

I am half-asleep, in trance,
the listening part of

murmuring. Everyone is
murmuring to themselves

with each other. It's a fucking
orgy of complete

misunderstanding. The nation
is like a dream, interconnected

through the IE roots of
ten languages. If there is

a group of people who can
converse openly

in ten languages without
an interconnecting root,

like having a world that is
all color without a convening

sense of gravity, I'd like
the opportunity

to be in their midst,
to totally misapprehend them,

and to stand to their directness
with the obscurity of my self.

*

[ ILLEGIBILITY ]
after Francois Villon and the Meters

Meet me in the alley
with Sally.

*

[ THE ARTERIAL GHOSTS OF CORAL BEDS ]

You do not know
my name: Tell me

your name for my name
for your name for you.

*

[ MONGOLIAN SEVERENCE PAY ]
for Bobby Delmarco

Grab a rattlesnake
by the rattle

and crack it like a whip
'til the head flies off: Uh,

dude. Then enter the underbrush
and cash the check.

*

[ HE CAN'T BE LIVED WITH ]

I know:
I tried it, too.

*

[ THE RATIONALE]

They were all good
reasons to be locked up:

mental and physical
exhaustion, overexposure,

malnutrition, loss of
identity, bad

compass directions,
pursuit by the full

French Foreign Legion,
etc., though the real reason

of course, was
that I defrauded myself.

*

[ THE RATIONALE ii ]

Fucked by my father
in 1946. So. The names

and dates have been
changed

to protect
the innocent. I can't be

the innocent, since I was
forced not to be there.

I just witnessed
the aftermath.

It still has
a hole in it.

*

[ THE CEREMONY ]

The soul of a man
is a beautiful human

girl, not an exterior
lover, but an internal

quantity that has
something to do with

a mysterious inner
knowledge of dying.

I am the Mahdi. Or will be
if the French Foreign Legion

does not catch up with me
first. Qiyamat will not be

declared on the high
tundras of Alamut, but

on Lemnos: 21 April, 2010.
The Garamations are

an important people
to pay attention to. Aea.

On the occasion of the
declaration, Elena as

Medea will emerge from
the Aegean with a crown of

celery, accompanied by
Claude Lecouteux.

He's a professor
at the Sorbonne, you know.

*

[ FAMISHMENT AT THE BANQUET ]

Tiny elephants
in the treetops.

*

[ VISITS FROM A SMALL ENGINE ]

Hoodlums dressed in white:
Hearsay midgets from

some previous age
shit up each other's assholes,

an alchemical procedure,
turning the black scald

beneath mummy cloth
into the bright faces of

rank October, consumed by
new wind and a drugged

solicitude of transfixed amazement:
Smile when you say that, partner.

*

[ NINE O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING ]

The mountains, the clouds
and rivers of words

unspoken on a damage binge
move purposefully yet

in random patterns
left to right

in the bright light at the window
of the Writhing Lawn Motel.

*

[ POIESIS ]

The wax of the candle
is impure, whether

before or after flame,
food or dung,

it makes no difference.
Even the flame itself

is impure, since it wants
for nothing but to

keep burning, using
the world for its own

illuminating corruption:
There is no pure thing

but that which will
burn no more. There is

nothing that will burn
no more: The liver

descending into the black
mirror of self-negation

completely affirms
the contradictions inherent

in a statement like that.
All of your sentences

are trivial and base
and attract the heat of

a spiritual sickness. I don't
honor the world's

conventions, though
I like to say pleasing

things at dawn or dusk,
and by the cover of

midnight or high noon,
slip away like a thief

chewed out of his senses
into a uniform of perfect ice.

*

[ MY LANGUAGE DID THIS TO ME ]

Human lips
are the blinders

that forever
renounce the kiss.

*

[ THE KINKS ]

Brecht got it wrong
when he said “Art

is not a mirror
held up to reality

but a hammer with which
to shape it.”

He ought to have said
“a hammer with which to

break it.” The inner
and the outer become

the immediate gesture of
one hand. It is

an unusual mistake
for a German to make.

*

[ GLACIATION ]

There are a thousand
panes of windowglass

stacked vertically in mutandis
between me and all

that subsequently becomes
the distance from my self.

*

[ SANCTUARY ]

The water of the river
runs out from under

a reflected moon, yet
there's always other

water there, to carry it
to my eye, and hold it

against the current
that reflects it:

While the water goes
perpetually “over

the edge”, the world
reflected on its surface

remains still life,
never still, terrorized

by being undercut
and swept totally away,

omnipresent, omniscient,
and totally under threat.

*

[ BLACKBOARD JUNGLE ]

The Talking Group

starring Janice Mae Marie Jones

1. Talk about your problems
2.

*

[ TEARING THOUGHT ]

Faint white dusk
and deepest night:

I stand in my doorway
to let myself be

penetrated, knowing
the doorway and myself

are not mine, but
of the devising of all

through which I will be made
strange to myself.

*

[FALSE DAWN ]

The pale eastern-facing window
made pale by the backsides

of three new Halloween posters,
and by the reflection of

all lights on in a room two rooms over
gone deeper into some whiter interiority

than our own, to the light, refracted
off the steel screen grate

that keeps us all from bolting,
or that this is ultimately

the room of the surveillance spot:
To bask in the inhibitory

brilliance of its illumination,
is also to enter the privilege of

hearing the steady hum of skulls
cracking out of

the burning engine
and black heat of

the ice machine's
perfect productivity.

Like, they got a system here
and you know how it is

to go up against mechanists
when they they think they have

a system. Mostly
it doesn't work. That's when

you start ripping it
out of the floor, throwing it

through the window, and letting
the talking fish finally have their way.

*

[ LEGIT ]

I like it when
the stadium lights

across the street
flick on at dusk

in preparation for
a game: Memory

is just the same:
Proust's madeleine

or the smell of fresh-mown
hay in early May, or

Syria 4 Yemen 1
and then the aftermath

on high from ge'ez,
and then the moonlight,

some stranger's city
streets and two

plush days rest: Syria 0
Libya 0. Apply yourself.

To anything. The sea is
never far: Only the name for it

sets its dark regard beyond
the touchpoint of

fingers, in deep behind
my eyes: A thirteen year old

Somali boy charged with
pirating a US oil tanker in

territorial waters beyond
American jurisdiction

now waits in jail to stand
trial in New York: Wing it,

baby. If I hadn't
left my foot in Belgium,

I'd be complaining about
breaking it on a goalpost:

The game of life, its onyx
heart, the blood of a cur

to keep it alive: The place
of one's thirst in a river,

a point of flame, gone
in a fire. I steal best

what's not nailed down: Victory
over the nonexistent: Syria 3

Palestine 0. It is good,
this talent that you have,

to burn away the ability
to extinguish yourself.

