Dictionary of Modern Times vii

to pray

God, the unspeakable, who rarely uses words and has now almost forgotten how, who is white like an infinite desert of arctic snow but hides in the palettes of painters and fashion designers, who comes and goes like steam on a window, about whom it might be said that little can be said and in this saying is our speaking, whom I think I saw once at the bottom of a tube of toothpaste, who may resemble numbers in their purity, who may resemble filthy rectums and schizophrenia and maggots in a putrid kitten, who does not exist, who played a tune once in a bar in the twelfth century in Perm, who had grown weary of love by the time of the dinosaurs, who prefers backgammon to bridge and Pauline Phillips to Martha Stewart, who owns a schnauzer and calls it Misfortune, who presently drives a ’72 Honda Civic hatchback but complains about it bitterly, whose LSAT scores are average, except in 1949 when a 179 was obtained, who’s sort of like you on one of those days, be near us we pray and be with Aunt Jennie and her dementia and watch over the situation in Belarus and take care of the distressed and starving everywhere and help me live forever without any problems and can we colonize another planet soon cause that would be really cool and I’m sorry for what happened in Auschwitz and please especially give me an iPad4 for my birthday and get rid of Mark who’s really annoying amen.

eat your greens, mister murray

Mister Murray was a carnivore from 1964—

cow and pig and fowl and horse and whale and wild boar.

No matter how much Spousey tried to get him to eat greens,

the most he’d have (perhaps once a week) would be a lima bean.

She tried the oldest time-aged tricks that Gramma had once used:

she lined her thighs with chard and kale, put lettuce in the booze;

but all that Mister Murray’d do was flick those greens away,

get some beer from the corner store then say, Ok, now let’s play.

Until finally one day she chained him to the rad,

took off her clothes and yelled—you won’t get had

until you eat four pounds of spinach, borage, collards and garden cress,

till then I’m just gonna sit here and taunt you with my breasts.

It was, you must admit, a fairly classic scene

of dueling wife and husband, of sizzling flesh and greens.

Who won, you ask?  Did Mister Murray get his meat?

Or was Spousey there till doomsday, throwing fennel on her teats?

We’ll never know, because it just so happened then

that Franky Rank, a drunk, was driving his volkswagen,

crashed into the living room where that war was going on

and killed all three, the dachshund too, and the teacup persian.

All the leafy things that Mister Murray’s wife had so carefully prepared,

laid on her lovely body, so eager to be shared,

slowly were forgotten, dried, and quietly withered to dust ...

and all that remains is this memory of human lust.

  

jabès, even, wipes his ass, too, like god

... it’s not a stretch to think of the two of them

squatting on eternity’s jakes

sharing a joke about scatology and suffering

pulling on the heavenly toilet paper roll they share

helping each other out a bit, the way friends do,

then jabès wandering off to write the book of rolls, or something,

and god, doing what he’s made to do—

silently watching the dumpings of humanity,

listening to jabès yab until he can yab no more

and becomes, like god, silent and watching,

dumping, pulling, sharing, wiping,

squatting at the right hand of ...

and the word redeemed, once, the silence,

or seemed to, in its empty suffering,

now so full of itself, it’s not a stretch to think ...

You know how it is, in the south of france, with all those grapes.

Petite Pierre preferred to spend his dimanches

not under Bishop Balustrade’s barbed brimstone

but under Boucher Borduas’ bobonne, Bernadette,

in the vineyards, with all those grapes,

until the bishop and the boucher

found and chopped Petite Pierre and Bernadette into itty bitty bits

and buried them near Bresse,

where they flowered into fabulous vintages

which you drank while touring

and said, How lovely, how marvelous, the wine, in the south of France,

with all those grapes,

you know how it is.

ode to coconut oil

- as if the great iam-iam had coconuts for balls

- as if he spread the earth with it then bowled down the alley of the coco-milky way
- this, not amniotic fluid, our squishy birthright

