The Twenty-First Century


by John Ryskamp

Nothing feebler does earth nurture than man,
of all things that on earth breathe and move.
For he thinks that he will never suffer evil in time to come
so long as the gods give him success and his knees are quick;
but when again the blessed gods decree him misfortune,
this too he bears in sorrow with such patience as he can,
for the spirit of men upon the earth is just such as the day
which the father of gods and men brings upon them.

                                                -Odyssey, 18, 130-137


I


Fraud most displeases God. Of what use is humanity?
Calm down, myself, and be still. Between the
Torments and the Scaean gate,
Surviving in the valley of your speaking,
Each word a copy,
Wall before the watcher
(you beat upon that wall
til truth obeys your call
and soon tire of three enchanted fires of the Lower Empire,
never the contemporary of your own desires)
Atmospheric parting of the frieze
Sections of arcadian strata—
Dream intense, swift—
Year to year and crag to crag, procuring,
Find, as if by design, this night book of signs
In a hell sans hooks
(only writing is thought),
And tread—like a broken chariot,
Enfranchised, from the three worlds—
That path of humility which leads to reality, going forth,
No lodging for you but a cold hard confiding stone—
And shout a secret to the agora stone—
The air filled with water and stone, in a bitter blue light.
Eating the legumen of the algoraba,
Thin from eating flies, circumcising the indefinite.
Fulfilling your destiny,
Shadow-bearing lord of weak remembrance,
Dissembled, proffered, recovered, withdrawn—
Speaking silence—
(Why not just say, disheveled?)
Infernal hurricane in your breast,
Have a little drop of nothingness,
Rest, perturbed spirit—and no fingerpointing!
Confusion is the beginning of the philosophical quest.
Here are some little straws to put in your nest.
I’m blown up! Xook.
Impatient for night? Vade mecum. Every woman is. Very well then, here it is,


Let’s have a dekko:
All men are whores,
Some named Therefore.
In obedience to other laws,
Fog cruises everyone and mobs embattled Seraphim to war,
Only exaggeration moves them,
Their will bondsman to the obliterate dark,
They set sail in a black, enigmatic
vain and helmless raft or barque, scarf upon scarf
Baudelaire sprawled on the poop
Of that craft, mumbling epigraphs. Gesunde Volkskraft.
Started—a thoughtwreck that. Ships set sail on time.
Then press at blue midnight beneath love’s cornice
(Draped by bunches of acorns, unsightly moss, mimicking
orchids, poplar, and grapevine tendrils)
In Porto Pozzo, live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
Let me open the door for you.


Night snores over the earth and wallows in wild dreams;
wishes take shape as deadly swallows and steal into the silent house of dreams;
this is the curative oft-limned pure zero hour
of [the relationship of] the will to power:
an inarticulate red right hand transmitted
from a bookish iron famine tower
bringing back a white celestial flower.
Twentysomethings
all ready in cock rings
awash in their fluids
and tonsured by Druids,
shorn like an ox’s balls, with horse’s horns
a tattoo
of a warbler born from wishful bamboo.
They seem to undress
looking as if falling to earth
but are merely repeating forms in infinite regress.


Where are they? Swear.
With ear-kissing arguments, hints and guesses
Nibbles and caresses
Hugo’s hide rope, dragon, present identical abyss
Severed heads kiss
In mourning eclipse
Under the assin between two apolinere enameled obelisks
(and their laurel wreaths slip)
In a garden without names, rapt in flames
Another old fat man, fat like a strange terrestrial cypress tree,
Daisy? or buttercup?
or just a rotten old fuckup?
It’s the way I’ve always been treated,
A creepazoid baron with a wicked pack of franks
A banished old tightwad claiming to be limited God, in imagination
Bent on the wisdom of fisting deformed solar God
who shows you his open hand
(yet their heart’s waters
spill no baleful word abroad)
ulcerated scrotum à la Coleridge
replaced haunch and trailing paunch, consults
the threefold whorl of a conch (the center of which cannot hold),
lives in the capsule of a cell phone
waits in a cassia tree munching the fungus of immortality,
plies and anoints with split nitrogen,
confiding, in a motionless sliding,
draws near, sweetly questioning in artificial English
If you lack anything:
A little usury up the mula bandha
While you’re in crow?
Fastens on your buttonhole
More subtle than a weaver’s shuttle
Ponete mente almen com’io son bella!
Si tu voulais seulement
M’approfondir ensuite un peu!—
the nineteenth autumn has come upon me
since I made my last count!
Behind the unity of a hundred masks he asks:
Is there anything else you don’t like? what makes you weep?
Tells tales (through halitosis) of a moral apotheosis,
Through barely-parted lips, a muted half-pentameter apocalypse.
Pumpkin, when do you shed diamond tears? when another sun appears?
Wiggle your unfathomed, unholy, burning Sanskrit ears and
Don’t look so forlorn, baby,
was ever innocence in beauty born?
Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ich Gewalt.
What’s up with your antithetical deformed arm?
Your watch must be fast. Show me your eggplant.
Thought is free: what’s your metaphor?
Bo-peep, what’s in the hibiscus basket?
Why are your fingers caressing my neck, you ignorant boy?
Non vis ut sim sollicitus: you parent killer!
Taking suggestion as a cat laps milk, in each other’s grill, about to throw down,
A bouquet of blossoming vulvae, c’est du sang en fleur
Let a thousand humble hollow pelvises blossom
Some are anxious crossed out spineless angels pulled away by an arm,
Some undone, in the unattended moment,
Approached in the sacred porch with consuming heat
from the speaking, sulphurous torch (to let the warm love in!),
Ponete mente almen com’io son bella!
Si tu voulais seulement
M’approfondir ensuite un peu
:
He fucked my ass off
while coalesced syllabic onyx nails scratched the rails.
men che drama di sangue m’è rimaso che non tremi
sed faciles Nymphae risere
Elated chatter among the leaves.
Nothing outside; nothing inside.
Nothing inside and outside.
Your dying slave,
Eyes uplifted speckled knees bowed down,
In the distinct concessional,
In Urso Major, under the dragon’s tail,
Under the very nose of Jesus [death],
Nurse, the basting syringe
(Fill it with Grey Poupon),
Unwilled of heaven in mankind,
You, with your Spenglerian brownish hue
see the point which has passed beyond you.
(outdo what you have undone)

primary master, secondary slave,
the bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft,
lance his piles,
give a masked antithetical neutering tincture
to his sphincter: all is beauty,
ecstatic concentration, and extinction
a new race of Longobardi, earth’s litter
speculators in derivatives
thoroughbreds and chickenheads
a sword fight
Some struggle—
torrid though torpid towards 3 PM (sundown)—
With a bottle
Up a millionaire’s ass,
Your idol and your tyrant—
Once a kindly Zephyros, now a
blustering Boreas
(and I mean that in a non-"windy" way)
a buster, stifled
Titan, going at it with Santa claws
out by the long home hidden by the almond tree
working burdensome gleaning grasshopper jaws
la lippe me fait le mouvement de paître
giving you a philoctetes with his everyday missile
by a divine thrusting on
and on a ratty couch in the vestibule,
in your hammock a whore!
The tiger springs from his fallen God, the dog
backs down before the bull.
Yacking, you eat the hair
on the eyes of his chest,
you blow menos in his wordhole, potency gaining existence by form,
in the felly and the nave
breathing each other’s life, exchanging colors,
living each other’s smoky breath, blowing out:
thought, absence, language=pulsating death.
Vis-à-vis lesbian Picassoid tongues by teeth are torn
impaled on rhinocerous horn or Glastonbury thorn
(not until humanity composed itself could Christ be born)
terror and oblivion
Your spirit overkissed—your young zeros! breath
scarce knows the way! w00t!
Rubens Moreau
Balthus Corot
Destroys with the brightness of his coming.
O, O, O, O. In life we are in death.
Au secours M. Kosygin!
You spill air;
it gathers in Rhone pools, psychic puddles
which whisper: "Call 647-8262,"
whisper The Solution:
"All crime is unsuccessful revolution."
Laboring under the erotic, cinema
(let’s give baby an enema)
Narcotic Kairotic juju of his succubus-like spell
Bite, and with ardent eyes and brite,
In a lonely impulse of delight,
Draw back to watch the imprint of that bight.
Discharging starlight, I feel like a prerequisite Job tonite.
Il s’agit a shrine of melancholy in a temple of delight,
personalized hobby: exteriorized rite.
Unpack your heart with words:
Zoit! A sillie worm: O do not bruise me!
quia amore langueo
The master struck him with three mirrors and a candle,
stole his yams and sandles.
Before you realize in the region of unlikeness
This Colonel you do not recognize
Tes yeux dans ces yeux-là!
You have changed blue eyes and have the throat of birds.
Soon.