*

[ NO POCKETS ]

As soon as I was asleep
she lowered

all my clothes away
on a windless of love:

I never saw them again
and she knew it.

*

[ MESSAGE ]

To: The Artist's Room
From: Janice

You are not here,
and neither am I.

*

[ POINT OF GOLD IN A PRIMITIVE FLAME ]
for Jess, on her birthday

To have been
born has no actual

sense of anything
but real play

about it: The years
of ambition

and sacrifice,
the spare regard

to raise a healthy
child are after-the-fact

yet still part of
procreation: While it is

the will of Allah to
bang his rod of authority

deep up the pussy of
The White Girl

to help her enjoy
a minimum 10,000 cellular

conversions per second,
it is in the end

to produce a vanguard
human advanced in

belle lettres, skilled
in theater and music

and who travels easily
from continent to

continent accompanied by
a hot and loyal pair of

thighs: Lost as I was
out of your arms

for ten days, gone
explicatory on reception

of imaginary kisses,
and partially drowned

in lakes of unburdened
distress brought upon me

by some Black Sea
king from 2500 BC,

you nevertheless remained
perfectly present to me

in the beautiful joy of
evening's darkness,

whose imagination in my
heart put kisses like

twilit stars on your closed
eyelids, that I might

help you feel a like progress
toward the complicit

mayhem of some
future unity, currently

out of sight, that nevertheless
can bring through the party

atmosphere between the planets
the simple news of

how it is to be born into
the wedlock of an domestic elation.

And what there is there to eat.
And how to eat it.

*

[ YOU DON'T NEED TO EXPLAIN ]

Stricken at dusk
by lack of sun and splintered

starlight: The flanks
of the animals have gone

lost in the underbrush.
There's nothing wrong with that.

Sign here. Don't worry
about anything.

And never forget: You're
just another ranch hand.

*

[GEISHA ]
after John Wieners, for Lizzie

We dehydrate with
the inner lotus of

the species, the Black
Chrysanthemum warehouse

vulgar-sized reputation inherited
with a throne and eight pages

that say you are “mentally
unfit to stand in your own

doorway.” Through
Misses Jane Driscoll,

Annette Bapp and the late
Elena Belleview, we know

mother must have had her
hands down daughter's pants

in a German monastery,
the chambermaid

in a ski-lift arabesque
as pertinent to the destiny

of bulemia as four adopted
children forced to bell-hop

status: The Welter Weight
Champion of the World,

or black apples, mid-March,
coming down off chloral hydrate.

You know how it is
with presumed position, despair

and self-flagellant cream of
celery soup Sunday afternoons

with sherry and small Italian cigars:
Throw the furniture

out the windows! Five will
always get you ten!

I am the Queen Mother, no: I am
Blaze Starr: Remember,

darling, that they use blocking
for burlesque, so don't go

thinking you can make it
on your own. I did it

blindfolded, as a Cosmo
cover girl in '69. So please

don't come on to me as an Austrian
chief of police. You know, I once

had it in spades. Not to mention
what I squandered on myself:

$744,012.00. And I intend to go
right on doing it. My love

for you is legion. You'd be
so nice to come home to.

But I know you'd have me
arrested within an hour of

my arrival. Nevertheless,
the church bell's evening chimes

turn my heart into the mother's
milk meant to give blessings unto

those like you, whose minds
like omlettes, fold themselves

always, against “deciding
something.” You are so like

a dry leaf floating in a dark
autumnal forest that I wish

only that I could lead you
up over the hump of earth

that is our nature, and into
“town”, where life is as limited

as a roulette wheel. You know
that song: I wandered around

and finally found that someone
who (finally) could make me blue:

What a surprise all those
years ago, to know this instant

drawing together whose immediate
distance became too much

heart for a mind to stand.
To smart for your own good,

in a way, but, whose warmth then
had to be you, it

had to be you, O marvelous
you. Right up there in my left ear.

*

[SUSPECT ]

Partly cloudy, where
the sun slips in

between bands of
muted grey, a bright

gold eye: Cinders capture
virtue carried through

observation and its
annotated deeds. The question is

what sort of shoulders
might she have had

to see the slip of a Magnolia
blossom from her

princess clavicle into an idea
for next week's story board?

I'll buy it. Or the sunset
of essentially Givenchy design.

Fedayeen, yes. Muhajaddin, yes.
Nanno Ricci supper suits,

definitely not. Lemon dew
fragrance in three-palmed

observers? Most definitely.
The temporal style of

elongation below the waist
continues to stimulate

the segmental in man,
in the demur visage of a totally

over-wrought host: Blow
Beverley Hills from Baffin

Island, Berlin from
Buenos Aires. From

a slightly elevated regard
to Manhattan on Monday evening:

Check luggage. Dine with
Sylvia, then overnight

with a pick-up in a bed of
phony precious gems

out of Bergdorf Goodman's
Tajikistan department

and by dawn, down
Park Avenue alone, memories

of a midi Bebe frock of
frosted cream, paste turquoise,

dictations from balconies of
Algeria, then out to the airport again.

*

[ FAMILY TREE ]

How does one even get
“Ted” from “Frederick”?

I guess it's one of those
three-hundred-sixty-pounds-

and-fifty-two-years-later
kind of things.

*

[ASTARTE ]

Aristotle Onassis
goes up as Amelia Earhardt

while Liz Taylor in a
post-Victorian proto-Wagnarian

dog collar is detained
at Baghdad International,

drifting East after her wholesale
purchase of the Balkan

Peninsula. She loves
the lights, the glamour,

the uranium depleted ammunition.
Anyone for Eddie Fisher?

We're all married to
our own half-lives. And the clock

is ticking. Except it's not
a clock. We have to start

everything completely over:
The old codes can't work us

anymore. We leave the house,
and disappear into the sky.

The old codes were toxic, but
they were the only thing

that could make us appear
to be against them.

Why else would either
them or us be them and us?

*

[ THE TRADITION ]

Ted Berrigan, Bernadette
Mayer and Jack Clarke

are all related, not only
to the sonnet, but

through Bolinas to Lewis
Warsh, whose lovely

sonnets 1 and 12
can be seen in Part of

My History (Coach House 1972).
I intend, tomorrow, to

bring out Oasis Press
broadside number 107,

perhaps the first time
in literary history

that poems have been
published, using

the mechanical reproductive
facilities of a local hospital's

state-funded lock-down
psychiatric ward, and distributed by

“a legal visitor.” I have no problem
with state funding for the Arts

as long as the state
doesn't know that it's doing it.

