Cunny Isle Goes to NY

Myrtle Beach Put-Put-Hutt (6' x 6')

 

Ready Table, 8' x 6'

Full Press Bonk, 6' x 6'

Nap, 6' x 6'

The Assassination Attempt of Gabrielle Giffords, 8' 6" x 6'

Having a Conversation, 6' x 6'

Hooplah Brothel Bad Train 1876, 6' x 6'

Flower-Eaters, 9' x 6'

Psuedo-Desert with 2 Attempted Figures, 6' x 5

Loving Couple, 9' x 6'

Hatted Bear with Canarding Cohorts, 5' x 4'

By Nelms, by Matherly, by Nelms, by Matherly, etc. etc.  Photos by Ted.

Details of works after the jump.

Extract from, "How a Horse Has a Head: The Fate of the English Carousel During the Second World War"

 Note: This piece is extracted from a larger work-in-progress, and has been modified so as to better stand alone.  Nevertheless, some references inevitably require contextualization that will come with further elaboration.

The English carousel is the only carousel type in the world to rotate clockwise.  While this feature is in and of itself significant in its very uniqueness, it is a more general mechanical process common to all carousels that creates the impression of flight that sometimes affords this great toy the name of the “flying horses” or the “flying whinnies.”

            The center pole of the carousel is a great axle, out from the midpoint of which extend beams, called “sweeps,” like the spokes of an enormous wheel.  This structure of long planks is linked to the center pole by cables running upwards the length of the pole to the main bearing.  Steel rods descend from the sweeps to hold a circular platform in suspension above the ground, allowing the floor to turn by means of an engine positioned at the center pole.  An earlier inception of the carousel, the “flying jenny,” had no such platform: each horse hung freely from the ceiling beams, and the center pole was turned by the shoulders of servants or donkeys.  Ultimately, the site of the carousel horses' “flight” can be located initially in the axle of the center pole, and thereafter in the physical movement that results in the four hooves of the horses altogether leaving the earth.

            It would be simple enough to appeal to a technical explanation by making the point that the very word axle etymologically relates to the Old Norse oxl, meaning “shoulder,” and to the the Latin ala, meaning “wing.”  One might even go so far as to mention that the ancient Aztec game of Palo Volador, wherein four players costume themselves as macaws and swing through the air from lengthy tethers, had at its center a ninety-foot tall “flying pole” to which said ropes were attached.  Even the apparent universality suggested by this semiotic note, however, can only fall short of recognizing the symbolic value of the mechanism in full, which becomes apparent only in light of the end to which it carries its charges.  In short, the horses of the carousel do indeed seem to rise bodily into the air, if only momentarily.

            The notion of a horse suspended midair however briefly is no piddling matter. That all four hooves of a horse ever leave the ground at once was once upon a time an issue of serious contention.  The final decades of the nineteenth-century saw scientists argue hotly the definition of a “pace;” artists painted speeding horses not knowing whether to depict its fourth hoof higher or lower; and equine enthusiasts set up odds against the truth of the matter whenever they were not busy playing odds against the track.  It was as genuine a problem as science has ever faced. 

Confession Grenade, the first

Near the whelpbars isometric

Of the tortured Judas

Window, I dug out

The carbon of my property

Slip.  In the end, there

Was no yellow-cake

Uranium on its way,

Draped over the booking

Please Try This at Home, They’re Professionals: What I Saw at the Opening Reception

Has the human eye succumbed to the propaganda of the “Gutenberg galaxy?” If the showcased artists “kicking off the 2012 -13 academic year” at Lamar Dodd are any indication, the answer is a resounding yes. Indeed, these artists could very well be the summa par excellence of artists whose eyes have been churned out by Time Magazine’s “Person of the Millennium”—one can never be too sure! Undoubtedly it was necessary for them to perfect their artists’ statements in order to receive MFAs, but must we also have our brushstrokes typeset? Are we to believe that the visual equivalent of a 1995 Windows screensaver is situated “within an avant-garde lexicon?” If so, as both the artists and their exhibitors would have it, the only ethical response is to ask why such is the case.

Rodin’s criticism was sharp when he said apropos of a then-burgeoning medium, "No, it is the artist who is truthful and the photograph that lies, for in reality time does not stop, and if the artist succeeds in producing the impression of a movement which takes several moments for accomplishment, his work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image, where time is abruptly suspended.” He might as well have been speaking of the artist’s faith in typographical reasoning, which has in the almost 100 years since Rodin’s declaration become virtually indistinguishable from the “scientific image.”

