The Twenty-First Century


by John Ryskamp


In memoriam Robert Sproat
GREAT TEACHER OF ELIOT
STUDENT OF F. O. MATTHIESSEN
ARDENT ADVOCATE OF LAURA RIDING

en quattor aras:
ecce duas tibi, Daphnis, duas altaria Phoebo


 


I. CLOACAE


Fraud most displeases God.
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)
Atmospheric parting of the frieze
Sections of arcadian strata—
Dream intense, swift—
Year to year and crag to crag, procuring,
Tread—like a broken chariot,
Enfranchised, from the three worlds—
That path of humility which leads to reality,
No lodging for you but a cold hard stone—
And shout a secret to the stone.
Eating the legumen of the algoraba,
Thin from eating flies.
Fulfilling your destiny,
Lord of weak remembrance,
Dissembled, proffered, recovered, withdrawn,
(Why not just say, disheveled?)
Rest, perturbed spirit—and no fingerpointing!
I’m blown up! Xook.
Impatient for night? Every woman is. Very well then, here it is,

Let’s have a dekko:
In obedience to other laws,
Fog cruises everyone and mobs embattled Seraphim to war,
Only exaggeration moves them,
Their will bondsman to the dark,
They set sail in a helmless barque,
Baudelaire sprawled on the poop.
Then press at midnight beneath love’s cornice
(Draped by poplar and grapevine tendrils)
In some public place, live lips upon a plummet-measured face.
Twentysomethings
all ready in cock rings.
With ear-kissing arguments, hints and guesses
Nibbles and caresses
A kiss
Between two enameled obelisks
Another old fat man, fat like a twisted old 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
ulcerated scrotum à la Coleridge
replaced haunch and trailing paunch
lives in the capsule of a cell phone
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
Ponete mente almen com’io son bella!
Si tu voulais seulement
M’approndir ensuite un peu!
Behind a hundred masks he asks:
Is there anything else you don’t like?
Tells tales (with halitosis) of a moral apotheosis.
When do you shed tears?
Bo-peep, what’s in the hibiscus basket?
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
Some are anxious spineless angels,
Some undone, in the unattended moment,
Approached in the sacred porch with consuming heat,
Ponete mente almen com’io son bella!
Si tu voulais seulement
M’approndir ensuite un peu
:
He fucked my ass off.
sed faciles Nymphae risere
Elated chatter among the leaves.
Nothing outside; nothing inside.
Nothing inside and outside.
Your dying slave,
Eyes uplifted knees bowed down,
In the 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,
a new race of Longobardi, earth’s litter
speculators in derivatives
thoroughbreds and chickenheads
a sword fight
Some struggle—
torrid though torpid towards sundown—
With a bottle
Up a millionaire's ass,
Your idol and your tyrant—
Once a kindly Zephyros, now a
blustering Boreas—a buster, stifled
Titan, going at it with Santa claws
working grasshopper jaws
la lippe me fait le mouvement de paître
giving you a philoctetes 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
Your spirit overkissed—your young zeros! breath scarce knows the way! w00t!
Au secours M. Kosygin!
You spill air;
it gathers in Rhone pools, psychic puddles
which whisper: "Call 647-8262."
Laboring under the erotic, cinema narcotic
juju of his succubus-like spell
Bite, and with ardent eyes and brite,
Draw back to watch the imprint of that bight.
Unpack your heart with words:
Zoit! A sillie worm: O do not bruise me!
quia amore langueo
The master struck him with a candle and three mirrors.
Before you realize
This Colonel you do not recognize
Tes yeux dans ces yeux-là!
You have changed eyes and have the throat of birds.

You have changed eyes
(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? An asana in the assana
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 against the wall (full of sound and fury!), de-
flowering indifference of liberation,
the separate substances: you produce a large
radish, ridenti colocasia, a rotted potato and la cookie
a chocolate kiss on a drop of blood (a puddle
of piss in the Pure Land)
A little one is separated from the body.
And why not? Art can change too!
huc ades; quis est nam ludus in undis?
sinister filaments in a thick, gelatinous substance
outraging two serpents which part the bears—
frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis
divine justice, a combustion from below to make
Christian hell smell like a sweet sachet
and your back crack, knees freeze and liver quiver.
It raised the wall, and houses too
(and silenced the Sybil).
And then a green apple quick step
Stouty 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
Fue una vaga congoja de dejarte
Lo que me hizo saber que to quería.
et durae quercus subadunt roscida mella