*

[ FACEBOOK ]
for David Hilliard

It's apparently perfectly okay
on this site, to advocate for

the assassination of US
public officials, as long as

you don't over-post
while doing it. It has also

become clear that no member
of the executive, judicial

or congressional branches of
government constitutes

“an official.” Authority these days
is American stupidity,

whose worst practitioners slant it
to their own advantage

while attempting to entertain
and not rock the boat. The boat?

Why a boat where there's no
real water? When was the last time

Mr and/or Mrs Stupid was
anything resembling “fluent”?

1936. After that, it's just been
a matter of buying, using, developing

and extending anything that
looks good, smells nice and has

a pleasant stride. The deal
with Internet sites like this

are that your communications
become part of a sales pitch

you might have no interest in.
To get others to do your work

for you: That is the world's
oldest profession. And as far as

assassinating “public officials”
perhaps we ought to look

beneath the Treasury, not
for some usurious Behemoth,

but, uh, that laughing dwarf
who owns Facebook (and whatever

shit you got on it): What'd you say
his name and address was?

*

[ MARS ]

Transparency and dissimulation:
Taos, New Mexico

is now being produced
“somewhere in Thailand.”

Simulation is now old hat.
The templates have been

thrown to the wind. Remember
the wind? You used to

have to be penetrated by it
to know what it was.

Then it became a “How-To”
book. Now it is totally

integrated, has reached
full employment, has direction

and purpose, and is highly
regarded yet totally unknown.

*

[ REGARDFUL COLORLESSNESS ]

Hoarfrost at dawn.

(At least it's not cold in here.)

*

[FORKED TONGUE ]

Human thought
runs in parallel

circuits of redundancies
said in an uncertain

way, kept sustainable
by the remarkable

infallibility of
the central groove

by which its objective
contact is cloven.

*

[ THE SCENT ]

You can fiddle
with Fidelio

but don't try to
fool Fido.

*

[ MENTAL WARD ]

If this place
were an airplane

it would have
already crashed

way worse then
any individual in it.

*

[ NIGHT ]

It's a temporary
experience experienced

permanently by all
mortal beings, as in

well, though, then,
shouldn't she

sleep with me, too,
as if there were also some

other, or there is
always some other

as, I, you, he, she,
just the lovely and familiar

“it” motif, simply
thinking up the existence of

some girl or boy
in order to want to

sleep with him or her
so that we have a real excuse

for not greeting the actual
person who is right now

bringing us our drugs,
rushing instead, straight

into the projections of our
archival imagination

to see if there's been any
progress, or in fact

if you've maybe even “won”
without knowing it: That

lovely yet totally impermanent
after-death condition of

the semi-living. The perfume
of perfect warmth

and spiritual solicitude
presses against your mouth

like a pane of glass
that gives you something cool

to kiss: One or the other
always picks one

or the other up, like going
to the edge of the world

and dropping them off it,
instead of going

as the evening does, draping us
with the shroud

which we then can share in
the tender removal of, together.

*

[ SMALL HANDS FLUTTER ]

To realize
the human family

is a tree of ice
that can burn

and cut your fingers:
This final reality

is never final: Neglect
of the body is

inability to distinguish
kinds of ice, or to parse

their hurt: Sexual relation
seems all incest,

and this madness,
this inability to possess a body,

drives the embodied continuum
of our throbbing procreation.

*

[ I THREW THE PIECES OUT THE WINDOW ]
for Christy

There's a part
gone missing:

I've seen this before:
To speak irrationally

about acting rationally
doesn't cover the whole

outline of the puzzle
or the night's wandering

to break it. To begin
to speak rationally, they

give you more drugs, and then
more drugs to forget the puzzle:

Sleep on the puzzle, wake
with it, eat it, whatever

the point is to have
its presence obliterated.

There is no puzzle. Or, more
actually, you are the puzzle

so why haven't you taken
the necessary responsibility for it?

Or, you have, letting it be
assembled in your lieu.

But of course, that is just the imaginary
death of heart and mind,

the puzzle of the puzzle,
its aftermath, and not the active

discard (dischord) needed
in order to make it whole.

*

[ THE CUSTODIAN ]
for Janni

The human whipporwill
at 4 AM, sleeping, or

in another time and place,
the ultimate crime, kidnapped

away with myself: It all happened in
The Big Cube, May Day in italics,

Robert Seward, no, Robert
Richard Seward, called

out of life in 1962 through
a sterling crystal dining area

downtown Manhattan hoteleria
with a woman for a son:

congealed blood breeds
a protective fame as Robert

via Queen Kelly becomes
the broken black rod of

husband Joe up my spine as
a vice officer spent from

18th century Versailles
and gathered now in hot pursuit as

the French Foreign Legion,
lately a transnational trend

of mildly fashionable knock-offs.
You don't think I really care

who pulled off the Great Train
Robbery, do you? Transcontinental

hostess conceits affirm that I
will remain out of the USA

for the duration, in a mental ward:
And blindfolded, if you please.

I will be among the last to be
noted, Babs or Sandy or

what have you for a name,
thoroughly, in a jockstrap,

or embryonically, of the coagulated
blood of trade winds

and discarded library bindings:
Read every text on saintly

companionship and ignore
by nightfall the bodies of

all three of us asleep. I join
the world by refusing

to know it. I've got
a lengthy life ahead of me.

*

[ MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL ]

From 1963 to 2009
there's a void continuum

from which hungry maggots
make my life derive.

*

[ PLAZA SIX ]

This curve, that curve:
I'm not in much for

crowd movements, never
have been. But, simple

road signs: Tehran, 2,350 km,
with blurry arrow. I have

always loved the desert:
Jordan Marsh, colognes

for gentlemen department.
This curve, that one. If

my mail is addressed to me,
I simply throw it away. I have

no clothes, and no money,
either. A seam guide for

a water droplet. Poetry
is not depth psychology, but

a mechanical doing, like
playing the piano. Rather

as from left and right,
federal coterie and powder puffs

and the unsuspected animosity
of having been with “you”

at the Russian Summit Meeting
in 1964 is what bore me

into the talents and interests of our recent
century, having otherwise

and also jumped bail for an ensemble
of fleur-de-lis and Bette Davis

bo-peep pantaloons and a perfect
ruffled collar of Flemish lace:

Thank god for Dartmouth bus boys
and the gaze of hooded cobras.

*

[ SPLENDOR]
for Carol

An Easter egg hunt
in October, necessities

forever displaced, or occur
when they either have to,

or do. Just do everything
wrong in the rightest

possible way. Wear
a flower in your hair

on a bad hair day, knowing
that despite it will wilt

before you know it, that
your own dark roots will

continue energizing your
life, and that your hair

will continue to grow forever,
even after you die.