Today the visual field has triumphed over the senses, but what does today’s artist know of optics? So subtle is the play of history that we are inclined to forget we are among its operations—indeed, that we are ourselves operatives—and we cheerfully adopt the assumptions of our present tools as mores. In passing over science, and art’s historical collusion with it, our artists seem by and large to have allowed themselves to be fundamentally guided by it. The problem, to be perfectly clear, is not merely the association of art with science, which is perfectly logical; rather it is the uncritical eye that operates under it-knows-not-what that is worrisome. Power has been ceded to technological progress, willfully characterized by passwords such as “communication” and “information,” and so it appears today that all images are the scientific image.

We could ask a litany of questions: How does it happen that the printing press exerts greater influence over the artist’s eye than the reading stone, and can we be certain that the reverse isn’t in fact the case? Why did we ever accept that the eye receives light rather than emits it? Why is the eye no longer a lens but a screen? For what reason has Alhazen’s name been banished? Did Descartes make a prison of Plato’s Khôra?

Instead we will ask just one question, three ways: 

Pixelated Passion

I.

"It's all printed off a computer."

Intimacy signed off at 5:10 am EST,

Exhausted by wireless communications,

The acrobatically clumsy wet-nurse hyperbole of the world.

No, I hate scrapbooking.

--Well, maybe you just don't have the right scraps,

Cuz I tell ya whatwhat, my self-steam ain't

hot nuff to flaccidize a broccoli head, & I'd

be glad to be leftover scraps all up

in yr seemingly southern-climate cozy, 

precipitation-heavy, bush limned junkyard.

"Send in the hearththrob, cue the shrieks."

You sure look stupid in that greendress Lisa.

Pinch attack!  O no, everyone's wearing green

What are you lookin at?  The innocent words of

A drunken child.

I'm a patriot, just like anyone else in prison.

Babies, more than bruises or rugburn, are the most irritating sex injury.

II.

I huddle, wrinkling the chore of my church clothes.

Okay, here's an anonymous doll with no head.

My wife is putting cardboard over her side of the TV,

The 60s were long over & ppl were just again

getting ready to feel bad about themselves again.

Dangling fillet

unzip my diaper toward the dairy wall

avalanche of shellfish, cheeses, meats and caviars

all the children are being allowed 30 mins to

pick out their treats (3 a piece) after dinner--

grenadine nasturtium sorbetto, sugar bunny

The ice cream cartons are rimed

a beginner's shrug

eyes like children wanting to skip up & down the aisle

entertainment console

roomy kitchen, convection oven, ice cube dispenser

really do things super deluxe

foot-tall desserts

I think there's a kind of Disney vulgarity

skimpy laugh trying to wrap a towel round feelings

just came out of the shower

III.

Accost tacos fuck!

Look—

Squatting like a bouncing lettuce rump drenched in sweet-

Tea-lions—

Nothing at all will remain

Because I was roaring like an emphysema-tango

       to bare it

Because I was large on close inspection

      like a miracle carnally snatched before the

      girl from the zoo could call out, snot rocketing archetypes

      of dirt like snowdrift through the nostrilly appendage

     of my heart

Wedged in the global village's archetypeangel's consumption chorale

My shouldery mind, a footballpaddled door wedge,

Swells like a deep-penetrated, battered tater-wife.

A gilded red dogrocket drills, entitled to love among rouged

Wrinkles, the bestial banks of my sewagey backwater 2nd-thoughts.

Rejoice!

I detect many thousand tobacco fire-signals of boredom!

Rejoice!

Now you, clothed in the autotuned anguish of olden apostles

& days, have finished me off,

Eternity fashions a festival of hundredweight maws

To give me the unwithered double rainbow made of yr

Inclement and hairpin-turn-bovine-sweating lips!

IV.

The current crisis of capitalism confronts

students with all their electronic devices

playing Judas, again,

rising cost of education

drastic decrease in real world returns

I huddle wrinkling the chore of my church clothes

In the kick-game rising per quarter lb cost of education.

A member of the Tribeca supergentry just bought

his 4 yr old son some swordfish fillet, 2 lbs, $97.48

If I can't be trusted, does that mean I'm 

not true?  I'm tired.  I only wanted

more than you.  I'm tired of scrapbooking

your dairy caveats & scalplike ice cream.

I would still unzip my diaper towards you,

my diary, my avalanche of walls

and afterdinner treats.

Your skimpy laugh is always trying to wrap a towel

around these anonymous-doll-with-no-head feelings.

I have vulnerable feelings I feel just came monstrously manboobed

out of the shower, dripping BP-olive-oil all over

the cardboard carpet whose cigarette burns and caviar of fleas

exhibit a drastic decrease in real world returns & 

the Disney vulgarity of good-humored laughter at MTV Real World reruns.

I love you because you don't know it and don't love yourself.

I hope, in this modern world of hot-pocket-like distractionary devices,

You don't start forgetting to remember you hate yourself.

Rejoice that just beyond the ladies' room crime scene tape,

A videotape of you opening a can of tuna with your orthodontically

rehabbed teeth exists, collecting enough dust in a Winnebago-

Radical's broken VCR to confirm your cubicled work

Is the split cuticles of your life.

