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
- 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!
- 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—
- Melencolia I
- ssssssssssodomy,ssssssssssodome
- hitting the jillpot
- ... and flesh fulfilled its destiny as flesh ...
- a sociology of use
- bach: so insufficient now, so sufficient
- death roe
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