*

[ VIEW ]
for Leela

Two smokestacks, a tin
roof, the elevated lights of

the baseball field, all social
constructs within a season of

nature that is both colorful
and slowly dying like all of

us: I've been wondering lately
whether this manifestation of

difference between the natural
and the novel hasn't much

to do with the sudden appearance of
your cancer, or my own talent

for hitting a psychic wall
repeatedly and ending up in

a locked ward for a few weeks
at a time. From where

do these interesting distortions
emerge? Or is that that your

cancer or my own schizodelia
are in fact the healthiest

and most corrective elements
we can know, could we but

accept them? Sickness is, after all,
contact with a stronger life,

which to survive, we will have to
assimilate, eliminating all

that's toxic and destructive, and
allowing ourselves to be transformed

by all the difference that remains.
It is not a view we deal with,

but with the toxic and life-
giving forces of vision, always

a threat and forever carrying
out beyond the boundaries of

common life. But of course
there is no common life:

There is only the common bond
that comes of doing battle

against all that tends to invade
and keep us unnaturally apart.

*

[ FRAVASHI ]
for Emma
Mankind's active imagination is part of the overall active imagination (tajalli) of Allah, so that when we submit ourselves to His will, we are in actuality making in prayer to Allah, the moment in which he reveals himself to himself through us, whose passion we are thus permitted to express and employ as our devotion, not only to Him, but to the totality of His creation, including the totality of our participation in continuing to form and be formed by it.

*

[ MAROON AURIOLES AND CRIMSON NIPPLES ]
for Jess

El Khameni gold ornaments,
wraiths of inclement weathers

worn as necklaces, ivory, silver
and turquoise bracelets

and perfect ostrich feather
plumed hats as well as

breakfast with an Egyptian
mummy wrapped in a perfect

Pucci silk cravat. It was
basically an open-neck affair,

Paris hedonism and the like,
German forgetfulness and a life

of dried Cretan beans to attract
and hold the complex decorum of

the peasant class. All is well. My
pajamas are on fire. Anyone

can do that. I will be around,
always, just to be reminded that

I don't yet even know how to
kiss you. But as a man skilled in

letters, I will endure this archway of
future prosperity to know

past imagination into the present, our
never-ending hermetic bliss.

*

[ 23rd APOGEE ]
for Jess

Flat light in eastern-facing
window: It is All Saint's Day

where mountains float in purple
fog: Lord, make my life

a small town in which to live
with my baby, a package of cellophane

noodles, five blue silk roses
and enough strange ink spots to pass

for poems: Catch my colors,
darling, make me your own, keep me

new between your thighs:
Let your soul go loose, and be

extravagant: Flick your tongue
against my skin like a viper,

spend every bit of me you can find
and let us shimmy together

round about the entire horizon
of each other, and leave nothing

untouched or behind
but the dark scent of you

on my skin that I might know
that I am for no other.

*

[ SOLACE ]

I care nothing for the human
voice: I love it so deeply

I can only sing like a rose
to let myself know

how my heart bleeds
when I hear the articulated

tones that are most truly
the intellect Beatrice

scolded Dante for having lost
the good of, the intelligence

manifesting itself through
Nature, as Agazziz said,

and most essentially, how in
the submission of prayer

in which Allah reveals himself
to himself through us,

we are given permission not only
to express our devotion to

the godhead, but are put in
the place of existentiation,

knowing that God can do
nothing for us unless

our devotion in being the mirror
in which he perceives himself

is as total in our participation
as the mistake of the teleology

of Him perceiving Himself
can get to us, who cannot

get on without fragmentation
which makes distinct our own

individuation, that helps
break free of the divine as

teleology by making it ever more so:
God has no voice. And has

lakes for eyes. S/he can
reflect, but cannot see.

The human voice is meant
to break the placid surface,

simply by giving this perfect
lake of light, a shore.

*

[ AN EYE AT THE TIP OF EVERY FINGER ]

Bombarded and ruined
by shit, it is better

to kill the father, and deal with
the matrilinear she who will

forever crush thy head, thus
making one willingly lie in wait

for her heel. Adam was too stoned
on desire and escape to make

a stand for paradise: Sick limbs
wrapped in seaweed (just after

Labor Day weekend): Please
do not set them before me.

*

[ THE ABYSS AND HOW IT ENLIVENS ]

The cultural underpinnning
that made a Mozart

serenade possible, was the court:
As wide as one's shoulders

and three times as long
and as deep as the shallow grave

kept for pauperage, whose art's
depths are endless, whose

dirt's over-refined and whose
performance has a scent of lime.

*

[ THE SKY SO BLUE ]
for Jess

What stirs at the heart of
desire: When a door blows open

in the middle of the night
I feel the need to speak

at the highest pitch, my body
gone green with need of

the next new drug to tell me of
the terror of a sleeping woman's

dreams, which is a parabola
around which I feel

the contour of things to come:
My palms drawing down your

hips onto the bony crest of my
sexual enchantment, your

rosa vulva and my spring
heart, where the sea runs

a perpetually deeper blue,
where in whose depth

a large stone drops, where
rises the roaring bird

from farthest East, patronized
by the Egyptian night, the Phoenix

as your full body, bright
with gold Greek sandals strapped

at your ankles, whose legs
wrap full around the gentle way

I enter you, tongue between
your lips, my inner ear set to

your heart, and my palms pulling
slightly against the small of your back.

*

[ there are 6 further Asylum Poems to be added "shortly" ]

*

By Ear

2009-11-08T13:54:00.003-05:00

for Jess

The primary excitement
is the sonic condition

of anticipation, listening
to you play with

your pussy on the phone,
not so much the catch

and uneven rhythm of
your breathing, but

the ability to feel
in sympatico with the tensing

of your body's fibers,
sense the wetness at

your fingertips, the wrinkles
of your panties pulled

halfway down your thighs
which are thenselves golden

in the afternoon light,
as they quiver slightly

and then stiffen as your
fingers and hands, as your

belly stiffens and your breasts
shake but slightly in

the momentum toward the release
in which every part will move

as one. which is
all that sex forever is,

the move to realize one's
singularity in it, over

and over, so that it is never
mind that centers any spiritual

continum, but your pussy
amd my cock that are the eyes

and arms of gods
and goddesses that form

among them a conubial
star, and that's the non-sound

I heard clenched and verging on
release just before you came,

the sound of being invaded
by a fantasy life projected

from an outside which then
enters through your pores

and against whose energy
your own sexuality comes to press,

as if the air itself were
your certain lover, for all

that you put there, against
your lips, against your breasts,

pressing on your belly
and finally, made all yours by

your own fingers in your cunt,
that you can be him and her,

whoever might be other than
you, who you also are,

as I heard you be, all the way
through, wanting no one

else but she who comes
through her own means and end

and lends her pussy to my
ear, to stiffen my resolve.

