WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS KILLING DONE?
We speak with the language of war. We laugh with the language of peace. Knowing that all life is born of crisis, punctuated by brief periods of solace, we also know that after all is said and done, we shall never cheat infinity, nor shall we extinguish the mark of a single thought.
—Gabriel Thy
Showing posts with label poem. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poem. Show all posts
Friday, May 16, 2008
Thursday, September 27, 2007
DEVIANT CUBES
1. If Albert Camus Had Taken a Train
Dead on arrival. The announcement shook the cold audience from their lethargic gaze. Still hiccupping for comic effect I returned to the dark alley to cover my tracks with stiff kisses. Snow is often poor evidence in this part of the city by order of law. Dirge slander prevailed over the rising costs of blueberry sympathies, prices were scalloping, less similar to the mollusks than the verses I used to sing in Presbyterian school to the potatoes all rotten my ex-wife liked to fix two meals a day, thrice on Sunday. Violin music had ceased to amaze the child in each of the misguided hipsters filtering in and out of our house still claiming to be interested in the same pasty things as the sober. Petty interests in common house pets came first in the squandered lives of these new urbanized aristocrats. Misplaced affections in my book. Vowels and pronouns in hers. Rodent fashion splashed heavy gray green bile, or is that thick gangrene bile (the light is fuzzy here in the taxi or maybe my eyes are simply taking a five-fingered discount on daylight savings time). Puffy zetetic faces spank this tree giving shaded responses to analytically buffed sophistication, and frankly had produced nothing but cracks and wise acres among this bull generation of raw couchspeak junkies. Because a mass upheaval across the globe would center these writers no more or less prepared to correct the sanitation problems facing them than an appearance on the Jeopardy Show during Tournament of Champions’ week could provide, a select few of them joined the local Guestlist Gestapo, went undercover into the nightclubs of each one’s own promised land of little return on their investment, and broke into happiness. But it was all a joke somebody said. Nobody really smiled. Yes, they would win points as bullies and defenders of the amorally elite, alas, becoming the worst opportunistic sort of chivalrous cheesetasters, but I bolted, hired a planteater, and left the fluids to fend off the fleas themselves. Even a vacation to the heartbeat of Somalexia proved a miserable failure. Lot’s wife, renamed Bra Lynx, for marquée value, changed back into flesh and blood chattering some nonsense about the salt of the earth, smoked oysters, and a nauseatingly competitive game of canasta. As a final splash of artistic flimflam and a vigorous distaste for symmetry of any breed, her Betty Rules blouse was ripped just above her left breast, some say for show of course while others chalk it up to sheer coincidence and a matter to be discussed at the weekly Me Too meeting. No clue as to the culprit though. Some literary cowtow from the other side of the lunar tracks had licked her there in the rip for three weeks straight, she smiled without ironing boards. The inspector sent her straight to Sisyphus.
2. Man Ray Eats A Sandwich Without Mayo
Looking for law and lawn in all the wrong places cannot and should not be compared to reading Dostoevsky on a summer’s day hoping to learn something useful enough to turn a dollar inwards via capitalistic coup, unfortunately for our heroes in transition. The lips galore move in a salute to Assassins Anonymous and the work they have done in the urban areas south of Detroit, a hapless ruin. Only Sophie Glass and her boyfriend Jackfred Wilson dare stir slightly the limbs agile photographers keep. (Enter past tense with gusto.) Every aisle thick with scores of rag gossipers on high horses broke rank regardless of the lack of ventilation in the tunnels. Finally in a call to arms, Sophie thought she alone heard a loud shriek like a message from the other side. “The word’s already been given, and you’re not getting it again!” Anticipation slurred the speech of all those who broke bread with the fishmongers on strike. The bluff was not taken. Anticipation dropped off the edge like Columbus should have, said Sophie, forgetting that her glass ceiling changes into diamond almost anywhere near Tom Paine she tries to shake down. Concluding their mutual witness of such namby-pamby plethora, Sophie and Jackfred shattered the dark silence with a rapid succession of sleazy infrared shots. Again the audience gasped in harmony with the pitter patter of visual demands made on each one of them as justice prevailed in the form of New Legislation made into Flesh and the two ventriloquy photographers hacked through the vines of cozy confessions this New Law required, no questions asked. Remarks of this type and talent would surely redeem them from the tight provocations their spouses dutifully employ as a mechanism for financial equality, thought Sophie in a more serious mood. Certainly at the very minimum, for household maneuvers. Sounds good? Wrong! A twig snapped and she then remembered her own husband’s final words on the blur just before she shot him completely nude, stiffy, all four and a sixteenth inches in paw straddled over a picture of Sophie Glass as a young child. Betraying her professional cool she would use these words against him posthumously in a court of law. “Kafka my darling, I need to use you, abuse you in every way, so please don’t stop talking and writing to me in your own chosen obscene way…please don’t lock me out you bastard!” They buried him in a small justified plot without fanfare, and the wife and boyfriend, greeted by a farewell gesture in court, received nary a token of affection for there was none save for the magnificently catered spread next door across from the kennel where life was cheap and these killer sandwiches were cheaper.
3. If the Shoe Fits
Tables and tables of tables and tables of tables of tables tend to forget to properly package the birthmark of their creator. This oversight will be rectified in the next edition by the egg plagiarist fat with knowledge only an actress requires. Please remit this coupon, he adds, with full payment. “Get it right the very first time,” prunes a sassy Gertrude Picklesimmer, an old friend and a recovering gene along the lines of Epidrome the fanatic. Ethiopian cuisine draws her in for a late night haranguing, her favorite activity, clothing optional, teeth required. In another chapter, curtsy Jane Getz, the Amway doll with unimpaired bust from East Anchorage realizes in a fit of high seriousness that the thoughtcrime she’d committed during her afterdinner phase taken in L’hotel Egmont was simply not curable by enforced comparitive thinking classes, if she was to remain an American Doll (unrelated to the Picklesimmer neurosis.) Quickly, she fell to the grass, pulled off her panty-hose in two swift movements and tossed them to the young Republican standing by in a selfless gesture for party unity. She gave out a loud sigh, and with her exploding right hand smeared her lipstick across her pretty face, her pushy left hand tugging at the rope she had obediently placed around her thin orange neck. “Oh forgive me father for what I am about to forget.” Then, withdrawn, she joined the stereo people, who took her life savings and doubled it on the troubled market, bridging the gap between the moderate liberals and the far-right wing tapdancers of the Reagan years still crying out for a fresh look into the morals of those less crowded by the ennuendos of the straight & narrow electorate. All that’s needed, dictates the Leader-at-Arms, is a simple majority of those who have the right to vote and swear that you’ll vote with your pot bellies this time, Kid Scissors, and yes…“you, George, may sit at my right hand, and you…”
4. Persuasion Is No Longer Possible
Dead on arrival! Thunk. The Plague Syndrome. Fear. Ugliness. Filth. Sterility. It seems we wait for crocodiles to defile us, suck us into the Mississippi while both Twain and Truman sprout buffalo wings in hopes of a superior, more incestuous vision to supply our air fragile economies with invincible Whitmanesque nurses, naughty to uncoil our moated homespun turmoils wielding killer drugs and boy killers and further relate them to the Final Quest…getting laid in a grave six feet over or under, multiplying the fast game of infinity by zero and dust over idea. Rationality gives no suck to thirsty camels. Neither beckons them homeward. Should we survive them, a brittle postulate hardly seems a hardy substitute for love in a two-way window. Here came the Beatniks with not a single plan to boil. Then the Hippies home of the shaggy truth in revolution. The Discognitos where sweat said it all. Then the Punks where boredom and displacement took a place at the table with the rest of our problems, unmasked. Then the Preppies (always primping close by whilst all the others storm in uninvited) proud to be rich and beautiful and well-spoken for. Then the skinhead revival where hatred and gentrification meet its maker. Then rush in the angriest of the angry, the Rappers, civil unrest the Messiah. Then the Ravers about nothing nothing at all. And this parade of the horribles just in my lifetime, tracing merely the high profile movements, topped out, each genre pilfered ozoning subgenres like anything else doping a molecule to spare. Change, eh? Here they came in thunderous herds to lay blame at my feet, and I welcomed them as a variation of myself. As contrapunctus night steals the hit playlist the swelling rhetorical voices all suggest the same fluctuating plot, the same arguments of straw woven into myth and mirth similarly disposed, seamless and useless except as a fashion quirk projectory flying loose in the machinery of the next breath and acceptable on that gut level in private until watching the Eternal Clock the staid gentlemen of the silver-tongued coif just laugh into a gold box guaranteed to mock us concerning this sanity of despair. The enemy.
5. Turn That Goddamned Television Off, Snotty!
The wars in Africa have passed into the streets of our nation’s capitol right up my doorstep. Riots are eating up all the quality time spent with our children, our flowers, our bitterness. Contact sports traded a hundred and forty-four thousand future draft choices of the free for instant contact death. Ringing in my ears! Reclusive, guzzling beer, awaiting my murder, humming the hymns of great speckled confusion. Yes, I’m sick and I’m tired. Proof is the existence of having to defend the fact that I’m not brown and beautiful, nor white and rich, nor yellow and well connected, nor blue and better off, nor green and cuter still, nor purple and well-hung, nor pale and a whiz kid keeper, nor any other multiple choice identification rite I can’t inhale because I’m just a poor freckle from a town far away where red-winged blackbirds reign upon the bloody marshes of a dull gray past. Dead on arrival! Ringing in my ears! This icon, this city of Washington tucked away like a puckered nipple between two states is the center of my attention span, the bloodshed of boys, and I shall fear no evil, though I walk through the valley of inconvenience and misunderstanding a glass darkly. Astonished I lie down in black pastures to annointeth my role, to scour the enigma off my soul. I choke on my resistence. And jump head first into deep waters to pluck out a thumbless axiom. There is no comfort. To survive I must so choose, and I would then call my publisher if I had one, to rub myself raw, to loosen myself from sterile explanations. Soon comes the resurrection, the comic moaned. I will just kiss my wife gently on her wrists. And pray that America wakes up from her synthetic nightmare in time to realize that street violence belongs in the mind, not on someone else’s pillow case. “You must be able to enjoy the phallic.”