Ch.1 of The Glass Eye & The Leopard

On The Scleral Shell of the Calendaration of Faces

Addressing the Glass Eye, which lasted rather less than 5 days, entered an old man possibly in the soft air cleaving to the good he had found—but not in all cases.  A terrace pale the color of stars came as hamadryas but declined to approve his waterdish, by which the leopard sat, dragged into a pair of dice by the hair. 

The leopard cried, “I want all of you out there to shut the fuck up.  I’m unbuttoning from my hair the most tiny flowers, and fucking’s the most wonderful thing in the whole world.  In fact, I want to fuck you right now—for the soil of Egypt does not resemble that of Arabia, or Libya, or any other neighboring country.  Not even Syria.”  “But many hallways led to the bedroom,” snuffed the cold man.  “Your wishes make all the difference.”   

He addressed the Glass Eye with the sesame bagel.  It eroded like a littoral sock. Unhungry, Eye intercalated his location was already known and therefore “speech, locution,” plus, there woodn’t any cheese. The old man, curls in the style of the time, whispered Eye the grace of hesitation:  “For you have possessed my innermost parts.”  With this Eye closed the last, razor-thin fissure of the single heart. So his mouth was re-moved, making clutter.  “A human is a being halfway,” he skanted to the leopard, “between an alligator and a bird.”  “Nevertheless,” the leopard sed, “let fly with spears.  There are people that can swim in the havens and rivers naked.  There are people that can sit on the floor of the pension dining-room mid a mess of pastels.”  The Glass Eye spat a knife to the old man.  “So that’s my seed, spill it here,” Eye said, gesturing to Himself.  It bounced off with the tink of a Sprint commercial. The old man shrank to the ground in a congenitaled torticollis of grief.  Astronomically hoisting his patterboots to trellis, he burst, rather anonymously, into tears.  “Heaven is swift,” he sed, “who will know of our grief?”  “Don’t ask Eye,” smoked the leopard, chafing his handcuffs. 

Across the way Eye could touch the branches of the trees running up the valley standing mid-wall.  Eye opened like a literal sock. Torn from their setting, the space between decks, nothing but, hauling lightning to the fisheries southward and a mercenary port bent wholly on cod, casks and bottles.  Their buried bodies I believe not, thought the old man.  And it was necessary, this first person. For I am sampling only this. I am not singing for the dead. One does not confide to guarding nor does one keep it.

On Ellen & The Old Man Mathing the Past

The old man was a cold old man.  He was sorta selfy bout it, wch was why he wasn’t old 4real.  He tried loving one once, turning toward: “I want your face for a pudding skin into which my chin will always brown cow.  I desire you for a window upon which my bones and eyes will always break.”  Ellen frowned unupsidedown, Get off my dick, the leopard sed she said.  But really she’d said, “The time is ardent for being redeemed but begs certain Mexican maids to open your hotel door, though you would have shut out those questions some new mouth takes the paperclip from, unlocking you from the radiator to a light—

the same and different as bangs of hair.” 

“I feel nothing,” she txted him from underneath.

“Yr 0 is only an additive identity,” he said, “it is +.”

“WTF?”

“Integrate your leg-matrices round my z-axis.  By this—it means—we can become a polynomial expansion—that is, negating the near-future extinction of the human race. Permission to ram?”

“Copy. Use yr discretion.”

Ellen was a below-knee amputee.  She dreams often.  Ropes dangle, or slap, in the inverse teat of a trombone.  Horror in the brightest hour.  In dark rooms her own unaccustomed hair, how many Last Times.  Films used to suggest rain up in the rearview mirror then out of his expectancy, gentian & bittersweet, refracted thru the clear juices. Metal & combustion, acts of minor surrealism in the military.

Able, at last, to tell of a personal horror. This deepening arrest from down at the end of a lunchwagon when the afternoon is brightest groove that you know it was, such as must come eased to cinders.  Nor wind keeps even the dust away, she—the tune is known ordinarily in our behavior, sinuous, so cross-wise to commence.

Leaves the upset one knows, not eating, going to sleep. She will get bacon for your breakfast.  If you 

make it, if you live. 

And then you find yourself jumping from ground level windows, more masculine than ever felt, sloshing through near arid creeks to eviscerate does who squeal like the fog of 7 a.m. finding you, bubbling alive to the fore of some movement of thought—one a new divorce, from life & wife & strife or some other things you'd been tethered to—aggregate of some overwhelming ballast the sand kept paying out to another bag, a purse  mother once put all your Kleenexes in.

The Old Man’s Letter to Ellen:

And I write to you that I love the delicate levers—spoken better, more abundantly as a spray—a fountain—you who arrive as if your coming, uniquely—I mean when I leave, barely turning.

