I wonder?

Stomach fire

the hunger's eaten

itself along with you

Skin fire

TV rays and radio waves

impregnate and shine

Hand fire, Eye fire

cinnamon candy where you were:

the syrup of your image hardens

Again

Long ebbing burn of kerosene

mildew and clear air

spirits turn and mutter

in their feather beds

in the soft down of nightmares

the forest cracks and heaves

the lawless steal their eternity

from the bosom of the law

the boughs spread like fire

cutting stars like stones

from the night

and I seem to be mistaken

staring from the heart of the noose

the night films over

Old love:

wolf pups at your teats

breezes in your mouth

On pine-needle beds

I press you in

into you

but you have thrown my compass

into the solvent of the forest

in the water at the roots

and my search softly dies

into you

sunless woman

night.

A little structure, a little myth

the wine, left of itself

is the heart's blood-

a hammer softly tapping

making in the fluid (fire)

what winks out the eye of the glass

*

your body is a vase

and I am the silent lily

a cup (like a grave)

in the snow; the imagination

you've seen so often

where it ought to be

that you know longer see

or know

*

I am the mooncow,

the two-headed, the cloven-hoofed,

calved of the sky:

eating from the trough

of old, degenerate night

and drinking the lies of the stars;

we (none of us)

have been;

we (never) were.

------------------------------

Good evening readers,

I just finished this little triad which explores the relationship of beauty/myth and its existence in the world, and conversely in the observer, a little piece of what I've been grappling with lately. I won't really go into the structure I kind of hoped to achieve with it; I haven't stood away from it long enough to really delineate its components in the reality of the poem apart from how I conceived it in my mind.

I've been thinking a lot lately about that famous Donne line "I am a little world made cunningly/Of elements and an angelic sprite." Now, I've always taken that to mean that the poem is a microcosm, a little world apart from the larger; a space which you enter and which you must accept the basic rules and premises of in order to gain access. I think that this view may be held by many literary critics and readers. However, the second line "Of elements and an angelic sprite" deserves a second thought; it of course means that a poem, like a myth, is composed of interchangeable pieces, held in sequence by a structure (as Levi-Strauss would say, an armature), an animating spirit. On the psychological level, the 'elements' are various mental objects and symbols, and the 'angelic sprite' is the arrangement by the ego into a more-or-less logical progression. On the level of construction, the 'elements' are pieces of myth, signs (whether derived or innate) that are grouped under a common genealogy and arranged according to a selective principle that is consciously chosen and may or may not mirror the author. Now, the question that follows is whether the elements and the structure are, as I said, derived or innate. I obviously didn't create the notions of wine/bottle, flower/vase, mooncow/sky (or face/face, hoof/hoof, and is/is-not; further subdividing), but in some form, perhaps a vague and nebulous form, but a form nonetheless, these concepts are inherent in me as part of my endowment as a human being. So I think that we can safely answer that they have their origins in the innate, but borrow from the world of experience (derived from somewhere) in order to find their shape and express themselves. But this is aside. Whether I stole these ideas from other texts (as I am admittedly apt to do) or whether I conceived them in the vacuum of my mind, they are external to the poem itself. Whether they refer to some specific reality, some specific mental object, or signify only other myths, other signs, in an endless progression, they are a referent to something. I conclude from this that it is not fortuitous to view the poem as a closed plane, but rather only as a signpost, a point on the infinite grid(or globe; I rather like the globe idea better) of possible things and possible thoughts. To use Buddhist terminology, the poem should be the finger and not the moon. I think that a study of the classic canon will bear this out. For example: I would rank the greatest piece of drama as Hamlet, the greatest novel as the Brothers Karamazov. In these certain ambiguities are very conspicuous: the question of Ophelia's suicide, and the question of the murder of Fyodor respectively. We can argue ourselves hoarse, but there are only clues, and no conclusive proof in the text, either of Ophelia's madness or intent, or as to which brother is the murderer; I believe that this blurring of the final outcome and it's consequent onus on the reader to fabricate some part of the story is the precise reason for why these books lead into the infinite and thus into the beautiful, the sublime. Well we know that every generation has a different reading of Shakespeare, a different insight into Dostoevsky; but these works seem to persist because they are colored mirrors, allowing you to strain out the muddle and din of humanity and isolate the human spirit, see a bit of yourself as you really are. We all hate poetry that's didactic and moral; in fact, we only tolerate morality in art when it's discursive, when it frames the question, the dichotomy of life (life/death, I/other, poem/reality), and if it asserts a solution at all, recognizes implicitly that its own solution is tenuous (the fable is a glaring exception to this, but I believe that can be entertained as well in these terms, and is for another day besides). The primary function of poetry is thus, not description, but wonderment; not the entrance into its own world, or the world of its author, but the limitless world of thought and myth itself.

Just my thoughts;

Thank you, and goodnight.