6. Help Wanted
Thinking is plural. We often do when our mirrors fog. Scores ago, in the quaint southern town where we first roamed the wild plains of youth in crass innocense, a young Aunt Charlemagne once scolded us, slapping our collective face, for an expression we’d just muttered without zip code or return address. In preparation for what we later grew naturally, a masquerade if anything sweeter came between us. Aunt Charlemagne was eight years younger than her sister, and less a threat to our ambitions as a kid without wings but this isn’t news. we admitted to preferring the sting of flesh when perpetrated by the younger sister; in fact we became attached to the violence young lash in their early twenties could foster all for our sake in the multitudes of shapes and thrusts of uncertainty principles everywhere anytime to the clue of making of the fodder of joy. Of course began the impossible task of finding that enchanting angular, gripped and primed, ripe for the plunge into theory and advance, who, inspired by control, feels no hounding shame in dominating le masculine urge with whatever is the most accessible tool available to our struggling leather saint and his epistomologic quest back to the founder of his words. This is news we said.
7. Out To Lunch Naked
I recanted publically. But this repentence tasted of kerosene and five unidentifiable culprits laughing behind grotesque clay statues of stool pigeons in drag, still figgering on three icy fingers their dormant appearance to contrive. About forty seconds earlier, which seemed like forty looks, she had asked me to unhook the strap prize of her feminine apparrel. I complied without question except those few which lingered like injured love tigers silently against my tattooed chest. My graceless blurtations spinned calculus webs glory spat back into the wind no wedding bells could seduce, by golly intrigue enough during that honest infidel period of my own due process. I intuited precious unspoken dignity when a single scrapbook neanderthalic blazing emphasized a year, like sun time, like gestation, like God in heat. No underexposed image would ever be too painful, ever too explicit, choices could never be too exacting. In this accelerated culture it’s uncouth hurray to deny our vulturous past or that its predicated smell of shame was that of fire, odorless, tasteless, but raging in gymnastic marble color, vast unmentionable hues of pit and passion. Only my credentials can whisper its name—burnt cosmos. After her fruitbox heaviness secured its diplomacy, a dress of bulb-white linen fell to its gifted position upon her kindling fuss, a flesh frothing with evidence of crude conviction, of unpublished zest, lasting heat.
8. Bring Us Another Round Of Abelard
Then there was this other game turtle. She in her early eyes dark with nuance, stretched like a vanquished dancer among gargantuan fates making breeze her garland through mahogany-silk hair and other dazzling inspectables. I pulled at the arbitrating cloth, brilliantly keen in brave foul textures of the sexual armistice. The fair. The frantic. I immediately compared these symptoms to those I’d experienced with quick lather & ecclesiastical bubbles when dare I remember how fear touched herself there among the sweaties. Tightly I drew at her dress until the static pressure flushed both of us, gazing into her aura, unphotographed wormholes of beauty crushed into shapes and color escapes, clutching with a long-fingered paw my prepared destiny, my meager knowledge, my Himalayan heart where monks have stormed. She kissed me about the pointless cheeks, and grabbed my hair, then my unproven mouth, each probing tongue wet like childbrain songs long since dormant. Finally I exhaled, and reached for her marshmellow clowns with one numbing touch. I had to go for the reckoning, had to press for that unknown limitation, neither expecting to give nor receive any sweeping social advantage, only impulse. “Enough!” she sharply directed, and I quickened to a freeze, embarrassed by her familiarity of the rite. Her anger tasted of its own 120 proof. I dismayed and shuffled from the now chilly room, never to return until I had come of age.
[1996, Washington, DC ]
Dead on arrival. The announcement shook the cold audience from their lethargic gaze. Still hiccupping for comic effect I returned to the dark alley to cover my tracks with stiff kisses. Snow is often poor evidence in this part of the city by order of law. Dirge slander prevailed over the rising costs of blueberry sympathies, prices were scalloping, less similar to the mollusks than the verses I used to sing in Presbyterian school to the potatoes all rotten my ex-wife liked to fix two meals a day, thrice on Sunday. Violin music had ceased to amaze the child in each of the misguided hipsters filtering in and out of our house still claiming to be interested in the same pasty things as the sober. Petty interests in common house pets came first in the squandered lives of these new urbanized aristocrats. Misplaced affections in my book. Vowels and pronouns in hers. Rodent fashion splashed heavy gray green bile, or is that thick gangrene bile (the light is fuzzy here in the taxi or maybe my eyes are simply taking a five-fingered discount on daylight savings time). Puffy zetetic faces spank this tree giving shaded responses to analytically buffed sophistication, and frankly had produced nothing but cracks and wise acres among this bull generation of raw couchspeak junkies. Because a mass upheaval across the globe would center these writers no more or less prepared to correct the sanitation problems facing them than an appearance on the Jeopardy Show during Tournament of Champions’ week could provide, a select few of them joined the local Guestlist Gestapo, went undercover into the nightclubs of each one’s own promised land of little return on their investment, and broke into happiness. But it was all a joke somebody said. Nobody really smiled. Yes, they would win points as bullies and defenders of the amorally elite, alas, becoming the worst opportunistic sort of chivalrous cheesetasters, but I bolted, hired a planteater, and left the fluids to fend off the fleas themselves. Even a vacation to the heartbeat of Somalexia proved a miserable failure. Lot’s wife, renamed Bra Lynx, for marquée value, changed back into flesh and blood chattering some nonsense about the salt of the earth, smoked oysters, and a nauseatingly competitive game of canasta. As a final splash of artistic flimflam and a vigorous distaste for symmetry of any breed, her Betty Rules blouse was ripped just above her left breast, some say for show of course while others chalk it up to sheer coincidence and a matter to be discussed at the weekly Me Too meeting. No clue as to the culprit though. Some literary cowtow from the other side of the lunar tracks had licked her there in the rip for three weeks straight, she smiled without ironing boards. The inspector sent her straight to Sisyphus.
2. Man Ray Eats A Sandwich Without Mayo
Looking for law and lawn in all the wrong places cannot and should not be compared to reading Dostoevsky on a summer’s day hoping to learn something useful enough to turn a dollar inwards via capitalistic coup, unfortunately for our heroes in transition. The lips galore move in a salute to Assassins Anonymous and the work they have done in the urban areas south of Detroit, a hapless ruin. Only Sophie Glass and her boyfriend Jackfred Wilson dare stir slightly the limbs agile photographers keep. (Enter past tense with gusto.) Every aisle thick with scores of rag gossipers on high horses broke rank regardless of the lack of ventilation in the tunnels. Finally in a call to arms, Sophie thought she alone heard a loud shriek like a message from the other side. “The word’s already been given, and you’re not getting it again!” Anticipation slurred the speech of all those who broke bread with the fishmongers on strike. The bluff was not taken. Anticipation dropped off the edge like Columbus should have, said Sophie, forgetting that her glass ceiling changes into diamond almost anywhere near Tom Paine she tries to shake down. Concluding their mutual witness of such namby-pamby plethora, Sophie and Jackfred shattered the dark silence with a rapid succession of sleazy infrared shots. Again the audience gasped in harmony with the pitter patter of visual demands made on each one of them as justice prevailed in the form of New Legislation made into Flesh and the two ventriloquy photographers hacked through the vines of cozy confessions this New Law required, no questions asked. Remarks of this type and talent would surely redeem them from the tight provocations their spouses dutifully employ as a mechanism for financial equality, thought Sophie in a more serious mood. Certainly at the very minimum, for household maneuvers. Sounds good? Wrong! A twig snapped and she then remembered her own husband’s final words on the blur just before she shot him completely nude, stiffy, all four and a sixteenth inches in paw straddled over a picture of Sophie Glass as a young child. Betraying her professional cool she would use these words against him posthumously in a court of law. “Kafka my darling, I need to use you, abuse you in every way, so please don’t stop talking and writing to me in your own chosen obscene way…please don’t lock me out you bastard!” They buried him in a small justified plot without fanfare, and the wife and boyfriend, greeted by a farewell gesture in court, received nary a token of affection for there was none save for the magnificently catered spread next door across from the kennel where life was cheap and these killer sandwiches were cheaper.
3. If the Shoe Fits
Tables and tables of tables and tables of tables of tables tend to forget to properly package the birthmark of their creator. This oversight will be rectified in the next edition by the egg plagiarist fat with knowledge only an actress requires. Please remit this coupon, he adds, with full payment. “Get it right the very first time,” prunes a sassy Gertrude Picklesimmer, an old friend and a recovering gene along the lines of Epidrome the fanatic. Ethiopian cuisine draws her in for a late night haranguing, her favorite activity, clothing optional, teeth required. In another chapter, curtsy Jane Getz, the Amway doll with unimpaired bust from East Anchorage realizes in a fit of high seriousness that the thoughtcrime she’d committed during her afterdinner phase taken in L’hotel Egmont was simply not curable by enforced comparitive thinking classes, if she was to remain an American Doll (unrelated to the Picklesimmer neurosis.) Quickly, she fell to the grass, pulled off her panty-hose in two swift movements and tossed them to the young Republican standing by in a selfless gesture for party unity. She gave out a loud sigh, and with her exploding right hand smeared her lipstick across her pretty face, her pushy left hand tugging at the rope she had obediently placed around her thin orange neck. “Oh forgive me father for what I am about to forget.” Then, withdrawn, she joined the stereo people, who took her life savings and doubled it on the troubled market, bridging the gap between the moderate liberals and the far-right wing tapdancers of the Reagan years still crying out for a fresh look into the morals of those less crowded by the ennuendos of the straight & narrow electorate. All that’s needed, dictates the Leader-at-Arms, is a simple majority of those who have the right to vote and swear that you’ll vote with your pot bellies this time, Kid Scissors, and yes…“you, George, may sit at my right hand, and you…”
4. Persuasion Is No Longer Possible
Dead on arrival! Thunk. The Plague Syndrome. Fear. Ugliness. Filth. Sterility. It seems we wait for crocodiles to defile us, suck us into the Mississippi while both Twain and Truman sprout buffalo wings in hopes of a superior, more incestuous vision to supply our air fragile economies with invincible Whitmanesque nurses, naughty to uncoil our moated homespun turmoils wielding killer drugs and boy killers and further relate them to the Final Quest…getting laid in a grave six feet over or under, multiplying the fast game of infinity by zero and dust over idea. Rationality gives no suck to thirsty camels. Neither beckons them homeward. Should we survive them, a brittle postulate hardly seems a hardy substitute for love in a two-way window. Here came the Beatniks with not a single plan to boil. Then the Hippies home of the shaggy truth in revolution. The Discognitos where sweat said it all. Then the Punks where boredom and displacement took a place at the table with the rest of our problems, unmasked. Then the Preppies (always primping close by whilst all the others storm in uninvited) proud to be rich and beautiful and well-spoken for. Then the skinhead revival where hatred and gentrification meet its maker. Then rush in the angriest of the angry, the Rappers, civil unrest the Messiah. Then the Ravers about nothing nothing at all. And this parade of the horribles just in my lifetime, tracing merely the high profile movements, topped out, each genre pilfered ozoning subgenres like anything else doping a molecule to spare. Change, eh? Here they came in thunderous herds to lay blame at my feet, and I welcomed them as a variation of myself. As contrapunctus night steals the hit playlist the swelling rhetorical voices all suggest the same fluctuating plot, the same arguments of straw woven into myth and mirth similarly disposed, seamless and useless except as a fashion quirk projectory flying loose in the machinery of the next breath and acceptable on that gut level in private until watching the Eternal Clock the staid gentlemen of the silver-tongued coif just laugh into a gold box guaranteed to mock us concerning this sanity of despair. The enemy.
