Baudelaire's Bunions

A Redefinition of Hell

I draw on whatever aspects of my soul are required to accomplish any task that calls to me.  Once that task has stopped calling, i turn to other tasks that call, drawing on whatever aspects of my soul that are required to accomplish those tasks.  If you get confused—if you expect me to have a heavy soul:  unalterable, fixed, dumb, knowable—whose issue is that?  Isn’t this what you do anyway but slower?  You who change your mind once a decade and view it as a fault!  You who praise diversity in your mouth and shit on it with your other!  You celebrate olympic golds, you paw at the maserati, then accuse me of speed?  You stand-ovate Hamlet then accuse me of wit?  You object to the creationists and assume darwin, then accuse me of adaptability?  You celebrate madonna, then accuse me of … of? … of! … anonymity and poverty?  You practice your yoga, then accuse me of aum?  You blab classlessness then take classes!  Oh you lukewarm camels.  You who are crucified on time.  You who require a stage for intimacy.  Have you not heard of the dance?  Would you go to the hell mister wilde created for you?  Ah, dear wombats, you are already there.

No

I’m not taking the burden of 40 years of bad management.  I’m not taking the burden of three millennia of stupid men or the women who throw that burden at me to suit their own stupidities.  I’m not taking the burden of christianity’s puerility or leslie who in kindergarten called me toothpick.  I’m not taking the burden of all those who are too scared to adapt, who have ossified psyches, who talk about god or peace or knowledge or anything as if they haven’t almost died from it, who call fear love, who haven’t sweat entire nothingnesses over a misplaced elastic, who cover their lust for money and comfort—what spiritual insecurity!—with rhetorics of virtue paid for by others by their tongues and their brains and the very pit of their love and their lives … you know … their lives.  I’m not taking the burden of your lack of voice and the burden of whoever and everyone who gave it to you, including me, i’m not taking the burden of myself.  The 51 years of bad management and whoever wrote the training manual for me or you or the dna we’re all happily mapping&living (what’s the difference?), like michelin or nat’lgeog or google-in-your-bedroom.  Easy blood, i call it.  What we do in our cloudy cage.  Living in the womb of something else.  That whipping destiny.  The face that’s waiting in the mirror.  Freedom.  Sing it, liar.  Sing it to the end.

What Edgar Taught Us

One doesn’t watch the symbols or the mermaids show

What might be their downfall in those randy glances.

Banks and eagles, worms and ladders, snakes, their branches,

Would cast the die for watching if it weren’t for Poe,

Who said, more or poor, less or poorer, One doesn’t watch,

Except by virtue of the spell that faeries throw.

The one that makes mamas drool and dread, gently blow

Their sons and daddies to the grave.

Letting Go of the Money Tree I

War of Dreams

It’s not that you’re wrong.  In your aubergine nights.  Reading the Gita or Dworkin or whatever.  Whatever it is you do to separate light from darkness, to march forward with the onion of truth.  It’s not that you’re wrong.  That’s how you do it.  Live. Talk. Work. Love. (I think that’s your word for it).  I suppose those fighting for peace must be peaceful.  And those for justice must be just.  The methods must matter.  Whether you use a cucumber or an artichoke, a pomegranate or a pear.  And the kind of pear, eh?!  Opuntias ain’t pyrus pyrifolia (and don’t forget—or begin to remember—that opuntia’s an anagram of utopian:  that means something!!)  The velocity at which it’s been shot.  Whether it’s been freeze-dried, ossified, fossilized, rottenized, vilified, mystified, juicified, photographed, certified by a CMA, taxidermied, pedicured, been to La Mancha, all that jizz.  How high it’s gone to heaven, whether the academy’s done its thing to it, if it’s done the Mecca trek.  The words must matter.  Whether you say passport or pisspot, jesus or cheeses, progress or pagan, fuckme or love.  We’re all right, really.  That’s the beauty of it.  We’re all just vegetables with the misfortune of inescapably getting visions (from somewhere! Where? Isn’t that the question? The question?) that we’re not.  You’re an onion, i’m a fruitcake, he’s a radish, we’re a kiwi, they’re a stinkbomb, she’s a yellowstripedcauliflower, you’re a fruitcake you’re a fruitcake you’re a fruitcake too.  But i’m a god.  Really.  Those visions like those neatly stacked multicoloured icecream cornets in a super supermarket.  So happy.  So convincing.  Must be true.  But then when you think about it (which unfortunately has to come from time to time, petite ejaculations from the same place [?] as the visions or the veggies) so much truth gets a little weighty after a little history, like our garbage or a marriage or the carnage or some cabbage.  Yet.  There it is.  That’s how you do it.  Part of the mix, i suppose.  Fridgecrapstew i call it.  Others civilization.  Whatever, it’s a word.  Yam.  We yammed all night cause we were high like grapes.  Hey—wanna come home with me and make yam.  Better than yooboob i suppose.  But.  Back to the Gita or Dworkin or Oprah or yourpickorprick.  Toss it to me, baby.  Shoot it like a flower.  Redpath maybe.  In your pistons.  Yeah!  Tank me silly like a Yankee.  Sketch the future like a doodle.  Make war not war like a Christian.  Shoot love not love like an Oxfam.  Have your ideology and eat it too.  Oh yeah baby.  Oh yeah.  It’s not that you’re wrong.