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?
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 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
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,
Sausage party of clerics and men of letters,
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, a concave womb re-worded—
they would have been lucky if there had never been 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. Stop sneezing and cool your
spleen. Shake it off. Bounce. Call 647-8262.
Cheese. Cancel past that.
Climb out of your K-hole and suck a pig’s ass.
Suckle Diana’s breasts.
Snap on a feed-bag—or eat yourself to lessen pain.
Such an unlucky hand! Symbolized
by five stars. Your megawatt 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.
Gaffle some skrill. Gank now from then. 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 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 borrowed gold—
Words in the air suspended, language in the air—
Wherein perfection lives on in some Cartesian void
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 on the horizon.
Upward man and downward fish.
La cité d’Ys, la Sodome noyée.
Ding-dong, bell.

In the circus of fixed destinies, the medical specialist and the painter,
The light collector and the headlight child,
The guey professor and the Negro,
Louis, Sir Sinister Palindrome, Prince Fondle,
Hu Nu in a porkpie hat (McNamara with a mouthful of bad teeth),
Hector with his stutter, Helen with her beauty spot
Aeneas short and fat, that Greek chap Clitoris,
A veiled Maya, secret shopper, scampering Chinese rat,
Un qui passait
Son ombre changée en souris
Fuyait dans le ruisseau

Baron Grimm the geology conductor,
Mr. Jimmy the mad hatter,
Ursula Major the minor, Easter, Erato,
Suzy Sansouci and the Disappearing Master,
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 gods are there
sous le ciel neutre
in despotic Tiepolo air
twining deceitful faces of hope and despair?
I met them all thirty years ago
for twenty minutes in some open studio
and endured a session
with poetry praised as an obsession.
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 princesse nocturne, la Muse camarde
ici pose
, and turns the dark card:
avoid the fifth and hell’s wan
king; owl competes with swan.
Til dawn I can’t do anything.
Young man and girl in spring.
Did you know
you resemble Foucault?
I see you’ve given your soul away,
but masterful heaven has intervened to save it.
What is meant
by an autistic designer of abbatoir equipment?
Orderly beauty of mass destruction,
whether military or industrial I cannot see.
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 in half-empty heaven, as God might be,
conceived in idiosyncracy,
incumbent on air though shorn of his beams,
riding in molto forte C major, phosphorescence
and Boucher clouds
Of unknowing upon the swan of melody,
Passing through brazen tempestuous skies,
flying in a 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, God loves 3,
Christ Hospitaler [death]
Intones from the Cross,
"Heaven is to die for."

He transforms himself each day anew.
Bearing the skin of himself,
Peter the grudge bearer rails at ninth
Heaven. Making all, unmade
unnamed universal He in the 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 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 disturbed by his own feces
Achilleus—tiny two eyes, broad-shouldr’d and pindick— impregnates
Sinbad the leech-gatherer and pea-green Atlantic
Sucks up his wooden ship.
C’est Galathée aveuglant Pygmalion!
Impossible de modifier cette situation.
Diana and Camilla
Posterity decides everything and understands nothing.
Rome had its cuts too.
And Rome died.

As gods toward their rest—
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 on a train.
What is young and old, and old and young?



II. THE GREEN HOTEL


During the day
We were alive to sunlit terrors
Syntax deceived us
With its sound-form phenocrysts
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 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 silence.

From where does the moon emanate?
Dull, small moon has forced the sun away,
This is the hour and the 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 death.
I know I do.
breuis est uia
You come too.
Do you see what I see?
What is the date today?
Valence blinds and other valences
Il est minuit comme une flèche.…
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
Stones with meteorological clot
(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)
Then on your back,
Turning beauty into a soggy sameness
Then face downward
—but at last a sad spider 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 dawn
You appear upon the lawn
In the radius of Venus.
Infra great sea-horses laugh at the dawn.
A cuckoo is erect in a good oak coffin
Sounding the knell of the 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,
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."
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
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.
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,
the albatross of the tempest,
the kingfishers, Slavic ducks and 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 dramatic dreamland—
Dream of Tangiers, American dream, Parisian dream—
You dream you throw embers in a stream.
Voluble flowers, stones look on.