Body grant and came with a sharp blow and made the dark for these. 

Where are the bodies, Eye said, Where did they go? 

You are not alone, you said, handing me the phone, Operators are waiting for your call. I am with the others as you are to me—beyond everything— that is, you are the one—and therefore the other.  Turn frightens me and I am frightened to call. 

Sleep as yet sleep rose on before, and as issue from the sheet—

skinned sound of a train on its way as my hand above your knee. The House with chimney.  I see the garden—clearly—a similar room.

Icicles, and in this room, I enter here and land in this room.  Walking upwards across the ocean in a boat—a slide appears…I’ve changed my sex to a hard, dry yellow soil—I’m his wife up and down—all the empty spaces love, a boy and a dog, barking—leaping…A man my build stood, half his face blown off shuffling in a suggestive itch. 

I so wanted to tell you.

There were fascicles shuttering in the EKG.  All the cruelty in the world walked to let it silence, one over the other—and I told you—my hair was soft, stupidly, to know the root of the problem.  

“I have not,” is the only thing I can say to you. 

You laughed.

“It is incumbent to lubricate the mouth area before kissing” and swept my hair into the been of your loss.  That was not my basket of disappointment—

I desire you for a window upon which my bones and eyes will always break—this evening the cuckoo and the corncrake—But I never heard that—Always, instead, it was our bower as children—  A greenish, dank, as if the rain in bogland gathered head—making dead wood more blest than living wart.  

I have lost my life in the too-thumbed vicinities of learning you by heart—And therefore have I slept in your report, unclear as the notes of a clavichord—

Groupon Cut-outs from a Marriage

The ceiling fan rolls over,

A useless husband doobie—

A redundant door, a teacher’s

Commands for blacktop basketball,

And grammar--the consistent

Sentiment of flight.

The businessman with mustard on his polo says,

“70% of shoppers off this coupon-site

Are women.  Think facials, creams…”

Death in an improved manner.

I tried it & now I’m happy with my face.

Post 9/11 Batman Franklin Fight

Sunburnt, walking banal as fog

Through the whorfed streets browed,

The baby batman cradled like a taste for revenge darkly

In our arms.

Prison was like a children’s story,

Full of beastly ghosts & mirrors.

I cheated the purported fog with the blood of dancing

With the stars

& shattered the ghostless marsh where men don’t

Fuck the Bank-of-America-blood-stained-glass-

Mirror of churchy cannibals—

Alive as a starling at dawn.

Baby batman said:

“The short hands of celebrity billionaires open

The nunneries of questions by hand.

I, detective-like, have the most conclusive evidence

That arms and munitions in large quantities

Provide to now pervade all the spheres of human life,

Like a Starbucks which sells cheeseplates of ignorant STDs.

Imagine, the twin towers as a cheesegrater

& America as a bland soggy serial of hallucinated days—like salad.

America is a salad full of cheese.

But who made cheese?

Terrorists cut the cheese.

American foreign policy pulled all their fingers.”

There were no longer shadows to help him see more,

Only glare…

He thought:

“I oughtta suff’cate u w/ moist towelettes.

You will fall down in yr home & curse the withered hand.

Your mind, full of the nondairy creamer of human kindness,

Will carry old newspapers around a ferris wheel of bullet chambers.

Kindness is a form of buttsweat.”

Effaced by a monumental thought of seasons,

The idea of a transcendent hue is back,

Baked local & fresh.

Turn off your brain & say something.

Benjamin Franklin drew nigh the wharf,

Leopard-like; his oil was very superior, clear and fine.

Heretofore an unmatched experience--including cake.

A downward spiral of dress rehearsals. 

The wharf was a window of mopeds taking a turn for the scandalous.  

It is 2day & 2day suxxx.

Besmirch yr heart,

Franklin said,

In the abominable twat of your partners in learning.

An orchard appears.

Shoes & oranges bend down the branches.

PAINTING INVITATIONAL 2012 Karen Ann Myers and Holly Coulis

The University of Georgia’s Lamar Dudd School of Art will host its INSIDE OUTSIDE: Painting Invitational Exhibition 2012 Aug. 17 through Sept. 14, 2012 in Gallery 307 of the art school. The opening reception was on Friday, August 17 at 7 p.m.  It was free, and we the public went to attend.  DERP.

Inside Outside features the work of Holly Coulis and Karen Ann Myers, two gifted paint-DERPERS exploring the human form, DERP-pattern, and DERP-psychology. While they both share a common shittiness in their paintings, they are also a study in contrasting shittinesses. Myer’s work features static-shitty representations of the solitary female enclosed in and defined by her shitty interior environment. Often seen from a bird’s eye view shitting above, these paintings stand out for their overt shitty sexuality and contemporary-shitty depictions of our 21st century shitty surroundings. Her technique employs shitty linear perspective devices, DERP exaggerated pattern and crisp paint application. The paintings of Holly Coulis shittily display a loose-stool integration of the figure with its environment as seen straight on and usually outdoors.  Most of her fecal-subjects are shitty men and evoke both shitty-memories of the past and/or imaginations of a world shitty like our own, only more fantastically shitty. Both artists construct complex, visual shit-puzzles, utilize highly borrowed shit language in shit paint and together create a DERP=dialogue about the nature of depiction.

