Peerless

Let us depart from wise-named Peerless, then, and spoil ourselves by the heals of our shoes. There was to be dancing in the pines! And GOD's wounds, that easy! It all had a great deal to do with women, I suppose. Flannel shirts in surprising shades of swamp and bruise. There were bone bracelets and a necklace of beaver-jaw. That easy. We pissed out our wisdom in the sand and dried up like salted snails. Oh, we could have been moist, certainly. Proper mud-men with sleak translucent membranes stretching across our armpits. But we weren't. We were troglodytes and lizard-folk. Gargoyles even, sunglasses shining in the bright. Naked, or mostly naked and breathing with the stones. There was no easy way in or out. That is regrettable, the blame of exiting. Yes, that is regrettable.

Come Autumn

September asks for a good fantasy novel, whatever that means. It asks to be hushed - brought low - and, oh so delicately - it's lips practically grazing your ear - to be paid attention to. These first few tumbling leaves, dry and rigid as the world is flat, scrape crumbling by and September scowls. Read Gardner's Grendel, Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun or even R. Scott Bakker. Read Harry Potter if you have to, or Simic's World Doesn't End. That last may be the best. September cocks it's dusky head and, smirking, agrees. "It is the epoch of the masters of levitation." You shiver, unable to resist the wind's nudging and think, oh, just die already. Turn to brown and slate gray, and cold so that I feel at home again.

Once I took mushrooms, for the second night in a row, at a friends house. The pixelated vines grew right out of Mario Brother's 2, right out of the T.V. and across the almost-smooth wall. Later I slunk threw the dark and snoring to the front door, down a couple flights of thick brown stairs and southwest. I slept in an old graveyard for a while, or I must have, because I had dreams there. Those tumbling leaves where as wide and solid as tectonic plates.

Old noise New

If you had hold of something that was worth a lot; not for its weight or sparkle but Shame-
-Could you justify not selling it out?
If no one's coming for revenge.

Please, thankful for my life and health. My energy and versatile; my hands.

That purple after-image like like cicatrice,
here I prefer the scab-pain to the scar.
A five piece Gospel Band strips breakbeats at the FCC.
And bend.
All knees prefer the Stun to Spin; bow deep. All weight bears shoulder.

Every mouth holds the things It don't have, so the Mouths all Sing.

Cash or

Man yelling about Gabriella. I gotta tell ya, he says. She replies crisply from an answering machine tape. Young, tasteless people spend money on band posters. The trees are green and evergreens stab at grays and browns and almost-blues. Things are - or at least seem - cleaner than usual.

Another draft of another too-long, too-meanderous poem. I listen to too much NPR.

The creation of shadow necessarily undermined the function of limitations.
-the power of deity.
-threaten the gods.
-process is everything.
Midnight believes she is saving people from themselves:


Something like a net of prohibitive energy,
as with any net, there are holes
more limited resources.
words may affect just about anything they can imagine,
only with very limited strength;
the hand ever at their neck.
Dead magic.
An acute and constant entropy;
a more remote and short lived affect every time;
an affect other than what was intended or assumed.
Really, these are just places damaged,
or breaking down in words.


As in a three-day festival,
There is the political discussion, though
it is important to consider who, and under what circumstances.
Silvered ravens.
Rather fucked off by the whole thing.
As one might predict,
ready to fight at a moments notice, which always creates tension, blah, blah.
Has a price.
caw, caw
deadly as all get out and
Dragged along by fond hates
sarcastic enough
a good enough actress
Who else?

It could be the architect
He has holed himself up in his ponder.

Is the presence of ravens a sign they are willing to discuss?
Expressing mostly concerns about trade.
Left needing.
There is a good deal of money to be made in weapons.
A good deal of nothing to be done.
About Boreal loam.



Nothing has changed on this front

A poem composed by blacking out words in a trashy romance/action novel

Filling her cup.
Not that I'm grateful
Should have offered his bed.
Sorry about that
A little drawn.
Why would someone want to skewer you?
What sort of shit
between her hands,
legs curling,
mouth went dry
between her thighs.
...Oh, she was talking again.
She feeds it,
tucks the fucking thing into bed at night.