In the Nd-Yag drishti of the stance you have changed black eyes
and in intellectual sweetness pissed crosswise so a menstruating Jew will die
(and the images of your mind are changed).
Qui s’en vont dans l’air pur
À l’aventure
I want to know what day this is. What day is this?
Reproduce all marvels of classical architecture
In a distended platitude
Et puis?
Well, in the dixit
of a contemporary critic
what follows radiates the sort of pathologic corona
of a pestilent Prufrockian persona:
in short, an herbal installation
an asana in the assana (without straps)
of an aerie of little eyases
with most miraculous organ,
one great fact of interpenetrative causation,
four positions of the host and guest
whistle belly thumps
You send a fax:
suave vulnus charitatis
gladius amoris
me vulnera


Behold the nadir:
Tension resolved at noon,
you show your O face without a figure from the lips of your eye,
an unhorrified evacuation (full of sound and fury!)
against an art nouveau wall, de-
flowering indifference of liberation (a wonder to behold),
the separate substances: you produce a large unimpeachable
radish, ridenti colocasia, a rotted potato and la cookie
a chocolate kiss on a drop of hammered blood (a puddle
of frozen piss in the Pure Land)
A little one is separated from the body—
la goutte d’encre apparantée à la nuit sublime

and produces an author.
And why not? Art can change too!
huc ades; quis est nam ludus in undis?
sinister filaments in a thick, gelatinous substance
outraging two enameled shady serpents which part the bears—
frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis
yes, divine justice like a sex poem, a combustion from below to make
Christian hell smell like a sweet sachet
and your back crack, knees freeze and needled, observed liver quiver.
It raised the wall, and houses too
(and silenced the Sybil).
Perchè sei tu sì smarrito?
And then a green apple quick step
Stouty lizard stampede to the hereafter!
Fear of faces and forms from this place:
Austerity of virgins, sobriety of slaves,
Outmoded shadows, children’s laughter.
I drank, from the clear milky juice allaying
Thirst, and refreshed—heads without name
Then made water at great need
Clutching seven unequal marsh reeds
One thrill sweet grass, one pulse in bitter weed
Fue una vaga congoja de dejarte
Lo que me hizo saber que to quería.
et durae quercus subadunt roscida mella


Reader, can you help observe
that some things are like big, long words?
Who then devised the torment?
Love, reinvented in perfect measure.
Io no lo intendo, sì parla settile.
Love took my hand, and smiling replied,
Who made eyes but I? You were born in the sky.
A part of labor and a part of pain (then reduced, somewhat, by wind).
The young in one another’s arms.
send out words and blood together from a tear
(there is no flying hence or tarrying here).
Sit down, love, and taste my meat.
Give me a gash, put me to present pain—
Beauty ripped by a boar.
Quick now, here, now, always—it’s Zen
Now and now
Teldeath I am coming.
He made time.
As men more like gluttinous swine


No checkypoo?
Wan wu sheng yu?
Yu sheng wu.
You who are a copy,
what is your name?
What is your name?
An sich?
Für sich.
Yanwai ngoh hai yat goh
Centing buck why-foo biby
O—mm—okay?
Todestelle
Work my loom and visit my bed,
Leave me in peace and go.
Love is the wind
Frühling, der liebliche Knabe
Erring, erring


Under the lash of a lust
Which drives them—
Mongrels of the summer
(their life so pressing
but one undressing—
steady aiming at the tomb),
Taking enlightenment in the end,
Noisy sausage party of clerics, men of letters and neoterics,
nulli certa domus
Loud sky and silent sea,
Butterflies struggling in a vacuum,
Grief pouring out through their eyes—nurse
(conceived in the false cow, with secret traces a concave womb re-worded—
they would have been lucky if they had never been given cattle!)
grief in a gutter and give the world to chance,
Come here, boo boo, come give me dein Hand. Sit here:


Cattywompus from there. Did you ring? Give me a pearl.
Stop sneezing and cool your spleen.
Shake it off. Bounce. Call 647-8262.
Cheese. Cancel past that. Wake up.
Climb out of your K-hole and suck a slaughtered pig’s ass.
Thus gone, suckle Diana’s green breasts.
Snap on a feed-bag—or eat yourself to lessen pain.
Such an unlucky hand! Symbolized
by five stars. Your guest star is Karuna.
Mr. Netsuke, a mekiki with a Buddha-hand citron.
Observe your faults
Observe you. In drag of regret. Wahrheit und Richtigkeit.
Leering like the sucking sun from the clouds.
Real sun. Don’t be too brazen!
Do you have a Pinto for sale? Sell the Buick—
and put a Cadillac in a Ford!
Gaffle some skrill. Gank now from then. Scarf Round Robin. Sorrow,
sorrow. Numbers are never spoken; bodies by Cézanne or Dr. Seuss
Hope never comes that comes to all
Violence is done to one of three
From such soulful amberlight nothing can give shade,
and heaven is out of view. Anglican einfühlung is not appealed to.
Your doom is in this sky
(the point of the infinite is sharp!),
Wherein you behold, in the délices
de Kermoune
(the truth cannot be told without prejudice),
A bossy Hebraic homily in colloidal borrowed gold—
Clashing words in the air suspended, unequal language in the agitated air—
Wherein perfection lives on in some Cartesian void
Raining points, even after its life has been destroyed,
Ideals unrealized so approximations unjustified.
The center thrice to the utmost pole.
Soleil, soleil, faute éclatante! Job and Sophocles.
Offers no relief, and does not share in the banks of Ocean.
Remorse smiles up from the Bay. Fishes quiver in the seiche tone
on the unjust horizon. Upward man and downward fish.
La cité d’Ys, la Sodome noyée. Leman.
Ding-dong, bell.


In the circus of fixed destinies
Da ist kein "humanity"—
Only time devils, The Ape’s Problem and profanity.
The medical specialist and the painter,
The light collector and the headlight child,
A nightingale named Ruth, the Green Man,
The gris-gris and the bochio, buoi and giogo,
The guey professor and the Negro twin
Brothers who are the only child of two mothers
(they perch like swallows and like swallows go),
Louis, Sir Sinister Palindrome in the sex act, his two-faced silent echo sister;
Prince Fondle, OMO in encaustic emerging from an acrostic on pride,
Hu Nu in a porkpie hat (McNamara with a mouthful of bad teeth),
Hector with his stutter, phantom Helen (her fair face) with her beauty spot,
Aeneas short and fat, that Greek chap Clitoris,
And circus animals and animulae:
A veiled Maya, secret shopper, voluptuous fox,
Scapegoats and branch-grabbing monkeys, scampering Chinese rat,
Un qui passait
Son ombre changée en souris
Fuyait dans le ruisseau


Baron Grimm the geology conductor,
hunting an Irish Atlantis in the swastika (facial?)
entrails of a greedy praying mantis,
Mr. Jimmy the mad hatter, a malignant turbaned dwarf
and eunuch deprived of the extension of his poetic unit,
Ursula Major the minor, Easter, Erato,
Suzy Sansouci and the Disappearing Master,
Buddha doing kung fu yoga in rose midair, the immoralist Goethe,
Sue Kasana and Rick Shasana,
Colombo, Sardinian Foolio, Molina,
a yummy mummy reek-of-estrogen Sybillina,
the donna dello schermo and the girl in pig-tails,
Cowfaced and owleyed,
All look down from out the stair
from the pages of the Revue nue
What minor tearless gods are there (with such hair!)
light little people sous le ciel neutre
in corresponding Tiepolo air
(a phenomenon which I have often noticed)
twining deceitful faces of hope and despair?
If life is a dream, what does it foreshadow?
Who has a bird’s head among the gods of imperturbable upper air?
Hakuryo still withholds the mantle
re-releases an immortal fox from a Chinese box
I met them all thirty years ago
for twenty minutes in some open studio
and endured a session
with poetry praised as an obsession: persiflage,
Duchamp playing chess in a mirage.
They created everything: God, money, time.
They’re not even listening.
They don’t ever care.
White raisins, beautiful virgins (blessed hoochie ladies in the sphere) and vaporized glass
Veronese and borzoi.
Schoolboy, wardrobe mistress and groom.
Fate yields to chance and chaos.
The ecstatic princesse nocturne, la Muse camarde
ici pose
, and turns the worked and patient dark Marseille card
(you watch her, frowning,
as if she were speaking while drowning—
she foretold twentysomethings—
their hair uncut—who look seventy years old!):
look at yourself through inner, other eyes: normalize
aspire to taste bitter fire
avoid four (the black eagle), the fifth and hell’s wan
king; owl competes with swan:
seek protection of the serpent king,
a literary terrorist plants word bombs,
til dawn I can’t do anything.
Kingfisher and Fisher King.
Young man and girl in spring.
You have a predetermined number of breaths;
don’t hurry things—dream of me at your identical death.
Lord! You were once ideally ordered selves
who met over a rag in Munich in 1912—
you are asleep, let me speak first:
Tell me and I will tell you if you know
you resemble Foucault?
I see you’ve given your soul away,
but masterful heaven has intervened to save it.
What is the one word? Being. Who speaks it? Truth.
What is meant
by an autistic designer of abbatoir equipment?
I call you humanity: I call you cacophony.
Orderly beauty of mass destruction,
whether military or industrial I cannot see,
death eyes cannot be read with such certainty.
Byron dan les îsles, et Shakespeare encore


From morning to noon they fell
Seraphim in an avalanche, hit and hit
Apotheotic collapse joining heaven and earth
Craters through flames
Bells from gorges
Rung
From noon to dewy eve—
A summer’s day—and with the setting sun
Tone
Yet in that sound the earliest names
have all faded away;
Yet in that Word the weaker words
have long since died;
and the paler images also
have melted away in the seal of the spectrum.
Des fanums qe’éclaire la rentrée des theories, d’immenses vue
(mock) Tone


God Pantocrator, Ur-Glossator, in half-empty heaven (when 4=7),
as God might be, conceived in idiosyncracy,
incumbent on air though shorn of his beams,
riding in molto forte C major, phosphorescence
and smoking Boucher clouds of conscious
unknowing upon the swan of melody,
Passing through brazen screaming tempestuous skies
of tumbling carp and butterflies
twittering predatory swallows and funky wavelets à la Hokusai
(earth-born clouds vacate the eyes
but Aphrodite renounces flux as her lucid curves crystallize),
borne into eternity upon selfful extended wings
of passionate things,
flying in a dancing sleeve
of Thracian hail, flags of rank indecency
Signing off on consistency,
Parousia of the logos, topos and tapas.
Measuring properties of angels in a Maya-like world.
The royal banners press forward (those banners come not in),
Tityrus is Arion and rides a dolphin
the Secret of the Cross is shining and
The flower pities the bee
for its fascist intertextuality,
in incommensurate mastery God hates 9 but loves 3
and throws an onion into the sea,
Christ Hospitaler [death]
Intones from the Cross,
"Heaven is to die for."
We were all with Moses then, he
was under the cloud and in the sea.