*

Letter 1

2009-11-07T12:14:00.006-05:00

Darling,
Here are eight of the pictures I made while I was in the hospital. Since they are in the same notebooks in which I wrote "Asylum Poems", they ought to be onsidered as a sort of accompaniment to that text, although in an inexact sort of way, and not as a "background", either . . . more like visual versions of the same sort of verbal commentary with which I combatted boredom. There is nothing natural about a place like that. Everything is made of linoleum and cotton swabs. Even the other people. I'm ecstatic to be away from there, and able now

to resume life as a shepherd, shepherding words and senses together and now, also, of course, wow, thank you for sending me all of those beautiful pictures of your gorgeous pussy, which I will shepherd as well, with my hands over the hills and dales of your voluptrix, leading you to the cover of some high brush where I'll lay you back and lick your bush and slit and core your asshole with my finger until cranberries and stars befall us from on high, and then, gushing with erotic light, I'll work my cock into your slit and make you wide inside as it and I go slowly up you, like a weighty ferry floating a load of marble up the Danube, to "Vienna", where I'll lick your lips for breakfast after I fill you full of juice, after our torrential rains, after our hair flies, after you make the base of my cock a gleaming pool of pussy juice. I can't wait

to meet you in the Jerseys. I been there, baby, I know that ground, and I'll help you walk it, without stepping on any angel droppings or shreds of black plastic garbage bags that are the New Jersey state flower. The state bird there is the snark. It looks a lot like your pussy, and sings like the poems I write in honor of it. We'll hunt this creature out, under the boardwalks, evenings at high tide. The swell of blood at your face and between your legs will make it easier to see it. And it will be a good exercise for you, too, to begin to differentiate between a big white gull and my throbbing cock. The language of each has the same IE base, but mine flies wingless and goes on automatic pilot.

Okay: Love letters ought to be as short and suggestive as love-making is long and explicative: Real pussies for real cocks. Real saliva, real sweat and real cum. The letters ought to just make us stiffs of anticipation, excitable enough to jerk off under stars, but with plenty of suggestible reference left for unbuttoning actual buttons, and kissing, licking and sucking whatever reality drops in those moments from ceilings, pants and dresses.

I love you, baby. I'm love crazy. As you said in your note with the pictures, or asked, was I ready, for, "it" . . . and, yes: All I want to do is, touch you, kiss you, lick you, suck you, finger you, fuck you, walk around with you, sit down and have a meal with you (squijili), then go down on you again and eat you for a few more hours or days or centuries. Ah, hummm. Not to say my cock doesn't want his share of your lips, as well. Sweet.
Yeah.
XX
Your Honey

*

My Life, Part 1

2009-10-05T21:06:00.004-04:00

I want to be a Berber.
- Kathy Acker

Starlight on backside
of cloud, whose light,

unseen, seeds the next
day's rain, or morphine

shot through dirty
khakis for a short

lifetime's case of
virulent hepatitus:

We laughed so hard
in Haiki's trailer, that,

then, so, yeah, we all
knew much, being

the children of bus station
personnel, about

what was present,
getting it, and transporting it

metabolically, well,
you know what I

mean to say
when speaking incoherently

about a picture painted
entirely in black:

Haiki stood on his head
and said "Malevich"

while Cream wailed
White Room on the stereo

as we waited for Aurora
Borealis. For months.

"They grow nice grapes
in Belgium." Some wit

actually said that, way past
midnight. I have always

loved the bleached stone
of the earth, stoned

on some sweet rock honey
Red Leb hash, watching

the air go white, with
the rise of the sinister

Sunne, at that precise
point, a mythological

being, like Sinbad the Sailor
against whose juicy lips

I press my own, as if
he in dream were my own

mother, yes, the impenetrable
Gene Tierney, with asps

swift and soft in her hair,
blown by sweet sea breezes

of the Persian Gulf, topless
in pantaloons, with a rag

wrapped around her subtle,
thin wrist in mourning for

the moon. The door opens,
and the world goes

green against eyes spent
with the black scrawls of

some inner alphabet
that scorches the horizon's

rim, ash by bitter ash
so we can read it, hold it

and keep it "for later."
Fuck, baby, I can no wait

tha' long. Johnny, from
the next room. There is no

"next room." Voices
in my ear are like fish

in water, still racked
by thirst: I hear all

that is but impossibly
present. All is present.

Here comes everybody:
The Sunne emerges

from the outer world
and with a crushing roar,

bruises its way into
the nave of my church

and locks my throat
in place. Beljiki. What?

We are desert people,
nomads living in the detritus

of spent America, thorns,
no, thrones, in the apple

paradise of the eastern
seaboard, lacking for

nothing, and without
east coast unilateral money:

We haunt the skins of
one another, searching out

some semblance of
pixie dust, and fresh dried

sweat is sexy, but
I like, you know, the works

giving sweet taste:
I wanna be pricked by

the thorn-apple and feel
in the torso of meso America

at my middle, the sharp
tin of a star's edge

gash, that whatever
possesses me, might emerge.

Sleep possesses me, so
I wake to it: Press

my heart between
the sun and the moon,

hot and cold, or
in my left hand, a four-

pound torch and in my right,
a pint of clear water.

Draw them together
and burn me, drown me:

Throw me on the floor
that I might consume myself

in peace, in fury: Nothingness
come and been gone.

*

Memorable Lunch

2009-10-04T20:28:00.003-04:00

Camp? What camp?
-Anon.

No lunch
and a memorable

fog descends
just above

the rattling
black plastic

sheet I'm
squatting under:

Just me,
Mother Nature

and her drenching
pelt of rain.

*

Extasy

2009-10-04T20:00:00.004-04:00

for Peteris Cedrins

Rumi said
that people

in his country
love to hear

poetry read
to them

as an
entertainment

to delay
their having

to act: Exactly
what they are

too frightened
to do. In fact,

they hate
poetry, because

it comes
through

a constituency
of acts

that are
continuous

and contingent
upon

feeling deeply
for others

and for
the things of

this world.
The Sufi must

reveal God's
intent

in everything
that otherwise

cannot be
named. We do not

ask to be
called a beet

or a carrot
when we are

cousin to
the rhutabaga,

nor do we ask
our human

dependents
to yell, Hey,

you big, fat
turnip, get up

out of the ground
and report

for kitchen duty,
without also being

prepared
to be totally

torn from life
by our hair.