Another Poem

Sorry
about the seemingly broken
refrigerator.
That is to say,
the succulent cold
in shining pieces
(hardly cinders)
lies
trembling, stupid,
not dangerous.

Allways: a draft

Sweat down neck.
Slick palms.
each step against;
abandoned;
clung to.
A fine dust
somewhere crept.
Tightening the howled
life.
A dog.
Three failed attempts
and he had
a black plastic bag;
a preference against
the wall; an empty
hallway greeted deep,
filthy.
Concrete stretched,
testing the unlocked,
dark paper.

1123 From Omaha

...And his wife was dying. Six days without a shower.

Maybe the one organ left in good condition. To take it.

Rumored Burials*:

1. Three individuals by the name of Boards
2. Two individuals by the name of Page
3. Possibly Phil S. Stein
4. The Sea, an enemy
* per research done by LeMar Ennemi

(They had been talking about donating her liver)

History: - not available

Maps: - not available*

(He must have knocked. Had to have gone inside.)

It was usually held up every week, and occasionally daily.

*Lizards have to carry water bags out here.

Buried in same lot as
(Made the water too hot intentionally. Libation. Cleansing.)

Done swallowed it.

The highway did/was not:

1. Crack and fracture as it rose.
2. Remind me of dry, flaking tree bark.
3. Or scar tissue.
4. Radiate heat.
5. Sweating.
6. Phlegethon.
7. Sleeping.

Buried in same lot as

Hear Pipe

Our poor Pud usually insisted that his name was neither an acronym nor a slang term for penis. There were times of course - playing his old flute, barefoot and shirtless in some alley, the issue having been raised by a stranger - when he would do just the opposite.

The hell kind of name is that?

Stands for Public Unity Development.

What kind of stupid...

And of course, it was back to the flute. His story, gasped through musical phrases that tottered between subdued and moribund, was always approximately the same. Was always given ethereal credence by the subtle grayness of his skin. Scrawny limbs. Salient paunch.

I reckon I's born out one a them yawning gutters. You know the ones. Don't make em like 'at anymore. That metal that turn green with all the rain. Faces, you know. Them new ones is just bars across the gutter, grates. Squared and ugly. Well, them old ones aint like 'at. They was made to be punished, to slurp up all the city's filth and bear it. Now, some 'em will talk to you, you catch 'em in the proper light. That there's how I got to be named this way. They all full of sympathy. Can't help it. So I took up this hear pipe.

Paper

Paper. The dull, dun, dry husk of departed life. Flaked off skin. Ground to dust, to waste, to nearly nothing then sopped and pressed into the most featureless plane possible. A plane on which mendacious accounting's might be made. On which the world will narrow, now framed. An aperture to reign in your volubility.

A Long, Slow Decline

I can not provide a sufficient preface for this anecdote, I just can't. If I did, it would be a novella. In fact it is one - at least in length - though it's scattered and sloppy. My dad is strange and brilliant and frightening. He has been "followed by spirits", great rings of scintillating distortion in the air. He knows a place in the desert, decayed foundations of forgotten structures scattered across the canyon floor, where NOTHING can be heard. No wind, birds, bugs. A silence so absolute it will prickle your skin and you'll have to gulp for air despite yourself. Once we stayed at some abandoned campground. Run down, unused. Dad was gold panning, I was a little kid. My sister, ten years older, grabbed my hand and started to run. To scream. I didn't understand. Still don't. Someone is watching me, she kept saying. Dad didn't buy it. Someone is out there. He looked for a while. I couldn't sleep. Dad was having nightmares. It was them real old indians, you know. Anasazi, Moqi, Fremont and them. They met up in this place, and there was some real rub between 'em. Oh they had all kinds of things. Squash and smoked meat and fish and dumb shit too, like farming tools and stuff to dig with. And that corn god, he was someone real.... like he had... status, you know. Well, his daugter was kidnapped and he was looking for her and thought Kimberly was his little girl. I just remember, that can't be right. Pale skin and blond hair.

Just after dad's birthday I came home through wyoming. Liz noticed that our map listed a profusion of ghost towns so we stopped at one just off the highway. It's a junkyard now. Are there any ghost towns near Clear Creek Canyon, I asked. That's dad's haunt. Yes, she replied... there is one named after your sister.

