Dictionary of Modern Times viii

With a mild preponderance and possibly overpreponderance of this is its and animals and genetics and night and screams and muches, very muches, born of a February in Canada and dedicated to the particular convergences of this time and this place, and in sweet memory of Excess’ child, Silence.

Melencolia I 

(7.2973525698 ×10−3 = 1/137.035999074 wasn’t, surely, just a coincidence,

when Albrecht writ god’s soul on 24x18.8 centimeters)

that old master, that old bastard, albrecht dee, calmly fit the whirring world onto a page

angels and artists, like cows and justice, aren’t that impressed

with whirrs and whirls and worlds

but go about their predetermined business anyway

of sitting or sleeping or looking

while others gasp or spit or drive quickly by when shown, calmly, cows and artists

just sitting there

appearing to do nothing

sssssso^domy,sssssso^dome

Manūščihr, High Persian Priest, who wrote Dādestān ī Dēnīg or Pursišn-Nāmag (but truly it seems more Dēnīg than Nāmag), devotes an unusually inordinate bulk of his little treatise to rectums, what not to do about them, what to do about them if you’ve done something about them, the impact of any such actions on archangels and whether the angels raise those who do something about rectums from the dead, whether killing those who have done something to them is meritorious or deleterious, a discussion of the height of the stenches arising from those who have done something about rectums, ... almost 10% of his ninth century work—written to highlight the most important religious, social, ethical, legal, philosophical, and cosmological knowledge of the age—devoted to rectums!

The pious may be pious but they ain’t porous, said Boris.

the propositions of freedom

1.      so one day you know or sense or it’s sensed for you

2.      or maybe not one day but in the crack of a mood or some hideous lunch or a forgettable decade or genital

3.      that this is it

4.      and you decide or more likely it’s somehow decided for you

5.      by your genes or a stray banana or your parents (whatever they have to do with anything) or some misplaced underwear

6.      whether you buckle down and do the that this is it:  kids and cars and pufnstuf

7.      or you go nuts and the that this is it does and buckles you

8.      or you try to detour around the buckling and the doing and the nutting and the #3 follows along (or maybe leads or plays hide-and-seek, it’s hard to tell), which seems like a kind of buckling and doing and nutting (and/or being buckled&done&nutted) and the seeming, as mister frost in his hiemal soul foretold, might have made all the difference, which doesn’t, frankly, (as he also sang, but more surreptitiously) seem very much

it’s raining cash&jism, the sun is slippery in the sky!

And I saw ducks, like greasy monsters,

hirsute and horrible, on the teetertotters of their quacks,

mourning for their churchy mamas yet,

spinoza’s ethics tucked inside their pretty breasts.

And I saw crocodiles, in sartorial suspenders,

quoting ducks but mainly snoring,

seated on their leather ancestry not meaning very much.

And there were tortoises too, almost cute and cuddly

if it weren’t for their memory of now till 1889.

And not just these!:  neurotic OCD flamingos chomping on themselves,

rolypunting wombats and crafty sewer faggy rats,

birds in bunnies! phoenixes in tabloids! fish in fishnets! giraffes as maître d's!

     !             !!!                    !!                  !              !!!                           !       !!

So it is in the age of meteorology,

with cash and giraffes and mamas.  (And a slippery sun.)

dna murmurs

Pling goes the pling of the pling on the plingpling

Plong goes the pling of the pling on the plong

Schasht goes the Unterwoof of your sweet pedigrees

And pling goes the plong of the pling on the pling

the fair

I like the weird ones.

Who have fallen off the carousel’s piggies and horses

and wander among the music, the rising falling rising falling rising falling

and watch, halfheartedly, the changing riders, the lineup’s scramble, the crying laughing faces

and wait, though not necessarily with anticipation, for those called to fall to fall:

and some sit there, appearing dumb, close to the hooves

others babble below the noise, the happy hum

still others walk with or against the revolution, conversing with the riders

for their own peculiar purposes or just because they must converse

and a few are given over to feeling the falling rising the revolutions the music

and saying, or not, this is it this is it …

Meanwhile, the lineup waits excitedly, replenishing itself like weather

and the piggies know exactly what to do to give that special feeling of what it’s like to be alive

and the weird ones, who have fallen off (or maybe climbed down because of godknowswhat)

still join in the ride and are not apart

All’s Well That Ends Well

The experiment fails if the word is uttered,

it’s all signs and pigeons and the impossible calm of your gaze:

time must do its thing without help from us

(who’ve never really known what to do with time other than fill it with our sighs and screams

[which may be, for us, all time ever is:

our problem play of noise]).