5. Turn That Goddamned Television Off, Snotty!
The wars in Africa have passed into the streets of our nation’s capitol right up my doorstep. Riots are eating up all the quality time spent with our children, our flowers, our bitterness. Contact sports traded a hundred and forty-four thousand future draft choices of the free for instant contact death. Ringing in my ears! Reclusive, guzzling beer, awaiting my murder, humming the hymns of great speckled confusion. Yes, I’m sick and I’m tired. Proof is the existence of having to defend the fact that I’m not brown and beautiful, nor white and rich, nor yellow and well connected, nor blue and better off, nor green and cuter still, nor purple and well-hung, nor pale and a whiz kid keeper, nor any other multiple choice identification rite I can’t inhale because I’m just a poor freckle from a town far away where red-winged blackbirds reign upon the bloody marshes of a dull gray past. Dead on arrival! Ringing in my ears! This icon, this city of Washington tucked away like a puckered nipple between two states is the center of my attention span, the bloodshed of boys, and I shall fear no evil, though I walk through the valley of inconvenience and misunderstanding a glass darkly. Astonished I lie down in black pastures to annointeth my role, to scour the enigma off my soul. I choke on my resistence. And jump head first into deep waters to pluck out a thumbless axiom. There is no comfort. To survive I must so choose, and I would then call my publisher if I had one, to rub myself raw, to loosen myself from sterile explanations. Soon comes the resurrection, the comic moaned. I will just kiss my wife gently on her wrists. And pray that America wakes up from her synthetic nightmare in time to realize that street violence belongs in the mind, not on someone else’s pillow case. “You must be able to enjoy the phallic.”
6. Help Wanted
Thinking is plural. We often do when our mirrors fog. Scores ago, in the quaint southern town where we first roamed the wild plains of youth in crass innocense, a young Aunt Charlemagne once scolded us, slapping our collective face, for an expression we’d just muttered without zip code or return address. In preparation for what we later grew naturally, a masquerade if anything sweeter came between us. Aunt Charlemagne was eight years younger than her sister, and less a threat to our ambitions as a kid without wings but this isn’t news. we admitted to preferring the sting of flesh when perpetrated by the younger sister; in fact we became attached to the violence young lash in their early twenties could foster all for our sake in the multitudes of shapes and thrusts of uncertainty principles everywhere anytime to the clue of making of the fodder of joy. Of course began the impossible task of finding that enchanting angular, gripped and primed, ripe for the plunge into theory and advance, who, inspired by control, feels no hounding shame in dominating le masculine urge with whatever is the most accessible tool available to our struggling leather saint and his epistomologic quest back to the founder of his words. This is news we said.
7. Out To Lunch Naked
I recanted publically. But this repentence tasted of kerosene and five unidentifiable culprits laughing behind grotesque clay statues of stool pigeons in drag, still figgering on three icy fingers their dormant appearance to contrive. About forty seconds earlier, which seemed like forty looks, she had asked me to unhook the strap prize of her feminine apparrel. I complied without question except those few which lingered like injured love tigers silently against my tattooed chest. My graceless blurtations spinned calculus webs glory spat back into the wind no wedding bells could seduce, by golly intrigue enough during that honest infidel period of my own due process. I intuited precious unspoken dignity when a single scrapbook neanderthalic blazing emphasized a year, like sun time, like gestation, like God in heat. No underexposed image would ever be too painful, ever too explicit, choices could never be too exacting. In this accelerated culture it’s uncouth hurray to deny our vulturous past or that its predicated smell of shame was that of fire, odorless, tasteless, but raging in gymnastic marble color, vast unmentionable hues of pit and passion. Only my credentials can whisper its name—burnt cosmos. After her fruitbox heaviness secured its diplomacy, a dress of bulb-white linen fell to its gifted position upon her kindling fuss, a flesh frothing with evidence of crude conviction, of unpublished zest, lasting heat.
8. Bring Us Another Round Of Abelard
Then there was this other game turtle. She in her early eyes dark with nuance, stretched like a vanquished dancer among gargantuan fates making breeze her garland through mahogany-silk hair and other dazzling inspectables. I pulled at the arbitrating cloth, brilliantly keen in brave foul textures of the sexual armistice. The fair. The frantic. I immediately compared these symptoms to those I’d experienced with quick lather & ecclesiastical bubbles when dare I remember how fear touched herself there among the sweaties. Tightly I drew at her dress until the static pressure flushed both of us, gazing into her aura, unphotographed wormholes of beauty crushed into shapes and color escapes, clutching with a long-fingered paw my prepared destiny, my meager knowledge, my Himalayan heart where monks have stormed. She kissed me about the pointless cheeks, and grabbed my hair, then my unproven mouth, each probing tongue wet like childbrain songs long since dormant. Finally I exhaled, and reached for her marshmellow clowns with one numbing touch. I had to go for the reckoning, had to press for that unknown limitation, neither expecting to give nor receive any sweeping social advantage, only impulse. “Enough!” she sharply directed, and I quickened to a freeze, embarrassed by her familiarity of the rite. Her anger tasted of its own 120 proof. I dismayed and shuffled from the now chilly room, never to return until I had come of age.
[1996, Washington, DC ]
Monday, August 20, 2007
SAMPLEX
I was swinging flamelessly flawed
Crookedly along a line of shooting fame
Where bleeping patriots bang
Living bull winking after coming
All that distance for nothing
and knew it mattered something
as my lead,
felling numbers by the wayside.
Washington. ID’ed.
D’ever visit
Looking like what is it
The keeping of the holy sanctuary
Ringing in clocks and cells
Sent off spacely spiffed
And then gathered erroneously
Introducing numbers colored
What has been?
In the beginning there was no faith
Tremble forsook theirs
The lady barker bit as something silent
And something like slender pumped branches
Of guilt-ridden hitchhiker fire
Gave zero a sympatheticological smile
Charging the going rate of two dollars
And manslaughter
And acts half flag
Half rag
Gagging suspicious gangs
Some sing some hesitate to recall
Soil deep replacing
Me and you.
Deciding to return to space
Its only begotten
To do right by what’s left
Like sheep they would leap
In a twinkling of a cobra’s eye
Insufferably here to stay
Using maximum flair to cornbread level
Dressed above the Machiavellian hips
Calling themselves out as apostles of
Aesthetics of inactivity
Their seed.
I said that night
Bar stool on my tongue I am
The college of my choice
And you agreed
That mine is a subtle creed
Strangerhood breed
Speaking for myself as if I had no tongue
Some new testicles glorified
Kinetic Pierjudy Rapier
And his spicy bride
Who aspires to the moment I ask.
[ 1981, Corpus Christi, TX ]
Crookedly along a line of shooting fame
Where bleeping patriots bang
Living bull winking after coming
All that distance for nothing
and knew it mattered something
as my lead,
felling numbers by the wayside.
Washington. ID’ed.
D’ever visit
Looking like what is it
The keeping of the holy sanctuary
Ringing in clocks and cells
Sent off spacely spiffed
And then gathered erroneously
Introducing numbers colored
What has been?
In the beginning there was no faith
Tremble forsook theirs
The lady barker bit as something silent
And something like slender pumped branches
Of guilt-ridden hitchhiker fire
Gave zero a sympatheticological smile
Charging the going rate of two dollars
And manslaughter
And acts half flag
Half rag
Gagging suspicious gangs
Some sing some hesitate to recall
Soil deep replacing
Me and you.
Deciding to return to space
Its only begotten
To do right by what’s left
Like sheep they would leap
In a twinkling of a cobra’s eye
Insufferably here to stay
Using maximum flair to cornbread level
Dressed above the Machiavellian hips
Calling themselves out as apostles of
Aesthetics of inactivity
Their seed.
I said that night
Bar stool on my tongue I am
The college of my choice
And you agreed
That mine is a subtle creed
Strangerhood breed
Speaking for myself as if I had no tongue
Some new testicles glorified
Kinetic Pierjudy Rapier
And his spicy bride
Who aspires to the moment I ask.
[ 1981, Corpus Christi, TX ]
EQUALITY BUM
Originally published on April 30, 1996
Yo Steve, your gnat is gnawing at my forehead. Was too depressed, especially after reading your notes yesterday to respond to anything much. Did get back to Tom Howell. He's a practicing HTML author now, quite proud in his jest, and sent his brag to "Gabriel" just like family. He always brings a smile.
Your job as literary justice in moaning is taking its toll on me however. A small toll, but one I recognize and simply weather, and also moan about afterwards, just to show you I know what I'm talking about despite any argument you or they would bring to your defense, or mine. But that's we price we pay for being ourselves. So here's the grease. High gear, Friday stew, stem, and glabe discharged to slow gear by Monday and on into Tuesday. But I'm feeling better now. Timside brought a puff to a gruff, and the clearly grown clown is clue-driven again.