So I looked it up. Kimberly utah was a hard drinking, whoring town. Had the strongest jail in 12 countys. It was full of murder and whiskey and gold. Untill it fell apart. Here I am, on the internet reading about this place. This place where the grandfather I never knew worked in the mines. Where his brother, Melvin, held the record for staying down in the mines longer than anyone. Here I am. I do another google search. By accident - wild, breathless accident - what comes up besides Kimberly, UT?... Me. Kelton Utah is stuck between the stink of the great salt lake and the government testing grounds in the desert. It used to be full of chinese immigrants. It has the record for being held up more than any town in history. For almost a month it was held up every day. People talk about the money buried in the hills around the place. Outlaws who buried treasure there and were caught or killed before they could collect it. The town? Well it died down when the railroad left. Got smaller. Then, and I am quoting wikipedia here, "Kelton was hit by the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Utah. Great fissures and holes opened in the earth, muddy water gushing from them. Houses and other buildings were severely shaken, and the Kelton schoolhouse was left leaning at such a precarious angle that it had to be abandoned." All that is left is one foundation and a graveyard.


Last thing: three of the four sources in the Wikipedia article are published by Western Epics, a company owned and operated by Sam Weller's books, where I work. I used to be in charge of those books. I shipped them out. Collected checks.

Regulation

imp
lantern
nu-skin
transplant
a ribbed age
communicate
hands free
blue teeth
for free!
been digging
this hole
some time
sky that way
if the pits deep
sky you've known
shrink away
leeward flow
rendered plain
sagging
breathing
blink your eye
the sting
wave an arm
the smoldering
silhouettes
blackened walls
sallow shells
maps of streets
statues
palaces
embers fall
flutter down
bright birds scared
from a darkening
canopy
of smoke formed trees
to die
appreciate their brevity
brief history's written
tautologies opined
inks of hackneyed symbol
blood, ash urine lime
and the obscenity
more stimulating
when confronted
from behind

T/APE

In Mylar there are dark

things

jungles, incest, coffee

unless projected

some white screen, pages

likewise burrowed

pitchy holed speech

as booked

laps drink

the piss

from puncture

wounds

Speech is dumb too it

cannot speak

though slowly

bores as beetles

do when through arboreal

darkness they

boring chew and chew

Duane/Duane

1. Your wounds are nu-skinned and slating flaking; plastic carapace is wondrous and protects us.

1. Duane works twelve hours, drives home, parks the car, and just sits there, just sits there.

2. You are a glorious house of decay.

1. Duane renders rings of ghostly light over dry red deserts and wonders what spirits brought them.

3. Do not crown me, I am too savage.

1. Duane believes the evolution of man, that beast whose shadow is protracted so permissively by the sun, was orchestrated by extra-terrestrials.

4. Your appetites are true, steady, constant.

1. Duane’s daughter is much sought after by some long-dead, befeathered shaman.

5. Let children sleep on the backs of white buffalo.

1. Duane’s grandfather made armor out of wood and killed bears with a knife for money.

Yay!

"As I say, it never ceases to amaze me how gullible some of our Church members are"

- Harold B. Lee, "Admonitions for the Priesthood of God", Ensign, Jan 1973

ESPECIALY IF BY ACCIDENT

And there was a porch. A shiny handrail wrapped in cheap gray rustoleum. A colony of fixies shackled. Must have been a hundred. New handle bars. Fresh spray-paint to cover any lurking insignias. Lime green. Flat black. Bright red tires. Music is for listening. You pay to watch it be pulled out, puked, planted and put together right before your eyes. Pay for it. A service rendered. Meant to affect, but you have to hear it. Have to give its smaller, cumbersome units a chance. It is helpful also not to drink until everyones face becomes the same featureless egg. The concert is not made better by your narration. I promise. Nor are you coherent enough to offer meaningful criticism. Fifteen dollars to drink until your eyes melt and try to find someone who will have sex with you. You could have bought some comic books and a soda. Maybe some gum. A nice little paperback even. A record.