So utter the word anyway—

the word’s but a yellow scream or sigh,

a streak on god’s expanding canvas

which does—(admit it!)—nothing to failure or experiments

(they’re quite capable of doing fine on their own, thanks).

Words are just pigeons and time is just your gaze.

weather report

The sky’s today the underbelly of a dove

Vast and sleepy in the heavens,

Resting on the bloated arrogance of earth

It looks, too, somewhat like a marshmallow

A little charred, as if it fell into the fire,

Enough food for all Somalia, if we could drag it down

All this—though it isn’t much—might portend some days to come

Without doves or marshmallows or the relief of famine.

Just the overturned blue bowl, the empty ancient shape,

Holding the avocado of the world.

in a february, random snapshots taken with my iEYE, whilst touring on a dubious lectica, inappropriately portered by doré and hopkins

the sky is green,

my heart is green like the sky

i drive the tram between the Cocytus and Lethe:

there’s always room, never any fare … entrer!

When I was six, bound in the trunk of a Bourbon taxi,

the Delta wailing like a herd of marauding banshees,

Krishna, gloved, in the back seat, tickled my toes.

the world, as light as bubbles,

is always chained to Wonderland with songs

See the paintings, suspended in the air!—

twisted landscapes with the brains of emergent DNA

sipping lattes in postbiopunk cafés.

Fluffy vivisected faces crossing suns of perfect beauty

whilst the Flintstones play stone banjos on a duck float.

There—the city rising to receding lights, coke and gin and futures in the faucets,

numbers cracking through the concrete, maudlin peace and tofu,

hearts for sale like sausagedogs, pronouns rotting in the dumpsters,

you like Shirley Mosque and me like Thelonius Poopoo

playing cards on the distended belly of the headless duchess.

It’s all here, in the funfair, in the city, on the greens,

the world is light as bubbles and the sky as free as banshees

we’re playing golf on bloodcarts, singing—Hey nonny ninny

it’s all here in the window, in a scream

Pflug & Pfuff

visited the Room of the Eleven Heads on the last day of the first month in the year after The Apocalypse, and counted the heads and looked into the eyes even when there seemed to be none and necked a little in the washroom and returned to the Eleven Heads, which all seemed to be quite aware that something had been going on.

They’re peeking out from everywhere, said Pflug.

Like gophers on Groundhog Day, said Pfuff.

They know what we did, said Pflug.

In the washroom, said Pfuff.

That we maybe shouldn’t, said Pflug.

Just recently, said Pfuff.

In the washroom, said Pflug.

But the 11 heads, despite their seeming awareness, remained mute, and if they knew anything, retained it in their stony hearts and showed it only with their eyes.

poverty

                … say it … say it over and over … say it fiscally, emotionally, intellectually, imaginatively, spiritually, ontologically, socially, romantically, sexually, psychically, erotically, culturally, familially, politically, aesthetically, oneirically, temporally, integratively, physically, eternally … an artist is never poor … her endless effusions of wealth erupt from vast deserts of emptiness … but none of this is poverty, for poverty is lack, indicating concrete objects outside one’s grasp that one must have to be fulfilled; the artist, wanting all and being intimate with the gap between desire and fulfillment, works with what is given—and what is given is most frequently the gap—to destroy and create.

dinnertime

(aka stretched unsonnet, having just been run over by a GO train, on a simulated death march to bataan)

Brussels sprouts like baby heads

In the laptop’s womby glow

Thyme like beatcops stuck in Gorgonzola’s teeth

The city stretched like bubbling pancakes

John Cage caged like hamsters

The dance like Karen Cane on stilts

Rice and lentils happy in their reputations

And the carrot—noble carrot!—laughing like an orange.

Ah!, it’s dinner, it’s dinnertime,

King Crimson’s playing bible tunes

And the city’s sparkling like a rhinestone demiurge

The city’s sparkling like a Brussels sprout

Baudelaire’s skeletons hiphopping on the twinkling apathetic clouds

Death winking like a greedy god

And metaphor on crack, you on jungle daylight savings time

The night climbing Leah’s Ladder,

You in Hades munching vultures

I in heaven being munched by cokey Munsch

It’s Toronto at three a.m. in February

It’s like a raisin tko’d in some detergent factory

It’s dinnertime and the oven’s counting roman numerals,

It’s dinnertime, we’re riding chaise longues to hell.