THOSE GOLDEN SCRUBBY YEARS

Twas in the days of the dishwasher.  When they were high and lifted up and mighty as a wigwam.  In the days of the dishwasher.  Full of cockatoos and syllables of the gloaming.  Oh, in the days when seraphim sodomized god and Isaiah wrote his euphemisms on his chariot of clouds.  Things were scrubby then, and golden, in the days.

I entered the cathedral of wishy-washy song, without entrance ticket, mapless, hov’ring on myself, not inattuned to the squeaks and wooshes of the pot and pan.  (Pan’s pot. Good stuff. Organic shit. The original.)  Awed by the organ of knives and spooning, quivered by the crypt of thighs to come, recurring dust and slaughter, suds & laughter, little jetsams of our days.

It was then i saw the onset of the words, those circly things, replete with themselves, and dirty, dirty as disease.  I saw the futility of the window-cleaner, muttering his mutters in the horny heavens, firmament of muhammad and the condos (good band name), his bud lite mane whipping in the wind, eyes free and barred from all that petty privilege, 57^th floor and nowhere, like an amulet dangling from god’s ass.  The trees are grand, i’ve been told, and been there too, once upon a time.

Words are filthy monads, scrubbing, scrubbing, all that other filth.  (Like billiard balls sortof.)  What are we to do, i asked a word (which i had spent a lot for); it bit my nose & burst.  I was once a window-washer, wiping off the tears of god from human souls which we know are made of glass.  Inside—when i could see (rarely, blindly:  god’s tears are thick, relentless, my vision’s rather faulty)—i saw (i thought i saw) undressing, stretching, dissolving, copulating, semantic orgies undoing all and us for we are a bit of the all though all we mostly see is us as all or worse this me as all and that is that but not this and once upon an aum.

The dishwasher now of course is just another utility.  Like hydro or eco dry cleaning or the worldwideinterweb.  What the fuck.  Get a dishwasher.  Get 3 or 4.  4 for 3 or 3 for 4.  Give em away, like usbkeys.  To your mama, your girlorboyfriend, your bossywossy (though heorshe already has 2 or 3).  Stick your pansies in them.  And your cat.  And your girlorboyfriend, bossywossy, yourselfwhileyoureatit, and the amazonwhynot.  The world’s a dishwasher and all its minions dishes, we are being scrubbed my friends my friends, like itunes and iching and tickytocks ticyfocks talkytics falkytucks &

twas in the days of the dishwasher that i saw the dishwasher, it defeating words and everything not dirty but scrubbyclean scrubbyclean scrubbyclean again and time made new, the songs and the cathedrals having fallen down to dust and the windowwasher gone home to his little flat and his tv and his onanisms and himself or selves and that is time and that is time and that is time and this

21.09.12 1122h

Finished memorizing the Tao Te Ching today.  After four years.  Ranging from a day in which i memorized five vignettes (of the eighty-one) to a year in which i memorized and recited none.  Now the text is in me and i have to figure out what to do with it inside me.  Rather, i listen to its whispers, its soft suggestions.  Likely some refining, some audio play/experimentation, and possibly a movement toward the Chinese (its 5,000 characters instead of the English's 10,000 words).