"If you want to make money... start a church"

When someone dies - someone who's name is public knowledge anyway - everyone suddenly cares. Suddenly understands them, knows them, sympathizes. What a tragedy. How did he die? Was it painful? Can we take a picture of the building, for old times sake, you know. Better call the news. They say he "ultimately became a walking historian of Salt Lake City". Not sitting. Walking. But don't all historians walk? I mean, except the few who must use wheelchairs, must be bedridden. Must be dead. Except when they are driving; riding a bicycle; on a flight to London; sleeping. Surely some of them walk in their sleep. The great somnambulist historians of the twentieth century are largely underrated. Something is missing though. A presence, a raucous, tempered humor. The man used to call everyday. I was lucky enough to be on the other end of the line five days a week. At least for a while. Sometimes he would pretend to be someone else. Ask if we sold smut, had dancing girls. Ask if he could pay in Russian war bonds. Once we sold a book for $20,000. Amazing. He already knew about it, I was sure. He had people in the walls. He called and we had conspired to prank him back for once. I gave him the numbers minus the twenty grand. Wait a minute now! That can't be right! Well, I said, we did sell a rare book for a few thousand dollars, but the customer paid in Russian war bonds. He was brimming with anger for about 30 seconds before he started braying and guffawing. He absolutely ate it up. Such honest, incredulous laughter. And I was lucky enough to have brought it up. To have put one over on the master.

A poem constructed from government websites about radiation poisoning.

Welcome America,
were all downwinders now!
This will be a (RECK)
in progress.
Specified exposure,
eligible claiments.
Diseases could improve
exposed persons.
Additional groups
should be covered under
a new process
based on science!
Even in utero
people live hours spent
out of doors
and consumption
of contaminated
milk.
There is a collection
of maps
external and internal
interpolated over very
large areas in
the gastrointestinal tract
and taken up the
unit called gray (see Box 2)
decay that emits.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are
particularly reliable
because of the very large, well
defined population.
Excellent long term doses.

A little song

You asked me, baby how does glue work?
It brings things together, does it operate under
some property of love?
See that's the thing about glue,
it does it's work silently and you should too.
Shut up.

(M)academia

Up to late. Made carrot butter and smoked salmon ravioli with a dill cream sauce for people I would have rather not spent time with. Going to the store? Here, take my credit card. This was Liz. Take it and get some macadamia nuts. That would be great. No, no. We got it. As long as we can use some carrots and maybe a pepper. We got it. Then later. We only had enough to get this stuff for you. We just wanted to get a few things for the week. But you wanted this food. Thank god for Dillon. Liz had to soak them in a little longer. On the porch. Sucking up cancer. Cigarettes are like food. Food and car accidents. They bring people together so they stand or sit around in unlikely groups. Gawk. Complain. I can ignore anything with enough whiskey. For the record, Ummagumma is a decent record. I think Careful with that Axe Eugene is on it. Hell of a track. I'll take Diamanda's banshee-in-heat screech and gurgle over Louis' scatting any day. Music is not worth arguing about. Liz is still asleep in bed. I wish I was. Not asleep. Just with her. I miss talking about James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Even if they turn people into pretentious weasels. Dry casques of departed locusts.

Downwind

They waited until the winds were favorable. Favorable meaning they blew, as they most always did, eastward. Out of the big empty Nevada testing grounds toward vague little watermark towns, shepherds who would find their flocks, lips melting off from radioactive grass, in shambles, into the west desert, down into mine shafts like slow protruding tongues. Kid died of something. Had to be something. Only one in his philistine family with any sense. Capable too. Hard worker. Just fell apart at the seems. First he developed seems, then they split, more like it.

a poem

It had a good deal to do with fashion: shaved chests and bluntish pendants nestled there in the vaginal pockets of half-buttoned shirts, swanky hats, an absence of keys. And their kingdoms disappeared.

When Making an Axe Handle

Beer for the gut lurch
taller shadows
changable enemies
untill the distance blurred
we pinned our shadows to mirrors
fairly smirking in slanted light
I need to know why we are laughing
whose there to catch us when we fall?
I'll unpin and pull the shadow
across the cracks along the wall
bathe in the stuff
drink it in
come to love
we drowned ourselves in rotten blood

I used to have dreams in which I clung to fistfulls of salt - left fistfulls - as though my life depended on it. I conveyed them, the fistfulls, through bleachy Escher-scapes.

.tic

Buddha is reincarnated in Elco, Nevada.