He transforms himself each day anew. I can’t hear you.
Bearing the skin of himself,
Peter the grudge bearer rails at ninth
Heaven. cantus infirmus Making all, unmade
unnamed universal He in the immense juniper shade
All over the map like an old tree
Black cloud occludes the sun
Like a Cubist collage, and then
Love clasps Grief lest both be drowned and
Homeless fearful sun dépose sa pontificale étole,
sleeps under the disappointed Bridge again,
The dead a talisman for men.
righteous cock and noble balls
God swallows a phallus
Hercules fresh from harsh austerities, disturbed by his own feces
discovers in it the pure concord of Empedocles
but without the strength to force the moment to its crisis,
addict Christ Adonis still half-brother to refined Dionysus
Achilleus—tiny two eyes, broad-shouldr’d and pindick—impregnates
Hyperbolic Sinbad the fleeing leech-gatherer and pea-green Atlantic
Sucks up his wooden ship.
C’est Galathée aveuglant Pygmalion!
Impossible de modifier cette situation.
Only heroes redeem Eros.
Homosexual Diana and Camilla
Without concern for the meaning of marriage
Posterity decides everything and understands nothing.
Rome had its cuts too.
And Rome died.


As gods toward their rest—
Youthful Chinese figures on a gilded hearse—
Listen, why can’t you, who
Are a copy, as night passes shamelessly:


BOTTOM WATER DEEP
LIGHT NO IMMORTALITY
THAT ONE BREATHE
THE CORD OF EXISTENCE


Tapas? Heat by body
Kavi? Designates the Saint
Soma? South of Market,
where the sun’s rays never penetrate.
Zophos
but rinse their beams under Aquarius.
Collocation, ascetic conjunction, Fire and Love.
Eat the leaves, and give the pain,
an outlet in each tear. Sad young man, cradler, on a train
contemplating poetry etched upon the window pane.


What is young and old, and old and young?


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
II


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
This world has forgotten many things.
Which is the natural man
and which the spirit?
Who deciphers them?
Fame is a consensus of sorts. What undermines it?
A bald face unbaptized, a blacksmith and his help,
tickled a pickle, tossed the salad and transferred data.
made a clam dive, whacked the mole,
tied up the toad and christened the cat, shaved their balls and
galloped the lizard, killed Nan-ch’uan’s kitten,
played with a fat dill piece, a turtle and waxed the dolphin.
Paratactic son of man, you who are a copy,
Distinct configuration of selves (not entirely verbal
Pace atlas and iron herbal),
Viral phallucinogenic penis rising at morning to meet you—
bootstrapped, no less alive for that


Out of the sea of spinning sound
On entre à cheval
Huge leviathans forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands
In the feast of nights
Heart full of sorrow as the sea of sands.
Shadow governments inch toward the light.
Kingfishers catch fire in a painting by Dali.
Europe after the rain—dance Monster.
Yes, did you ring? I can’t hear you.
Do you feel
me? Clear karma which is real
persistent rolling wheels
Ezekiel sitting in an open field
Greek steam engine and Aztec wheel
A scented hand from the cloud emerges
(bird’s round eye in the
palm),
holding a chart expanded—
The living eye—searching past and future—of a gargantuan reordering,
A monumental ordering of the doubly-contaminated eightfold way.
Great sea-horses bare their teeth
and laugh at the dawn.
Out of the sea of unjust sound


Freedom!
Freedom from tolerance, freedom from intolerance.
Freedom from freedom, freedom from servitude.
Freedom from mortality, freedom from immortality.
Freedom from indifference, freedom from concern.
Freedom from love, freedom from hate.
Freedom from sickness, freedom from health.
Freedom from poverty, freedom from wealth.
Freedom from death, freedom from life.
Freedom from darkness, freedom from light.
FREEDOM.


Maitreya, schist, with the knowledge fist,
shake the tree, repress the mountain and startle the fish:
The gadfly clung like a nymphomaniac,
A hermaphroditic self-eating devourer of the dead
(identifiable by the necessary white patch on the rear).
I am the dog.
No, the dog is himself, and I am the dog,
a seven-year woman, a witch’s dog unearthed from the sewers—
Hypospadias, urethral opening on the underside.
Warred on by cranes.


Kaum erwacht, hört’ ich dein Rufen,
Stürmte zu den Felsenstufen,
Hin zur gelben Wand am Meer.
Heil! Da kamst du schon gleich hellen
Diamantnen Stromesschnellen
Sieghaft von den Bergen her.
Me, the heart moving toward the heart
Moving through the heart toward moving the heart
Love moved me. Love has made me speak.
Todestelle.
Ist auf deinem Psalter,
Vater des Liebe, ein Ton
Seinem Ohre vernehmlich,
You who are a copy,
So erquicke sein Herz!
Öffne den umwolkten Blick
Über die tausend Quellen
Neben dem Durstenden
In der Wüste.


We move above the moving yew
Tree in light upon the figured leaf
Observe the black hunter and conversion of the Jew
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the vengeful boar
Pursue their pattern as before—
Only this, and nothing more:
terror and oblivion.
Beauty ripped by a boar.
Kill a boar and prove your name.
exultatio secura cantantium,
concordia summa laudantium,
lex mentis, lex in membris,
rixa cupiditatis
victoria charitatis


O qui dira les torts de la Rime?
infin che il mar fu sopra noi richiuso
Et son égal en pureté et son égal en piété
Ma Dame et Saint Michel
bénissez
A leper once he lost and gained a king
They had no son but the helmsman had his poem
These noisy cities are not my cities
East to New York
Far East to Japan
West to the Tyrean whore.
Gitmo and Indokorea
Tibetan Kalachakra
Merger, Japan
six great cities
Germany hears from every corner of heaven
Russia brings poetry


They’re making a circle out of a star
Pierrette in chains
The owl upon the wall
Banked
Where Michael bent proud spirits under law
[red star] We are [red star]
non iniussa cano


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
III


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
During the day
(and I mean this in a nighttime way)
We were alive to sunlit terrors
Syntax deceived us
With its sound-form phenocrysts
And obelisks swam in amethyst
Des noms barbares hurlés par les rafales roulés,
Sous les larmes sourdes, cases
Dans les brisants et perdus en
Chair de poule sur les marais


In ambrosial night, still awake at 4 AM, eos erigeneia,
Aiolos, word and mind eponymous,
Castor and Pollux hapax,
Parrity and disparity,
synonymous, fractious fractals,
Mind dirt and broken ash, grimy ash over exhausted ground,
We are in mourning,
Knowing neither zophos nor eos,
That is, neither life nor death, but rather,
One longing for the other.
death unrelated to life
Or rather:
And die, being dead. The world’s asleep, the night keeps phonemic silence.


From where does the faded horny sun-in-moon emanate?
Dull, small astonished Equinox 1 moon has forced the tie-dyed sun away,
This is the hour and the third day,
The bride stripped bare becomes the wife
And Strindberg wields a palette knife,
Dante is a foreign car,
Rimbaud a movie star.
Babbling all its foolish past
English, its head in a bag, goes down in babble at last.
Imagine all of
humanity leading you to chance death.
I know I do.
breuis est uia
You come too.
Do you see what I see?
What is the date today?
What have the waves done wrong?
Even if it is not true
Even in despite of truth
We must maintain it anyway
Valence blinds and other valences
Logology made flesh
Il est minuit comme une flèche.…
We are now entering the author’s gallery of grotesques
We hope you’re very lonely
Because it’s For Madmen Only. Here you will see unfurled
like a backdrop in a theatre, the world.
Featureless midnight, deceptive, itchy-fingered dawn
(sacred if only for the mask it grants you)
An AI insect climbs the tree of knowledge
the two taxations
animal-fantasies


Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque
First on your right side,
Breathing like the sea you are
Breathing like the sea in your black sack,
Between sleeping and waking
The sound of language breaking
Investing shadows with lucid rot
Notional stones with meteorological clot
as it were, fraught
with floating debris of mediaeval psychothought
(and reality with too much Eliot—
didn’t he have false teeth and put his wife
in an asylum? They must have had a falling out—
he thought habit would atone for all his sins;
is it by choice
he exorcised the ghostly voice?)
It is typical of the mediaeval mind
to find meaning in concrete images of this kind
deep in shit, and blaming someone else for it
Then on your back,
Turning beauty into a soggy sameness
Then face downward
—but at last a patient sad spider (Penelope) brushes your black diamond eye.
e li occhi no l’ardiscon di guardare.
Beautiful body as you are,
you’re dead now: karmic retribution.
Two hours before cold and passionate dawn
in the sudden thunder of 59 mounting precursor swans—
warmly rejecting number—
and graphic figuration of the beyond
of the fertility myth and Ariel’s song
You appear upon the identical lugubrious lawn
And plant an oar in the radius of Venus.
Standing on your head: feces,
baby and penis—an infinite number of species.
Infra great sea-horses laugh at the dawn.
A cuckoo is erect in a good oak coffin
Sounding the knell of the vast hours.


Behold the man that loved and lost:
Des noms qui ont des voix
You rise, to wander, from your crib,
the cavernous waste shore, bitter endive and ammonium chloride,
painting your white sister’s image on the ground,
Distractedly, jaded, along the line of surf—
The unharvested seat of desolation, void of light—
Heart full of sorrow, disconsolate chimera tail in your mouth,
Forsaking unsounded deeps, lost in loss itself,
Cast out you are cast down, sand in your hand,
Storming your world with sorrow’s wind and rain.
Des noms qui ont des voix
That one, that of so many myriads fallen,
Yet one returned not lost,
pour quêter un linceuil.
A sigh is the spirit come into this world.
From a sack of mute sounds
With twilight wrapped round
In a sordine enveloped:
"Rain, rain." With hints of burnt siena,
Padua at the marsh stains the waters of Vicenza.
nec lacrimis crudelis Amor
The white rock, the gates of the sun,
The community of dreams.
Solus, si liceret, tota die sederet,
Libros versaret vel reversaret
Yes, paler for sorrow than a milk-white dove.
One by one the stains that kisses made
In biting cold and burning sunlight fade.
Io vegno il giorno a te infinite volte
No, no, he’s gone—it zoots you.
Before dawn his glory and monuments are gone.
Je ne retrouverai plus ma petite folie.
He is not here; but far away
in the inexhaustible fountain of beauty’s spray.
Devoid of return.
J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,
J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,
Tellement aimé ton ombre
In pilgrimage, bearing their cry inshore, gulls,
the albatross of the tempest, swans,
the kingfishers, Slavic ducks and warning geese are still there.
Veuve avant épouse car la mer est jalouse
You parch your skin and lose
Your hair. Baked, you see, or dream you see, di gonna in gonna,
3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n’ont rien à faire avec la sauvagerie
the throne of Lachesis in the talismanic dreamland—
Dream of Tangiers, American dream, Parisian dream—
You dream you throw embers, and a key, in 62 rushing streams.
You are your Mother’s prophetic language dream.
Voluble flowers, stones look on. Eliot’s dream.
Each is another’s bad dream.