Wish I could help you in your status search, but this, appropriately, is evidence that I have failed in this department, particularly as I must state emphatically, as it concerns you. Maybe it will take seven years to thaw or two months to germinate, as each thought bares itself in time, and then comes the moment when we all put in a call for mercy. The messianic skids uncoil as we try to separate the body from the mind, or the mind from its redeemer, accompanied by the same long list of equivocating characteristics we've known about ourselves from the earliest years of our precocious lives, characteristics and traits we called them by different names then, or at least, most of them.
A very conservative idea must come to pass. This is the genetic or scientific approach. We know this path, or rather we stumble across it, and figure we don't have a chance to evoke ourselves. This sudden opinion of ourselves reads itself to the world in word and picture, skin and tragedy, speed and oblivion. We clutch for hope that our highest aspiration remains our surest fallback position as we dally with the fires of our own heated disputes with a strengthening opposition.
My own most vicious excitement of the day was Sue allowing, even offering to keep the whole house cool today with air conditioning. Man, what a bosslady, although yesterday there is still some confusion in my head whether she knew her spanky new luggage was due at the house yesterday. It came, but was delivered across the street to 110. Don't even know those people, which hurled me into a mild rage (5.2 on the GT Richter) before whimpering down to a sigh.
Thus, baking in the raw configurations of cause and effect seeking motives & derivations of man, and god, and country I had to face the repeated crisis of being home yet again, just upstairs with only a small fan compensating for repeated delivery failures posting an argument against me. My half-deafness may also contribute. More than likely the air was blasting at that point. I turned it on around 1:30 yesterday in the computer room, and around eight last night as I nodded out with QUE's Netscape 2.0 in the sofa shortly before Sue bounced into the room and removed my glasses. I slept another few hours there in the royal chair before sliding myself into bed just after midnight. A long & heavy dream sequence followed me after I pounced up slightly dazed at seven oh nine. Still depressed. Alienated by having to growl in sweat past the courier's light knocking on my door, yet once more again.
Missing a delivery irks me enough. Knowing that I didn't even know to expect a package that day had me twisted in knotnumbing speeches to myself. She surprisingly got on the phone and gave that piece of mind that almighty customers are supposed to inspire. But knowing a delivery was coming hasn't kept me from missing eight to a dozen deliveries over the past few years. Ah, but what is missing from this picture? Sue must have known it was coming but she neglected to tell me, or remind me because this transaction was initiated on her order. Yes, she surprised me by harrassing UPS (it turns out; I mistakenly thought it was a JC Penney's direct delivery with a glance at the delivery paper. UPS is not mentioned anywhere, but Sue obviously called with knowledge.) Anyway, I've let go of that issue until it pops up again. Her luggage is sassy, and bless baby with baboon oils, it's obvious her Carribbean cruise is shaping and tidying up in her mind as the calendar drills onward.
That brings us full circle back to you. I can't respond to your unSETled or UNsetLING loops except by running it back onto you. I figure you figure Tim, Sue, and I are your set. But while each of us chagrin in general challenges to what appears to be each of our individual, and better or worse for it, our collective fate we are surfing from day to day realizing the overall will take care of itself one way or the other just like you do, you seem bitten by the biggest bug of all of us.
All we are saying is not give peace a chance (although that too), but just face up to the fact that "life" ain't gonna like us if we don't like it. So now let's figure to solve in the equation: Life=x, where x is whatever ONE can achieve. A second equation: (Good)Life=(Good)x may first appear redundant, and needs to be reduced to its simplest form, the linguist feeling unserved by pure mathematics would insist words are self-modifiers, and not to its own finite standards decipherable like numbers in a numbers racket. Seeing goods in stores one once lusted after but which now seem plastic and faraway does not change the relative value of the goods, or does it?
Has x changed, or has the quality quotient changed? What caused us to change?
This is a mystery I suggest the philosophers, the mathmeticians, the psychologists, the theologians, the aarTvarks, the united we piss paragons, and the warbugles get together to solve, but then again, the word fails us also. Until the word can mend as well as melt flesh, we cannot rest as advocates of full knowledge, and replicated consciousness in those who would be anybody's avengers. Do we ever avenge past failures? Agreement, however fragile an agreement, to accept one's bland experimental kinetic placement in this whistling dixie of a world is the only path I can recommend. It's a role. A puzzle. An almighty gig just as big as anything one can't quite figure in aces right now.
To actually have done this over here ain't much different from having done that over there. To achieve anything without factoring in this finer evidence stoolpigeoned up against our biases and our prides is to fool ourselves of our misplaced recognitions. It's not about value or unvalue. It's about both, and there is no separation of state and status. Would Colin Powell really think he would be any different a man whether he is president of the United States or simply a retired soldier, a self-confessed Republican, a busy and influential party member at that, good husband and father, and distinguished symbol for an amazingly broad spectrum of people?
Life=xyz/abc
And communication boils, hot springs
we flock against in hordes still wet behind the ears
from our last visit to the sources of good
riddance and circumstance
lockjaws rifled by the word
timed riddles still waters
flooding our echoes
flames filled and felled
as the woods the would nots
and the teachers resort to tears
comic fears basic hogwash
mister to clean our stripping
canons of doubt
figures in between the couch
the clue and the closet
salvaged for memories
lost pretension
segregated ifs
or something else entirely.
GT
Yo Steve, your gnat is gnawing at my forehead. Was too depressed, especially after reading your notes yesterday to respond to anything much. Did get back to Tom Howell. He's a practicing HTML author now, quite proud in his jest, and sent his brag to "Gabriel" just like family. He always brings a smile.
Your job as literary justice in moaning is taking its toll on me however. A small toll, but one I recognize and simply weather, and also moan about afterwards, just to show you I know what I'm talking about despite any argument you or they would bring to your defense, or mine. But that's we price we pay for being ourselves. So here's the grease. High gear, Friday stew, stem, and glabe discharged to slow gear by Monday and on into Tuesday. But I'm feeling better now. Timside brought a puff to a gruff, and the clearly grown clown is clue-driven again.
Wish I could help you in your status search, but this, appropriately, is evidence that I have failed in this department, particularly as I must state emphatically, as it concerns you. Maybe it will take seven years to thaw or two months to germinate, as each thought bares itself in time, and then comes the moment when we all put in a call for mercy. The messianic skids uncoil as we try to separate the body from the mind, or the mind from its redeemer, accompanied by the same long list of equivocating characteristics we've known about ourselves from the earliest years of our precocious lives, characteristics and traits we called them by different names then, or at least, most of them.
A very conservative idea must come to pass. This is the genetic or scientific approach. We know this path, or rather we stumble across it, and figure we don't have a chance to evoke ourselves. This sudden opinion of ourselves reads itself to the world in word and picture, skin and tragedy, speed and oblivion. We clutch for hope that our highest aspiration remains our surest fallback position as we dally with the fires of our own heated disputes with a strengthening opposition.
My own most vicious excitement of the day was Sue allowing, even offering to keep the whole house cool today with air conditioning. Man, what a bosslady, although yesterday there is still some confusion in my head whether she knew her spanky new luggage was due at the house yesterday. It came, but was delivered across the street to 110. Don't even know those people, which hurled me into a mild rage (5.2 on the GT Richter) before whimpering down to a sigh.
Thus, baking in the raw configurations of cause and effect seeking motives & derivations of man, and god, and country I had to face the repeated crisis of being home yet again, just upstairs with only a small fan compensating for repeated delivery failures posting an argument against me. My half-deafness may also contribute. More than likely the air was blasting at that point. I turned it on around 1:30 yesterday in the computer room, and around eight last night as I nodded out with QUE's Netscape 2.0 in the sofa shortly before Sue bounced into the room and removed my glasses. I slept another few hours there in the royal chair before sliding myself into bed just after midnight. A long & heavy dream sequence followed me after I pounced up slightly dazed at seven oh nine. Still depressed. Alienated by having to growl in sweat past the courier's light knocking on my door, yet once more again.
Missing a delivery irks me enough. Knowing that I didn't even know to expect a package that day had me twisted in knotnumbing speeches to myself. She surprisingly got on the phone and gave that piece of mind that almighty customers are supposed to inspire. But knowing a delivery was coming hasn't kept me from missing eight to a dozen deliveries over the past few years. Ah, but what is missing from this picture? Sue must have known it was coming but she neglected to tell me, or remind me because this transaction was initiated on her order. Yes, she surprised me by harrassing UPS (it turns out; I mistakenly thought it was a JC Penney's direct delivery with a glance at the delivery paper. UPS is not mentioned anywhere, but Sue obviously called with knowledge.) Anyway, I've let go of that issue until it pops up again. Her luggage is sassy, and bless baby with baboon oils, it's obvious her Carribbean cruise is shaping and tidying up in her mind as the calendar drills onward.
That brings us full circle back to you. I can't respond to your unSETled or UNsetLING loops except by running it back onto you. I figure you figure Tim, Sue, and I are your set. But while each of us chagrin in general challenges to what appears to be each of our individual, and better or worse for it, our collective fate we are surfing from day to day realizing the overall will take care of itself one way or the other just like you do, you seem bitten by the biggest bug of all of us.
All we are saying is not give peace a chance (although that too), but just face up to the fact that "life" ain't gonna like us if we don't like it. So now let's figure to solve in the equation: Life=x, where x is whatever ONE can achieve. A second equation: (Good)Life=(Good)x may first appear redundant, and needs to be reduced to its simplest form, the linguist feeling unserved by pure mathematics would insist words are self-modifiers, and not to its own finite standards decipherable like numbers in a numbers racket. Seeing goods in stores one once lusted after but which now seem plastic and faraway does not change the relative value of the goods, or does it?
Has x changed, or has the quality quotient changed? What caused us to change?
This is a mystery I suggest the philosophers, the mathmeticians, the psychologists, the theologians, the aarTvarks, the united we piss paragons, and the warbugles get together to solve, but then again, the word fails us also. Until the word can mend as well as melt flesh, we cannot rest as advocates of full knowledge, and replicated consciousness in those who would be anybody's avengers. Do we ever avenge past failures? Agreement, however fragile an agreement, to accept one's bland experimental kinetic placement in this whistling dixie of a world is the only path I can recommend. It's a role. A puzzle. An almighty gig just as big as anything one can't quite figure in aces right now.