.tic

Christ is reincarnated in Rifle, Colorado.

.sic

Christ is reincarnated in Dinosaur, Colorado.

.tic

They have a Graveyard.

tic.

Here lies Rex.

The Tower of Babel is a metaphor, like gender, only instead of signifying nothing, it signifies alphabet soup. Old Yaweh did'nt scatter peoples. He scattered soup. Made a mess of it. That's why He hasnt smashed the internet. That's why nobody cares about Esperonto.

Precarious Assemblage

The Deification

aspect and symbol

sky-god of

and others like him.

Sure, this is old news.

things of a promethean leap

human image of the cyborg

in the wake

already disassembled and

conscious or not

re-embody her

makes sense in our epoch.

holistic, simultaneous, synthetic,

[while] linear, sequential, reductionist,

great human satisfaction

prosthetic cell phone world

sleek, polished,

gently a feather duster

two shining fingers

Join the people who will free you from housework

public interest, is making statements

of Voices

fragments possess a sales receipt

there is a certain pith;

ruminated and action of extraction XXXicided-detritextual units that, despite being fragments

itself an assemblage

observations of anecdotes about

node or cluster… to the profusion of fragments -process himself

form its body

extracted interlacing is replete with the detritus of history. This succession of archival fragments, this rattle of old men’s voices crashes forth in anaphoric piecemeal

ear for the sea-surge

plenitude of an old man in a low drone beneath the columns of false marble until the voices fairly fuse and the voice itself lifts itself

sentence

sintalks

each fragment a brick. Go To! And burn them thoroughly!

neologisms such as

fused at the hip, though, they do not become nonsense.

mewling and gurgling at a Pentecostal church.

Neither of these

In other words

We might be crowded

can be reconfigured, he

wall of broken to bits and sifting

we might catch a drifts; here a pang of sadness ensconced in the laughter of young, there a brief and accidental illegitimate child of a hundred voices. What the combined and synthesized. Ttexts

system of relationships between latticeworks we may climb through which always in danger of falling.

Slaughter the Clown

The bouncer said he had a dream. I had one too, only mine was not about anything interesting or sad, or even funny. There was a guy in a suit dancing with a vacuum cleaner. He sang a song about making it with a vampire to the tune of "Strangers in the Night".

I used to have dreams about clutching handfuls of salt like my life depended on it. Escher-scapes and toadstool rings. Monsters enough. Flat cities of gray planks set in muck and go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. It was science fiction - my dads social reality and my fiction, if there ever was a distinction. They should have been huts, not boxy brick things. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

People struggle with words, they really do.

Words that made whatever I looked like look like itself where not the words that had in them any quality of description.

The memorable, the important writing of the last few centuries is mostly about NOT communicating. Everything stands for something else. The more degrees of seperation between signified and signifier, the better the work, right? Go to, let us worm toward genius! Maybe old Yaweh was right to scatter us. Maybe thats why no one cares about esperanto.

I should have dreamed about cyborgs. Donna Harraway: And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984'sUS defence budget.

I know a guy who built a laser for some goons to shoot into space. I'm tired and I have to read all of As I Lay Dying by tommorrow morning.

Posthuman

I brought the stone back to our grotto because I liked its stubborn shape - a weary mastodon, belly deep in the river.

The one with long hair wanted to move it and I fought with him. It could be called unreasonable. They don't see it's energy.

The little one with big eyes looks at it too. She brought coal from the fire and made on it the shape of a man. I asked who, and she said it was me. I am the man on the stone and the man regarding the stone. Now I am afraid what will happen if the stone is broken, or my image rubbed off.

Kaboom

Really she was some kind of cow. There is no difference between the carcass of a rich but spent woman in a fur coat and that of an ox, for example. Oh the movie was dreadful, just dreadful. The one that just ended? Don't get smart with me young man. The foreign one? Yes, yes of course. Well, I am sooooo sorry. You did finish the film? Right, unfortunately, half way through is sort of the high water mark for refunds, if you know what I mean. God! That shrillness! To just lose control and shake your jowls over six fifty and some trash that was over your head. It must be cathartic. Oh, that shrillness! I had a migraine once, walking through the desert, squealed like that. Helpless. In war films when the grenade or whatever explodes near the soldier and there it comes, that squeal, that pestulant static that drowns all the other stuff.