Todestelle
Liebster, Liebster, der Morgen kommt.
Was sol ich allein hier tun?
In diesem endlosen Leben,
In diesem Traum ohne Grenzen und Farben.
Der Morgen trennt uns, immer der Morgen.
Wieder en ewiger Tag des Wartens.


I think there is nothing to be seen in light
But
The Muffled Gentleman and the ghost of Moritz.
No one can take my death from me.
Watered but cool in an ice age,
Before the pastoral obelisk, a symbol and its tristitia we have put away,
On the descending ass-end of space you brood,
on an unjust wandering grave and rapid cooling of nearby lands,
unpregnant of your cause, drawing resolution from despair,
Make it pregnant, and state an elegiac mood.
Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods.
Memory, and perception, and expectation.
Memory, and perception, and expectation.
that
what
how
where
when
why
if
March 10
if you know that you are but not what you are,
what you are but not how you are,
how you are but not where you are,
where you are but not when you are,
when you are but not why you are,
why you are but not if you are,
if you are but not that you are,
what you are but not that you are…
the hundred negations


The dead are a talisman for the living.
Anne, ma soeur Anne, ne vois-tu rien venire?
A restless seeming, dreadless, unlooking back,
Too full for sound and fury
Having shaken the oak, you turn again
in an allegory of the letter
to your memory palace and obscene confessor,
litigious tame Superman,
A sickle with never a handle
Your oar become a winnowing-fan,
Thoughts all a case of knives: Christ
Glittering with hatred,
Keeping your anger bright: Kleist
(you scare your melancholy).
Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore.
Eroma erpmes arapir litneg roc la.
Dusty garments committed to amber earth before the swept threshold
of your house: thou shalt die, and not live.
Your house is empty, your birds have flown.
In that bright unique tomb, and taking the
measure of that room, again—
descend the staircase, drink the poison and enter the tomb—
you destroy half your brain
you go to bed
in a carcare named freedom
prism of freedoms
but cannot sleep with sleep
perceptions out of wedlock
recorded time
and put a bullet through your head
power to thyself, in singleness thy state
indictable on several grounds, self-indicted on them all
but all the while take the Fifth—and smile
Your watch must be fast
You must eat your medicinal meal (frying gravel),
asphalt, salt and delirium (but not fish)
drink chocolate+blood+mescaline—nothingness—
amber, viscous and sawdust
from the cinnabar vase of the seven gods, from a cow’s hoof,
sweeten it with eater and eaten,
jazz bachelor, to melodious thunk,
check your airline schedule and carrier pigeons,
observe teeth, the black snakes and kids

(you’re the man who built the pyramids!),

defend to the devil the literal level,
cut off your eyelids,
nurse your habitus, brew your blood via sacred induction—
vengeance listen to a fool’s request—
manfully strive to squeeze your lemon dry
to step off the mad 51 bus, brush success
accept the armor and hoist your ass
into the noisy upper middle class—howl your howls,
but a draw a web out of your willow bowels
before the coveted crow and incestuous owl;
between the intention and the act
build a fire in the digestive tract.
It would be some kind of music.
Thus gone, you do the bars, keeping your heart
and other inner organs, in Canopic jars.
Work harder, jog faster (keeping going)
then consult the horny Wu Li master.
Take 17 different immortal vitamin and deer pills
then a hike into scores and spores of the alchemic Berkeley hills.
You must learn to confirm L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in Esperanto,
frantic to become a reactionary romantic. Wake up. Vous êtes mal armé.
Defend cliffs in stages
O captain of the rear guard,
nor trust too early to reluctant soil
a whole year’s hopes.
To make things clearer talk to the orangoutang in the subtle mirror
(in which, like a Catholic Ulysses,
you see everywhere the turnless turning cosmic face
fantôme qu’à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne

wisdom’s reward for running life’s race—
but the finished man sees his enemies),
mirrored mirrors the mirroring mirrored;
whilst a three-legged white raven warns you: be craven.
Dead the warrior, dead his glory,
Above all, dead the cause in which he died.
Practice pinning a ghost on a cactus.


Your eyebrows fall out of the window of the hearing:
raw vegetables and cooked vegetables.
You open a door onto a constitutional
Right, the fact of knowledge (we don’t
tell the Jew!—transfixed by SM politics):
omnis feret omnia tellus
If anything, the opposite.
You’re back from where you went,
and become the constellation Virgo.
You sense a theatrical police presence.
You honor your limits and complete your partial mind.
"Right now I’m washing my feet"—spoke and set the cocks a-crow.


The stricken sun is not named, but his power is amongst us:
Scattered by winds and high tempestuous gusts,
Just, stereometric bees with smoke, and doves in mid-air with noisome stench.
And de se borner à connaître de près les belles choses, et
À s’en nourrir en exquis amateurs,
En humanistes accomplis.
Rimbaud with a cyst. A diseased face shadowed by Catholicism. Pretty as a pietà.
Bees from an unhappy cello come
Summoned by a deathless damask drum.
By wasps and hornets stung.
A dog dreams of a happy ending.
I charm asleep—and when I will, awake—the eyes of men.
Poetry from raw pork and opium.
They vibrate in the dark, and remain below language.
"You taught me language, malice, and I know how to curse."
True dat.
quia amore langueo


and endless rooms of endless houses with emerald chairs
and copper halls, violet corridors and three tumbled ivory stairs
above or below? enharmonic elevations
leading to houses and—muffled scansion—endless rooms, failures of wise
diamond corridors to lead to endless rooms of chemical red velvet houses and


Princess Eavesdrop, aka Belle Headache aka Matelda Hale-Bopp,
a yellow-mouthed baby in oppression blue, her pet
tricked out chimps, Fantoche et Josette:
"I don’t care!" she screams,
"if you invented air!
There’s a real image there!
You only have so many breaths;
do you want to hurry up your death?
Vines and creepers, my girl! You
haven’t killed your lower-case self yet? I can’t hear you.
The five vowels gave birth to you, and passion turned you blue.
It’s time you got off that sofa, Mary (she was born in the sky)
(she hides her literature: she’s drained life to the dregs,
her arms are like forelegs—
how did she get in? she preens
and eats apricots where everyone can see her naked skin,
undoes herself across nine acres,
farts up a sky and expends her yellow labor—
she’s as tarty, farty and arty as Astarte
(her lovers included Sraffa and Malaparte)—
in full view of bewildered neighbors:
the tricks of this dominatrix! the trysts of this Iscolde!
she reminds me of spilt water and my long-lost daughter).
Viewless wind always brings a blush to Phoebe avaricious of life,
The moon spots to destructive Bea cowardly as a spider
who never could bear much reality
and who, for that matter,
in thought, word and act always smells of the fish of the sea—
she’d suck whiskey off a sore leg;
silk comes out of both sides of her mouth.
To hell with her—and I mean that in a heavenly way.
Ma jolie (Rrose Mystica), you have a run in your hose—
don’t look down the dot of your reversible Roman nose
in the anger of the pose! You’re the opposite of prose.
Marianne? takes it in her recuperating can
(she was "traded" between Bellmer and de Man, but
shat on Lacan—cauterise her sinus!
she sings of anger—and of her man)
nevertheless sees in Sanskrit and Chinese
the five elements and ten degrees:
she doesn’t see the forest for the trees
(what can I say? she digs sleaze)—
she just wishes she had a brain pearl! seeks "peace,"
has applied for it to the Bureau of Release.
Lulu (the first Mrs. Milton), in five signs—qu’elle est
of an angel’s decline,
guides us all—or did, before her fall
(this Cinderella came late to the ball,
wearing a necklace of ping-pong balls!).
She has an hyperbolic eye in her forehead:
she has eyes—wha-what’s that you say?
What do you know about my image duplicator?
—for days! They rest, like Keats’ vectors, in relays.
I suppose love’s blind heart conquers all.
What a fright! with her triple sight.
Let me make this clear: she lost her mind over a mirror.
She hides her writing (her perfumed periods stink!).
She longed to see the top of her head.
She was born in an extant lotus and
flipped a coin as she rode on a shameless tortoise—
not to be believed! but what has my scolding ever achieved?
terror and oblivion. She never
comes until Hugo, her arrival, leaves (in love those two are one)—
don’t worry about this nymph, I’m giving her (too much!) notice. Enough; no more.
She’s not as sweet as she was before. They’re not people—they’re napkins.
Don’t even think about it—you have your music too! This
is a chambered tomb à la Poe, a poem: what do you care?
She’s history, she’s a closed book.
Dream on: you’ll always love her, and she’ll always be there.


Although she does not know, she is quite dead—
that’s in a life-enhancing way,
if you can see that in a light more than that of day!
On whom is this joke being played?


Are you an undertaker’s hamburger? I’m cold. You’re throwed off. Find everything
Here first. Listen, my little personette. This is my advice
(did Prince Albert ring?):
Next time you go out,
pack your cock in ice,
hide your syntax—
It’s much the safest way.
This is the hour and the day.
It’s not that anonymity is your best defense:
You are anonymous. Get over it or emigrate to Saturn.
You are so dramatical! You have Rachel tension.
It runs from the family.
Obsolescence is the mother of invention.


—the mother of invention. Symbol of change.
What is your name?
What is your name?
Enlightenment is an ember not a flame.
Etor in her mouth. "Baseball."
Voi che’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete
You know her: the spiky-haired postfeminist, rather screechy—
she blinds you with botox science;
polymath, polyglot, or fashionable nonsense idiot, psychopath?
devotee of Derrida or simple carping dogged barren Hecuba?—
anyway, she wanted to spank the shit out of Nietzsche
(he stood for formless norms a-and normless forms
which he hurled against life in nine fearful storms)
with the telephone: I just could not understand the feminine blank—what,
and get that syphilis all over your hand?
(This shows how little you know—
she reached perfect enlightenment countless eons ago.)
epizootics of the blowhole
perdrix sans orange
a hieroglyph in a chicken


La jeune demoiselle à l’ivoirin paroissien
Modestement rentre au logis
persons haunted by a bird
to hell (in an eggshell) in the middle of our days
complete and pure as a polished shell
in the freezone narcotic of Ravel we go
with an old flame, Michelangelo
The bottle: "There is one among the birds, among the fish and among men one, perfect."