*

Theosophia

2009-10-04T15:18:00.004-04:00

for Jess

To be driven to near
madness, without

losing the grammar
necessary to say

any and everything
through which

sounding I may become
the illiterate

goldsmith who leaves
pink finger streaks

in the light alloy
of your skin when

he touches you:
The grief of lover

and beloved is not
absence, but

refusal to address
the void still present

even when pressing
skin to skin,

the identity of
separate action, yet

remaining completely joined
in the act: Sexuality

is equational, literal
and numeral as well as

perfectly metaphorical:
We do not see

the blue sea for
the foam we stir up

on its surface,
and what we see of

that has little to do
with the weight of

the fluency pounding
down from the heart

whose blood hums
between both your legs

and my own: The exchange
of salt, the Roman

salary, to pay the legions
for our mutual

intervention one
upon the other: Consider

not only the image
in the mirror's glass,

but the glass itself,
and what becomes of

time: The silicon
in the sand clock becomes

the device by which to
reflect upon one's looks,

the vegetable state
become conscious again:

Wing a tomato at the moon.
My experience of

the numinous is from
direct experience with your

gleaming pussy
and the moistness of

your armpits: Smell
your elbows while I

squeeze both cheeks of
your ass and let my hands

slide up the Spanish
peninsula of your hips

to the ball-and-chain
baby maker of your belly

rounding side to side
against my own, while I

sniff the fur of your
musky underarms

to complete the Soviet
twenty years too late

but right on time:
Spread your cunt lips

with your fingers
so I can work the head of

my cock in the personal
faith of your opening,

and lodge its weight up
against the biological

endeavor to resist, yet
equally feel its gash

widen measurably
with pleasure and real

juice: Then is hijira,
withdrawal, and again the push

forward, jihad, spark
of the convincing:

hijira, jihad, hijira, jihad,
far in beyond

the plush purple
horizon of your thighs,

this conscious rebellion
against the injustice of

ennui, or its shell of
interesting dailiness,

for our inclinations
toward and movements

within each other are
intrinsic affirmations

that the gods are being
reformed as inevitably as

snap beans grown long
in a late summer garden:

Inevitability is a catastrophe
of divine disinterest:

Things going on as before:
No. There is no original

sin from which to fear
retribution, for then I am

free to praise thee, it matters
not, of the two ways:

Selfishly, to the occlusion of
all else, for my own, or

giving my all, not to own
but to see thee as to

thyself pure value: Both
praises, either side of

a single coin. I finger
its edge: What sustainer

would make those in wont
to be satisfied, fearful?

I look in your face
and say Who is this

mirrored so fully back
through the bright, dark

cups of her eyes? She is
the working of the dissolution

of subject/object
relations: The undifferentiated

"difference" of being who you
are, with another into whose

heart you have disappeared
but to manifest there

and be manifested as
one of the faces of

the Godhead, seeing itself
through your looking at

me looking at you seeing me
see you: The first sound

realized in the church of
the obsidian night, forever:

You a single, me a single
and the shares of each

a singular presence, perfectible
love, an encounter

that will burn, with
esoteric delight, the names of

all the substances at hand
tenderly into their own

cognition, felt invisibly, yet
fully, in perfect blasphemy

and faith, right to the tips
of each of our tongues.

*

Irony

2009-10-04T12:55:00.003-04:00

Jamal al-Din al-Afghani,
whose acolyte Mirza

Reza shot Nasr al-Din Shah
dead in Tehran in 1896,

was protected by
the Ottoman Sultan

when Iran attempted to
extradite him for

"significance" in the murder.
Al-Afghani died

the following year in Istanbul
from cancer of the chin,

after threatening to
castrate himself at the urging of

the Ottoman Sultan
that he marry. In Qandahar,

he brought military ruler
Azam Khan into an alliance

with Russia against
the British, but was forced to

flee by Khan's brother.
A fierce ascetic, he inveighed

against every materialist
from Democritus to Darwin,

saying they had "opened
the gates to the dogs of

acculturation." Prophesy,
he claimed, was a craft,

and identical to philosophy:
Tactical thought in transparent

eye-to-eye exchange
has always been thought

penetrating, devisive
and heretical to metaphor.

*

Your Front is Behind your Rear

2009-10-03T19:02:00.004-04:00

for Jess

According to Benedetto
Croce, there are

four sciences. We have
three of them

so easily that we take
the fourth for

granted: The Beautiful,
the Good, and the True,

corresponding to
Aesthetics, Ethics

and Logos. But these
must be grounded in

and activated by
an intending body of

proprioception: Economos,
or the Useful.

Without it, no call
through the other three

can be heard: What is
thinkable, is do-able

and thought ought not
remain in the dictionary,

but flow through
battered streets: The voice

to dent the air, scour it,
roughen it in the same

sense that sex is for
creating in the beloved

an animal husk in
rough desire whose satisfaction

makes the temperate
spirit break forth and rise

to flush your face, yes:
Yours. Let me loose

the leather thongs of
your horizon and slip

my hand between
heavenly and earthly

paradise and finger
the folds of your little

river until waves of
renewal liberate it from

its own positivist accretions:
You are Thera, 2500 BC,

now a small, dark, hard
lava rock I hold in my

mouth: Hear it rattle
against my few remaining

teeth? When I hear
the moan of your syllabic

principia, my kappa
stiffens, and like a child

I think in symbiotic
rhyme: Ka ka, cha cha,

chi chi, da da, kai kai,
and on for all I'm

worth, building by
sound the fundamental

bulwark that will
keep your pussy spread

so that the A at
the tip of my tongue

can touch the rotund
arc of your simple O.

So: Where were you
when I was born?

What star-bright beam
of love carried you

all the way to the rim of
my mortality, and spoke to me

in the language of
the dahlia, the chrysanthemum,

the simple white daisy
field that blinded me with

its pelt (all yours) as
I climbed the tantrik

ladder fondly through
the blizzard of our love

to find myself in clear air
on a snowy mountaintop?

Cream in my throat:
I must have drunk it up

from you, plus
a pitch of midnight

brandy and new ash
from recent fires. Are you

there at all, my darling?
Kosmos, bios, parados:

The green silk of
your inner thighs

and their intense heat
as my hand draws up

to gauge the depth of
your smuggler's cove:

Fucked, and fucked again.
Swollen with eggs,

which grow, as from a dream
into the dangling roots

that grasp the present
moment, ta'wil, and my hand

strokes your Scorpion
moon, which bristles back

fur: The wraith of fire
around a star. The pit

of our bodies reeks of
the Dharma, for all belief

is filth, stolen from libido,
the mate of its own

inversion, and bent on
nothing more than living

on a deserted island
and fucking all 10,000

devils that are stranded
there. But I have,

tucked away in the brush
just up from the littoral

of the deific sea, a full ring
of dried figs, and two jugs

of fresh water. All
we have to do is meet

for three hours a night
in the dark, "in behind

the liver, and just below
the heart," and, accompanied

by the screams of
earthly hell in perpetual

orgasm, begin carving
from our oaken bones,

the prow, keel and steering
oar of the proportionate

craft we'll climb into
when we're finished cutting it

out of ourselves, and set
hard to port, with heart's

wind behind us in our
sails, forward into the rush

of perfect, salt sweet
airs of decanted mystery

and device, to measure
the parasensory sinews

that bring us to
a journeyman's fluency

in our black-gold blood,
and the music of

its impropriety
as it sucks us full into

each other's pores
with total dignity and grace.

