from The Blue & Brown Books (or the Second Verse of my Life)
[SIDE-A]
1.
Hell slap it into them. And not without a fury. Right inside
the delicious caption wherein the snail has captured our confidence
as he himself confides to a hedgehog
about his own classified bones, a creature that as he floats mid-
sentence, we sometimes will misidentify if not mistreat,
mistreat like a paper clip bent out of shape or the hovercraft
that, with its projection of blue beams, might as well have taken
one of us up through the central hole of (yes) its toilet.
Yes, they’ll blame it on too much Jim Beam
after handing you a couple orange Tic-Tacs,
while, now, we play another game of paper, rock, scissors,
and try not to confide about those grenades of grim flash-backs,
which still haunt us.
Either way it might have been for five minutes or four hours
when we consider the time for which we didn’t mind the gap,
the gap in which, for four minutes or five hours,
we were taken aboard like two raw appetizers for their ship’s
butcher, baker, and (yes) candlestick maker to distill
what still might drip through the government’s filter
and so land
in your own poisonous cup of tea.
2.
It only takes one to two sips for the message to sink down,
down past the candlestick’s other end and hit
at Descartes’ Brain in the Bottle
as its green stain of glass keeps itself adrift
at the bottom of the sea.
Meanwhile, may we gain all of our strength
while we fast
these weeks of Lent after which we may hope on nailing down
the whereabouts of last year and, particularly,
make sense of that serpent-coiled spring.
That serpent-coiled spring when the whole town of lovely Pinehurst thought
it best to tee off
on my head’s jew-dimpled afro-dome,
which, given their old age, they might have mistook for a golfball.
Regardless, it served them well as a means to project me out
of my sickbed
(and again) by catapult
deliver me splat!–
to land
in the ash-bin
of exile.
3.
O Father to whom I now pray
for how their miraculous fear
still runs, runs like a single
segregated elementary sink,
both hot and cold.
And with such credulous con-
viction for which like K.
from Kafka’s The Castle
I played both joker
and villain
for their trite village
of bullet-proof
glass
and pall smoke.
4.
I tally up the hours of time and w.a.s.t.e.
from my own love affair with idleness
as the scarab-black ink scuttles
like Stephen Dedalus or Gregor Samsa’s
better half
across my mind’s
wine-soaked page.
A page on which time itself now ushers past
and stretches forward
with a certain scientific temperature
that only a tardigrade or moss piglet
might endure. Tardigrada which means “slow steppers”
for their four pairs of legs,
each impaired with sucking claws or discs.
It was former intelligence officer Luis Elizondo who would shed light
upon the large bright ‘Tic Tac’ that like a Frisbee disc,
without any windshield or porthole, any visible wing or empennage,
would fry any attempt from the scramble of F/A-18F fighter jets
sent to track if not wrangle what, even for the USS Princeton‘s
and Super Hornet’s electro-optical scanners, radars, and classified gears
left only another 'stubborn chem-trail’ of unexplained aerial phenomena.
5.
If this is a dream, I haven’t woken up
as, once upon a time, I did after a good-enough stint
of pledging allegiance to some anonymous skulls
and bones for which Elvis Presley is, if not Alien,
an honorary member. If this is a dream, I haven’t woken up,
woken up yet to quote “that there was nothing to save me from the F
that stood, as you may like, not for my grave but the two grades dealt.”
(How much fun.) To keep from moving up with a degree which,
back then, I must have wanted to smear with the mushy dung
of my own bullshit. Nonetheless, that was the year that silently bled
back to the boom of 2006, the year through which you might have watched me like Cosmo Kramer from that sitcom
study abroad and, night after night, episode after episode, trip
with such diligence over cardboard pizza boxes and bottles of gin;
with what was more than a little tar on my heels as now I tug and tug
and (yes) tug one foot, at a time–by and with and at the stuck
lever my own bootstraps, praying for whatever might give.
6.
It was by the blacked-out bootstraps while marching out
from the timber stands of Apache-Sitgreaves Forest
that Travis Walton would find himself trying to add up pieces
for which there was no arithmetic as he walked blindly as Saul
against the few stray head-beam lights. Yes, on the highway
though his nose could still pick up on the lingering stench
left by the clear-plastic mask that–how many times do I have
to say this– an unreliable troop of short, bald, Gollum-like gnomes
had pulled like a pall over his bearded map.
Plus those few men in black fastened with General Patton’s
very own helmet.
After handing the boy a Tic Tac
they’ll blame it all
on too much Jim Beam
even as the blue-to-green afterglow
continues to exhale and radiate
from Walton’s workman’s jacket
with the same brassy phos-
phorescence. The same brassy phosphorescence that first compelled
all six of his crew members to flip back and duck into the single bed
of the truck for which (yes) Walton was Goose.
7.
The goose for which, according to such schemes one sometimes adopts
in mathematics,
‘the man who cries out in pain, or says that he has pain,
doesn’t choose
the mouth which says it. It was for my own scheme to if not duck
then eschew
any conventional plot or storyline
that I derailed on & off the bent-steel switch-back rails to my own (yes) train
of thought, the days and weeks after I first felt
being psychically-drug more than pulled by the vatic leash
of–if not god–what demonic power?
8.
It only took the next dawn before they were blaming 'all this non-sense’
on the orange Tic Tacs that, for over a decade without incident,
I had been taking to combat the many hall-scribbled marks of ADHD.
Nevermind, nevermind, for how even this playful admission plays
into their (yes) Trump-
et of cards for which I now feel quite pinched
between the pages
of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49
where they still might find me ‘sensually fatigued’
and ‘death-wishful.’ Like Metzger muttering
“possession” as the very means
to lock me back in the trey
of some state vending machine
or county icebox.
9.
Always getting ahead when not away
from myself. Still, I want to go back
to the base of Fort Bragg, off the back
road of some American Highway
to where the leaders of our troop
were patched and stationed
to a building that shot up
8 stories below
to first leave
my stomach
in knots
like the first time I paused
to catch my breath
before the fast rope
that snaked down and out the mock-up frame
of a black hawk hauled back from
some desert storm.
Though it felt more the Raven
for how incredibly I shook
myself like Elvis into the alien
two-step of such awful panic.
10.
The muted post-horn, the muted bugle
for which only god might hear
a dog’s blind whistle
I think of saying something like this to Ezra Pound
while leafing through Whitman’s Leaves
of Grass as the Nurse asks me
to recite my ABCs
before I’m given even the thought
of gasping
at the greener grass
that is the blue air outside.
11.
I blink then blink then blink,
harder and harder again
through the pilfered salt
of my tears as they drop
and scuttle past my left cheek bone
like Stephen Dedalus’ stunt double
or Gregor Samsa’s better half.
It was Gogo’s better half who,
among a congregation of turnips,
would hold up a carrot
at which Estragon still idly gnaws
to reiterate his (or was it my own) boredom
with pulling up and putting on
a fresh pair of hospital socks.