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 creepy obelisk, a symbol we have put away,
On the ass-end of space you brood,
on a wandering grave, 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
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
to your memory palace and obscene confessor,
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.
Garments committed to earth before the threshold of your house.
Your house is empty, your birds have flown.
In that bright room, and taking the
measure of that room, again,
you destroy half your brain
in a carcare named freedom
prism of freedoms
perceptions out of wedlock
recorded time
power to thyself, in singleness thy state
indictable on several grounds, self-indicted on them all
but all while take the Fifth—and smile
You must eat your medicinal meal (frying gravel),
drink chocolate+blood+mescaline
viscous and sawdust
from the cinnabar vase of the seven gods,
jazz bachelor, to melodious thunk,
check your airline schedule and carrier pigeons,
observe the kids and snakes,
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 and hoist your ass
into the upper middle class.
Work harder, jog faster
then consult the horny Wu Li master.
You must learn to spell L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in Esperanto.
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 yourself in the mirror;
whilst a raven warns you: be craven.
Dead the warrior, dead his glory,
Above all, dead the cause in which he died.

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!):
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 sun is not named, but his power is amongst us:
Scattered by winds and high tempestuous gusts,
Stereometric bees with smoke, and doves 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.
By wasps and hornets stung.
I charm asleep—and when I will, awake—the eyes of men.
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
and copper halls, violet corridors and ivory stairs
above or below? enharmonic elevations
leading to houses and endless rooms, failures
of diamond corridors to lead to endless rooms of red velvet houses and

Princess Eavesdrop, aka Matelda Hale-Bopp,
a yellow-mouthed baby in oppression blue, her pet
tricked out chimp Josette:
"Vines and creepers, my girl! You
haven’t killed yourself yet?
It's time you got off that sofa, Mary.
Wind always brings a blush to Phoebe,
The moon spots to Bea.
You’re throwed off. Find everything
Here first. Listen. This is my advice:
Next time you go out,
pack your cock in ice—
It’s 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.

What is your name?
What is your name?
Etor in her mouth. "Baseball."
Voi che’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete
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

You should be forced to live out on the streets,
Eating your beard.
It's your hat makes you mad.
…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?
You cannot be deprived of glorious haven if you follow your star.
With time—Josette! Ne touchez pas!

it's an occupation for a saint.
ppp We know what you mean by the second coming—
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 liver over and over.
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—
get off the white stag and take a lilac;
feed fat sheep and sing a slender song.
Take a dog’s-eye view: focus on the characterological.
Only an asshole is scatological—that dark brown god!
You’re a case of involuntary certitude.
If things are so bad, why haven't we noticed?

You plunge your dart into
A supplicating mother’s heart.
Ne touchez pas! Wench!
I tell you this: you’ll leave a perfect corpse."
Vous avez l’organe bien perdu.
Et lui comprit trop bien, n’ayant pas entendu.
But when you are dead you are not.
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 through century after century
Then strawberry seeds
and a thin little spangled 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 cleft in a rock
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 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 phthisic hand,
Zoe, chipper Madonna of the garbage can
(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!"

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

Whiter than butter on a ground like 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 language we use today, will live forever
I only live in the green forest,
Fly up on green branches,
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 Idea, like a rétiaire, combs her girl’s mane in this people’s garden, tandemly repeated genes
(in which ontogenic concretion recapitulates phylogenic abstraction!)—
Or was that only possible which came to pass?



III


What largesse of bright air—
In which ducks flee falcons, dogs attack a hare—
clothing the vales in dazzling light, is here!
Is this the region, the soil, the clime
Amidst spurge-laurel, cypress and thyme
Of one who cannot be changed by alltime?
Hier is kein warum.
The year is at its nicest now.
Don’t praise cups when you can see cows.
All things that love the sun
are out of doors. Infra wind-driven souls on gilded runners run.
Sclerosis and Farinata
ut bos piger palaestrae exerceat
aut asinus segnis inter spheristarum ordinem celeri
This youthful land has a sun and stars of its own.
The flowers are inscribed
The 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.
With apples, chestnuts and pressed cheese, reader,
rest yourself awhile on these green fronds.
For this world is a room
Furnished with poplar, osier and broom.
Hier ist kein warum.
The topmost spray entreats the day
cliché serve and inhabit cliché.