To actually have done this over here ain't much different from having done that over there. To achieve anything without factoring in this finer evidence stoolpigeoned up against our biases and our prides is to fool ourselves of our misplaced recognitions. It's not about value or unvalue. It's about both, and there is no separation of state and status. Would Colin Powell really think he would be any different a man whether he is president of the United States or simply a retired soldier, a self-confessed Republican, a busy and influential party member at that, good husband and father, and distinguished symbol for an amazingly broad spectrum of people?
Life=xyz/abc
And communication boils, hot springs
we flock against in hordes still wet behind the ears
from our last visit to the sources of good
riddance and circumstance
lockjaws rifled by the word
timed riddles still waters
flooding our echoes
flames filled and felled
as the woods the would nots
and the teachers resort to tears
comic fears basic hogwash
mister to clean our stripping
canons of doubt
figures in between the couch
the clue and the closet
salvaged for memories
lost pretension
segregated ifs
or something else entirely.
GT
TIME SLEEPS CLOSE TO EARTH NOW
Time sleeps close to earth
now as we groan without irony,
asking bright future,
where is thy promise? Sinister factors
threaten with extinction the entire global nest
as proud terrors of control
and fickle poisons of chaos
are unleashed
to give us all a taste of the wicked ruins.
ALL nations and ALL peoples
must recognize and name
this ever-pursuing power grab
which separates the wheat
from the chaff in its own
peculiar language.
It is time my friends to inspire the future.
[2000, Washington, DC ]
now as we groan without irony,
asking bright future,
where is thy promise? Sinister factors
threaten with extinction the entire global nest
as proud terrors of control
and fickle poisons of chaos
are unleashed
to give us all a taste of the wicked ruins.
ALL nations and ALL peoples
must recognize and name
this ever-pursuing power grab
which separates the wheat
from the chaff in its own
peculiar language.
It is time my friends to inspire the future.
[2000, Washington, DC ]
Friday, August 17, 2007
CHARLES BUKOWSKI WHERE IT COUNTS
[To the Editors of The L.A. Free Press]
November 15,1974
Hello editors:
Regarding the Lynne Bronstein letter of Nov. 15 about my story of Nov. one:
1. The story was about pretentiousness in art. The fact that the pretender had female organs had nothing to do with the story in total. That any female made to look unfavorable in a story must be construed as a denunciation of the female as female is just so much guava. The right of the creator to depict characters any way he must remains inviolate—whether those characters are female, black, brown, Indian, Chicano, white, male, Communist, homosexual, Republican, peg-legged, mongolian and/or ?
2. The story was a take-off on an interview with an established female poet in a recent issue of Poetry Now. Since I have been interviewed for a future issue of the same journal and for future editions of Creem and Rolling Stone, my detractors will get their chance to see how I hold or fail under similar conditions.
3. When the narrator lets us know that he has Janice Altrice's legs in mind might infer more that he is bored with the poetry game, and also might infer that he could have a poolhall, dirty joke mind, at times. That the narrator might be attacking himself instead of trying to relegate the lady back to a "sex object" evidently is beyond the belief of some so-called Liberated women. Whether we like it or not, sex and thoughts of sex do occur to many of us (male and female) at odd and unlikely times. I rather like it.
4. That "she is indeed speaking for Bukowski himself, who has expressed a similar contempt for unknown poets who give each other support." The lady spoke for herself. Her "contempt" was toward poets not academically trained. My dislike is toward all bad poetry and toward all bad poets who write it badly—which is most of them. I have always been disgusted with the falsity and dreariness not only of contemporary poetry but of the poetry of the centuries—and this feeling was with me before I got published, while I was attempting to get published, and it remains with me now even as I pay the rent with poesy. What kept me writing was not that I was so good but that that whole damned gang was so bad--when they had to be compared to the vitality and originality that was occurring in the other art forms. As to those who must gather together to give port, I am one with Ibsen: "the strongest me alone."
5. "Now that he's well-known and the only California poet published by Black Sparrow Press, he thinks that nobody else is entitled to be a poet—especially women, My dear lady: you are entitled to be whatever you can be; if you can leap twenty feet straight up into the air or sweep a 9 race card at Western harness meet, please go ahead and do so.
6. "A lot of us think there's more to write poetry about than beer, drunks, hemorrhoids, and how rotten the world is." I also think there's more to write poetry about than that and I do so.
7. "Female artists, on the other hand, try to be optimistic." The function of the artist is not to create optimism but to create art—which sometimes may be optimistic and sometimes can't be. The female is bred to be more optimistic than the male because of a function she has not entirely escaped as yet, the bearing of the child. After passing through pregancy and childbirth, to call life a lie is much more difficult.
8. "Could it be that the male is 'washed-up' as an artist, that he has no more to say except in his jealousy, to spit on the young idealists and the newly freed voices of women?" Are these the thought concepts you come up with in your "ego-boosting" sessions? Perhaps you'd better take a night off.
9. "Poetry is an art form. Like all art it is subjective and it does not have sex organs." I don't know about your poems, Lynne, but mine have cock and balls, eat chili peppers and walnuts, sing in the bathtub, cuss, fart, scream, stink, smell good, hate mosquitoes, ride taxicabs, have nightmares and love affairs, all that.
10. "... without being negative ..." I thought they'd ridden this horse to death; it's the oldest of the oldest hats. I first heard it around the English departments of LA highschool in 1937. The inference, when you call somebody "negative" is that you completely remove them from the sphere because he or she has no basic understanding of life forces and meanings. I wouldn't be caught using that term while drunk on a bus to Shreveport.
11. I don't care for Longfellow or McKuen either, although they both possess (possessed) male organs. One of the best writers I knew of was Carson McCullers and she had a female name. If my girlfriend's dog could write a good poem or a decent novel I'd be the first to congratulate the beast. That's LIBERATED!
12. Shit, I ought to get paid for this.
Charles Bukowski
November 15,1974
Hello editors:
Regarding the Lynne Bronstein letter of Nov. 15 about my story of Nov. one:
1. The story was about pretentiousness in art. The fact that the pretender had female organs had nothing to do with the story in total. That any female made to look unfavorable in a story must be construed as a denunciation of the female as female is just so much guava. The right of the creator to depict characters any way he must remains inviolate—whether those characters are female, black, brown, Indian, Chicano, white, male, Communist, homosexual, Republican, peg-legged, mongolian and/or ?
2. The story was a take-off on an interview with an established female poet in a recent issue of Poetry Now. Since I have been interviewed for a future issue of the same journal and for future editions of Creem and Rolling Stone, my detractors will get their chance to see how I hold or fail under similar conditions.
3. When the narrator lets us know that he has Janice Altrice's legs in mind might infer more that he is bored with the poetry game, and also might infer that he could have a poolhall, dirty joke mind, at times. That the narrator might be attacking himself instead of trying to relegate the lady back to a "sex object" evidently is beyond the belief of some so-called Liberated women. Whether we like it or not, sex and thoughts of sex do occur to many of us (male and female) at odd and unlikely times. I rather like it.
4. That "she is indeed speaking for Bukowski himself, who has expressed a similar contempt for unknown poets who give each other support." The lady spoke for herself. Her "contempt" was toward poets not academically trained. My dislike is toward all bad poetry and toward all bad poets who write it badly—which is most of them. I have always been disgusted with the falsity and dreariness not only of contemporary poetry but of the poetry of the centuries—and this feeling was with me before I got published, while I was attempting to get published, and it remains with me now even as I pay the rent with poesy. What kept me writing was not that I was so good but that that whole damned gang was so bad--when they had to be compared to the vitality and originality that was occurring in the other art forms. As to those who must gather together to give port, I am one with Ibsen: "the strongest me alone."
5. "Now that he's well-known and the only California poet published by Black Sparrow Press, he thinks that nobody else is entitled to be a poet—especially women, My dear lady: you are entitled to be whatever you can be; if you can leap twenty feet straight up into the air or sweep a 9 race card at Western harness meet, please go ahead and do so.
6. "A lot of us think there's more to write poetry about than beer, drunks, hemorrhoids, and how rotten the world is." I also think there's more to write poetry about than that and I do so.
7. "Female artists, on the other hand, try to be optimistic." The function of the artist is not to create optimism but to create art—which sometimes may be optimistic and sometimes can't be. The female is bred to be more optimistic than the male because of a function she has not entirely escaped as yet, the bearing of the child. After passing through pregancy and childbirth, to call life a lie is much more difficult.
8. "Could it be that the male is 'washed-up' as an artist, that he has no more to say except in his jealousy, to spit on the young idealists and the newly freed voices of women?" Are these the thought concepts you come up with in your "ego-boosting" sessions? Perhaps you'd better take a night off.
9. "Poetry is an art form. Like all art it is subjective and it does not have sex organs." I don't know about your poems, Lynne, but mine have cock and balls, eat chili peppers and walnuts, sing in the bathtub, cuss, fart, scream, stink, smell good, hate mosquitoes, ride taxicabs, have nightmares and love affairs, all that.
10. "... without being negative ..." I thought they'd ridden this horse to death; it's the oldest of the oldest hats. I first heard it around the English departments of LA highschool in 1937. The inference, when you call somebody "negative" is that you completely remove them from the sphere because he or she has no basic understanding of life forces and meanings. I wouldn't be caught using that term while drunk on a bus to Shreveport.
11. I don't care for Longfellow or McKuen either, although they both possess (possessed) male organs. One of the best writers I knew of was Carson McCullers and she had a female name. If my girlfriend's dog could write a good poem or a decent novel I'd be the first to congratulate the beast. That's LIBERATED!
12. Shit, I ought to get paid for this.
Charles Bukowski
Saturday, August 11, 2007
POWER RETURN
Rimbaud has received me,
and I rock his drunken boat. A fever
frothing both his mouth and mine,
each glitter phosphorous, sublime
kamikaze believer.
His archipelagos
in the stars
now wet with perspiration of dry
summer sucking stones,
open woes.
He welcomes me in my madness,
assures me I am nothing but
sheer speechless vision,
pale flier of raw bone.