12.
As when there’s nothing to say, there’s nothing to see.
I think of Pessoa’s I asked for so little from life
and life denied me even that as I make one last
post on the bugle before so muting its horn for good.
It was the grey horns of a stuffed-ram
that I chewed off with the few sharp-
teething incisors of Mr. Edward Scissor-
hands. It was Edward Scissorhands
directed by Tim Burton–who would fall in love
with Winona Ryder eight years or 10 seconds
after Blade Runner hit box-office. I forget which
room it was that felt more the box office, the room in which
despite my many wails of contra I apparently recovered
after the two months of absence for which I might have filled
out more than one absentee ballot and like some Nintendo plumber
or princess run the pink risk of permanently playing the vermin or victim,
which ever comes first as in South Carolina Biden finally strikes a match
after a celebratory dinner of beans and pork dunked in some cheer-wine sauce, which brings us to no point at all for which we now swerve
given
the curve
ball.
13.
It was after trying, again, your very best to unhinge
my white-gloved hand in a stolid
game of Paper, Rock, Scissors
when I thought it might take a whole pail of white-
wash and then some
to dove-coat over
those brilliantly-
strung together posts
that for two consecutive months I ran up and down for only one burned-
out rail
of Christmas-tree light bulbs.
My statement for playing the national lampoon might still ring
and read something out for truth like “and the whole city blew-
out then it was over the white-picket fence for an incredibly dark age.”
14.
It is somewhere along the outer banks of North Carolina
when an original Dali woodcut
from Dante’s own Divine Comedy, with its woman
in blue next to its man in red,
would wash itself adrift. Adrift like the severed hand
of Divine Mother Mary–and by some strange rote–
land on the winter dock of Nagg’s Head where, in a crate
of potatoes or cabbages, it would pop up. Yes. Pop up
like some Sour-Patch Kid
at a thrift shop’s back-
door and so serve as
the rare thing that
even you might steal
before anyone nips
the bud and cries wolf.
15.
Meanwhile, it’s somewhere off in the Central Pacific Theatre
as we now watch through a Super Hornet pilot’s head camera
and listen for how quietly the pilot swerves at 252 knots
and almost 20,000 feet above the disbelief of our own heads,
as he plays with the switchblade of an AN / ASQ-228 switch
used to toggle and shift his Nintendo Display in and out
of infrared and visual modes.
Notwithstanding that–despite all King David’s Might
which entails all of this classified-government make-up
to add to the pilot’s swollen list of sensory prawns and spark
plugs, the few sprockets and greater gears–the Super Hornet pilot
fails still to lock step with any silver boom or squeamish beam
of light which The New York Post might run still a headline post
as we now may read ‘Blurry, Abominable Tic Tac Kerfuffles Super Hornet’
16.
Just as this hand-carved piece, now, considered a collectible
for how it may have been tagged by DalÍ himself
with aid of one wooden stamp & purple-coloring pencil,
so the scab that runs the size of a scarab beetle,
which, from my left wrist, I now try
to tweeze something out.
It was just beneath my left wrist
where the spud-shaped freckle
would, beneath the skin, first swell
with such an orange ton of wattage
as I soaked in the ketchup of my wounds
and tried to play the Devil’s fiddle
in (yes) my
Washington Height’s studio.
17.
It was in that Washington Heights studio
that like Pozzo
I would enjoy a selfish
kosher snack
of some chicken and wine
before soaking my heels
in some tar and picking up
any bones after having rolled
(yeah) some dice.
It was a pair of hand-carved dice
that along with a few snails
I would toss into a well’s bucket
before picking up where I had left off
in Dante’s own Inferno.
18.
As here we are sometimes misled
by a few substantive ‘objects of thought’
for which the whole town of even Nags Head
will squelch and squawk and (yes) squeak
for some attention the week the substantives
‘Cogito, ergo sum, [as Wittgenstein writes
'toothache,’ ‘table,’ ‘chair,’ and ‘leg’]
first touched down like a zebra-spotted ‘Tic-Tac.’
19.
The mouth that says ‘i’ now becomes the hand,
which Hell-raised, wishes to speak, to speak
on a pain for which, now i point towards nothing
at all. Sometimes when there’s something to see,
there’s nothing to, indubitably, say in place
of the pain that we have been inclined
to forget by dint of the grocer handing us
a few pink slips of paper attached
by blue paper clip, the blue paper clip
which now serves to label the illusion
that there then is nothing to mind
if and when we consider the gap.
20.
I was minding that gap of four hours
or five minutes and running my sight
down the rubber-duck barrel of an M-16
in desperate search to point out
what, queerly enough, cannot be seen.
“When I made my solipsist[ic] statement,
I pointed,” but then was robbed of any point
as the hovercraft pops
like a Pop-Tart
out of a toaster oven
and then to the shape
of a Tic Tac
changes
its clothes.
21.
As for “The Blackbird” I would manage to “Boil the Breakfast Early”
the morning a hawk’s wings
touched down on the rotting beams
of my backyard swing-set that was missing all its swings.
I’m sure there are many ways of saying “turn off the light,”
out in that world of blood and snatters that always works
through lunch, that world where Gallogly only partly holds
a veil to stretch over his foot tracks as he tries again to scale
some cliffside that gives to a patch of waste ground where Alice
provides the cover around a burnt-out heavy-duty tyre
where six, maybe seven, skinheads have [roughly] formed a quorum.
But as for “The Blackbird” I would manage to “Boil
the Breakfast Early” and avoid all collisions.
It was like walking on the head of a drum.
He saw it all as a parable of power, its feeding,
growth and systematic abuse: a loop, a triangle
and trapezoid, thus: we miss another point.
22.
Another point about the hedgehog and the snail
and their weekly kerfuffles about some paperclip
or hovercraft that could turn itself into (yes) an
orange Tic Tac. Once again Eros, like a black smith,
has struck me with his great axe, and has plunged me
into an icy torrent.. Once again Eros looks at me meltingly
from under his dark eyelids and with all his enchantments
flings me to Aphrodite’s inescapable nets.
It was over a few bubbling jets
of rapid-white water
that the Green Hornet pilot
first trained eyes on the oblong craft
before it took off ‘very rapidly’
from approximately 60,000 feet down
to approximately 50 in a matter of seconds.”
23.
It might have only been a matter of seconds
for which the blue cassette tape’s recording
blinks in and out of our focus as we tap our ears
to the wooden desk and listen for a bull to rush
out of some pink brush-
stroked bushes.
It was out of a pink-burning
bush that god
delivered Moses from despair.
‘Now that I’ve turned another corner and spent
another coin lets turn off
the TV.’ Then the message plays on
and plays on like Moses carrying the bones of Joseph.
24.
The Argo, it was a voyage ‘on all men’s tongues.’