In a world already wretchedly boring, you have made it even more boring.  CONGRATS!

1.21 FAP rating out of 99.

Ted's Most Best HOPE

Ted teaches the world about HOPE at ATHICA.  Full retrospective review coming soon.

Cunny Isle Reacts to D-How's Move

Dwight is Howard

Coming from

Atlanta

The greater

Area

With an unusual

Amount

Of

Uncertainty

The pick

Became

All it ever

Could have been

What it was

Supposed

Intended

To be

Being first

And there-

fore

Full

Of

Possibility

A

Risk

. . .

Visions of

Shaq

For the

Magic

Visions of

Him

Giving them

Their something          back

After years

With T-Mac

Playing penny

Alone

Something

To look for

Forward

To

For the

Franchise

The

Franchise

Something to keep

No matter the heat

But that wasn’t

Yet a problem

Far

From it

 . . .

They made

Him

An

Option—

He took

It

Added

Weight

Accrued

Mass

Likeness of

Shaq

All rookie

Team

All sophomore

Team

Third

Second

All star

Starter

The franchise

Player now

Brought the Magic

Back

To the

Finals—

Edging

Everyone

Who

Matters

Who

Cares

If

They    lost

. . .

More visions

Of Shaq

And he

Stayed

Came

Back

To try

Again

Demanded

A trade

For the Reilly

Model

It

Wouldn’t

Work

Here

No one wants

To live

In

Orlando

Not even

Shaq

. . .

Dwight Howard

Is a Laker now

And this changes

Everything—

Two teams

With two

Of the new

Top ten

A-

Piece

And

One

With

Every-

thing

Else

This

Changes

Every-

thing

In

This     league

Of

Stars

Everything
Just changed

A Gibbeting For All Mankind, or How a Woman's Hair is More Dangerous Than the Editor's Note of an Almanac

This paper was originally presented before the C.I.B.P. Board of Emphatic Tactical Dressage and Scuppernong Appreciation Review on 1/19/1997.

“One can walk perfectly well without a head.”

—Xavier Forneret

The word axilla, in avian anatomy, refers to the underside of the point at which the wing and body of the bird meet.  In human anatomy axilla refers to the corresponding region of the arm and torso, and is called by the common name of “arm-pit.”  This anatomical coinciding of man and bird ought now be taken solely as a trope of linguistic semantics, since there exists also pictorial representation of a similar, related joining amongst some of the earliest of paintings.  In the lowest depths of the famous caves at Lascaux there exists the image of a man being gored by a just-disemboweled bison—not any sort of man, however, a man with the head of a bird.

Doubtless, prior to claiming the power of equine movement and becoming what would be later known as “centaur,” man wished to become one with the bird.  Striking in this particular formulation of the bird-man found at Lascaux is that it is not the wing but the head that our ancestors adopted.  The head is, of course, not only the seat of reason, it is also the site of direction: in this sense we find the bird-man of Lascaux to symbolically, which is to say religiously, coincide with the type of joining found in the word axilla.  In both instances we understand the profound impulse toward flight, wherein the greatest risk lies not heavenward but upon the terrestrial plant instead.

Stray Cobra-Ryan Self-Publishing Plan

THAT WORD, IT DOES NOT MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS

It should surprise no one that the bar for qualifying as an intelligent person is pretty low in America.  Do you have a lifepreserver?  Because yr French fries are drowning in ketchup, especially in our glurge factory. Let’s just say not many women can put up with the way I live—the motorcycles, the synthesizers, the foundrytown night lamps and guns moveable in their master-nativities. Yet the most alarming aspect is every clip art or guncase must be unsnapped like a fish and cleaned until it smiles grenades into the headlamped road of simple dusk. To cave to the big GOP money and shackle himself to the anchor who can sleep?—for I wouldn’t hurt you with Paul Ryan, with pigs, with the repeated references to his new partner's considerable intellectual gifts. Given that we now live in a world in which shows about Honey Boo Boo and married couples with 19 children are on something with the gall to call itself "The Learning Channel", it makes sense that

LET’S BLEED PIG!

WHUR R U PIG??

I WANT UR EYES PIG!

YOU WON’T DO IT PIG!

EVEN I HAVE RIGHTS DON’T I PIG!

THE COURT IS CIVILIZED, ISN’T IT PIG????