*

The Spinners / Rubberband Man (Live 1976 Midnight Special)

2009-09-27T20:02:00.001-04:00

The Trammps / Disco Inferno

2009-09-27T19:58:00.001-04:00

Marvin Gaye / Heard It Through The Grapevine

2009-09-27T19:47:00.001-04:00

Ain't no Mountain High Enough

2009-09-27T19:41:00.001-04:00

Al Green - Livin' for you (1974)

2009-09-27T19:38:00.001-04:00

Al Green / 1974

2009-09-27T19:29:00.001-04:00

Lotus-Lunged

2009-09-27T18:20:00.006-04:00

for Jess

To she through whom
God's circuitry is

complete: You court me
as your hostage with

visionary apparitions of
perfect and concrete

desire, and I am
naught but an angel of

love's lexicon, wrapped
in the thin blue

sheets of your midnight
bed, feeling

in my heart the
vaunted high ceiling of

your womb, the fur
of your pussy, this

door that is a halo of
mortality to protect us

with sexuality's
royal train of

stars, dragged across
the night sky

like my fingers over your
glorious skin, from

vainglorious symmetries
of error that would shroud

all that happened
as we woke to each other

at either end of some
great bird's song,

accompanied by
the double drum-drum of

our natural hearts
in sweet fucking, turned

to the novelty of
divinity, opening

and pouring out in
deepest song, the thrill of

loosening our limbs, one
upon the other,

the curl of toes, quake
of fingers and shimmer

rolling down from
shoulders, as thoughtless

mind gone green in
waves of multiple

orgasm: Moon shine
seen from a grove of oak

whose autumnal heat
goes waning, an orange

globe riding lake water
south: We will

never be done with it,
the gravity in

the scheme of how things
are between us:

Black bread, currant
jam and endless tins of

deep dark caviar, with
sherry and the rush of

laying back, seeing
stars through Queen Anne's

Lace, and feeling you
move on top of me,

and on top of you,
sky, with Mars, Jupiter,

Saturn and Venus
laughing as my fingers

move between your
legs and unband the template

that holds your happy
mischief to the perfect

fallibility of being
where we are, together

through the blasting
charge of minutes as they

pass through us
in deep exchange

and fathered visions of
further streams,

and No, I'll never
put you on, except to

glove my cock
with your unpretentious

sheath of noon
and night: My

Mission Girl: I'm
the aesthetical dude that hangs

from your nipples,
and feels the crush groove

sensuality of rising to
the interior level of your

navel and beyond,
to express within

these acts of love,
the flaming circlet of

my heart gone into
your every pore,

the intimate orb of
my desire for you,

the throb of this
flaming, liquid, orange

ball gone into the black
womb of your laughing

sun, and opening
like wild iris

in some distant Egyptian
night, the thick lips

of your Nile wetness
rising to meet

the Ra boat of our
tripping up and out

to touch the shore of
this final river

that embraces us,
my lighthouse, bright

inside of you, riding
waves of perfect

bliss and passage,
leaving us each

in the presence of
an inconsolable

presence: The ache for
sweet companionship

and its stewardship
seeing us through

the building of a world
as it comes entirely undone.

*

The Mystery of the Sonnet

2009-09-27T13:40:00.002-04:00

I am the Qur'an and the Seven Doubled.
- Ibn al-Arabi, at Tunis

The Obvious is a link to the True.
- Hadrat Abdul-Qadir

The number fourteen represents
The Divine Throne that encompasses

All worlds. As the Breath of
The All Compassionate Allah equals

The reality of all Realities at
The Cosmic level, so

The reality of Muhammad is
The reality of Realities at

The human level. There is
A direct analogy between

The Breath of the All Compassionate
Through which the world becomes

Manifest, and the human breath,
Via the articulation of

The twenty-eight letters of
The Arabic alphabet, each of whose

Sounds determines one of
The Mansions of the Moon.

There are fourteen lunar
And fourteen solar letters

In the Arabic alphabet.
Twenty-eight is the number of

Days in a completed lunar cycle
And on the fourteenth night

The Moon is full. She is
The Maid of Fourteen, the perfect

Soul, the loving combination of
The seven heavens and the seven

Earths, the Fatiha, the seven
Doubled, the perfected sexual

Creature, al-insan al-kamil, or
The ta' ha' that summerizes the whole

Of existence from lowest to highest
Degree, s/he who both encompasses

Yet is a copy of, the world. The seven
Attributes of the Essence are therein set

Like garnets fixed on a pure granitite
Face: Knowing, Willing, Able,

Living, Speaking, Seeing and Hearing.
And so there is in clarity, the Naming

Of the Stone, the 70,000 angels
And folds in the veil that provide

Continuous occultation for the black
Meteoric stone, and which endlessly

Refer to the reverie of rising
And witnessing through the consonants

And vowels of the alphabet
The necessity of diving for the Keys

To the Treasury of the Essence,
The supple opening of capacity.

This alone is Islam: the wisdom
Manifested as Self, and never

The reverse. These are the Divine
Mysteries and their embodied numbers

Arising mutandis mutandi, all
From simple, ordinary pain.

*

The First Real Mark

2009-09-27T10:26:00.003-04:00

with apologies to the whippoorwill, the oriole, the swallow

The letter A is
An inverted bull's head

Whose fly-laden
Carcass as Osiris was

Sweetened by the work
Of bees. There is

Honey in Typhons'
Hanging sac, if only we could

Steal it. Poieisis
Provides the stealth of

Combining Time and Space
Enough to take it down

From its ever-rusting
Nail. Neuros was

In restoration of
The feminine comforting guise

Gone under image to
Manhood when Dionysos

Was prematurely torn from
Zeus' thigh. My Sweet

Lady Lay is in dominion
Through transformation of

Echidna to her Athena
Potential, mutatis mutandis,

And although we cannot guide
The Argo via earthly

Life, we can possess the residue
Of the Bear, Ursa Majoris,

The honey-dripper.
From a drop of the Medusa's

Blood, winged life was born.
There is force, among

The growth rings of an oak,
The unstable shifting of

A viral code, the internal
Heat that makes a human

Flee, and the deep-swirling
Gravity of earth. To move

Another way, let's say that
Ganesh crashing through dense

Jungle is lithe. Or the whole
Winnebago nation cut from

The side of the elephant.
To sacrifice through heavenly

Time and carnal space
The resolute particulars of

Organic, receiving life exhaled:
This, alone, is love. The most

Powerful organism on the earth
Is the human throat in song.