The best version comes from the late epic Argonautica
Or was it from Euripedes Medea wherein a cold, dark stall
I tremble, now suddenly worse for my years, at some threshold
like some ‘prize-winning horse’ who is put (yes sir) ‘once again’
in the chariot-yoke. Euripedes Medea was the first to mention
the wooden bows and arrows with which Eros pierces his victims.
25.
Just as with the map of Moses after spending those forty days
and forty nights without a syringed droplet of water or scrap
of bread, my face was radiant when I came back down Grandfather Mountain holding the very map that some craft
of a god left etched in the palm-branched palms of my hands
for which I barely scratched fever as the weeks and days latched
on, as the skin of my face continued to shine like one of Thoth’s
10-cent coins that you place in slot and like a switch turn on Tesla’s coil.
26.
I might have woken up in the home of wild beasts,
somehow already bathed and bedecked
if not ‘decorously draped’ by the Graces’ long
silken robes,
and just as Zeus wields another thunderbolt
and Poseidon his tri-
dented sword at, as Homer calls him,
“the light-bearing Lord
of the Silver Bow.”
It was the ‘Far-shooter,’
that Shining One, Lucifer
Who like Icarus would fall out
the very bottom
of some painting’s impression-
istic sky
and thereupon exemplify
an identification
which (knowing the
shedding skin of himself),
through the years, be-
comes
all the more standard.
27.
When Samuel Beckett started scribbling in french
with a black stamp-pad and purple crayon
for the world(s) of Vladimir and (yes) Estragon,
he never referred to them as tramps,
just some voices for which one,
through seven brush-strokes of grass,
tells the other he should have been a poet.
The only thing that Beckett assures us
‘is that they were wearing bowlers"
when under a leafless dead oak
Estragon sits down numerous times
while Vladimir restlessly dozes.
Though the clothe scraps
that Estragon wears might be
shabby, he appears quite the de-
feated aristocrat or genteel
for how he delivers Vladimir
with the blood-stained maps
of the Holy Lands then finds way
to pin-point why exactly he wishes
to blow himself up like a banana-
boat raft and so float the rest
of his honeymoon out on (yes)
the Dead Sea. 'That Estragon
belongs to a stone’ comes with
very little surprise as it now drops
at our feet.‘ Now as I air out my dogs
after a few sleepless days and nights
of hitchhiking back and forth in a city
of light bulbs and overflowing ash trays.
It was one of those overflowing ash bins
or trays that Beckett was known to oc-
casionally empty as he traced out
the text from French to the English
for which it is scarcely known like
that Estragon belongs to a stone.
28.
The boundless sea boiled terribly 'round
while Cymbals of the Earth crashed
and the brothy curtain of sky trembled
and groaned at the onslaught of (yes) an
orange Tic Tac whose heavy tremors
stretched down to 'gloomy Tartaros,’
with din of the world’s terribly pounding
feet and hard missiles, which–even now,
might reach up to ‘Starry Heaven.’
29.
to elapse, but we know we are no longer same,
and not only know that we are no longer same,
but know in what we are no longer the same,
you wiser but not sadder, and I sadder but not
wiser for how the world with its ‘Daltonic Radar
of visions’ makes us shift the map in our hands
for then another onion and peppermint,
another onion, another peppermint and those
revived prayers for our souls
as we stake out our gigantic beams
and posts
and have another go at blowing up another Carnival
for which you would give not a cent,
being in the know how too many Jokers
will use a hammer and so abuse the pierced hands
of some contestants for which we’ll have to offer
another onion, another peppermint.
Another onion, another peppermint. From this point,
30.
one might go on talking about the price of Tic Tacs
as a deer gallops down the blind stretch of Haywood Ave.,
prancing on and off a sidewalk of dog-walking yoyos
leaving us all quite charmed if not quite flummoxed
at the sudden invasion into (yes) the private
epileptic world in which Gallogly is thrown
another crake of sunlight as Thoreau mutters
“Now comes good sails”
before one final croak
of Moose
followed by (yes) Indian.
And so on to the very dust for which the trails
of our dusters are covered in sand and those
higher strands of chalk for which its another neat
double boot-legged glass of
another genie in the bottle
after which the barman
offers me another Tic Tac
to break any ice
as the Dow plunges
slower than the bloody tit
of the Titanic
another 10 percent.
As I prepared myself
to take the icy plunge
I could hear, someone
among the rows, calling
out for ‘more bleach and toilet paper.’
31.
[HERE WE ARE. WITH YOU TAPPING THE CHARLESTON ON THE DARK SIDE OF, IF NOT THE MOON, THEN GUANTáNAMo’S DARK ZERO BAY WHERE EVEN THE CLOSET’S DUSTBIN AND BROOM ARE KNOWN
TO SNAP THEIR FINGERS IN STEP_OFF SET AS ONE MOVES THE RADIO’s DIAL IN ACCORDANCE WITH NO PLAN (OR SCHEME) FOR WHICH ‘ANOTHER ONION, ANOTHER PEPPERMINT, ANOTHER ORANGE TIC TAC,’
MEANWHILE TWO INTERROGATORS TOSS ANOTHER HORSESHOE AT THE CLOCK’S KILL BOARD AND TAP THEIR FINGERS ON THE PIZZA BOX,
THE PIZZA BOX THAT CONTINUES TO REST JUST BENEATH THE SILVER to RED EXCLAMATION MARK of (YEAH, YEAH, YEAH) THEIR KILL SWITCH ]
32.
It all boils out after the whitewash as even this boils down
to nothing more (yes sir) discernible than the bug in your
phone as it scans out the tap of a few purple patches and
how they might pan out a scent for Dr. Frankenstein’s few
sack cloths of Myrrh, that gum or resin which even now
hangs its su-
spenseful perfume like some medicine
in a thorny
green branch of sapwood. “On being asked what these pictures
have in common, he is to point to a sample
of red, say, if there is a red patch in both, to green if there is
a green patch in both. This shows
you in what different ways the same answer may be used.”
33.
ANOTHER ONION, ANOTHER ORANGE PEPPERMINT OR TIC TAC
ANOTHER ONION, ANOTHER ORANGE PEPPERMINT OR TIC TAC
ANOTHER ONION, ANOTHER ORANGE PEPPERMINT OR TIC TAC
FOR WHICH THE PAGES OF PROJECT BLUE BOOK LEAVE SUCH
A BLANK SLATE OF STARES AS I THUMB THE NEXT PAGE OVER
AND SEARCH FOR A PAPERCLIP THAT EVEN NOW MIGHT LEAVE
ITS MARK OF GHOST PAGES RIPPED FROM THE YELLOW PAGES
OF (YES) THIS VERY BOOK. IF ONE WERE TO FLIP ON THE NIGHTSHADE,
THEY WOULD BE SURPRISED TO FIND ANOTHER SET OF BITE MARKS
IN THE PINEAPPLE. NOT THAT FROM THE HIGH BALCONY FULL OF
CHINGAS AND CREAM-PUFFED MARICONES IT’S NOW FEEDING TIME
AT THE ZOO.