But I’m not.  This is where the law stops, and I start.  The darkness

can embrace, biblically, the light but never eclipse it.  After this is all done, snapped

up, like loose shoes on a dragonfly buzzing in front of a steroided frog,

our boogers will cry out

In a Thick Lived Tenor of Things

by Kevin Ortiz Fallis Coferyoung Judithjeff

Necessary to respect what we discard, as a young man (I’m sure of it, of at least my youth) I’d read somewhere, sunny perhaps, with the green of ferns filtering across pages, “Longing on a large scale is what makes history.” And waiting then, assured of the evagination of events, that I could easily insert, sheathe myself in the scale, I was calm, and cradled my peace, happy to dream the world would end, an necessary adjunct to my discontent. Well by Jeez, Joseph ‘n’ Harry that’s poppycock! Always in the name of an easy past we condemn the difficult present!-- So we must, it appears, inquire into the qualities of something of which we do not know.

For instance, suddenly inundated, wrenching images closely knit upon the zinc roof of a provincial washhouse. 

Out of a monster’s grip, like silent girls, darkness dropped—

“But that day, in the rainless tempest,

Approaching the extravagant embrace,

Impossible to, I never doubted

For an instant, not even if

Life’s waters fell as rain.”

When this super-

Intendence of

Trifling affairs

Is done, I lie back on pillows and sleep with my face to the South.

I sleep late, but less,

And wake, sit-up straight;

My house is poor

And at the door-

Step no one knocks.

Those that I love have left me.

In the first cold I don my quilted coat, the last leaf already flown from the boughs, I meet

her foster-mother in the road.

For you will not

Cut off what is

From clinging

To what is,

Neither being scattered

Everywhere, in every

Way, in order,

Nor being brought together,

In the “thick

Lived tenor of things.”

--“Well, so much for the views on the soul our predecessors handed down.”

--“We say, then, that one kind of being is substance.

In fact, however, it is an axe,

A story that doesn’t flinch.

Nor do we deliberate about particulars, about whether this is a loaf, for instance, or is cooked the right amount; for these are questions, perceptions, and if we keep on deliberating at each stage we shall go on without end, and this will be what we are looking for, and if more than one are complete, the most complete of these will be what we are looking for.”

A short time passed.  I was becoming distracted.

I was laughing.

At last, she lowered her head and asked me in an undertone,

--What do you mean? I’m afraid.

My life was following an increasingly crooked path. 

A sooty cloud was blackening the sky…

What was happening in the bedroom was bringing us closer together. 

She wanted to be given extreme unction while she went through her death throes for my benefit. 

“Fuck dead things and you’ll end up a self-loathing suicidal wanker with a knife in your gut and a bloody, sticky dick hanging out of your shorts, poetry as incarnation.”

Seek truth and ripe dreams will follow, they said.  How can I best find a new place to live? Is this my new soul mate? Every activity, though, has special tricks that can only be learned through practice, kisses. If after ten minutes, the indicator fails to move at all,

it comes homeward, from the Eastern religious traditions. Everytime though I tell the story, how I met a man who made me want to fall in love again, all anyone hears is that he was married.

Sincerely I am very dissatisfied to know that some people

Do not support a project that many have worked hard to put in place.

The training I have, the training I had, although easily learned and in

Far less time than that of any psychiatrist, was tested thoroughly

As he screamed at me across the miles.

But he told me things he never told anyone else.

The malformation is pancephalic, the love of a good woman. The children stay.

What perfect weather, every morning,

Every morning, sand still damp,

Easy to walk on,

Like cement we are,

In the last stage of drying.

--We’ve got plenty more.

I wasn’t going to say anything, but, well…

But then I thought, it’s what men do.

--Long rectangles of the net-curtained windows

Filled with a faint light, and the sick

Woman’s Breath, scolding, almost

Disappearing…

Allow me to digress.  Do you

Ever wish you were more beautiful?

Fairness is important to me.

I sit in the kitchen.  When the cup becomes half-full with thick phlegm, my breathing is under control and I can go back to sleep. To grow in faith through the reading of the New Testament requires that we comprehend it to the fullest degree possible,

But we did well,

Well I think, and take back

Into your heart

Into your home the freedman

Who was once dear to you,

Even if there’s

No one like me

Around to interfere for them,

For you.

Because of our weakness, slowness

Living, hearing about the nature

Of things, the earth, indeed,
Under the heavens—nothing,

It is worth hearing, grows under the sea;

Our experience the same, of these stones

And as, the whole region, eaten away,

Begnawn, as jades, with bots,

We live, in a certain hollow

Of the earth the way things,

In the sea, are eaten by the salt

And the salt-water, confident

Only demanding, not the sow

But for a definition of ham,

Content to ask no longer

Why animals inspire our dreams.

No sensible man would insist these things are as I have described them.

Allow them

to step out

across

the lake.