In the meantime, the text has begun oozing surreptitiously and explicitly into my life.

To devote a life to the ingestion and expulsion, absorption and incarnation, of a text.

That is all.

INSOMNIA

I did go to bed early.  Whatever that means.  The night was dark, like a sewer, and turds careened through the streets without purpose.  Cinema was everywhere.  And all its hideous accoutrements.  I wanted to hack like a heavy smoker and run my hands down the pants of something furry with a bottle of bourbon up my ass.  The streets.  Turdcicles. Turdcycles.  Made me think of double gyres of scats as a kind of schema of history or something.  STOP trains winding down to trainy beddy bye.  Oh god.  Love again.  Or, rather, thoughts of love.  Or, rather rather, something resembling a neon sign i saw in Bangkok once intimating practices sometimes associated with love.  (Though i’ve never been to Bangkok.  Or Spain.  [Kissed Spain’s ass once, as it stuck it into France when i was perusing through Whatever when i was Ambassador to Whatever.  That’s true.]  That’s true.)  Parenthetical desires.  Epistemological eccentrics.  Make the toilets go round.  Speaking of.  Just saying.  Whatnot.  What if toilets were like carousels—pretty coloured piggies and horsies twirling in circles, oop and down like dandelions, all for a few buckaroonis ... imagine plunking down your ass on that!  They’ve almost finished it.  The bridge.  The one down to the left and over there.  But they’ve been almost finishing it forever.  Like civilization but without the Fruit Loops.  We have enough humans doing research into reason (or what’s called reason by those doing the research into what they call reason).  That’s what the nightmare’s for.  (Though nightttime should have three teas, like The Hatter & The Hare when Halice joined them with her chalice.)  And we have enough people going mad in the traditional way, the mad way, as compensation for reason.  I propose calm detached soothing comprehensive vigorous investigative documented cited methodical research into madness—which is surely nothing other than reason in a mirror, and what are mirrors for!??!—using not reason’s methods but madness’s (madness has its methods but they’re on different books):  ([{after reducing my political commitments in the external world i find i’ve been becoming more priapic at the keyboard ... good sign, wouldn’t you say?}]) the (a!) problem with psychology is it uses reason’s methods (those fearful forms) to research madness then wonders (though it rarely wonders!) why the stats are getting worse ... and they call them insane!  (I don’t usually like emoticons, i find them demeaning.)  Isn’t that what art is?  To hang reason and psychology upside down and spank the shit out of them?  To take the cosmic dildo god and make the brain’s holes moan.  Isn’t madness just the body and though we say we love the body we just want to fuck it?  René in drag.  Whatever and whatnot.  Evernot and whatwhat.  Cinema and cinnabons and sin’a’ma.  But now i’ve been at this long enough that the STOP trains are going again, even the gloaming has gone, the stupid sun is crawling up the hypodermic needle like a giant rabid testicle and everything is normal once again.

So here it is.  Seven in the morning.  Wide awake like lemons.  The soupy soup of words having souped.  Eternal night having done a dump on its techno singing swirly throne.

13 PROBLEMS OF THE EXCESSIVELY LITERATE

God swoops and hollers in our souls, calling us to lives ... mad lives, futile lives, aimless lives, fragmented lives, Our Lives of Perpetual Doubt and Anguish ... calling us to lives of trainwrecks and sunspots in the coffee, of tomato plants as high as heaven, of hippos in the jubjub trees, of shoes.

I once, when i was General Paint, commanding (or is it [was it?] commandeering?) battalions of cans—african mudslide! faulty love! flamingo sunset!—fantasized (not without some guilt and pleasure) of being Specific Paint (or was it General Mudslide? General Specific? [it most certainly wasn’t General Motors]).  But that was then.

Shoes.  Can’t live without them.  Though i did once on the backside of a giraffe.  Giraffes.  Can live without them.  Have my whole life.  That says something.