34.
It was at the zoo in the Bronx of New York’s best loved borough
where the New York Post would first run with the story about a Snail
trying its best hand at a game of Paper, Rock, Scissors against
the very Hedgehog we still are more than likely to mistake for an
orange hovercraft that, as it performs its latest chess moves in
yet another Game of Go, again, changes its clothes before dis-
appearing altogether from the Lockheed display of any map.
35.
It was Paul Klee’s grandmother, Frau Frick, who taught him
very early one pink to purple dawn to draw with crayons
something which, even now, in the parrot-light, looks like
a cow’s udder. Deep down one might take this for a fib
as I cast my glances through a gap in Mr. Knott’s garden fence
and spy upon the leaves of a friendly flower by which Watt
may again tell Sam’s tale of the old man and weigh absence
in a scale that is characterized by its hypnotic abuse of repetition.
Another onion. Another peppermint. Another onion. Another peppermint
for which there is only ‘fatigue’ and ‘disgust’ as I begin this umpteenth approach to summit with Sisyphus’ boulder that, yet again, finds another way to run me down like a Bulldozer. It was at base camp where I lit
another cigarette and began to choke for all “these painfully gained experiences” that bear less and less fruit notwithstanding being hit
over the head
with a coconut.
36.
That we belonged to the fat tire of the workshop
that took little company
and so caused such a shaking of heads,
such a shaking of heads in that old church warehouse
in which the roll call for our unheavenly troop
of painters was said to be overflowing
with veteran pilots. What the consequence
will be for going against the rattlesnake’s rattle
as we boil another page from Thomas Paine’s
Common Sense that we might be ‘led by
a thread’ and ‘governed by a reed,’
keeps itself quite unseasonably up
in the air as Benjamin Franklin tugs
on the skinny floss of his kite’s string,
and waits patiently in silent disquiet beneath (yes)
the electric clap and growl of a thunderhead.
37.
One scans for where the next balls of lightning
may strike out another clandestine blimp
for which its black box will be classified and sealed
by four or five tridents.
It was four or five tridents or Navy Seals
who would with the help and detail
of the Army’s own Combative Arms Group
begin to hatch some plan for how to slash
this hedgehog’s sail before like a hovercraft
or Tic Tacked snail it blinks off the read
of our radar
as Trump declares another ‘National Emergency’
over the ‘Corona Virus Pandemic,’ that causes
more than a few Green Hornet pilots to scramble.
38.
I was scrambling up some eggs, like Beckett’s Watt,
‘as just an exercise’
to be carefully studied
as we might
near the end to another chapter where there’s no symbols
where none are intended to be read
for Hieroglyphs from The Book of the Dead
for which I’ve scrolled through the w.a.s.t.e.
of many hours. And in the Duat
with what felt
an entire platoon
of priests.
That a number of these great apocryphal spells and curses
of the thrice-great Thoth
kept rolled in the rw nw prt m hrw‘s papyrus
would cast themselves
out of roll call and so paint themselves on tomb walls
and sarcophagi still has me shaking in (yes) my boots.
39.
The squirrel in the wheel. The fly on the wall
which we would like to cast off the rod’s reel
and into the dead sea on which so much floats
in and out of display as we scan for anything
that might possibly appear (how to put this)
invisible. It was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man–
like the bodiless head you sometimes see
at the circus sideshow surrounded by mirrors
of a dark, reflecting glass–whose intelligent mind
was constantly being 'bumped against by
those of poor vision.’ The very piss-poor, black
and white vision for which you are just another jig-
sawed piece of their sound for anguish as you strike
your fist and begin now with such a flourish to bump
people back, that figure in their nightmares, which
the sleeper tries ‘with all his strength to destroy.’
40.
It is through a wooden picture frame bought at a flea market stall
that we take our seats for an evening at the theater, waiting for God-
ot to blow up, like Marilyn Monroe, the curtain of his skirt
as Vladimir and Estragon skirt around a country road’s pale-blue ditch–
out of which the same segment of dialogue again loops
itself as if to hang its thirsty-rubber neck
around the leafless elm, or was it a Japanese oak,
where it’s expected they’ll spot this Godot,
whose phantom limbs
scratch into so many of our powdered heads–
as during the first of many intermissions,
we stretch the black and white thumb
of our suspicions and so bite down
on another orange Tic Tac
or (yes) peppermint as the only means to kill
the purple onion that hovers and hovers
just below the Gothic harbor of our breath.
41.
It was in my Heaven-sent, Hellfire-proof Tuxedo
and with ash in my brain and blood in my camera’s
technicolor sight that I sat somewhere at the eastern tip
of Washington Heights, in this–my proper hole inside
an Amsterdam basement strung out with approximately
1,369 Christmas lights,
remembering that, like Tesla, ‘I am invisible.’
That Louis Armstrong made poetry
‘out of being invisible’ strengthens my own grasp
to stand at these dark, moon-pocked points
where time leaps ahead of itself like a possessed
deer down the war path of Haywood road
Where at Battle Cat I try not to gasp
through (yes) the chain smoke
as this reindeer hurtles herself
like Rudolph or Prancer over
the taut silver leash
of a golden retriever
and so proceeds
to buck and buckle
on
and off
the side-
walk.
42.
At present, some 192 spells are known,
most beginning
with the ro, which–rolled off the tongue,
can mean “mouth,”
“speech,” “spell,” “utterance,”
“incantation,” or just another “chapter
of a book”
that we find book-
marked with stains from
a few paperclips
marking where a page
or two might have been torn to relinquish what heka
or dark magic had been aimed, through the spit
of some saliva, at controlling the gods themselves
as I scroll down another report that wishes to disclose
the next eyewitness to this latest streak of TicTacs.
43.
Perhaps they’re merely the boats or life rafts
of the gods themselves as we scratch and sniff
at the few blurry images capturing Oumuamua‘s
spear-point or arrowhead as it boomerangs in and out
of this world.
44.
'This trystero dies irae… .’ leaves the line nearly as corrupt,
owing to no clear meaning for the word
unless it be a a pseudo-Italianate variant on triste ( = wretched,
depraved).
45.
I return to my muted TV set,
which now is showing cartoons,
and wait for Maxwell’s Demon’s
high pitched, comedic voice
of gemlike clues to communicate
as he begins to sort molecules
between hot and cold
as the method ‘to make up
for [Oedipa] having lost the direct
epileptic Word, the cry [or ro]
that,’ having something to do
with a post horn, ‘might abolish
the night’ that the whole
world might have
withdrawn into a vacuum
lit by one 10-watt bulb.
46.
When it makes sense to say
“I see this”, or “this is seen”,
pointing to what I see,
it also makes ‘sense’ to say
“I see this”, or “this is seen”,
pointing to something I ‘don’t’
as when Ludwig makes his solipsistic
point of of all this pointing out,
he robs the pointing of its sense
by inseparably connecting
that which points and
that to which it points.