You should be forced to live out on the streets,
Eating your beard.
It’s your hat makes you mad.
It’s absurd. Let’s leave the initiative to loan-words (follow that bird!), try these:
Michelangelesque acorns—and baby birds!
…les demains sont morts.
Zosted, imagine! drinking Mai Tais on the island of Ififi.
Feel into the moonness of your dog. Which is my right leg?
Ring for an oscillating mushroom. From the thigh lengthening.
Get down this way often?
I should give up tarts. Reverse swan. I should have followed the arts.
I mean, that’s not O.K.—and I mean that in an O.K. way;
you could be meaningful—and I mean that in meaningless way.
See this finger? It’s a toe. Someone shot my dog Munich. He has
a peppermint bark. You cannot be deprived
of glorious haven if you follow your star.
With time—Josette (look at her turquoise ring)! Ne touchez pas!

I have 0 tolerance for intolerance


it’s an occupation for a saint.
ppp We know what you mean by the second coming—
The wind take you. Your highness, if I live a thousand years,
I’ll have your corpse spanked til enameled. I overstand—
marry yourself in San Francisco.
Prince Fondle, I’ll eat your divine liver
over and over and throw it in the first meeting of local rivers.
Christ I’ve got eyes for your peacock:
your figure is striking—
you must have made a language to your liking.
You ought to go
On a rape safari to Colorado
In Georgia O’Keeffe’s truck!
Speak of pearls before swine and you hear their wings.
You’re a bird of very ill omen—you’re such a monet.
Be less great to be less ridiculous—
frog, get off the white stag and take a lilac, go;
mouse, put off holiness and put on intellect,
feed fat sheep and sing a blind slender song. Mr. 9, go eat your Jack in the Box.
Take a dog’s-eye view: mold the characterological.
Only an asshole is scatological—
that dark brown god with its red aureole!
You’re a case of involuntary certitude.
If things are so bad, why haven’t we noticed?


Little Coriolanus, you plunge your dart into
A supplicating mother’s purple heart.
Ne touchez pas! Fantoche! Wench!
I tell you this: you’ll leave a perfect corpse.
Right Dao, wrong day.
Some people were born
to be humiliated: Happy Birthday—
and have a great day!"
Vous avez l’organe bien perdu.
Et lui comprit trop bien, n’ayant pas entendu.
But when you are dead you are not: what good is humanity?
And keep blowflies away.


Contemplate
a world of things.
Weave and reweave, homage and regret.


Parfait chemiste, dull-witted ambassador of the purposive cliché,
Drinkin ’em pretty
You wouldn’t dream of putting your
Tongue into their mouths
After you see them urinate, first
Some jelly beans,
Then a tiny ravening fish
sucer la chair d’un coeur élu,
ravening like autumn shears through century after century
Then strawberry seeds
and a thin little spangled polar snake which
bursts upon the ground.
Certum and verum
Forming the New Society
Out of the Shell of the old.
Word become flesh.


A fallen branch
Becomes a tether
Becomes a snake
Becomes a woman
Becomes a cleft in a rock
Woman from rock and rock from woman
n’est que femme encore
the death of a beautiful woman is poetry
A flock of scarlet pigeons
columba mea in foraminibus petrae
Thunders imprecations, name and place,
Then in vigil plunge through meadows of flame
Into a thicket of somber emerald lace.


I wish I had been a tree
I wish I had been a fish
I wish I had been a young girl


Laforgue Baudelaire
Mallarmé Corbière
Despising hope and adoring despair
A blue, period gaberdined lunatic holds out the
rosy fingers of her immense phthisic hand,
soaked in a sweat of black venom,
Zoe ugly as a turd, chipper Madonna of the garbage can
holy terror and human error,
can’t find herself in the mirror
(one of six daughters of a dead Indian and a three-legged Jew,
"I’m not waiting for the bus, I’m waiting for truth, for hell!"
pitched battle of well-matched oblivion and terror.
Of many thousand kisses the poor last.
The Nazi Yeats would say, "This one’s colossal—
A poor woman with the soul of an apostle."
Your basic grousing homeless freak
here given a pomo tweak.


trails darkness as a robe,
sells ointment to kill dead moles,
smells like a Protestant church),
In America’s green and pleasant land.


Thank you for your letter. We are doing very well here. We have work and we are well treated. We await your arrival. We are working towards the Führer.
weltanschauliche
vernichtet warden Bildung und Vernichtung


Whiter than butter on a ground like a shower of red coagulate gore,
I am not used to live in a cage,
I only live, I only live
In the green forest,
My goal being modest:
To turn objective ideas into myths, Lord
The borrowed language we use today, will live forever
I only live in the green forest,
Fly up on mulberry branches,
Above the silent sea
And orchids in their mimickry,
I eat pine-nuts, I drink pearl-dew, the food for glory.


Quickly, you who are a copy,
run to where the passage starts!
And was that past life a dream?
Where sobbing Idea, like a rétiaire, combs her girl’s mane in this people’s
garden, softly speaking tandemly repeated genes
(in which ontogenic concretion recapitulates phylogenic abstraction!)—
Or was that only possible which came to pass?


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
IV


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
What largesse of bright air—
in which ducks flee M eagles, dogs attack a hare—
clothing the vales in dazzling light, is here!
in which everything, in dropped wind, is a cylinder or a sphere.
Is this the most damned city, the region, the soil, the clime
Amidst spurge-laurel, vengeful heliotrope, cypress and thyme
Of one who cannot be changed by alltime?
Hier ist kein warum.
The year is at its nicest now.
Don’t praise cosmic paired cups when you can see 100 cows,
make yellow patches, quote a sutra, or see the ship of the vow.
All things that love the sun
are out of doors. Infra wind-driven souls on gilded runners run.
Maitreya, schist, sclerosis and Farinata and
in the voiceless shady tamarisk and applauding juniper
curative fourth bear garden of a reciprocal fresco of Siena
we glimpse the fashionable hyena
devouring—its share of ecstasy—the triple refuge of a Lady
while a fawning feral impotent poet makes love to a lesbian lady
Distracted, tonal garden! Hiatus.
Painting, not prose, is the opposite of poetry
ut bos piger palaestrae exerceat
aut asinus segnis inter spheristarum ordinem celeri
This proscribed youthful land
has a sun and stars of its own
and cries out for a mythology with none to hand.
The flowers are inscribed
The exiled sky is five feet wide
Stretched taut over the last of genocide.
A pair of feathers and a long-legged fly
dance a jig on the surface of a pond.
On freshly-cut diamonds, with
white blackberries, babycakes, and apples—narcotic fare—
stolen pears, cloves and pressed cheese,
reader (or are you sick of apples?), rest
yourself awhile on these pithy green fronds—but skirt the laurel pond
(the audience is a myth) of human wishes and prolific
voiceless celadon fishes, where every maw
the greater on the lesser feeds evermore.
Gaze into the index of two ever-flowing springs of unjust water
to see the water-bearing ao fish and
tears and horns of your scavenger’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter
(you owe me a son, my raped daughter),
sip mountain tea from ersatz, named Raku for an hour,
casually, against a sky blue as staggering lapis lazuli, and,
ton irrémédiable filet, l’ennui, browse:
the Elgin marbles have come to drowse
a te convien tenere altro viaggio
fête galante
of Utrillo
with the Duce the Führer and the Caudillo.
thaw your locks, feed weeping figs to buried ravenous
loyalty pigs
and suppress the urge to devour
(like that fly, I seem to see you seethe
but remember: even poetry must breathe—
at this point your hostess,
a grave old doll with a murderous gaze,
takes your order in reverse on a pad of little post-its
and muses, like nurses,
famish what you need for your verses).
Turning now to Wieland, Horace, Kant and Plato—books fairies read—
now to Benedict, Peter Damian and Bernard of Clairvaux (and perhaps Marot)
in a universal language of Latin, Greek, French and Hebrew.
Or draw from models here afforded you,
reverse profiles of Osiris in bistre upon protective papyrus,
or watch kings,
gods of their kind,
dismembered by subjects drugged out of their minds—
and that’s a good thing.
Or, finally, renounce a wish
on the cup, the lance, the sword and the dish.
Did you ring?
For this magnified penny world is a perfumed academic room
Furnished with poplar, osier, pipal, teak and wise broom
Purple robes with embroidered roses, and stone looms
Batty atmosphere distinctly "avian": goût grec, meubles Flavian.
The White Cube is not a room. Proceed freely.
Hier ist kein warum.
The topmost spray entreats the forty-ninth day of Y2K
cliché serves and inhabits cliché
puns savage reality.
Why not just say, fictive narration with true signification?
This crown of blossoms, this gay of hue:
although not heaven, this noisy earth is lovely too.