New work written in the hospital

Unsequenced poem

clear-headed, clear eyes;

you fly through mazy disentanglements

the saliva spans, like bars,

the place of the jaws

pulling apart.

the baleen of the uterus open:

pitcher/bell/category

of all enclosures; mark

of disparate Cains: you, small wings,

fly in.

crack the acorn, dear,

he bleeds honey;

in a mat of reeds and slivers

he sings himself to sleep.

when shall he pass through?

horn curl, like hair, framing:

the ridge of her clavicle,

the wings of her breasts,

the teeth of her ribs

and her tongue-heart.

in the center, centrality:

periphery gnashing his teeth,

castigating absence.

cut your many holes

through the many rings of the wall!

here is the place to end.

I rather like this one, it's got a nice balanced sequence and some lilting prosody; and the metaphor is quite decent even though it's necessarily abstract. The five sections are complementary, not quite to be viewed as separate poems; however, they are all split viewpoints of the same view, building not a progression or resolution as is normal, but rather adding to the picture different aspects and shadings. It attempts to make the solid silhouette, the block, into a fully dimensional entity, occupying space.

What is describes is somewhat beyond me to convey in prose without gross understatement. Besides, this is the age of the reader; what is intended by you is infinitely more subtle and meaningful than my intention in the composition.

Unsequenced poem

This is rather recent. It's already in audio form on the player, but I thought I'd supply it as text because I rather like it, with all its dissonance, and I thought maybe I'd get some criticism. Enjoy.

Unsequenced Poem

The shape of your surface

is skin and clotted ink.

Caller of bones,

Declaimer of genealogies,

Architect of sutures

to dam the insidious blood

galloping from mouth and eyes;

your speech is an act,

but you named me my name for nothing.

I've displayed it on poems, on possesions,

superscribed it

on long nude arches of women,

set it, paranthetically,

between fingers of stone.

Altar-place, dwelling-place

meat and sleep of the fires,

the atonal hush of

the sacrifice; the melody

and clamor of the pyre;

all these in identity,

old knower, covered in maps.

Nomenclature of the senseless,

orator of the sense,

your voice overwhelms you,

overflows you.

I am your erasure;

I am the signifier, decaying

into the signified.

You've broken the pieces to fit you,

you've broken your eyes to fit,

big eyes with sensuous tears.

Your taxonomies, your tongues

only say the quiet,

only photograph the night.

Another from the Manuscript

Book 5: XXXI

inkpots and thin paper,

gruel of rice and tea,

my many lesions open.

jasmine and lemon,

Gaia twisting her teats,

generate-

themselves of themselves,

stain on the page.

we prick our thumbs,

my mother and I,

mingling Adam with Eve.

she licks the dust off my ribs.

in the lush

mazes of her breath,

walls of creatures part-

they leave her scent behind them.

lingering, lingering.

Short poem from the manuscript

Argot Book 2: III

an insight

an awareness

a flash in an empty pan

and I glisten

as the moonlight moves

my hiding-place

revealed

a sliver of face

exposed

how must I look

sunken and drawn?

Post numero uno.

Hello world; and hopefully you have a happy day full of applause for the newest venture into the overcrowded Blogosphere and the even more brazenly full and exclusive world of poetry. This is to be my font of opinions, and you are to be my captive audience; you are expected to ovate, boo, or scream as conditions warrant; while I regale you with my modest genius and epic failures, be they in essay form or verse form, formal or unnecessarily strange.

As I don't quite have a topic for this first of many entries, I feel that I should explain the background of the name I've chosen to represent myself to you, faithful audience. I currently have a pile of around a hundred and twenty separate instances of poetry laying on a table next to my computer desk. I have just finished organizing and cataloging them into a single cohesive work, however, at some point during the sequencing, a poem *gasp* fell out of its rightful place and onto the floor. As I haven't really had the time and inclination yet to put it back in its neat little order, it lays on top of the stack. As I was searching for a nom-de-web, my eyes fell upon it, and voila! My late night Dada urge gripped me and I chose a random little string of morphemes from the poem that seemed to represent something or other; what, I'm not exactly sure, but I'll let the academics agonize over it later.

So, here, for my first post, I will reprint for you this little poem that you might glean whatever small understanding it offers and get acquainted with my work. Enjoy.


Book 3: XV

Pale youth,
apropos of nothing,

the sky is ocher for you,
can you not see her drip?

thighs of orchids and cream,
hanging, a mistletoe,

the cusp into destiny.
She does not wait for pilots, for astronauts,

but for the children, blue and breathless
who choke upon her pigment.

She sends her cirrus valentines
to these. Her stalactites,

ghouls of vapor, palpitations
of air, are tubes

that drink your grief.
O saints and suicides,

guiding her arms into place,
can you hear the spirits

knocking at the horizon?
We will come in.

You already see,
painted in your rhyme book,

our faces, approximations
Noh masks and gongs

twirling, sounding, drowning out
like an engine's rotary blades.

Our anatomies
are the machinery of the stage.

Every night, our snowfall
quenches the summer that blushes our cheeks.

Open the stoppered end,
let us fly into your passageways

let us rest on the cloth
of your breath. Bend us into

bows and hoops, arrows and escutcheons,
that we may sleep, and war; and sleep again.


Finish, and Goodnight.