47.
As so suddenly it feels by CERN‘s latest reports
that we all have fallen, and quite headfirst,
through the trap of Lewis Carroll’s Behind the Looking Glass
“like gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone, [and] still as the silence
round about his lair.” When the Scorpion rises, Orion sets
as still Scorpio is in relentless pursuit of his old enemy.
Marking the tip of the scorpion’s tail are λ Sco (Shaula)
and υ Sco (Lesath), whose names both mean “sting.”
Given how they juxtapose, λ Sco and υ Sco
are sometimes referred to as the Cat’s Eyes [wikipedia].
That from time to time its body disappears, leaving only the rabid-
raccoon-like smile of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat as he grins
for the Milky Way’s abundance of (yes) milk and cheese for which
crop circles are rumored to center around three dollops of cream
as (I guess) their offering after sapping the reproductive organs
out from 369 moo cows. Nonetheless, when the county sheriff
arrives at the farmer’s field, he’ll need more than a few Tic Tacs.
48.
'That August didn’t swim.’ ‘Thinking of those legendary sharks.’
Perhaps because in our big top-
heavy overcoats noon here cooks
too hot on the very dung heap
where we sit like Captain James Cook
on a few broken hooks
and rods,
watching as ‘a sacred dung-beetle
does his [home]work,’
moving back through time with his freshly-sculpted Turkish ball
of what looks to be opium tar
and so on towards
an evening that (through the pall
of all this smoke) is quite ‘worthy of all the music.’
49.
YKCOWREBBAJ
sevot yhtils eht dna,gillirb sawT’
ebaw eht ni elbmig dna eryg diD
,sevogorob eht erew ysmim llA
.ebargtuo shtar emom eht dnA
50.
That reading through a black-mirror’s
stain-work of glass looks very pretty
but, like the Jabberwock’s squawk,
is hard to understand,
leaves my head
like a cabin for which
the roof has been taken off
as this tropical storm’s
lazy eye continues to dump buckets
of cats and dogs, lobster and crawl fish.
Like Alice after the rain gives out, I like the walrus best.
As for the regular bee that turns herself
into an elephant, I’ll need another orange pack
of Tic Tacs.
51.
Hell slap it into them. And not without a fury. Right inside
the delicious caption wherein the snail has captured our confidence
as he himself confides to a hedgehog
about his own classified bones, a creature that floats mid-
show while Estragon vaguely recalls having been beaten the night before.
It was the night before that, like Alice through a mirror’s stained glass,
I entered a fantastical world in which, for four minutes or five hours,
with Tweedledee and Tweedledum, I poked at the writing on a urinal wall
for how like the Torah scroll
each and every tag read, if not backwards then in the reverse.
It was from the Book of Moses dictated by Joseph Smith
that Moses, having gone out the presence of God
and no longer being clothed, would fall back to Earth,
with the thud of a snail’s begotten voice still speaking
of horse latitudes
& (yeah) parallels.
52.
It was with legs crossed and fingers intwined
and while murmuring spells
that Herakles choked-out two snakes
that like slithy [sic] toves
had crawled out the dust and so slithered
into the son of Zeus’ bed
if I accurately recount my favorite bed-
time story for which drifting off
has become such a can of worms.
That I’m still missing the lid
counts for more than a little
lack of sleep as I toss beneath the pall of sheets
then spend my last hand at playing corpse
before, carpe diem, I’m besieged by the god-
forsaken seizure of another day for which
I’ll burn the toast and torch the cheese.
53.
As one might continue to tally up the hours of time and w.a.s.t.e.
I’m struck by the journal entry from Paul Klee
wherein, from the Hefte für schweizerische Volkskunde,
he has traced ‘Tramps’ signs (authentic)‘ and 'Names of devils:
Chrütli, Federwisch, Schuw, Tüntzhart … . To signal = 'pfeifen,’
To beg = ‘jalchen,’ ‘schnuren,’ ‘halunken.’ To confess = ‘brillen.’
Perhaps, to a Priest = ‘galach’ or God [Himself] = Doff-caffer,
(the good man) or great mystery beyond that like an unmoved snail
hovers ‘as still as an orange paperclip’ above (yes)
the hedgefund of our heads for which the CIA
along with that other anonymous agency
might plead the fifth before your eyes find time to blink
into the false report
of being blind or even deaf
as the world continues to blow up and so
build [the] suspense for any judgement.
54.
It was a New York judge who, as he prepared to strike his gavel,
would squint a look my way of some aged sort of sympathy
for that Everyone has heard the [Kafkaesque] story
of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf
of [sic] apple-tree wood … .
I can still hear the liberty-bell crack
of his hammer’s blow
that, by wail of ambulance,
would find me strapped back to a gurney.
And so on back it was to the ill-bricked ward
where another month of pink to white Tic Tacs
did nothing more
than make me drip drool and slur
the few fragments that failed to deliver
what, even if dealt clearly enough, provided on-
ly one certainty: that I was speaking in tongues.
55.
Because genius decays
as judgement increases
the marching tap of (yes)
their rods and canes,
I’ve stuffed my ears
with such a mouth-
ful of cotton
to fume away
what amounts to empty hisses.
That the venereal breath
of their triumph critically
piles up and amounts
not without ‘another’s pain’
speaks volumes for how
I might still be ‘swallowed
by [their] quicksands’–
notwithstanding how one now plans to extend a
friendly hand, only to dash me upon some rocks.
56.
Another big disappointment
as one finds our 45th President
just another ass with a lion’s mane
for whom our nation’s blue-collar
still plays the good shepherd’s
bottomless flock of born-again
Cheetos fanatics bearing fake-
news for which I’ll need to buy
some more Purell and Clorox
before picking up where Klee
reports playing “Liszt’s Faust
Symphony” followed by “an inter-
mezzo from the ballet music
for Prometheus,” whom Hesiod
once again bears witness
to his daily agony of being
chained to a cliff, a cliff on which Trump’s
skin-headed faithful always come flocked
as the same bald-headed eagle
and, with a couple grievous war-hawks,
begin with torture by pecking at their prey
with yet another morning prayer breakfast.
57.
It for “a very fine cup”
that on a silver plate
still might rest
that often a boomerang
will carve a path
and career back around
with 36 cannons plus a crew of 300 men,
over which the devil himself scans
through Blackbeard’s spy-
glass. Out across the bul-
warks of La Concorde–
a Macron Merchant Vessel,
which makes for
another ‘bad meeting.’
58.
Enough! Here is the punishment:
J'ai avalé une fameuse gorgée
de poison, or as Pessoa writes,
having created a cast of characters,
we live them all, all at the same time–
Va, démon! “But what could he want
with my dull, my craven life?”
à présent, je suis au fond du monde.