Swoops and hollers in our souls.  God is our souls.  Swoops and hollers in itself, themselves, themself ... echoes echoing in echoes of echoes:  that’s art and god and life and nothing much has happened more than that.  Swoops and hollers, woopers, shollers.  All the excitement.  Tuxes and taxes, minis and bindis, you know the story, you’ve been in the hole.

A fuzzy word approached me on 42^nd (42^nd so’s overdone—41^st) asking for directions.  Fashionable, a little pissed, a fan of Švankmajer, never very punctual, sewer-friendly, musky, i told it, Go south 54 blocks, turn right which wasn’t true so bad on me.  Fuzzy words and oops and wollers, gotta love ‘em.  God does.

God.  What a word.  Not a fuzzy word (or not the fuzzy word on 42^nd asking for directions [maybe]).  We can only swear in response, the 7 billion of us all at once swearing like banshees, that’s why we invented god, to swear.  A little madness, a little dancing, a little god.

So here we are, looking at the trains, waiting for a wreck, calm and collected like a Jesuit, gulping coffee like a brodsky, smoking cigarillos like a train, looking out for god (as usual), the wreck’ll come first, someone said, probably right, this is that, amen.

Tomato hippos high as willows, heaven trees planting in the suns.  Lucy, Alice, ain’t Lucy, Alice, but de Sade is Poe when he wants to be; smack, smack.

I was walking in my gods (i mean shoes) (i think) when a flamingo slid down Africa and said (something like) Sunset Motors! General Faulty! Painty Painty!, left without adieu or whatnot.  Whatnot!  There’s a word.

Speaking of.  Waste management.  The future.  Not plastics any longer.  Old TS, that menstruaphobe, that Starnbergersee, hurry up please it’s twit, like a violet taxi patronizing Thebes by the Isle of Dogs in drag or rag or something.  *%#$@!^.  Data data dumdiata aum.

Rhyme bites, rhymes bite, brine rights ... no ... let’s stop it here like gentlemen when travelling all day never letting their heavily laden carts outa sight.  But like st paul or oppenheimer or humankinder (why kind or kinder?) can’t quite stop it here or even there.  Hence dr seuss, said foucault.  So there.

Anyway.  there it is.  there them.  the goddy folk.  whooping it up in whatever.  here we are.  in da hearta darkness, revelation (why revelation?) any chapter, bm epilogue (judge of our scats’n’fires), andy Warwhoop, maria marina fluxus-nexis fluxus fucks us amen amen tutankhamun lowercase u txt me make me lol me down ya benjy fretting dilsey candle lse-me yippdidƏya puddin’pi  {“ ”}

anyway².  Here’s a joke.  How is a shoe like a soul?  They both flapflap.  Laugh much?  Like angels.  Chicken Boop.  Like Betty sorta.  It’s going down.  Or rather, its.  Jughead for Antichrist!  Education is the answer.  Was.  What is it now?  The Intertits.  Praise me and quasimodo panzamancha quasipanza modomancha ... j_a!