Sraffa, the correspondence theory of truth a tautology,
We have no economy now—and no singing:
we place orders in a cave,
The City 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.
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 lady of Christ and Miss Virginity
beating an antique drum—on the 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!
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,

In obedience to other laws, surcharged with fairness
Cool in an ice age and clean as a piece of dusted glass
Tableaux vivants in the light show of paradise
Naked Sparta boys and girls relentlessly
against one another in pugnacious array—
paradoxical prudes, rapt sunny nudes
Spiritual eugenics: "Being hated makes us beautiful and strong"
two spheres and an obelisk
skeletal centipede atop the femur throne
A terrible booty is born
and not a bird of day
dare extinguish that delight
Glittering with hatred and sing ara vos prec
(Sally and Aunt Flo are visiting),
Endlessly advancing,
endlessly resuming their initial positions, arrayed
thirst from the clear milky juice allayed
a thousand foreskins fall
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 chiton
After the bucolic diaerisis, before the sleepy feminine caesura
pepnumenos What is your name?
periphron What is your name?
Clay babies melt the heart in laurel fire:
Oto, Flo, Clo, Leo
Lio, Zio, Ojo, Geo
Abbo, gabbo, babbo
Tebe, plebe, zebe
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,
The hand of the land upon their shoulders,
Virgil and Rousseau,
sand in their hands, at arm’s length
In revelry of sport, in isolation taking hands.

Ryskamp the rabbit scribe among them
Orpheus offending (for style is fate),
Futurum: a poet en retard? not quite yet a bard?
(What was he thinking?)
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 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
His rhetorical bitches his sublime
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.

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!)
"For sure, some of his lines do fall flat, but
he is Number One—how cool is that!"
Concetti
sprinkled like confetti,
more twists and turns than a plate of spaghetti.
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 verse!
Figliuoli where sì is spoken.
A Veritable Bede!
A courtesan who reads!
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. He’s Australian—off the charts!)
Who, smitten by auctoritas, could say,
"Go to hell, Dante,"
and make hella rhymes that way—
but he has a headache today.
Estraneo a la bellezza, non può essere nessuno
Poetry’s 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
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? Who is his guide?—
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 left thumb.
Poetry is the subterfuge of an age.
Perhaps he has a brain tumor.
Do you think he wants to rival Apollo?
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 are 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 a poet
mind dirt and ash
squeezing my 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
and a thing apart
amidst scorpions and rats of art—
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.

Shedding veils on laurels
Slender charm and cool dignity
Some foot the bacchant rhythmic dance
under the radar
in the sacred grove of inframince
and
chant poems aloud, love in bee breath, distichs,
eclogues, ellipses of psalms,
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

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,
vegan cannibals who scent
humanity’s one, piddling accomplishment,
endless argument: when can I die?
Danseuses de Delphes with bling bling, fly tresses
In a Herakles knot, streaming real-time between trailing firs.
Cicadas (which are quotations) on the 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 music absorptive and resorptive!
sonic doubles, hero twins, in terza rima the walking rhyme
in involuntary certitude
forgetting human words and
wishing what is happening as if it weren’t
pascentis seruabit Tityrus haedos

will and world-spirit unconscious
moving in silence and detached hysteria
to unbearable Schubert
in the circle garden, to soft pipes,
amid obelisks and phallus-bearing herms,
pruned trees by sepulchers, Priapus and Procne,
a target, and music marked out, on a tree
reality by Satie
love and hate movements of the dance
with no more sound than mice make
their hands move to and fro
in carpalistics of relinquishment and distress
font moins de bruit que des mouches
daisies must be daisies still,
and still saying, "We are here,"
to the blind singer,
discharging all sound
on a drum: hooves paw the ground
None are better known to the hound
What can doves do when eagles come?
the Puvis girl in pig-tails is pregnant
and in labor among the hazels;

in the silence of prior discord,
make one music as before
and love 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,
valerian, lilacs and rank ailanthus support the sky,
calamus and oak tree in the front garden
(the hyacinth girl is a boy!)
"Black roses"
and golden armor on the grass
only exaggeration moves them
by their own hard spirits deified, in natural piety,
Daphnis plants a pear tree
thoughts fed by the sun: what is my self?
wheat and poppies in the right hand

dreaming of change as warriors dream of war,
and war, the Trojan geste 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
moving as the real sun moves,
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 mares mate
lynx and river spellbound
the boar and the boarhound
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
all lands are burning
Epos