“The poet
makes himself seer by a long
prodigious and rational disordering
of the senses. Every form of love,
of suffering, of madness, he searches
himself, he consumes all the poisons
within him, keeping only
their quintessences!”
I nod gently on this wine,
chewing on the tettered ends
his long-snapped kept bargeline
reveals, aged like finer cheese,
mankind's more
pretentious
pleas.
[ 1984, Washington, DC ]
and I rock his drunken boat. A fever
frothing both his mouth and mine,
each glitter phosphorous, sublime
kamikaze believer.
His archipelagos
in the stars
now wet with perspiration of dry
summer sucking stones,
open woes.
He welcomes me in my madness,
assures me I am nothing but
sheer speechless vision,
pale flier of raw bone.
“The poet
makes himself seer by a long
prodigious and rational disordering
of the senses. Every form of love,
of suffering, of madness, he searches
himself, he consumes all the poisons
within him, keeping only
their quintessences!”
I nod gently on this wine,
chewing on the tettered ends
his long-snapped kept bargeline
reveals, aged like finer cheese,
mankind's more
pretentious
pleas.
[ 1984, Washington, DC ]
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
DRUNK INSIDE ATLANTA WITH THE DC OOZE AGAIN
Originally composed on December 5, 1995
So lutely! Graet shakes! Cringe past losses. Mix the matcher air with maels minutely charmed. I repented I'd recognize the fare, pull my socks together & organize the counting crusader's crude anatomically correct fair, take spat with the common, just adopt a sudden stare, blanket all wing water wares chosen to imitate, become themselves, codify the cruxifictionaries, ban the bottomless pits, withstand the bottomless bums, accept the unacceptable, bargain the table and the blossoms, the boss ums, and the quiet rose from the dead characters copywritten by fools not knowing or knotting the difference BE tween fingers and the spare tools time imagines we never corrupt but take for granted. PX.
There were times when eyes wrote the words.
Thinking chains link to something.
Trying this more than that.
Possibly 5.
Icongot.
NX.
$$$
$$$
$$$
$$$
$$$
$$$
$$$
By the way, does it upset the crumb to be the rest beyond the sum of the best?
To spell the name of GOD I had to accept the limitations of a glass of water.
To break those laws into twos I had to divide by the examples of U & O.
Slurfish I awoke dry between the quips thinking of a taylor maid.
She shined my buckles tho I aimed no boots infallibly struck.
Punctuation a false idolicular beamed the mad yeast coy.
Besides the oh river yesterday swam lewd as a vine.
Asking rather questions like fame or rich I fled.
Spooked in zero the twelve remembered.
Fast idea idiots often cheat degrees.
Placer beckons discontinental nix.
Favors quickened glances set.
If riders studied road aims.
Fish duties knowing.
Marry Ots irons.
Staking fund mentals.
Allotted only so much sheetwise.
Pregnant she thought Oi.
Defiance sailed with.
Tweaking imaginary.
Numbers felt up.
Not friend oh mine.
Savor seconds as much if.
Thirds became her basement.
Personality quotas drilled a scissor.
Expecting noise routinely for harried.
Isles nor ailes he scoffed seasonally.
Never snit much qualify marched.
Mess ages fail to intrigue conned.
Con stages bewhipped battered.
Better buttered clip-ons scale.
But even legs give lessons.
Tired beyond complaint.
Textures corpus fully grasped.
Addition ally spiked without irony.
Failure to communicate points rung up.
B4 seven measures of implementation charged.
Samantha combed back tresses nooooooo window could sail.
Without obedience even floods forget purposes exist but for Aunt Sue coins.
Commons needs inspired common diseases furled beyond evidential true serum therapy.
Every node west of the north pole and west of the south intracted sake begotten ID.
Orthographic dispensers the grape shrew goddess unveiled to wails of admiring me.
So lutely! Graet shakes! Cringe past losses. Mix the matcher air with maels minutely charmed. I repented I'd recognize the fare, pull my socks together & organize the counting crusader's crude anatomically correct fair, take spat with the common, just adopt a sudden stare, blanket all wing water wares chosen to imitate, become themselves, codify the cruxifictionaries, ban the bottomless pits, withstand the bottomless bums, accept the unacceptable, bargain the table and the blossoms, the boss ums, and the quiet rose from the dead characters copywritten by fools not knowing or knotting the difference BE tween fingers and the spare tools time imagines we never corrupt but take for granted. PX.
There were times when eyes wrote the words.
Thinking chains link to something.
Trying this more than that.
Possibly 5.
Icongot.
NX.
$$$
$$$
$$$
$$$
$$$
$$$
$$$
By the way, does it upset the crumb to be the rest beyond the sum of the best?
To spell the name of GOD I had to accept the limitations of a glass of water.
To break those laws into twos I had to divide by the examples of U & O.
Slurfish I awoke dry between the quips thinking of a taylor maid.
She shined my buckles tho I aimed no boots infallibly struck.
Punctuation a false idolicular beamed the mad yeast coy.
Besides the oh river yesterday swam lewd as a vine.
Asking rather questions like fame or rich I fled.
Spooked in zero the twelve remembered.
Fast idea idiots often cheat degrees.
Placer beckons discontinental nix.
Favors quickened glances set.
If riders studied road aims.
Fish duties knowing.
Marry Ots irons.
Staking fund mentals.
Allotted only so much sheetwise.
Pregnant she thought Oi.
Defiance sailed with.
Tweaking imaginary.
Numbers felt up.
Not friend oh mine.
Savor seconds as much if.
Thirds became her basement.
Personality quotas drilled a scissor.
Expecting noise routinely for harried.
Isles nor ailes he scoffed seasonally.
Never snit much qualify marched.
Mess ages fail to intrigue conned.
Con stages bewhipped battered.
Better buttered clip-ons scale.
But even legs give lessons.
Tired beyond complaint.
Textures corpus fully grasped.
Addition ally spiked without irony.
Failure to communicate points rung up.
B4 seven measures of implementation charged.
Samantha combed back tresses nooooooo window could sail.
Without obedience even floods forget purposes exist but for Aunt Sue coins.
Commons needs inspired common diseases furled beyond evidential true serum therapy.
Every node west of the north pole and west of the south intracted sake begotten ID.
Orthographic dispensers the grape shrew goddess unveiled to wails of admiring me.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
DIED IN MY MOUTH
A silent tongue unravels the strangling noose,
Its path, unheralded by truce.
Odd scratched and scribbled graffitti,
Peacemaking my splintered head,
Ballets in dizzy nymph
Arousing the needy.
A parlor hunger, birds unfed.
My mind, a blank page.
My head leaps as a small frog,
There is no comfort.
The nothingness crowd is quoted no more,
Altared but undevoted they pay by nod.
My mind, a cluttered page.
My head sleeps as a burnt ephemeral log,
There is no comfort.
(Yet told around gracious Sin Avenue
camp fires spotting downtown Machinery Row
to the lilies laughing over a fine glass
of the best Napolean brandy
noonday dollars never doubt
where sheer distance is divided by
voteless cog, the mist of democracy
is seen reflecting upon our names
an appointed fog grazing upon
the tracks of method....)
And the saint thus
Spoke scantily to the prophet:
"He who demoralizes another
"Can claim no morality for himself."
To this the prophet said nothing, but
He knew in part the saint
For a shanty fool.
(And the unfed,
Left to perish among
The unwelcome, left to ravish
The beauty of beast, and the beast
Of beauty, established
Many fine logics.)
I fell blank at such a formula—
Asses built on caged numbers observed,
Deserved and dirty word reserved
For quaint molecules and family,
Where my occupation is a gift to anyone
Stroking along fishy fables,
Mentality tables, cradled
Images, daisies, nightsies,
Keepsies.
I am the yellow sheep
I can’t earn my keep
Proving the fallibility of this text
World without maps
World without worldliness
Matterhorn
My mind, an accurate page.
My head keeps to its own symbol,
There is no comfort.
I wonder what proof died in my mouth.
[1980, Corpus Christi, TX ]
Its path, unheralded by truce.
Odd scratched and scribbled graffitti,
Peacemaking my splintered head,
Ballets in dizzy nymph
Arousing the needy.
A parlor hunger, birds unfed.
My mind, a blank page.
My head leaps as a small frog,
There is no comfort.
The nothingness crowd is quoted no more,
Altared but undevoted they pay by nod.
My mind, a cluttered page.
My head sleeps as a burnt ephemeral log,
There is no comfort.
(Yet told around gracious Sin Avenue
camp fires spotting downtown Machinery Row
to the lilies laughing over a fine glass
of the best Napolean brandy
noonday dollars never doubt
where sheer distance is divided by
voteless cog, the mist of democracy
is seen reflecting upon our names
an appointed fog grazing upon
the tracks of method....)
And the saint thus
Spoke scantily to the prophet:
"He who demoralizes another
"Can claim no morality for himself."
To this the prophet said nothing, but
He knew in part the saint
For a shanty fool.
(And the unfed,
Left to perish among
The unwelcome, left to ravish
The beauty of beast, and the beast
Of beauty, established
Many fine logics.)
I fell blank at such a formula—
Asses built on caged numbers observed,
Deserved and dirty word reserved
For quaint molecules and family,
Where my occupation is a gift to anyone
Stroking along fishy fables,
Mentality tables, cradled
Images, daisies, nightsies,
Keepsies.
I am the yellow sheep
I can’t earn my keep
Proving the fallibility of this text
World without maps
World without worldliness
Matterhorn
My mind, an accurate page.
My head keeps to its own symbol,
There is no comfort.
I wonder what proof died in my mouth.
[1980, Corpus Christi, TX ]
Monday, July 16, 2007
NICKEL
Nickel
I am in disgrace, imposed
Strictly between the lines hunger drew,
Composed of
I had it! I had it!
But a poor speaker gone near-public
With a whetted conscience of mayonnaise
And economic morality gone sour,
I jerk off into another memory, sifting
My self-rising hour, shifting on my feet
Like an entrepreneur trading promises,
Looking to the burning bush for better days.
I've been swallowed by that whale,
Caught in the drift of a dedicated urge.
I had it, I'll borrow to
Replace it in one revolution or two.
Yes indeed! I had it to give it
Its proper massage at face value,
To grease the palm tree with coconuts
Or oil spilt during an afternoon's taboo.