I saw the whole setting with which in his mind
he surrounded himself: clothing, fabrics, furniture;
I lent him arms, another face. I saw everything
relating to him as he would have liked to create it
for himself. When his mind seemed absent,
I followed him, yes I, in strange and complicated actions,
very far, good or bad: I was certain of never entering his world.
How many hours of the night, beside his dear body I kept watch,
trying to understand why
he escaped reality.
59.
Regardless of the sea-current’s level
it is quite the ‘step on the gas’
for the couple of ambulance drivers
as they show up more shaken
than the unhappy fowl
who appears quite disarranged
for being arrested atop
the checkerboard
while the dead janitor
turns to squawk
out from under
his cheeks before
giving up the ghost
and throwing a few darts
at an ash plant
on which a few names
have been carved with a blunt instrument.
60.
Meanwhile, Bambi teases her red nose into the road,
scanning both ways inside and ouch!– before jumping
like a kangaroo shipped on a few bad postage stamps
of acid for which one might look out for any cannon balls
as Bambi becomes Alice as Alice begins to recite her ABCs
on the greenest patch of grass in town. So it’s been told.
Having almost crossed the road,
this snail now practices flight maneuvers
which might come in handy as his homemade
hovercraft turns with the drag of your avg. orange
TicTac. Now that it’s time to flip over the sketch
and kill another fly with the duct-taped wand
or lemon switch by which all the warehouse lights
still flicker on
and
off.
61.
It is something like a handsaw or battle axe
that this hedgehog now turns into the snail
that maneuvers like a hovercraft in and out
of space and also sea water like an orange
Tic Tac or Piraña foreseen by Peter Higgs,
himself as I flashback to wearing an eye patch
to capture some gold before catching my hand
in another tub of pop-corn from one of those raffles
of crayons, gift wrap, the few rusty blue and red paperclips
that Elvis used to thump touchdowns with his ‘foot-
ball finger’ into one of those w.a.s.t.e. cans or baskets.
It was through a sawed-through peach basket that the first
free-throw sunk down the hatch like a cough drop for which
no one is drinking Corona or going on any cruise
that declares the same pointless pine-box of microphones
and coffin nails, horseshoes and hammers.
62.
It was Durs Grünbein’s Descartes’ Devil
and specifically the arousal of what René
calls esprit animaux; for ‘animal spirits’
read ‘flesh and blood’ for which John
Donne, Andrew Marvell, John Milton all
are writing intellectual meditations
in the same verse form that always lodges
itself between a few cooling rods and coils;
the spare parts for which I find my-
self on the same pair of crutches
still playing the part of Gogo or Estra-
gon as Didi dreams of sacking Rome
into one plastic bag that one ties
to a stick before hedging out on a limb
within something like a race for
which we’ll surely run out
of (yes) toilet paper.
63.
For what it’s worth
it was the 23rd chapter
and ninth verse
of this, that, or something
entirely out of this world
for which notice the svbtle
pause before we have cataloged
and framed ourselves about the tenth word
strolling out of some Torah for which again
one pleads the fifth and counts the seventh
day that he’s waded farther out into the pan-
demic for which no one is
readily playing their reed
pipes & flutes.
64.
It is through the flight consul
of a Nintendo 64 remote cntrl
that I swipe right across the pink-
clouded screen in which for lack
of a screen saver this chimp
inches her neck closer to a pink
& green-spotted caterpillar
as he wades out on a branch
of beech wood under which
one might stop to take a bath.
65.
Like Beckett pining for the low-
down on Pozzo, his home ad-
dress and curriculum vitae,
I still count myself Lucky
on Pozzo’s pink-spotted
leash as Lucky utters forth
in the public works of Puncher
and Wattmann of a personal God
quaquaquaqua with white goatee
qua-qua_qua-qua. It was for
a personal god that one keeps
a book of remembrance
like a long-winded and disjointed monologue
for which a Croatan belts out from his ruby-
red throat with one more quaquaquaqua
before, like a Sasquatch, coming to naught.
66.
That is to say–like the ash-tinged canvas wing
of a sacrilegious moth plunged in torment
of an ash-bin fire–this rag of scarlet cloth
embroidered with another capital offence
provides reason enough to wipe my brow
and just enough time to adjust my footing
in the crow’s nest, wherein I tilt Blackbeard’s
spyglass from port to starboard while attempting
to adjust the cardboard laurel of my Burger King crown
for which there is no sign of a whopper or white filet of fish
that still might turn into (yes) the headline for the Sea’s
Sasquatch by which we may have heard of Billy Budd
by dent of Herman Melville’s nom de guerre
for whom the capital A stands not for Artichoke
but the Albatross for which this storybook now hangs out
by a hook which, tied to copper string, now walks plank.
67.
When in all capital letters the very APOCOLYPSE
comes with a milk-white unicorn opening up
one of our Navy’s sealed scroll books, leaving
Wittgenstein to swipe majestically all his ker-
fuffling recipes and letters down with a blue-to-light-
brwn penfeather for which the Fountain of Youth
is dry as a long-leaf cone; notwithstanding, as I
swipe away on your well-placed swivel of oak,
at the pine sap of my own tears and try to rake
some bones wherein, like Lewis Carroll, Read
the Capital Letters, for how the mere mesh-
work of cartilage scans somehow for this phantom’s
limb wherein Titanium has by some hat trick spliced
with first-Tier A-Level Plutonium for which
Lucifer picks another pink and green-spotted apple
from the Tree for which so much floats through Pan-
dora’s satellite dish: as she floats with ‘such credulous conviction.’
Now if we are to pick off from where we might have gathered
the glimpse of Alice Z reading from the apocryphal Book
of Revelation for which Big A or Little a, m stands for
someone like MO*MUS (/ˈmoʊməs*/) as this Jester or Sphinx
lifts up his mask’s ibis beak-wand and sends one last swig of bourbon
down the hatch before taking off with a rusty-swing-set whistle
for which one might hang his head in disgrace, blame, reproach
from tyranny for which like Sisyphus beneath his ball
of stone or then even Icarus, ‘so much falls as it burns.’
68.
So much falls as this Viking’s funereal ship drifts about in a dodge
as the mast timber tilts and burns
over this fuming green-lit swath, which now boils out
of harbor, not-
withstanding how all this wax keeps dripping off
a dove’s white plume
while Icarus floats according to Brueghel
quite insignificantly out of frame–
and into our den
to take a bite
from (yes) the
micr vv a vv es
of your TV dinner.
Meanwhile, it is just
another spring off the coast. Beside this Little Red Light House
by which a farmer sloughs in the bloody pageantry of his field.
69.
“Why thus perplexed,–and cogitating,
among” a sea otter’s hypothesis
for how to weather the storm;
for how now this purloined letter
might serve as one of those knot-
ted ornaments that
the white man still may use
to dial back into the brave blue eye
of a Cherokee Chieftain.