Receive them,

close to sunset,

for the reward is beautiful

and the hope

of continuing fear is great

and flows from there to the rivers,

from the regions of the earth as from a

prison, more good than harm,

ornamentation, not alien, during life.

My Voice (in Pastels)

by Yusef Komunyakaa 

Do not think one nano-second that the

sound of my voice will

paint in chalk Pastels and

Wash off your Hands and Clothes.

You will hear the distant

echoes of me hiding wrinkled in me-mories

Pale of age, undulating, garbled may-be.

You (everything, everyone) painted me with fingers like

Children prancing over blank paper, staining it and their clothes.

Just as I (everything, everyone) have painted you.

Lovers should be in

museums, antiquated with grasping poise

--in their best light.  In your

memories, the effect will be same.

Nostalgia by your side, near the hucklehedge,

in a summer rocking chair, the birds too in the trees, is a Museum of sort,

but I guess you do have something, we (all) will wash

away with the sands of Antarctica, and be

churned into seacow’s cud.

Resign—(ed)--?

Walt

by Ed Pavlic

Walt,

convicts mow

your leaves of grass

they wear masks

that look like the eyes of a fly

and everywhere

they move

they vomit

along the ground

the smell

they would not smell.

Today I drove

past a field

manured and hayed

and rolled my window up.

I have let you down.

Tell me—

do you know?—

Is this what prison is,

no longer

and not wishing

to smell

not just grass

but even ourselves?

Poem from Red Beard

By Shittopher Nelms

Though the wind

        had been fierce

 that morning and

         had flown

into

her throat like

                       ash,

she had come

   to Koshikawa.

       

 On

a ropemat

       lay a wizened man

                                 whose throat gurgled.

A tallow

        candle

     was almost dripping

                                 to sheathe

the zogan

stand.

String Theory

by Kevin Young Dum 

“The A string of a violin…is designed to vibrate most

readily at about 440 vibrations per second: the note A.

If that same note is played loudly not on the violin

but near it, the violin A string may hum in sympathy.”

--?

Watson and Crick found only proof

Man’s world tumbles and rises

Conspiralling in the recurrent helix

  Of its malcontentious desires—

And that by an accident;

  The three dimensional image

  Of Vico’s history, Campbell’s masks

And mutating grand, intuited grimace.

  Already Blake had set our energies

To click the bomb’s time when reason

Most divides—

                          for him divinity marked

the territory where the bark of confusion gnarled the sides.

We keep up the HazMat failure,

smithying ourselves into molten worms,

our experiences like hamburger meat cannoned through a colander,

or Playdoh squeezed out in serpentine shapes.

We are told the universe is strings,

writhing like water snakes and open ground chuck.

Should we bless it on a ship,

at the table, hands in a steeple,

an albatross cut steam and nice plump with a butter knife?

Strong string is always layered,

which I can see.

Chords are not one note, but

many strung in unison—

Even our DNA is twisted like the twine of a noose, or

the half open zipper of a body bag. 

Ommmm. Jai guru.

Sixteen Ways of Circumventing a Death in Spring

by Raw Doggin Stray Almondac 

Funeral-thunder-odd

Jangle the air

          with a flapcracking ribbon

     rigtied to a yewtwig

swungho! bouquet on the roadside site.

The thunder flarks and flies with the last fallen flower

and mills,

                 mingles with khaki pants chomping dry grass—

  lightning bolted

                      sends locked up fears flapshot caroming the ironglossed light

            back to slowgravelling cars and peelingeyes.

                      Hunchedbacks quaddle along with tennis ball feet,

                      Slushing, sluicing through gravestones

                      With tired arms and psoriasis skin,

                       Blotched, knucklecricked faces,

                       Anatheminiized,

                       With embedded streets dangling,

                                                                      dripping,

                                                                         stretched and wheeling,

                                                                             from cupped euphorphones greeling.

Night-lake-swim

For the sing of the dock over moonlit wrinkles,

parked to the tune of rounded rocks, and skipping

       over jaguarjungled waters,

        the mine has opened to canary jaws.

      On the darkbreezed esplanade

            fiddler crabs

            scruttle forth

            from sandcastle moats.

A flap and strap and leatherseat too tight to touch

Like a Drum Overbeat

Martial thumbednose gone powder awry,

Light like the hair fuzz on the bottom of a young girl’s small back

   and HIP-HIPPED

                                     UP

    And enticing dance

with bellyshirt

(loud)                       HENNA

(whisper)                           sari

 (Sake bomb voice!)               KALIMARI….

Bumblepollenbeetrees

Bumbleharling pollenbeasts bronzingshackle

        Shadowfoxed

                    the glove that dealt the

                    doubleblow—

      while

               frugal pinkies of buttersweet

               are blossom lentigoes.

separacíon

En el jardin de los huesos oscuros,

Los abetos como los dedos tuyos,

Conmigo—con la luna verde—

De que dijiste?  De que te dijo?