Homophonic Translation of "Some Dutch Poem"

Hit water in da fever, we're speed-guilt
In golden hit, lamp licked, war! Duh minister-president, ends it
in da hood, man.
In da fuckin' war, hits hombre! Arangin' blitzed hangin'
Dat whole seen down wit' da hell. I'm givin' crunk.
Hate this prick dat you and me heaved da back vault. Still.
In hit worker, almost him is one hot Russian.
Meen sucka. Mm. Our stage-wind die-door, da vomit wait.
All soft we knock 'em in here, in da dreams stoned end.

Worth Regurgitating

"Burrow, burrow, burrow! theres sky that way too if the pits deep enough."
-William Carlos Williams

A Re-Presentation

To pursue the end (and I have to admit to a desire for recognition) with the mindless throbbing fervor by which the porn addict hunts and hoards his prurient pray. We must, then, address that other, novel organ: the soul. Address, well no, inflame? See it there, swollen with blood and neon, spilling blue and pink light on the squat structures over which it towers. Let us not be mistaken. Dear god no. Not for romantics! There is adequate distance now from Spenserian-monologue poets and anti-Spenserian-monologue-poets and tautologists and slippery entropists. That pulsing neon cock is our papal bul. We are licensed vegas-the-sequal-poets. We are Times Square blue. Someone, shamefully dancing, must parody the parody of a parody that once parodied a re-creation of a famous parody of... To live happily, growing hippo-fat on the pith of the abyss, the mirror house, the tower of infinite regress, the soul! Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy... and all that.

"Without self-expression there is no self. That must be why the victim of an atrocity, no matter how many times well-wishers advise him to "just get over it", returns again and again to the horror."

-William Vollman

A Tautology; A Poem

When your world shrinks, and oh it can, to the condition wherein the most important thing to you, the thing you talk about with such passion as to plant the toes of your shoes squarely on the ground while flexing the muscles in your calf anxiously, moving your heal in sync with your complaints about the "soap-opera(y) qualities of Dexter: Season Two; when the "cuteness", the quaintness (cunt comes from quaint) of these things swells with electricity and the anecdotes that illustrate it cease to to strike you as hopelessly absurd; when your parents three story, five bedroom house breathes like a vigorous meadow, circuited by gently rolling streams, appealing, and their having to downsize fairly seethes tragedy so that your eyes become ping-pong balls and you look even more like a donkey; when your sad, dark eyed friend slurps up your vacuous exuberance with blindly comic desperation; when you see this play across her face and you know what it means and suddenly you want to read a magazine instead, National Geographic, poor people; when you wonder why class distinctions exist at all; why moribund peoples are paraded through the leaves and across vast wire streams but are still ignored, you realize that nothing is trenchant and wonder at your own stupid volubility and cringe at the blindly sententious way you must sound when you talk.

750

I am writing a book. I don't know how many times I have said that, or tried to do it. For some reason, though, I am now willing to argue that I mean it this time.

I don't know how to write a book. I don't have the slightest idea. Does anyone? I haven't seen enough to have a book to write. Or, as a part of me really believes, I have seen enough to feel tired for it, and that is enough. People I know have seen death, and stopped deaths and lived how they wanted to despite the fact that it was impossible and stupid. Not me.

So here I am with a blog. A kind of bloated appendage that I don't know what to do with. If it spurs me to write though, it is useful, right? Why, then, should I not use it as a crutch (I am a coward after all) to keep me hobbling through this book? 750 words today... not good enough.

Ignus Fatuus

Your dry flesh, in its slating, flaking leprosy, is wondrous and it betrays us both.

Duane works 12 hours a day, drives home, parks his car in the driveway and just sits in it, sometimes for hours, before going inside.

You are a glorious house of decay!

Duane compulsively renders images - rings of ghostly light over red deserts - and wonders what spirits, what will, brought them to him.

Do not crown me, I am too savage.

Duane believes that the evolution of man, that beast who's shadow is drawn so permissively by the sun, was interfered with by aliens.

Your appetites are many and constant.

Duane's grandfather made a suit of armor out of wood and slit the throats of bears for money.