That I happen by coffin nail to play taps
and so tack on this capital letter
like a bloody rag of crumbs and snot
to my blue and orange breast
before presenting myself as ‘a new
kind of lo-
cust plague.’
70.
That it is a first-tier misfit or marine
mounted on a black & tan special-
ops horse for whom the government
finds, still, so much use for how they’ve
stationed this horse marine in the green
lagoon where the first pair of binoculars
broke after spotting first sight of this snail
moving like a blimp or pill-shaped hover-
craft before pulling not a rabbit but this hedge-
hog out of (yes) its top hat for which an orange
piss stain presumes this snail to be higher rank
over those who unquenchably yearn about for
knowledge which no longer fits the latest advance
from those who do not know that they do not know.
71.
That fragments have confounded most frameworks–
for how they’ve panned out in the dark fallout shelters
of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Florence, Copenhagen
and New Haven–builds upon the shapeless mound
of an old hypothesis made by Watt himself
that the Book of Thoth is at Koptos
dragging like a lobster trap in this river’s quick
polestar of bull’s eyes and pivot points
quite like a Russian Doll might entail one gold box
held within one of silver that is sealed itself
by an ebony and ivory coffer, which then is capped
off inside a trap of keté-wood.
A bronze trap of keté-wood
that, at last, gives to the bay
and so the harbor of this little
sarcophagus or casket of iron.
72.
It’s for a game of 52 points with the Ka
of Nefrekeptah that a spell-bound Set-
na continues to cry out to his personal god
with one of Lucky’s quaquaquaquas
beseeching for some Amulet of Ptah–
that might spring this game of draughts
from out of the ever-widening maw
of earth as now we look at the brass tacks
that only the sprouting bulb foreclosing
along with Setna’s mouth remains
undelivered upon that riverboat of Styx–
where in the Duat the ferryman sticks
a fork in your tongue and frying pan
up your ass as the necessary price
to forget that one might be gone if not dead.
73.
Meanwhile, the Prince of Darkness
is playing “Patty Cake, Patty Cake”
in Lindsey Graham’s pigsty, patting
and pricking and then marking his stake
not with the capital *A but B for Baal
as we wade further into this pandemic’s
Twilight Zone which, for the start
of another week, informs its citizens
through a virtual Fox News chat box
whereby President Donald J. Trump
obsessively cites and adverts, charges
and credits as his only means to reference
the annual death count from influenza
before swerving blindly upon the subject
of his Cabinet ‘patting another patriot cake’
after which the country will be raring
to go fast for Easter’s resurrection.
74.
As madness will often gaze upon the quip
of its own reflection as an effective gag
to prevent any little gasp from reason,
I now tap my knuckles against this looking glass’
stained mirror and press my ear near-enough-by
to pause for any hollow skein of fog and surf
beneath the speculum’s surface of echo and smoke;
notwithstanding the silt and dross of left-
over soap and shaving cream
for which the whole world’s a close
shave once considering, minute after minute,
nothing lets up or develops
from ‘drinking the sea’
when we’ve all developed
the same submarine cough, being sequestered to the same rock on which it’s only matter of tick-tick | tick-tock before we start eating glass stones.
75.
With one last little worm gnawing
through my eardrum, I gradually fall
asleep to the tired whistling
of a train’s bullet and so then depart
for the gap of dreams where inside
the ‘skull of an idiot’ the rain never tires
in its drumming to death a dead thing
while, like Keats, “I […] clamber through
the Clouds and exist,” nearer myself ‘to hear’
the immortal wings of ‘your Christ being tinted’
by Beauty’s trembling, delicate snail-horn,
(yes) Beauty’s trembling, delicate snail-horn
for which so much ineffably floats in air
and out of our Rat-trap’s brown to purple depth–
as if to ease the burden of mystery
as you again try from memory’s sewer
to trace the arrow-like flash from ‘a TicTac’
that, among constellations, would shift for
your Dragon, Whale, Southern Cross.
76.
It’s in Plymouth County,
Massachusetts
that ‘a skeleton key’
with the tail of (yes)
a caterpillar poises parallel,
if not paranormal, in the sky’s
blue blank of a vault as if picking
at some wraithlike lock,
which for the duration
of the You*T*ube recording
remains quite invisible
over the tilt of S‘s head
that, for what it is worth,
like a Jack-in-the-Box
is just about to 'go pop.’
77.
Like the scarlet letter tacked
upon Hester Prynne’s breast
the camera-eye of my memo-
ry’s bosom ‘is too deeply branded’
if not scorched–as now the mind
hath become a seaplane’s single
engine as it whispers, chokes
and begins to whimper through such
a clouded squeeze: over the ocean’s
roughhewn sleeve of terra-cotta cays
and reefs, bars and enclaves, an entire
isle of skeleton keys for which I dwell quite
unavailingly upon the lurid gleam
of an orangeTicTac’s beam, calling up how
such an emblem would split itself to thirds
before fusing about and back to the pirated
face of some hooligan’s snail-like craft, allied
if not akin to (yes) Sonic the Hedgehog.
78.
That they’ll blame it all on too much Jim Beam
as the seamless way to close this most recent x-
file case finely suits the infinite jest of your onion
breath for which, like WATT, it’s another pepper-
mint or Tic Tac doing its best version of a
NIKE SWOOSH:
and so down the hatch
while the mind sharpens
its dullest hatchets
and blades, getting ready
‘to parley’ with a few
interlocutors from that
satanic school for which
one enters a chocolate lab and sits
on a blueberry couch, reciting from
the hush-hush pages of Crow and (yes)
WODWO … .
78.
In a kingdom of brick
walls and glass houses
where one lets the wind
out for how against a lab
cow’s pink rubber-band-
ed tongue, an egg
of blackness marks
where a thistle’s spike
came with blades and
splinters of (yes) summer air.
79.
That Houses and rooms are full
of perfumes, the shelves
are crowded with perfumes
and silent castles of toilet paper.
I breath the fragrance
of death myself it is for
the shopping aisles of
my mouth forever, (yes)
I am in love with it
as I witter ‘on
about Nabokov,’
connecting on the punch
that agonies are one of
my changes of garments.
80.
It was beneath the beaten bough,
in the ruins of an old Elm
that–as I in-
gressed into the ever-
receding ground,
you etched ‘unicorn,’
‘timberwolf,’
‘caribou,’
‘gumball,’
waiting for
‘a scarab
beetle,’
to appear from some portal of pine-smoke and the
tar for which Achilles might have dipped his own
heels.
[SIDE-B]
81.
It was Achilles’ heels that Thetis neglected to dip
and so wash
in the aqua-saliva of River Styx,
making for a nasty,
life-long sentence:
as it is either his h
eel, ankle, or t
orso that, after tipping
his hat, Paris pierces
with the poisoned-tip
of an arrowhead mixed
of ‘rose’ & ‘smoky-quartz.’
b
For what It was after calling some of Wagner’s music ‘the greatest
masterpiece of the sublime I know’, [that]
Nietzsche claims Wagner wrote ‘perhaps the worst music
ever written’.