If'n you are polite, say
You are void of impulse, and
Let it go at that, say no thanks
But I have to go. (Periodically
Perjury is a motive known
To the best of legends.)
I had it, almost.
Language, your honor,
Is mere alphabet dirt. Abandonment is energy
Too sharp to touch without furor,
But say, haul it in,
Taste beyond contentment
The release
Doing its own work,
And other mad values captioned in crime.
Strapped to thyself against the deck, say
Blow, say blow bay blow, say
Grab up cane and tame the vicious dog.
Know that fear's elect echoes no chorus
But somehow somewhere sometimes forgets
To clothe itself with dignity befitting
Its call, say howl Allen Ginsberg
If you chance meeting him
In occupied territory
Where gods wrestle and speak, say
Speak to us in whale. And to the last word
Nymphomaniacs and their guessing captors,
Legging margins across the dispassionate land, say
Hey button those blouses open to angry remarks
Ruthless enough to Naomi, say
Juggle yesterday's summer
Until parenthetical dawn, say
Nothing to Walt Whitman,
Ezra say Pound, the captain of swans,
Willie Mays say hey Neil Young, say
My…my…my…nothing
To the brash Elvis, research impulsive,
Or Johnny Rotten in the heat
Of awkward citizenship.
And Mother Alibi, say the key to happiness
Won't open the door
Where implication and silence
Are only as good
As each word implies,
Say, how is it every time I pray
I feel like deodorized vomit, say
Souls grow on bones but die beneath
Banker's hours, say
Tell us your name whale, and
We'll make you a star, casting
Matches like chorus lines
Between government issues, say
Where do we hang our hammock, say
Hope a man will cut his hair
Simply to punctuate a sentence, or
Fix his neighbor a cheese sandwich, say
To Delilah Mae Jones,
Samson is dead. Say, but
There has come another greater than he, say
Welcome y'all, say crab canons are delicious
Ways of life, say whales of America
Are a sign to insurance agents.
If'n you are angrily plundered, say
Do not be tricked by men, say
But let them trick you, sampling
Their techniques
So that you are never sent to the orchards
To gather unbias pickles, say
Pairs of excuses are unexplainable
To a whale who is strictly vegetarian
For reasons only the father knows, say
Midnight cravings innocently coded
In hollow rhetoric
Are useless to the slayers of
Civil disobedience, say
Navel oranges tapered to grip expense
Sit down, roll around, gnaw bones, shape knees,
And remind us that chaos is culture, say
Practice what you preach, say
Silence. I am in disgrace, almost.
[ 1982, Atlanta, GA ]
I am in disgrace, imposed
Strictly between the lines hunger drew,
Composed of
I had it! I had it!
But a poor speaker gone near-public
With a whetted conscience of mayonnaise
And economic morality gone sour,
I jerk off into another memory, sifting
My self-rising hour, shifting on my feet
Like an entrepreneur trading promises,
Looking to the burning bush for better days.
I've been swallowed by that whale,
Caught in the drift of a dedicated urge.
I had it, I'll borrow to
Replace it in one revolution or two.
Yes indeed! I had it to give it
Its proper massage at face value,
To grease the palm tree with coconuts
Or oil spilt during an afternoon's taboo.
If'n you are polite, say
You are void of impulse, and
Let it go at that, say no thanks
But I have to go. (Periodically
Perjury is a motive known
To the best of legends.)
I had it, almost.
Language, your honor,
Is mere alphabet dirt. Abandonment is energy
Too sharp to touch without furor,
But say, haul it in,
Taste beyond contentment
The release
Doing its own work,
And other mad values captioned in crime.
Strapped to thyself against the deck, say
Blow, say blow bay blow, say
Grab up cane and tame the vicious dog.
Know that fear's elect echoes no chorus
But somehow somewhere sometimes forgets
To clothe itself with dignity befitting
Its call, say howl Allen Ginsberg
If you chance meeting him
In occupied territory
Where gods wrestle and speak, say
Speak to us in whale. And to the last word
Nymphomaniacs and their guessing captors,
Legging margins across the dispassionate land, say
Hey button those blouses open to angry remarks
Ruthless enough to Naomi, say
Juggle yesterday's summer
Until parenthetical dawn, say
Nothing to Walt Whitman,
Ezra say Pound, the captain of swans,
Willie Mays say hey Neil Young, say
My…my…my…nothing
To the brash Elvis, research impulsive,
Or Johnny Rotten in the heat
Of awkward citizenship.
And Mother Alibi, say the key to happiness
Won't open the door
Where implication and silence
Are only as good
As each word implies,
Say, how is it every time I pray
I feel like deodorized vomit, say
Souls grow on bones but die beneath
Banker's hours, say
Tell us your name whale, and
We'll make you a star, casting
Matches like chorus lines
Between government issues, say
Where do we hang our hammock, say
Hope a man will cut his hair
Simply to punctuate a sentence, or
Fix his neighbor a cheese sandwich, say
To Delilah Mae Jones,
Samson is dead. Say, but
There has come another greater than he, say
Welcome y'all, say crab canons are delicious
Ways of life, say whales of America
Are a sign to insurance agents.
If'n you are angrily plundered, say
Do not be tricked by men, say
But let them trick you, sampling
Their techniques
So that you are never sent to the orchards
To gather unbias pickles, say
Pairs of excuses are unexplainable
To a whale who is strictly vegetarian
For reasons only the father knows, say
Midnight cravings innocently coded
In hollow rhetoric
Are useless to the slayers of
Civil disobedience, say
Navel oranges tapered to grip expense
Sit down, roll around, gnaw bones, shape knees,
And remind us that chaos is culture, say
Practice what you preach, say
Silence. I am in disgrace, almost.
[ 1982, Atlanta, GA ]
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
WIPE THOSE FEET
Each American city evaporating
into the clean cool dusk
experience sends tapping nervous patients
on suspicious knees, devoid of grassy knolls,
brokering unabridged entropy, fixated
on last hope expense checks electronically mailed,
and yet without fair warning.
We laugh out of sheer geometry,
absorbed in a crackling worth, our capacity
for sweet shock stilled for camera shots
and misfitted shoes of fortune gaping a t the naked
grizzled flesh, shoving it across in public
bodies of water and wine and mud...
We drop our coin
into each inverting slot,
pulling a bag behind the bushes,
a bag actively malevolent, still cruising
our crusted minds like a decade
we forgot to peel.
into the clean cool dusk
experience sends tapping nervous patients
on suspicious knees, devoid of grassy knolls,
brokering unabridged entropy, fixated
on last hope expense checks electronically mailed,
and yet without fair warning.
We laugh out of sheer geometry,
absorbed in a crackling worth, our capacity
for sweet shock stilled for camera shots
and misfitted shoes of fortune gaping a t the naked
grizzled flesh, shoving it across in public
bodies of water and wine and mud...
We drop our coin
into each inverting slot,
pulling a bag behind the bushes,
a bag actively malevolent, still cruising
our crusted minds like a decade
we forgot to peel.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
WORKING TOWARD COLLAPSE
Originally posted on October 3, 1996
As I think so I do. What is THAT all about?
But on a more gripping note, why is it that THE VERY things we think only take us so far, torment us til our dying breath, while the rest is up to the fist or the finger, the tongue or the trigger?
Should an idea take root in infertile soil, is this a miracle or hard work with emphasis on the idea? Is any soil truly infertile, but only to its inverse proportion that it is soil and not something closer to another idea? Dirt unlike men evolve optimum relationships to nature. Maybeeeee I am wrong about men. Define irony.
If when tired I am still inspired, is this a good, bad, or ugly thing?
If uninspired when completely comfortable, what is THIS all about? There are some things a poet puts in his own back pocket. There are others he puts in hers. What is wrong with this picture?
Understanding that one plus one equals two, why does one more make three? One times itself is nothing more than itself, but adding one to itself, we come closer to the relationship of the bumble and the bee. We won't mention birds in this context. I lied, so dub me an epicurean.
Like the good admiral (is this redundant on the face of all things clarified?) I want to know only simple things like who am I and why am I here?
First things being first if I multiply myself do I remain the same? But add myself to myself, do I become two minds?
Is it Wittgensteinian to question the mark at the end of this sentence, which for obvious reasons must remain motionless...
From the Guy Kawasaki file. True or false, he taunts: Managers would rather delegate problems that cannot be solved than empower subordinates to implement solutions that cannot be understood.
He continues: "Pity the poor echidna. Captain Willian Bligh documented this animal's existence on a voyage to Australia in 1793. (This was a trip Bligh and a small number of loyal crewmen had taken after having been "right-sized" from the BOUNTY.) The echidna is an egg-laying anteater that combines reptilian and mammalian characteristics likes its relative the duck-billed platypus.
"Because it exibited reptilian characteristics such as laying eggs, biologists in the early 1880s typecast the echida as primitive—not quite up to the standards of us mammals. These bilogits ignored one minor detail: the echidna has a very large brain for its body size.
"We can surmise that these bilogists cherished their precious theory: reptilian equals primitiveness. This theory was so powerful that it prevented them from seeing an obvious and myth-shattering fact: the echidna's big head. Retrofitting a popular riddle, we might ask, 'Which came first—the brain or the egg?' The answer for biologists in the 1800s was clearly the egg.
Like these biologists, business folk can become prisoners of conventional wisdom, traditional methods, and the holisest of mismangement litanies: 'This is the way things have always been done." My message: Resist the known and defend the unknown. Switching from biology to..."
Mother, if Mom suffices, why do you bother with the other?
There are times I think on purpose and there are times I cannot stop. These two times are congruent. Do the math, screamed the antichrist drunk on uppersmanship. Always a hops man, myself.
Why haven't the feminasties abandoned the word: w-o-m-a-n?
If one figgers a wigger is not a nigger on the trigger why opt for a bigger chigger in the woodpile? Rather rig her routing each rocker along the first stone to sinners as blood is to beer.
Facts are like fantasies. It takes one to know one.
I can't believe I am writing this, but my disbelief is as illogical as yours. The sun sets. The set sums. No wonder the subsets are rioting in the streets.
Like Bob Dylan knows, there are things to behold. But I know the only way to drive the point along a circle is to divide it. It doesn't take much insight to realize this elephant is more than a sum of its parts.