Sraffa, the correspondence theory of truth a tautology,
We have no economy now—and no singing:
we place orders in a cave,
The open kept City—where every sex club is opacity and its revolutionary committee—
as levels of human satisfaction, epidemic contagion of space.
Judicial astrology in Macrobian zone theory
Characteristica universalis differentiation without gravitas
Look! There are those who sharpen the tooth,
glitter with glory,
sit in the sty (jigger the dance)
and suffer in ecstasy—
a moral geography, quirky in the first instance.
I could not weep—the children wept.
Bavius and Mevius
neatness and philanthropy
presents and constipation:
dark origin of liberality
Here they scum again! Here comes one of the parings!
They ask the water buffalo to the bath
In Cancer above the flocks. It is July 14th, it is
One hour and forty-three minutes.
They bring a lead rope or not.
They grab him by the nose.
"Okay! Beast!"
trahit sua quemque uoluptas
Look here come two ambulatory cowpies!
The composed lady of Christ (self) and futureless Miss Virginity (soul)
beating an antique drum—on the amorous green enamel
out of council in pandemonium.
Look! Tiresias has his tit
fresh from the pallet of the posing misfit
(that forwardlooking nanogigawit)
caught in the wringer again!
He’s worse than Ruskin
struggling to master the seven laws of Tuscan!
They take us, leaving us behind, and
Leaving us behind, take us.
Autopsy of Ephesia
Some exercise upon the grassy-fields, but grass is far from them and each goat is pined,


Light Salutaris Hostia
In obedience to other laws, in plastic reaction, surcharged with fairness
Cool in an ice age and clean as a piece of dusted glass
Tableaux vivants in the crushing light show of beryl, non-repeating paradise
Naked green Sparta boys and embarrassed, drowsy pearl girls relentlessly
against one another in pugnacious array, receptive and directive,
hurling invective, balsamed ephebi,
hornless epiphany, verging on majority, starved for authority,
cries as shrill as the sound of a dentist’s drill—
echoing to enjoy their Parian marble bodies and their own ideas
paradoxical prudes, rapt swift sunny intertextual nudes
Spiritual eugenics: "Being hated makes us beautiful and strong"
(the comparison to the mud puddle)
and non-hurting of any small animal
and close observation of small things:
beauty is no longer sexually attractive
two spheres and a sounding obelisk
skeletal centipede atop the femur throne
A terrible booty is born
Adorn
in tears amid the alien corn
and not a bird or bat of day
dare extinguish that delight
Glittering with hatred and with
bloody throats in posthumous voice sing ara vos prec
(Martha, Sally and Aunt Flo are visiting),
an ode to divinity in a tone proper to sublimity
Endlessly advancing,
endlessly resuming their initial positions, arrayed—
to repeat is not to reason—
thirst from the clear milky juice allayed
a thousand foreskins fall
summer’s gladness, repose, then a spasm of madness
Tu as vu la mort en face, plus de cent fois,
Tu ne sais pas ce que c’est que la vie.
In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood,
exhausted himation against cotton chiton
After the bucolic diaerisis, before the sleepy feminine caesura
Cold pastoral!
pepnumenos What is your name?
periphron What is your name?
Sunk in the abyss of desire
clay babies melt the heart in laurel fire
and selfful desire
little bastards short and stout
here is their handle, which is also their spout:
Oto, Flo, Clo, Leo
Lio, Zio, Ojo, Geo
Abbo, gabbo, babbo
Tebe, plebe, zebe—
Ineluctable refinery! alder, poplar, heavenly fir
Hunting in line, as if on physizoos earth again
arrayed in the middle air
a sangha member: don’t bear any children
Or wrestle on the yellow sands, desexuals
With strength hung in their dark blue hair
(what if that ancient hair were neatly arranged with a boxwood comb!),
The spiritous hand of the land upon their shoulders,
Virgil and Rousseau, practicing skillfulness and trust,
sand in their hands, at speckled arm’s length militantly bland
scarified dominated must on their hands or woven in their garments
In revelry of sport, in isolation taking bound diamond hands
Giving energetic song to man,
singing it in a strange land
one small step for man.


Ryskamp the rabbit scribe among them
with the sky rooster, grinding herbs
Orpheus offending (for style is fate),
Futurum: a trepanned poet en retard? not quite yet a bard?
(What was he thinking?
Ryskamp, like Stella, always loses at cards)
Still, the darling of the avant garde,
pursuing with Ciceronian aisance
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme (stil nuovo!)—
They do say he…
The appreciation of his verse
has exceeded the prewar level.
You who are a copy,
what do you think of Nature Studies? —
That twice-dead mystery Ryskamp is a famous man,
Skillful maker of comparisons.
quae Ryskamp praescripsit pagina nomen
And what of Metamusic? he transforms himself each day anew—
They say you play it with your eyes.
Aimez-vous Ryskamp?


(That jabronie does this all the
time!—he’s especially fond of a rap around rhyme
["But it’s to lengthen the poetic unit beyond the line!—longer poems mean longer lines"]
lives like three angels terminate on the rhyme
As if, "All drama is mine"
His rhetorical bitches his sublime
as if he knows there is no genuine rhyme
That ghost in the machine
Where is the concordance with his rhyme?—he writes
The way a Czech cook speaks German!
Or a Scotch puisne judge of decidedly French origen! —
"There" as if it rhymed with "near"!)
Annoyo Babylonian! Xook!
He razed the roof
with changes to the net proof.
One has to hope
he lives in a world which rhymes like Pope
and in his bowels conceals a reciprocal global proof—or falls off a roof!


molti che forsechè per alcuna fama
in altra forma m’aveano imaginato
Concussive convulsive
Complex conventions for the sake of all people,
The convex lens of his conversation
His encyclopedist impulse does nothing but repulse—
Does he even have a pulse?
Than whom none are wittier
(Tho his doggerel stinks like Whittier!)
That he’s obscene
is clear to any reader seated in Phase 13.
"For sure, some of his lines do fall flat—
his metamorphoses are ovious—but
he is Number One—how cool is that!
He can ride but he’s the devil to guide.
Look: he simply sought images for thought
and his audacity like lion’s wings—
motivated, to be sure, by all things antiquated
and rhymes subject to extension into another dimension—
flies, a delay in glass, like time’s arrow to expression of six personal things.
It’s cornucopic, honey, not myopic:
he provides the new metaphysical foundation of the world—
he takes it with him."
Yes, I catch your drift:
you think that, like a woman, he’s better than Swift.
In incommensurate mastery concetti
sprinkled like confetti,
more twists and turns than a plate of spaghetti—but don’t cry,
feel free to dissect him before he dies.
He turns up his nose
And in pitiful prose
Turns poetry into a small Cheshire Cheese.
And worse! St. Ryskamp Demodocus!
His heart as broken as his hollowed out verse!
Figliuoli where sì is spoken.
"His literary references violate sense.
There has been a hostile influence
a sort of groping in cloacae for erotic penitence."
A Veritable Bede!
A courtesan who reads!
Ses tendences m’alarmaient!
Bad breath from reading Gide!
perceptions out of wedlock
(this poem is like his Bride,
he can't keep his hands off of her!—
so learned his readers divorce him!—
Modulations? Discrete. Allusions? Replete.
Illusions? Complete. And the Lord knows what—
an excursion his readers take with aversion.)
Who, smitten by auctoritas, could say,
"Go to hell, Dante,"
and make hella rhymes that way—
but he has a headache today.
Even if it is not true
I can’t hear you
even in despite of truth
we must maintain it anyway.
Estraneo a la bellezza, non può essere nessuno
Poetry’s reflexive stores serve
But to renew his stock of metaphors! —
And, like Nature, half reveal
The soul within—and then conceal.
O rustice et wozzock,
ut quid opus tuum inter
scriptores indi aestimas?
qui saepius pro masculinis femina
pro femineis neutra
pro neutra masculine conmutas
The work some praise and some the architect
parva quidem et humilia, sed subtilia ac dulcia
Ce charme! il prit âme et corps
Et dispera mes efforts
Thus gone, subtly of himself contemplative, vowing
Eternal hatred of poets and poetry, a nimble dance,
no poet but ego of poets, of a better nature,
a few years late
(but well worth the wait!)—
then he appears by speech (song is a need of man)
who walks beside him on the white road? What is his Dao? Who is his guide?—
Is it his sister? We. I can’t see: fears are in the way
I do not know who is going to come,
there is no root: where are you bound up?
Two men are just, but held in disregard,
a weaver by his tooth, a compositor by his vacuous left thumb.
Poetry is the subterfuge of an age.
Perhaps he has a brain tumor.
Philistines and the Saracen
and Blake the watcher (Jesus from his tomb) again.
Do you think he wants to rival Apollo…?
finding the element of surprise
in poetry and gods’ eyes.
It is easy to kill people.
lupi Moerim uidere priores


The muffled gentleman and the ghost of
Moritz—but what is the date today?
Poetic rules, like Heraclitus, are the residue for fools. Better than you speak I know.
but to be a poet seen by a wolf
(even a pen and paper poet!)
not poetry itself
not writing poetry
but to be an azure Smyrna poet
cristal comme un conscience
a dancer and a tree
(and root beside that tree)
asphodel, lilies and the dead
mind, inky ash and mud
jade crystallized from blood
and footprints crystallized in mud
squeezing my medicinal lemon dry,
j’essaierai en choeur d’endonner la note
to overwrite is to override
thou are to me
but an invisible thing
a voice, a mystery
(the more I age, the more this weighs on me)
and a thing apart
amidst abdicated snake gods, white notional scorpions
and clever, timid rats of fixed art
in a parable of the poet—
we know not whence come
the basic beats of rhythm
Ach, wer heilet die Schmerzen
Des, dem Balsam zu Gift ward?
Der sich Menschenhass
Aus der Fülle der Liebe trank?
Erst verachtet, nun ein Verächter,
Zehrt er heimlich auf
Seinen eignen Wert
In ung’nügender Selbstsucht.
Todestelle.