- probe & astroglide & k-y & even butter (& always vaseline) be damned:  cocoil!—the healthier alternative (got coc & nut & o! in it ... it’s meant to be!)
-  oh oil of the coconut, be praised!

lover in bombay, margarita in oaxaca

recently the Council of Doves in Bad Worms confirmed the vatic cries of the heresiarchs in their distress and declared that god is cheese and his angels worms, that god was formed of the milky way and his angels of him when he was sour.  Consequently, through the declaration, the heresiarchs were put to death, their distress silenced, but the truth of cheese remains.

i have a lover in Bombay, a margarita in Oaxaca, and this is the truth i see in the cold and the soil and the cries of loneliness as they swoop on the vivid wings of night.

flinging w/o flinging

the jade of middle age

jaded, middle aged

the age of mutton fat jade

do you hear the war cry that men hurl

into the face of the future,

challenging it to strife?

not wishing to be one among many like jade

nor to be aloof like stone

faith 0 doubt 0

After 6,000 overtime periods, the score remains ...

... if you must shake your fist at something, do not shake your fist at fate, shake it at freedom ...

unit of pain:  microouch

¹ base unit of felt pain

² Microsoft’s underground subsidiary and parent

i see myself through the rearview mirror of a passing motorcycle seen on the bumper of a vintage car reflected on the concave chrome of some trinket on the dash

Yet, even so, there i am.  Solid, in a sense, like industrial smoke at night when it’s -25°.  Indisputable, really.  Something that surely wouldn’t be there, that appearing, in a world just of machines and mirrors.  Distorted, perhaps, but what isn’t, considering the nature of reflection and the reflection of technology and the technology of nature?  It’s the case, i suppose, if i hadn’t got the trinket that i wouldn’t have been seen and so, presumably, would be nothing, unless you’re one of those who believe there’s always a surface somewhere that’s reflecting the immanent image, if one knows where to look, under the views, in the closets of mirrors, in the blood of machines, the hidden alphabets, if one needs to see that much, if it’s a quest instead of simply just an accident.

i sensed myself passing in a mirror, and i was not undone

this is it, the self as an intuition of a simulacrum of a self.  This isn’t only time, its elusiveness, its impossibility, its eternal game, that peepshow on the bottomless lake of the heart.  It’s what we are, in our ... what shall we call it? ... our ... our ... our humanity ... but can we say it(, how can we say it)?  ([Humanity is so inhuman.])  It’s the inability to grasp that’s at the center of the mirror, our recoiling, our glimpse of that glimpse of the glimpse.  I walked on, though, as if i had seen nothing, and the mirror, too, did little other than what it does.

we travel to the moon but, still, our brains are underwater, our hearts are in the womb (_{and this is to say nothing of our gonads, which seem to be, most of the time, just in themselves})

and what connects these odd devices—brains and hearts and moons?  Something in the drugstore or the eucharist?  The black and white prints of dyer or wilbur or osho or katie or ouspensky or jesus (who didn’t do prints [unless you count the shroud]) or dürer or you?  A tweak to the brain or the heart or the moon? You? The plague or the crash of the web or a plane, the planes or plains of non-euclidean geometry, sweet flowers of absurdity, elliptical love?  An exclusion of thoughts (new thought, higher thought, severed thought, california thought), ^the work, the negation of suffering ... or their inclusion—mind’s niagara falls:  seduction, death, and power, the high-wire over the lyric eddies of the masses?  Perhaps god has a giant elastic, a collection of twine and ribbon, which he wraps around the stuff when he’s in the mood or it’s about to snap.  Or maybe it all just somehow hangs together on its own, despite our plagues and drugs and books and amulets and work, and nobody really knows why or how.

... and, for our excited readership, lounging at home in their petunias, sipping chai and turnip juice, we hint at definitions to come—

1. Melencolia I 
2. sssssssssso^domy,sssssssssso^dome
3. hitting the jillpot
4. ... and ^flesh fulfilled its destiny as _flesh ...
5. a sociology of use
6. bach:  so insufficient now, so sufficient
7. death roe