Trumpets. Gold. Now does gold trumpet its appearance like so many fameseekers man has produced, or does it just exist, limplike soft but confined after man grabs it, sprawled across the bed, inert? Gold is like a boring lay.
Laid within a manger, the ultimate manager of fools, Jesus changed his name from Emmanuel, and the world forgot.
Forgetting that time is just another number, age becomes the deciding decoding factor in the youth culture which promises itself the same promises at least a dozen generations before them promised in spades. Has someone sued for enfringement, yet?
Savior of sinners? I think saviors have sinned enough. Sinners haven't saved enough, however.
Language as redemption. I only WISH I could talk like a kitten.
Money buys its own safety, but safety buys nothing money can own. I feel like Ben Franklin, but gawd what a fat twisted turkey he was...
Somebody needs to confront Felicia Rashad on her comments about the computer industry. She made these revolutionary statements on the Derek McGinnety radio chat show on WAMU a couple of weeks ago. I was in the audience. My longstanding pleasure rejecting federal grant monies was rocked by her arguments about art subsidies. It's a discipline thing that keeps on giving, she says, as I parse. Damn, I was indeed moved by her logic. Yet her gall still floors me as she added, and of course the quote marks are bogus as I again paraphrase but only somewhat, "Cutting art funding is racist. The arguments about not enough money are bogus. There is always money for this or that. Computers? What is THAT about?"
Girlfriend, GET a clue. Computers are about the end of time as we know it. What exactly causes a series of word links to race across the finish line of a completed thought? Armageddon brings us closer to both God and the devil.
I love Jack and Jack loves me, but I think this tautology frightens us both to the point of a designated conversational nix. Well, a one-sided event multiplied by itself is still one-sided. Added to itself it becomes a clue doubled over, a mere echo of eggs still in the basket.
Easter is a lovely depravity. Who am I, the egg, or the sperm? Of course I am both. I am a dual nature. Gabriel coagulated on Christmas Day, 1954, was squeezed out on September 26, 1955, nine months and a day later, a sign of the ushering in of the age of rock and roll. Not everybody can say this with a straight face, and mean the same thing, but it follows that Jesus was a Libra, the question of balance, not a Capricorn. Yom Kippur. Life of Atonement. Flocks in the field. The ninety-nine versus the one. Et al.
God what a shit I can be. Jesus was a perfect messiah because he was born for it, that’s all. I am the imperfect. Yes, I was born for it, also.
What can common numbers have in common with uncommon numbers? Do the language dude. And keep a careful eye on the punctuation, dude, or you might miss an opportunity on your way to hilarity.
Fear of flying? Does this mean I am predestined to NOT make the cut on rapture day. And are we sure it won't happen over the six o'clock news, with a LIVE FEED? So maybe it will be rapture night, or as is frequent with biblical a day is equal to a year or an age...
Oh, I guess it's time to stop this Gabriel stuff. Let me know your silence is not indicative of your personal stake in the questions. Or let us gather around the party banner, and forget we ever had this conversation. Remember sofa is couch, purse is pocketbook and Gabriel Thy in a white heat is R......S.......N.......
A star.
GT
As I think so I do. What is THAT all about?
But on a more gripping note, why is it that THE VERY things we think only take us so far, torment us til our dying breath, while the rest is up to the fist or the finger, the tongue or the trigger?
Should an idea take root in infertile soil, is this a miracle or hard work with emphasis on the idea? Is any soil truly infertile, but only to its inverse proportion that it is soil and not something closer to another idea? Dirt unlike men evolve optimum relationships to nature. Maybeeeee I am wrong about men. Define irony.
If when tired I am still inspired, is this a good, bad, or ugly thing?
If uninspired when completely comfortable, what is THIS all about? There are some things a poet puts in his own back pocket. There are others he puts in hers. What is wrong with this picture?
Understanding that one plus one equals two, why does one more make three? One times itself is nothing more than itself, but adding one to itself, we come closer to the relationship of the bumble and the bee. We won't mention birds in this context. I lied, so dub me an epicurean.
Like the good admiral (is this redundant on the face of all things clarified?) I want to know only simple things like who am I and why am I here?
First things being first if I multiply myself do I remain the same? But add myself to myself, do I become two minds?
Is it Wittgensteinian to question the mark at the end of this sentence, which for obvious reasons must remain motionless...
From the Guy Kawasaki file. True or false, he taunts: Managers would rather delegate problems that cannot be solved than empower subordinates to implement solutions that cannot be understood.
He continues: "Pity the poor echidna. Captain Willian Bligh documented this animal's existence on a voyage to Australia in 1793. (This was a trip Bligh and a small number of loyal crewmen had taken after having been "right-sized" from the BOUNTY.) The echidna is an egg-laying anteater that combines reptilian and mammalian characteristics likes its relative the duck-billed platypus.
"Because it exibited reptilian characteristics such as laying eggs, biologists in the early 1880s typecast the echida as primitive—not quite up to the standards of us mammals. These bilogits ignored one minor detail: the echidna has a very large brain for its body size.
"We can surmise that these bilogists cherished their precious theory: reptilian equals primitiveness. This theory was so powerful that it prevented them from seeing an obvious and myth-shattering fact: the echidna's big head. Retrofitting a popular riddle, we might ask, 'Which came first—the brain or the egg?' The answer for biologists in the 1800s was clearly the egg.
Like these biologists, business folk can become prisoners of conventional wisdom, traditional methods, and the holisest of mismangement litanies: 'This is the way things have always been done." My message: Resist the known and defend the unknown. Switching from biology to..."
Mother, if Mom suffices, why do you bother with the other?
There are times I think on purpose and there are times I cannot stop. These two times are congruent. Do the math, screamed the antichrist drunk on uppersmanship. Always a hops man, myself.
Why haven't the feminasties abandoned the word: w-o-m-a-n?
If one figgers a wigger is not a nigger on the trigger why opt for a bigger chigger in the woodpile? Rather rig her routing each rocker along the first stone to sinners as blood is to beer.
Facts are like fantasies. It takes one to know one.
I can't believe I am writing this, but my disbelief is as illogical as yours. The sun sets. The set sums. No wonder the subsets are rioting in the streets.
Like Bob Dylan knows, there are things to behold. But I know the only way to drive the point along a circle is to divide it. It doesn't take much insight to realize this elephant is more than a sum of its parts.
Trumpets. Gold. Now does gold trumpet its appearance like so many fameseekers man has produced, or does it just exist, limplike soft but confined after man grabs it, sprawled across the bed, inert? Gold is like a boring lay.
Laid within a manger, the ultimate manager of fools, Jesus changed his name from Emmanuel, and the world forgot.
Forgetting that time is just another number, age becomes the deciding decoding factor in the youth culture which promises itself the same promises at least a dozen generations before them promised in spades. Has someone sued for enfringement, yet?
Savior of sinners? I think saviors have sinned enough. Sinners haven't saved enough, however.
Language as redemption. I only WISH I could talk like a kitten.
Money buys its own safety, but safety buys nothing money can own. I feel like Ben Franklin, but gawd what a fat twisted turkey he was...
Somebody needs to confront Felicia Rashad on her comments about the computer industry. She made these revolutionary statements on the Derek McGinnety radio chat show on WAMU a couple of weeks ago. I was in the audience. My longstanding pleasure rejecting federal grant monies was rocked by her arguments about art subsidies. It's a discipline thing that keeps on giving, she says, as I parse. Damn, I was indeed moved by her logic. Yet her gall still floors me as she added, and of course the quote marks are bogus as I again paraphrase but only somewhat, "Cutting art funding is racist. The arguments about not enough money are bogus. There is always money for this or that. Computers? What is THAT about?"
Girlfriend, GET a clue. Computers are about the end of time as we know it. What exactly causes a series of word links to race across the finish line of a completed thought? Armageddon brings us closer to both God and the devil.
I love Jack and Jack loves me, but I think this tautology frightens us both to the point of a designated conversational nix. Well, a one-sided event multiplied by itself is still one-sided. Added to itself it becomes a clue doubled over, a mere echo of eggs still in the basket.
Easter is a lovely depravity. Who am I, the egg, or the sperm? Of course I am both. I am a dual nature. Gabriel coagulated on Christmas Day, 1954, was squeezed out on September 26, 1955, nine months and a day later, a sign of the ushering in of the age of rock and roll. Not everybody can say this with a straight face, and mean the same thing, but it follows that Jesus was a Libra, the question of balance, not a Capricorn. Yom Kippur. Life of Atonement. Flocks in the field. The ninety-nine versus the one. Et al.
God what a shit I can be. Jesus was a perfect messiah because he was born for it, that’s all. I am the imperfect. Yes, I was born for it, also.
What can common numbers have in common with uncommon numbers? Do the language dude. And keep a careful eye on the punctuation, dude, or you might miss an opportunity on your way to hilarity.
Fear of flying? Does this mean I am predestined to NOT make the cut on rapture day. And are we sure it won't happen over the six o'clock news, with a LIVE FEED? So maybe it will be rapture night, or as is frequent with biblical a day is equal to a year or an age...
Oh, I guess it's time to stop this Gabriel stuff. Let me know your silence is not indicative of your personal stake in the questions. Or let us gather around the party banner, and forget we ever had this conversation. Remember sofa is couch, purse is pocketbook and Gabriel Thy in a white heat is R......S.......N.......
A star.
GT
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
ENTROPY
Some men are pansies and some women are painters. The lion's roar
can be dressed up in colors neither'd recognize.
The paint can in time is exploded by a handsome bullet
with my name on it and a typewriter's glint.
Fame's not a fruit but the lady bug's as beautiful as the core
a nuclear reactionary must in faith never hypothesize.
Nobody hears and nobody's nose, to unquestionably spool it
I'd need to check the past reconfiguring absolutely every hint.
GT - September 1, 1996 - Washington DC
can be dressed up in colors neither'd recognize.
The paint can in time is exploded by a handsome bullet
with my name on it and a typewriter's glint.
Fame's not a fruit but the lady bug's as beautiful as the core
a nuclear reactionary must in faith never hypothesize.
Nobody hears and nobody's nose, to unquestionably spool it
I'd need to check the past reconfiguring absolutely every hint.
GT - September 1, 1996 - Washington DC
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