Light
Shedding veils on laurels, pulled away by an arm
Slender charm lotus feet and cool statist dignity
ritual impurity! noxious magic! virginal irony
Some foot the bacchant rhythmic dance
(they have 0 tolerance for intolerance!)
transferring corn under the radar in double flaming drishti of the orator stance
in the sacred grove of smoky inframince
(the medium says will sterilizes choice and
nocturnal, knowing chance)
and, in the hour’s right mode
(cider is the liquor of this ode),
chant locked poems aloud, love in bee-loud bee breath—
distichs, eclogues, ellipses of psalms
(four syllables for the eternal, six for time),
chantefables and rational allegory in the volgare illustre
in a style proper to comedy. music as the key of love.
Chausson: Caillebotte
in another room
cantares pares et respondere parati
The Dance of Death, the Way:
choroi in northsouth progress, their foot their tutor,
…les demains sont morts
Friends neither ardent nor weak
Granite monuments to granite
Leur tête a du requin et du petit-Jésus, needless
Careless and heedless
Regarding neither swadeshi nor Hindutva
Tho some do their duty
To the Buddha and the booty
later, departed from the Greek Theatre, advance
pacified blackstone absolutist apsaras in a jetlag trance
as if at an immense séance
follows Orpheus Apollo
ad vocem tanti senis
to a green thought in a green shade: a convenient park,
a beneficent orgy in a far from cool
-.1 porous tufa grotto owing nothing to human artifice—
forgetting that recognition is begetting
hyena their emblem, fuck you their motto
Soon


Rameses the Great spits three times.
Air and world unsought
Central focus of the eternal for a week
Not exactly statuesque—Picassoesque
With a crystal visor and a knot of ice
These kanephoroi and korai,
showing but a single face, refugees from apogee
pressured by a postmodern absence
vegan cannibals of the apricot tree
who scent (their only food) humanity’s one, piddling accomplishment,
endless argument: when can wan "I" die,
beat up the light, and chase it like a kite through the sky?
burdensome grasshoppers, surfeit of data, a cacophony of maiden cicadas
(Hedge-crickets sing—actually their thought is rather messy;
it springs from aspidistra, not the root of Jesse;
their movement, their doxology,
from metaphysics to epistemology—
why not just say, applied typology?
they’re dopes, who "mope" in an erotic trope
passion fueled with frankincense and empty hope)
They are those criminals
whose crime is to invent their symbols
Danseuses de Delphes, apple-cheeked celebutants
of la période flottante in amber beads and five chignons
with tribal bling bling, fly tresses
enduring two changes, trivial systolic confinement: disciplined diastolic expansion
contracting and expanding all their flexible senses
In a Herakles knot, streaming real-time between trailing firs.
Cicadas (which are quotations) on the lifelike morning dew.
tum uero in numerum Faunosque ferasque uideres
ludere, tum rigidas motare cacumina quercus
Metamorphoses approach the epic.
Fruits, leaves and human skin.
Glimmers of light amid the silver summit.
minuet, allegro, andante ground under Ixion's wheel—
chemical syrinx music absorptive and resorptive! sonic
doubles, Stalinist hero twins, time devils, Hoho, He He
little light people in terza rima the walking rhyme
an inglorious harmonious crowd of two in involuntary certitude
release amid the girlish sala trees
forgetting human words and
wishing what is happening as if it weren’t
pascentis seruabit Tityrus haedos


will and world-spirit unconscious
where evolution and relativity once held sway
from these notions they have simply walked away
(as from establishments far gone in madness)
rich in the simple worship of a day.
moving in silence and detached hysteria
to unbearable Schubert
terrible lightning from the harmonium or shielding lute
tunnels between worlds
in the humility of the brute
and love affair with the assassin of the future absolute
morbus in patient pursuit
in distilled panic in the circle garden, to soft pipes,
amid meteoric obelisks and phallus-bearing herms,
frenzy in the broad cold palace
("feet," also "vestiges," are a euphemism),
pruned trees by sepulchers, barebacked Priapus and Procne
(a surfeit of fruit, and dizziness),


in a field of non-actual hyacinths strewn with weeping plinths,
huntsmen with horns spy on an atmosphere of bathing nymphs,
a caterpillar, a target, and music marked out,
on a beautiful soft poison tree,
procreation from friendly enmity,
ravished nightingales, reality by Satie:
this all takes place in Thessaly
murderer repeats his murder
lover his serenade
robber his robbery
on the foreground of Purgatory
parallelogram of painted wood
for them his ears gushed purified blood
and yet they call this Friday good
end of an endless childhood
but it’s all good—
Jesus before his birth
love and hate movements of the dance
que peut signifier ceci
breasts white as a gambler’s cast dice
with no more sound than mice
make their miniature hands move to and fro in childish carpalistics
in exact transmission of relinquishment and distress
or of ether, or airy,
the auricular or annulary—the funeral of a fairy;
toying with a filial fan like a dancer of the Han
or in a boat reciting Qu Yuan
or bearing lilacs from France
font moins de bruit que des mouches
immense daisies must be daisies still,
and still saying, "We are here,"
sunflower abuses, every hundredth iris glares and lotus stares,
demurred orchids flatter and follow everywhere,
to the blind singer,
discharging all sound
on a drum: ominous, displaced white counterfeit stags, in letters paw
their left ground (later lashed as riderless they pursue their course)
Subjective and objective,
none are better known to the hound
gazelles predicative of the law
What can doves do when eagles come?
(fictionalize the sound)
the Puvis girl in pig-tails and Thetis are pregnant
from the germ and in labor among the hazels
never-bathing bears springing to life;


Light
in the silence of prior discord,
enemies cancel each other out
make one music as before
and love at noon on the bathroom floor;
mind and soul, according well, according to the canon,
defending clefs in staves along the digital divide
skipping from junk to junk
captive flies with detached features, on burning soil,
amplified valerian, lilacs and rank ailanthus support the sky,
calamus and oak tree in the front garden
(the dead hyacinth girl is a live boy!)
"Black roses"
and golden armor on the grass under a sky like lead
only exaggeration moves them who would not live long
by their own hard spirits deified, in natural piety—
where are the songs of spring? menis and cholos
terror and oblivion, mystic union with deity
Daphnis plants a once more extant pear tree
but, conceiving no aspiration, plants no seed of liberation
thoughts fed by the sun: what is my self?
womb, self-ruined wheat and poppies in the right hand, meadow of violet and parsley


dreaming of change as warriors dream of childless war,
and war (a new home), the Trojan geste (God’s boke) and
the acme of heroic saga, the war of the bones, shock and awe,
a bungle sans the jungle—the maddened love of Mars,
killing as mourning, mourning as wandering, nostalgia
moving as the real sun moves, swift-footed and swift-fated
un soleil blanc comme un crachat d’estaminet
comme une glande arrachée dans un cou,
sweating selves in date—
less, branding lively heat:
griffins and bloody pedigree mares mate
Indecorous Keats masturbates—dubbing sound—with Yeats
lynx and river spellbound
a wilderness of monkeys
the boar and the boarhound—
they are words dipped in meaning and sound—
teaching which enjoins the good is seldom found
warmth the sculptural condition
enriching soil, sweating surplus, fed by bees,
opening paths and tightening pores
in a pasture of steel
150,000,
000 dancing in the breeze they are dancing
everything, all lands are burning
Epos


iam neque Hamadryades rursus nec carmina nobis
ipsa placent; ipsae rursus concedite siluae


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
V


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Every woman adores a Fascist.
Which was cruel, Mother, love or you?
They burst from the sauna like Jews from a gas chamber!
One dog goes in while another goes out.
Waiting out the regulars,
They don’t come and they don’t go.
Jews and screwdogs (dogs in heat).
word and word
terrible and gay
Why are you here every day?
You’re nothing if not in my way.
I loathe you—and I mean that in a loving way.
Then what they say three times is true:
There’s just no getting away from you
(but pines and laurels weep for you).
Who knew
You were evil through and through?
Then you bit my pretty red heart in two.
They quicken their pace as at a lash,
Nor wait a second there,
But pick up their feet and make a dash.
Ebbing men, like shuddering toads from snakes,
near the bottom run, accroc de l’astre jaune, éteint.
The run of the mill are ground under foot.
Freud’s filthy image came on more and more
Yet landed with but head and chest in view,
Leaving his tail where all the unjust waters roar,
Eau et gaz rise from the floor.
Blind house of woe, shutting the door on futurity
(Shut up! They have their Vanity to keep them warm!)
Ach! du who walk alive, speaking well,
Ryskamp, you who are a copy,
We have lingered with the tips of our fingers
in the chambers of the sea
Because and because
White raisins, beautiful virgins and vaporized glass
Fanatic Egypt and her priests
To fright the reign of chaos
Falconetti
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Sitting in a park in Paris, France
Peace is despaired, for who can think submission?
Jane Fonda
The world is named so
Syncretic Chinglish
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
genoi hoios essi: the world congratulates the mind
Poetic rules are for fools:
A mongoose spews a meteor, then the circular origin of jewels.
In whose intelligences sixth in line
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought
Let us follow knowledge like a sinking star.
Leering, leering.


the clock on your wall
the clock on your VCR
the clock in your car
the clock on your wrist
(your watch must be fast)
the clock by your bed
Ransack the center
hora and hebe
divided time


My cousin, my wife, what are we here for?—you’re asleep.
I can’t hear you. You are eighty and I am eighty.
It is late
in the world and Aremideia
must be skillful in Upaya to teach it.
My wisdom is not very great.
I have turned into what I hate.
I smell a plum blossom in a cherry blossom
Blooming on a willow branch.
Shuddering orchids and narcisso floreat alnus
peony tree and chrysanthemum tea
I engage in 3-coloring.
I use Chvátal’s comb.
I think it is night
both years and days deep midnight.
And I, Asinius Gallus, held on to one word
Eyes bandaged,
With but a memory of language,
Lingering between heaven and noisy earth
In gray twilight knowing
Neither victory nor defeat.
Offered by a downy-lipped, chlamys-clad eternal boy,
a mere intersexual lad in a wide-brimmed hat,
a syrinx air, and acorns in his hair
so aloof he falls off a roof! Early and late, foot and fate
who complains of Virgil, and that nothing happens
in the faint Iliad,
Guarding sheep by an obelisk
(or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep),
leading an unflawed complacent goat from a fruit-laden vine,
to an old man blinded by an execution
and led by an unhealthy mongrel dog,
a bunch of acorns, cookies, a cold biscuit, then a cold potato.
A set of teeth and galvanized bones is traveling upon this road
through explosive, tearstained bamboo, tattered flags
no-go zones and slag,
prunus and pine hunting the toad,
to where all loves end and all love ends,
bearing an impure load;
but better trudging through residue there—than living here—
on death’s hard royal road.
Non sum qualis eram,
there fell my shadow, there falls my shadow—a distant shadow rhyme…
I cannot endure an old man like myself. I’m tired,
the soles of my feet are on fire. Hell is middle age—and the faces you meet.
Square principle, circular knowledge and the cone of nonduality.