TUESDAYS

art ain’t what it used to be

Let us think now of creation.  Think of it rolling down itself like a snowball, rolling up like a sunset.  There we are.  Here.  In the lap of the machine, our mother.  Reading ones and zeros like a baby train.  The moment is now, you may have heard.  And i say the moment is now but i say the moment is then and a belch.  I say the moment is that stock broker cracked out on himself and the wall being broken and no one knowing the difference for that is the nature of the moment and who are you to say anything else.  The moment is the machine.  Let us pray and ask for grace to continue praying until we bleed flowers.  Who are you anyway to think of tomorrow.  That maestro of indifference.  Tomorrow is the absurdum ad reductio of absurdity, the dog of gods.  Where is spirit? where is potency? where is animation? where is virility? where is the transcendence of gender and war and despair and greed?  In strategic plans and retirement plans?  In pissy plans and coital plans?  In plans?  Yo Yo.  In the noon of now and the eye of cow and a trip of pigs and an I of you, woof woof.  Think now of creation.  Purple underbelly of sodomy on a Sunday afternoon.  Slinking down your panties like a song.  Oooooh.  Like a slug in your throat and a song in your ass.  You want peace?  You want love?  You want that desecration called money?  You want an automobile?  You want the apocalypse and you want it on this date and you want it in your bank account in neon?  Let me tell you, that weasly little imposter tolle and all his whoring siblings should have kept their mouths shut not because they were wrong but because they were wrong.  And if you don’t get that just go to jail and wait there with your cheap bourbon while everyone passes GO a thousand trillion times until even your boogies take on eternal significance and that is that, so there, buy Toyota, it’s American, and fuck your hamster until it bleeds.  Be nice.  Think now of creation.  That magenta haze of branded bliss.  That drunken taxi ride down Fifth when she was sprawled like a kangaroo and the clouds were raining testaments of truth, gutters sucking greedily, tongues like the Mariana Trench.   Who said Kathmandu didn’t have something to say after midnight?  Build a blossom to the sky.  Smother the Internet with tits.  You never were what you claimed to be.  As some evangelist spoke in the urban desert as the moon went black and limbs nailed themselves to the pretty windows of Costco.  Not much, she said, as she dropped her little black dress and poured another martini in the geraniums.  Not much for a Tuesday.  Let us think now of creation, which must have happened on a Tuesday if you think about it which i hardly recommend not simply because i hardly recommend anything but because Tuesdays are for drunks and pedophiles.  Where’s the light?  Where’s the light in the anus of rhyme?  Pulse pulse pulse pulse pulse pulse.  So there’s this Tuesday, see ... this Tuesday walking down the street in his stockings with a little cash, this Tuesday on which nothing’s happening but TV, which isn’t much, and Greta Garbo’s strutting down a rainbow into Ireland and someone says, Hey Greta, what the fuck you two-faced fulda, and not much happens after that.  I saw the clouds on a Tuesday, quoting Donne or Sappho.  That turned me off Tuesdays.  Let us think now of ... dark pit of whatever, shark shit of Flight 447 ... here it comes ... that song you love, that law that protects you, that heat in your hardness, your murders in bed.  Let us think now of creation.  Creation, at 40,000 feet combusting.  In the drawers of your mother and the lap of incest.  In the god of mediocrity and the injustice of justice.  Let us think now.  Now.  Of creation.  It happened on Tuesday.

And if you doubt that, you’re a fink.

BLACKBIRDS

Time is blue like yogurt.  It doesn’t fall.  I saw it yesterday, hiking the adirondacks, slightly hungry.

Time, i thought, Not one for talking.  Yet i thought i heard it mumble as it almost fell (it almost falls but doesn’t) something about something left at the cleaners.  Must have been me, though, hearing time.

Time is blue like yogurt.  Like a sari wanting to be undone.  Really!  One would think its tastes would have evolved somewhat!  But that’s it, i guess.

I’ve always pictured it sort of like a foot-shaped solar-powered rubber calculator, with big keys, very pink, fun to press, always counting.  Time, unfortunately, has never quite returned the favor.

Time likes, i think, routinely to be stroked, like a cat quite acquainted with itself and having had a tabby as an uncle.

It likes to change in a closet, like a superhero.  It likes to brush with pepsodent.  Smokes like a chimney.  Doesn’t think twice, or even once.  Might make a good ceo if it weren’t for that annoying tic.

Whenever i’m in paris, which isn’t often these days, due to something some say is the same as time but really isn’t, never could be, but sort of is, i often see it sitting on one of those benches by the river, looking in (as in a mirror?), at the bodies that have been there.

Time, like the finest waterproof treatment (^hydrobloc) for the finest leather boots (zamberlans), isn’t cheap.  But, like lots of things, it is.

I fondled my yellow banana phone the other day, reminding me of time.  If it were green, i asked myself, Would it have done so?

Some say (some would say something else) time’s better in some things than its competitors.  But i don’t know.

You know what’s been said about time and blood and fear and more by that frenchman on a throne.  I’m inclined to believe in it with certain stools.

Time.  Bit of a pisser.  Like granny’s dingleberries when she’s dying.

A bit like yogurt?  Sure.  Green yogurt on the big keys in leather boots