Philosophophiloloblossomy

CONVERSATION UNDER GREEN MOON

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

1. “What is our quintessence

         But swatches of conversation

               Snatched from cracks in groaty floors?”

2. “Mein amor, c’est paracusis, es todo.

        How long will it take for our ears to,

        Once again, become attuned to the

        Sound of our own voices?

        Right now I am a dogwhistle.”

1.        “Approximations of our own futility

(wordstatistics), nothing other we’ve

expressed, creativity an algorithm or

sour lemmas unfit for living’s motley

unfractaled dress.”

2.        “The simplicity of the household dust

Begs the craven and fructate mind

Lie down, fold hands, flake or husk as orange rinds.

Yet I would but fill the mind’s attic must,

In cistern-words contain, while fountains over-

Flow.”

3.        “Qauntity is overrated.  Numerous notches on a belt scar the leather.”

1.        “ Ideas would be such great things if only one could put them to any

              sort of real use.”

2.      “De acuerdo.”

  

Sunrise-fern and fell

       

                  s

The sun ca    c

                        a

                          d

                               e

                                      d

                                           down the dewdrop

fern and fell

of lightleggéd velvet

greenlichen vale.

Hucksteryew (or Personipunification), THE HUCKLE SPEAKS TO THE YEW

What is this injustice, this denying grief?

We are berry, berry alike, yew, I.

I may be a huckle, but I (in brief)

Edilberry fructate while yew twigs dye

Apothecary neeps.

            In steelystare of the “always” ground,

Goffering of the gossamer amnion,

        Primaverdances

                                  thread the head’s down

                                     lambence

                                  and way.

Afterdinner-seconddate

“The only thing viewing time is

A lenticle,” he said,

Taking his shoes off,

Bending,

And Rearranging magazines on the hickory table.

She looked.  She had the sort of beauty which incites conversation

But which never invites it.

Sevré.

Leftover-winterwind-at-nite

A trichoid wind vomits a subcutaneous shudder,

   birthing militant scabes

            steelbooted

                and filing rifle-angle

                                                 thru flesh.

Bulbous streetlamps splash orangejuice onto

         weedcracked sidewalks, adiron crennels,

and

       a bluecast moon

      the color of adema

          illumines a flimsy

old biscuit

                  rotting near a

dust-leotarded cricket gymnasting

              pinestraw.

Theology

Every angel is a devil who hasn’t fallen yet.

Surrealism

Mi espalda es una tortuga

Que caminaba las playas.

Journalism

                              

                                       What moves at night but words

                                             cut out from newspapers and periodicals;

                          Tomboys and tomcats are thatched roofs catching fire.

Two poorwomans’ variations on a Sunset

            The sun set, cascading down the vale.  Its last champing foams bursting flecks absorbed by porous humus and nightshade, purple-pink curlews receded, pushing back thru the dead elm limbs, sucking into vacuumed night.  Cold, the night air hung like a wet towel from after-shower skin, luminous hair compacted to her dry scalp, clinging dog-close for warmth.  A scent of browning bananas elbowed thru the front-screen door, shaking hands with the shelled walnuts and inert pommes.  The Studebaker, rusted, cycloptic, beached upon cinderblocks and plastic tarpaulin, watched the routine, theirs, with a sad mouth, slack into the dirt.  Air mutters, some say, like dancing homunculi. 

The sun set,

             cascading down the vale,

   with fire dancing, catching tails, on diaphanous

      nacre pupils.   

                          She rocked,

              back to forward,

                      her nails pushing old flesh up to the cuticle.

The cracked boards quipping underneath the runners popped like scarabs in heat.  Sound caromed through almond shells, careening around cicada husks fervent, clinging tightly to desolate bark and sap; the sinews branched beneath crabgrass, sprung in patches like mangy hair, fingers outstretched, praying to Vadose.  The air over the muddied asphalt hugged its shoulders, shivering with fever. The sun, some say, swords the stillborn air like fangs into an unchipped egg.

Memorywalk--Springlove    

More sinister are streets walked in very marrow time,

in strut and strut and walkaturnabout,

                     finding selves of our pushed against bark of trees,

                                       feeling leg,

                                                sigh,

                                                          kiss almost,

                                        and running up the thigh

                               when all is out

                       like afternoon dogs on topiary streets,

panting guilt like love’s cement-soon-to-dry.

                                          

Gaia

                                                A motherbreast

                                                      eternitygorgeous

                                                    whispers

                                                 milkelaborate

want

                                                                           of

am-enormous-I.

                                               Together

                                                              we were those,

                                                    wet & shake

                                                           of rust,

                                           who manipulate

                                                    gardens into

                                                                    waterbeds.

The-tie-the-time-that-binds

Time is an abstract of pain.