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



IV


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, 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),
Phallucinogenic penis rising at morning to meet you—
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.
Kingfishers catch fire in a painting by Dali.
Europe after the rain—dance Monster.
Do you feel me?
A hand from the cloud emerges (eye in the
palm),
holding a chart expanded—
The living eye—searching past and future—of a gargantuan reordering,
A monumental ordering of the eightfold way.
Great sea-horses bare their teeth
and laugh at the dawn.
Out of the sea of 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.
Shake the tree 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 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 tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before—
Only this, and nothing more.
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 Virgil had his poem
These cities are not my cities
East to New York
Far East to Japan
West to Europe.
Gitmo and Indokorea
Tibetan Kalachakra
Merger, Japan
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



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.
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 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 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
Syncretic Chinglish
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
genoi hoios essi
Poetic rules are for fools. 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
the clock by your bed
Ransack the center
hora and hebe

What are we here for?
It is late in the world
and Aremideia must be skillful
in Upaya to teach it.
I smell a plum blossom in a cherry blossom
Blooming on a willow branch.
narcisso floreat alnus
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,
In gray twilight knowing
Neither victory nor defeat.
Offered by a downy-lipped, chlamys-clad boy
Guarding sheep by an obelisk,
leading an unflawed goat from a fruit-laden vine,
to an old man blinded by an execution
and led by an unhealthy mongrel dog,
cookies, a cold biscuit, then a cold potato.

What pity! What pity!
Only exaggeration moves me.
Parcels and morsels, homage and regret.
I like to be alone. Iron must be the heart within me.
A poached egg underground,
an old man hanging upside down
swinging the scaly horror of his folded tail,
a white ax in the open ground.
The rug, capsa, kandys and lamp of vigil,
En bas, dans la nef dalleé de pierres tombales
A blind mother pouring chocolate, and a child of seven.
A red crab roasts on the hearth.
Late Vesper lights the lamp.
Scars and music—and sing the sun to bed.
A sterile hour has struck and
The horse and the bull have bridled their ardor.
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.

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.
What else have I to spur me into song?
Eyes that lured a doting boyhood
Might well fool a dotard’s age.
English is the language of the sea,
English poetry runs to the sea.
no long time will you remain to me.
La pensée est la houle ressassant le galet.
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.
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.
Let me be!
saeva indignatio
I have seen the city 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?
A sighting of humanity
Such as a Returning Angel sees,
Amalgam of life forms,
I am tired of humanity.
I do not ask for a wife.
I have no father-in-law.
quia amore langueo

Imagine all of
humanity leading you to death.
I know I do.
You come too.
Humanity is grass
And knows it. Pray you fill this glass.



VI. THE SAILOR


You address the assembly:
Quickly, run to where the passage starts!
Eternal west, seeking distraction
In the life it made. You were born in the west.
And was that past life a cool dream?
Where Idea, like a rétiaire, combs her girl’s mane in this people’s garden, tandemly repeated genes.

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, Boötes and Charlie's wagon.
Something apart from the four statements.

preserved in transcendence
in perfection by divine judgment
through experience of youth

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.



FOR THE POEM


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.
One feels like applauding.
Carrying bricks or be moved by something—but I’ll discuss that later.

Thoughts beyond reach
grasp, clutch and crush deformed—
or gently massage, masticate, mutate or laminate liberal—speech.
Tandemly repeated genes. On gilded runners run. 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.
Is that
door shut? That door isn’t open or shut."

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 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.
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?—
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.

"That damned door—
Have you seen my
@ ?
I think I might have left it with my
ˆ .
Or perhaps it’s doing time with my
Î .
This then is your coda? Ipse dixit and Coca-Cola?"
ð ð

Let gross minds conceive, see and hear
the inscription on the bell.
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).
Why a physical "high" and "low"—
a mirrorical return
of uninterrupted forms and literalness—
comme dans un
haiku by Bashō.
Or why historical relationships of text—
see above—
impede development and vex
the virtuosic feat and extended body, or
and here I quote
Collocation, ascetic conjunction, Fire and Love.
Look, on the one hand
The Jongleur de Notre Dame
is doing in the pureness of his heart what he can.
And on the other? There will never be another Munich,
says the teeny weeny voice of the commanding eunuch. C’est à dire,
the nation, in theme and variation,
consumes the universe in self-congratulation
(written under observation).
So…there is no middle flight, no,
to help us through this night. Shut that door—I think it’s my Mother.
"I’m sorry. There is no night flight tonight."

Wind-driven souls on gilded runners run.
Fraud most displeases God.
 
 

_______________________________________


The final version of John Ryskamp's poem
The Twenty-First Century appears in FlashPoint 8.

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