What pity! What pity!
Only exaggeration moves me.
Parcels and morsels, homage and regret.
I like to be alone,
my tongue’s a stone. Iron must be the heart within me.
A poached egg underground, a windbag cobbler,
an old man but no bats hanging upside down
swinging the scaly horror of his folded tail,
a white ax in the open ground.
Let me load an empty autumn:
The rug, capsa, kandys and lamp of vigil,
En bas, dans la nef dalleé de pierres tombales
A blind insightful Sicel mother pouring chocolate
and opening blindfold a plain black egg to wisdom;
in a hanging osier basket, snake and an eaten baby boy;
and Friederike, a clairvoyant restless dead child of seven: anastasis.
A kettle on the hob, some tea things on a shelf,
a mirror which does not show you yourself, storehouse key
and Cézanne’s obliterated apple and 54-skull rosary.
An indolent goddess on an urn,
a melancholy nightingale in autumn,
the soul’s assent to exquisite constraints,
the perpetual triumph of sacrifice, terror and oblivion.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch.
A red crab roasts on the hearth.
Late Vesper lights the lamp—
bid me strike a match and blow.
Scars and music—and sing the sun to bed.
A sterile supreme hour has struck and
The horse and the bull have bridled their ardor.
Darkness hangs about me like a shroud or a sheet—
tomorrow I must go and go out and with myself compete.
The perishable sound of a bell.
A hollow form with empty hands.
Youth is landscape, old age the blacksmith’s cave.
the fence of time, the geological twilight
The repetitive stress of living, and the drug of dreams.
Yes, soon.
You’ve said goodbye
when you’ve said goodbye to the lantern of the moon.
My fortune my misfortune. What I heard
In the wingbeat of a bird. Ah, misery!
Glad to be old
and not see this mess unfold
even with my trousers rolled,
soon to face the wall and not speak—
thus gone, look after my soul in the seventh week
and place a three-headed dog at my feet. I’m cold.
Voll Güt’ ist, aber fasset
Allein Gott.
So lebte er hin


It would be comforting to make love with a woman,
and sing the canticle of infinite gratitude
Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute
for pleasure’s endless trance—
or of Kosovo or South Central L.A., in song: place it on the female body.
I would rather be free than loved.
What else have I to spur me into song?
Eyes that lured a doting boyhood
Might well fool a dotard’s age.
Lord make me chaste, but not just yet.
Silent, unaccompanied English is the language of the sea,
English poetry like sinful karma runs to the sea
And remembers the Thames valley. November 10. I want to die.
Shakespeare and "heart."
Shakespeare and "stick."
Everywhere I turn robbed by the urn.
Harp hung upon the willow, a damask drum hangs in the laurel tree.
no long time will you remain to me,
a semi-Islamic litsedei among the fissiparous—in reality
or what us humans call childish reality.
evading the chain of causality
Who was the Prince Hal born under the sign of Gemini?
(Master Frost with his feeble stylus)
I am not Prince Eliot or was meant to be—
Fascist or Jew, he was once tall and handsome as you
La pensée est la houle ressassant le galet.
What is the use of humanity?
Beautiful body as you are,
you’re dead now.
C’est la chanson des rêveurs
Qui s’étaient arraché le coeur
Et le portaient dans la main droite
perceptions out of wedlock
Ratification is a burning reality
and ransomed heart-mystery.
Di realtà e di acqua: la ratifica è un altro.
Tell death I am coming,
an old hunter talking with gods—but I am not content, I want proof
(do you hear this nightingale? named Ruth—or is it a toilet flushing?)
I will regress through age to youth.
Let me be!
saeva indignatio:
I sleep beneath the greatest epitaph known to men:
The Point of View will see me through
To my death—
or should I take arms against a sea of troubles, like Macbeth?
I have seen deep-seated Phthia and know the thoughts of men—
And my death belongs to me
and it walks with me and it talks with me.
The earth is already round.
A loud tree—but what exactly does the wolf see?
I can’t bear it.
A sighting of cacophonous humanity
Such as a Returning Angel sees,
Amalgam of life forms,
I am tired of humanity—Ryskamp,
it has been a scene well set, and excellent company:
may all these characters remain
when all else is ruin once again.
I do not ask for a wife—
I am a poet of the afterlife,
like Keats, before and after life—
sons, money or a long life.
I have no father-in-law.
And seasons have no parents.
quia amore langueo


Imagine all of
humanity leading you to death.
I know I do.
You come too.
My hands are numb, my insight dumb.
One must go to bed laughing.
Humanity is grass
And knows it. Pray you fill this glass.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
VI


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Speaking first, you address the noisy assembly:
Quickly, run to where the starry passage starts!
All those rooms, white bears and passages are gone,
as is the exacting lawn!
That music is gone: where are they? eternal west, seeking distraction
In the life it made. You were born in the paradise of the fateless west.
Goodbye. And was that past life a cool dream? a shipwreck that
in which you doubt your sanity, and wag between extremes.
Where Idea, like a rétiaire, combs her girl’s mane in this soldier’s garden,
microepic tandemly repeated genes.
You have seen Apollo and your peers anew
And venerated the lyre. Night, adieu.


Yes, though sin and pride hath brought God’s wrath
and death of previous afterberths,
Demoniac cerebrates return
And his will the loving piece. Vetch and lentil.
Pleiades, confused Boötes and Charlie’s wagon.
Something apart from the four statements.


preserved in transcendence
in perfection by divine judgment
through experience of youth
through the spinning wheel you saw
the end of the law


Such is the use of memory,
Such the string of desires.
Liberation from past, liberation from present, liberation from future, liberation from past


And that reality within us
awaits the chore of ratification,
Is the chore of ratification.
Systematization of the chore
Is reality the experience,
Long experience
the illusion of reality within us
and the chore of another.
Reality’s chore within us is the ratification of another.
Another’s chore within us is the ratification of reality.


 
 
. . .


 
Reality’s chore within us is the ratification of another.
Another’s chore within us is the ratification of reality.


:Let gross minds conceive and see that inscription on the gate.
Wind-driven souls on gilded runners run.


As the universe pursues its course
Every elbow-wiggle becomes a tour de force.
With but this was our universe begun,
Mole and mountain, sinner, sun.
Two spheres (sans obelisk) were joined by the grace of their Creator
Through the third sphere of connectivity at their equator.
In an axial age, axle as praxis and axis—one feels like applauding:
the word "earth" brought forth its birth.
Carrying bricks or be moved by something—but I’ll discuss that later.
A wig rolling down a street, reburied in a pot of basil:
What’s unjust water but the generated soul?


Thoughts beyond reach
through ten thousand banana leaves of right speech
grasp, clutch and crush deformed—
or gently massage, masticate, mutate or laminate liberal—speech.
Tandemly repeated genes. On gilded runners run. Ghostly gyres run on
(and at this pace, and in this wise):
"Remember: irregardless of what your feelings, motivation or personal inspiration might
Be
please remember: don’t act foolishly, proceed methodically; call
647-8262 and ask about that schedule: ‘CAN THEY GET YOU A FLIGHT
the hell out of here without a stopover in Dallas?’ tonight.
I’m cold. Is that
door shut? That door isn’t open or shut. Yes? I can’t hear you."


Marking descriptions are not complete.
The lion’s share of ecstasy is, being a doer.
Argos and Neptune are wiped from your mind.
The virtuosic feat and extended body
Two are dripping in sweat while a third is dry
A mole’s adventures of a whackamole hole—and humankind
Historical relationships of text
Impede development and climax
Factory fabrication and tasklike activity
and climaxes come on the heels of one another
and Satan lacks a certain manual dexterity.


Renvoi:
Lady, you farting devil, I am almost done
Even though touching the poem has not begun in the
time of the portable sun when two languages become neither two nor one.
Then it’s true, what they say three times about you.
Why so intent on being yourself? because you know,
Still registration, neutral performance on a human scale—
Matters not how golden—or stolen glance! can miss the point of hell.
Climax—are you well? having drunk toad venom from an oyster shell—
not standard stoppages in still suspension,
was the point of the fourth dimension.
But that was then, this is now:
carry bricks or be moved by something. If
Virgil had been Dante’s wife, would he have written cantos all his life?


"That damned door,
is it emblematic of oblivion or terror, love or war?—
Montashigi, have you seen my @ ?
I think I might have left it with my ˆ .
Or perhaps it’s doing time with my Î . Where are they?
This then is your coda? Ipse dixit and Coca-Cola?—
it’s the coffee talking! and I mean that in a decaffeinated way—
if you can see that in a light more than that of day." ð ð


Let gross noisy minds conceive, see and hear
the inscription on the sun (Hebraic homily, nicht wahr?). Wake up.
That’s why separating-out is the point of departure at the gate
(and we are on the point of that departure now, just you wait—
English tortures us with love, and that love with hate).
Why a physical "high" and "low"—
a mirrorical return
of uninterrupted forms and literalness—
comme dans un haiku by Basho,
basically, severed heads tête-bêche conversing in a Géricault.
Did you ring? Men are sick with love.
Or why historical relationships of text—
see semiotic sparks above—
impede development and vex
the virtuosic feat and extended body, or
and here I quote
Collocation, ascetic conjunction, Fire and married Love.
Look, on the one hand the Jongleur de Notre Dame
is doing in the pureness of his blind outstretched heart what he can.
"Yet" takes some stretch of the imagination—so give me a pearl!
And on the other?
The fool is the happiest man in the nation
For he lives in a world of his own creation.
Standing surety for national security, There will never be another Munich,
says the teeny weeny voice of the commanding eunuch. C’est à dire,
the unresisting nation, in theme and variation,
consumes the universe in self-congratulation
and chance dissimulation (it’s a work of installation!)
and your heart in (self-)laceration
though in this poem all is in musical relation
(written under observation—self the object of observation!).
Are questions the agents of spontaneous regeneration
or mediumship dramatization?
So…there is no middle flight, no,
to help us through this night. Shut that door—
I think it’s the bones of my Mother,
or the prophetic dream of my Mother. Yes?
"I’m sorry. There is no night flight tonight."


Wind-driven souls on gilded runners run,
each assures the other’s life to come.
Fraud most displeases God.


_______________________________________


In this issue John Ryskamp also offers a brief essay, On the Unity of Twentieth-Century Ideas.

An earlier version of The Twenty-First Century appeared in FlashPoint 7.