*

Roky Erickson / Two Headed Dog (Red Temple Prayer)

2009-09-26T20:38:00.001-04:00

Roky Erickson / Sputnik

2009-09-26T20:34:00.001-04:00

Roky Erickson / Click your Fingers Applauding the Play

2009-09-26T20:32:00.001-04:00

Roky Erickson / Mine Mine Mind

2009-09-26T20:31:00.001-04:00

Roky Erickson / If You Have Ghosts

2009-09-26T20:16:00.001-04:00

George Schultz

2009-09-25T21:26:00.003-04:00

They call me Dr. Feelgood.
- Aretha Franklin

Dean Rusk once said
that one-third of

the world's population
is always awake

and probably stirring up
trouble somewhere.

George might've agreed
but with the important

corollary, that everywhere
in the world, there is

intelligence and know how
driven by local habit

and dear affection for
increase. You can fool

some of the people, all of
the time, etc., but No: We are

better than that, George said:
People are smart

right where they are
in what they are doing.

There is no overview, no
teleology is possible.

*

9:44 PM Thursday

2009-09-24T21:27:00.004-04:00

for Jess

A man without a telephone
lost in fantasy land:

There we have it,
long on the short side

of knowing everything:
The juice in your

pussy after sex gone up
for sugar and tongues

erect from cardamon
through an Egyptian moon

slung low between your
upraised legs: Suck it

out of my hole,
and spread it with

your lips along the rim
of my cunt's longing

vertical gleam: No
Okeanos will ever match

my quim for force of
inspiration: I love it

when you speak to me
of forbidden powers,

your finger up
my ass and your lips

and tongue in subtle
wind and force to the means

and midst of laving sweet
my cock head's flange,

to hear a horse's breath
through human nostrils

when the stink of
a mare in heat is set

before them, and eyes
gone red with devilment

and lust, where the poetic
grows from my heart

not with sweet words,
but in hoarse cries,

the spasm of twenty
fingers and toes,

and the rank smoothness
of my imagination's

upthrusting
ivory tusk.

*

Near To

2009-09-23T22:32:00.005-04:00

for Jess

To lift the great
crystal, that would be

the diamond heart,
the hard, sapphire

mind of soft, sweet
love, raised

or heightened
exponentially to

a degree unmeasurable
with which we

measure the world
in which love takes

place: To fall
"in love" is to feel

the gravity of being
so inclined toward

another's glance
away or toward,

that the fall is
in actuality all rise

to love's occasion
where sensibility is

out to lunch
in leafy tenantry:

Strawberries, figs,
date pastries from

my Iranian friend's
cookie shop in

Damascus, to whence
the sun withdraws

at dusk, tree leaves
ruffle, and there is

the refreshment of
some misunderstood

Shi'ite theological
conversation, out

on the sidewalk.
These guys wear

cool hats. Let us be
versant there among them.

I dig fanatics, just as
I love a vanity

set in red cherry
with attached mirror

arching overhead
in entrance to

one's self. We will live
in Trajan's summer

palace in the Balkans,
and ignite the powderkegs

of each other's
dark sex with fuses

too short to even
bother with. Blow off

felicitous desire and set
keel hard to the lee,

as we score
indifference with

the dense forest of
our presence to

each other: I want only
that we sit enrapt

within each other's
limbs, in a small

cereal bowl set loose
on the Adriatic,

confessing to the invisible
hosts of our sins

our former lives
in the form of actual

tears that have no need
of applause, two

romantic nomads
trading tongue for

chocolate, confusing
"belief" and "religion"

and maybe
not even knowing

the difference between
tuna and albacore:

Pale hearts always turn
pink with unfished

passion. And all rise:
Yes: It's raining.

And for this alone
one forgets nothing,

ever, the cats
and dogs of a close

occasion, or my
streaming cock deep in

the throbbing quim
of your split new moon,

O Lady of the Lakes,
sweet hide and lovely

still life aftermath
of star-mouthed kisses

set against my heart:
You set the fire

and I'll bone
the mackerel right after

we share a short jar
of pickled herring.

Our love is as wide
as the Hudson

ten miles up from
Manhattan: That river

runs both ways:
Tidal passions and their

odd effects, and stars
dead before we perceive

their light. It's
a strange life, here within

the lit sky determined by
mightly Allah, and measured

by Apollo's nine. Love is
a perpetual freight

whose bales require
the endless lifting

whose raised status is
inevitable anyway. Nothing

happens in imago mundi,
but that in terror of

being without it, fear
pukes back depth

which emerges as
multiple orgasm.

The heightened pace of
practiced love

forever acceeds
in acceptance toward

a refusal to exaggerate,
and the pale agony

of having to accept
what is, written

darkly across
the skin of a seamless

lake of light: Just say
yes. Love justifies

nothing. We are headed
for peninsular luxury:

Burn the maps! I smell
the intimacy of

Trieste at hand, foreign
travel, pale blue

passport stamps,
and lira, or drachma,

hobbled goats and diesel
stink within the smell

of roasting lamb. My hand
climbs the gold of

your inner thigh. Your
organ spreads. And in

such chambers of
understanding, my work

with you, is an integrity
of labor and faith:

Love who covers
her nuns in pretty meat.

*

Election

2009-09-19T11:25:00.003-04:00

I wouldn't be happy if I were occupied either.
- President George W. Bush

The institutionalization of
Attention involves becoming

Hopelessly radicalized as
A feeling individual. Heresy

Is neither a way in nor out.
But its weight is gathering

Among the shadows
In between. One no longer

Need wait for a fatwa
From the 'ulema out of

Qom before acting. Everyone
Can smell the trouble

That has entered unto
Lotusland, the withering of

Its vaunted stems, its stiffly
Standing flowers. It used to be

We'd simply dance the night
Away, and do likewise with

The day. But now, our pollen's
Being laundered, plunder to

Some foreign bank, and replaced with
Rank bacteria. There grows a need

For death squads. As all bodies
Under attack respond

The same. The names are all
Clear, and I possess them:

Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfelt,
Wolfowitz, Libby, Perle, Khalilzad,

Ashcroft, Powell, Bremer, Giuliani,
Garner, Shinseki and Wal-Mart.

Voting machine manufacturers.
Most other republicans. Or why not

Members of any organized
Political party? Including all those

Falling under the rubric of
Our ruling monetary system, say

Anyone possessing more than
A single twenty dollar bill.

These all constitute the total
War brought about by

The delusional cult of the important
American individual. I am

Possessed of it too. What to do
To get the blood off my hands?

Or pass it off as some others'
Responsibility. To wash my hands

Of it. A bar of soap? A bottle of
Environmentally friendly detergent,

Or a word from God to wise one
Up in summary to the Dead?

Don't shut your eyes against their swarm.
I want to live. I need a gun.

*
　