Meanwhile, still in quarantine one feels to determine what ‘is’,
what it’s ‘like’, appears unutterably higher and more serious
than any ‘it ought to be’ … .
82.
As this mile-long mosquito stretch
of grunge-vinyl scratch
plays over our own Talking
Heads‘ funereal
Wall Flowers that we could
be heroes, peopling the centers
and [folded] distances, the far-away
galactic slurs of 'I don’t care’
and Silenus’ ‘It is best not
to be born,’ to be born the nail
of a coffin, or the orange snail
driving that yellow submarine
or (yes) school bus out of a looking-
glass’ sink where all the water falls pink … .
83.
As the carnival-like tents
continue to pop-
up. Out of horse-
trailers and milk vans,
spreading out over a black ice-
rink as the government’s make-
shift response for the lack of h-
ospice care, I read The Daily Beast
for how, ‘regrettably,’ Edwards failed
to depose Copperfield’s subpoena
due to a number of ‘legal and logistical
roadblocks,’ as
when one lacks bridges
to patrol all the private islands
on which Epstein threw out his back from groping
all those birthday tricks and ponies in (yeah) his
backyard.
84.
iv. ‘SENTIRE (B)’
This is the aesthe-
sis meaning: to per-
ceive by one of the
‘senses’ . [That]
it is quite simple
and need not ‘de-
t[r]ain us by 'a bat’s
natural habit to cough
as ’Where do we go
from here; this . …
time?–with all the drip’-
feeds and footage of tanks
and special op, banana re-
public marines dressing our
own blck lips and blo-
ody fing- e rs
out from what otherwise
moves quite anonymously
adrift as one might dream
of floating over a cliff
or waterfall for which
one’s flotsam does not
avoid ‘a healthy crunch.’
85.
It was not without 'a healthy crunch'
that Russia's first space monk-
and monkey last made contact.
As for this orange TicTac 'I wish
my mind's fake plastic castle
were bullet proof--for so sudden
does one often hear the single splat. ... '
for how to milk a Spanish **F**ly by
(yeah) the bull of the shriveled tit.
86.
That the pilot sighting of “an
unidentified flying object, bro.”
generally is given street cred.
for which we might give the
Dollar Store Evangelist or
Fire-breathing Gideon, not-
withstanding it is one of his
snakehandlers’ little grape bites
of ‘poison in the punch’
for which the whole
congregation might
have fallen into a well’s
bucket for which
its just another bite
into a peppermint
to nip any little bud,
before packing their few space
bags for some hole in a (yeah)
basement where they’ve been
summoned if not non-plussed
by a chorus of hallelujah’s
to just lie prone and play
at dead ‘til having blinked
themselves off ’what else,
what else,‘
the radar.
87.
It was for that bright fireball event
on October 11 2019 over Son-
jyan City in the Jilin Province
of NE China that a fragment
of a loosely held carbonaceous
material carrying a cargo of
viruses & bacteria entered the
mesosphere at high speeds
for which its inner-core’s incan-
descence would have fallen
to ground higgledy-pig-
gledy, and so start this pro-
cess of 1-2 years until the initial corona
inoculant of the infective agent would
be drained.
88.
As 'forever and forever’ is the reicht, or ‘righteousness’
of ‘that’ silent skein
of stars on which ‘knowledge
shall be increased,’
while a rat might, ‘to and fro,’ live
on no evil star–
dripping pine sap and tar
as some final seal to Thoth,
so shut up the words, and seal
the book, until you have tilled in-
to the slough of ‘that’ time of the
end. Meanwhile, Shelley might, three years later, play
the grey cake of sponge after washing up stiff as a screw
and dumber than the few nails by which Christ met a few
(yeah) bulls*e*yes.
89.
For that ‘the words’
are closed up ‘til
the end of the wor[L]d
as now we blow-
in and drop anchor
without a clock
to (yeah) punch
out as this first
pint-sized vial
of the Corona-
virus Disease
continues to bust nuts faster than a rat
and snail might go (yeah) 'to and fro,’–
as they continue with their idea of beep-
bop in an orange TicTac or (yet again)
hover _raft .
90.
The open book of these Smoky-
blue pages of foliated buttes
and ridges
of quartz
and all that baleful
Microsoft glitz
and glitter now burning
two 0s for ‘our most
empty of pockets’
as we stretch out
the long str-
etch of quarantine
in which we find our-
selves gloved and etched
by too much purell
as we try not to flow against anybody’s
front of playing it kool as we throw
out any id-directed ideas
of lounging to our death
on the grim reaper’s
(yeah) cruiseship
and instead press from
pause from our own
cosplay into another
fckng week in (yeeeh-
haw) the twilight z*n*e.
91.
IT was March 26 that, with its id
full of apocolyptic ide(s),
some you
tube footage would trawl out
the Outer Banks surf
its own august, auber-
gine rhomboid blimp
of self for some other
life
like
Gregor Samsa
or James Joyce
doing their scar-
ab bug beet-bop
scuttle out of the blue-to-green phos-
phorescence of (yeah) Florida’s surf
of lost credit cards and black-market
keys.
92.
Also peeps for the apocolypse
‘
beautiful
,’ i said
that to
o–
yeah,
Tomorrow’s
April Fools
and DIRGE
of Easter Egg,
macoroni
salad
for which
we eat a peach.
From Me to Every
one: (07:54 PM)
Like
th=t John Ashbery poem
of salty wa*vv*es
that we’ve
all drunk
bread from.
nope
.
93.
Those first salvos of black-face singers & white-faced clowns–
and some invisible smoke on the monkey-barrel’s head,
were all that were needed for the rest of the lost batteries
in Los Angeles to erupt
like a volcano.
It was out of POP-
O*CA*TEP*et*L’s black-iron
lungs of a crater
that a giant TicTac
would pop like a Pop-
Tart or (yes)
Toaster Strudel
and so proceed
to blimp off radar
with the silent tremolo ‘of
such tremendous speed.’
94.
That like Klee ‘I am ripe’ for this step for-
ward that ‘so begins’ with (yeah) the white
surface of chaos. That ‘I may … . be chaos,
myself’ for which Paul, (yes) my single pall-
bearer–would etch, ‘it’s convenient’
with some charred pine coal–for which, in
Beethoven’s music, the last dark corners
are merely ‘a residue’ of ‘the original black-
ness’ that s writes The effect is often
for which I stand trembling and hesitant.‘
95.
That, like Pessoa, My destinies are the dull
pack of clowns 'left behind by the circus,’
as I pick up on the smell of death’s hounds
among the chalk-dusted books wherein life
‘goes on outside,’ wherein ‘not even rot-
tenness,’ with its ravens and dead branches
‘is rotten’ on this blank chalk-white strip
that reminds one of Hangman as we limp
out of each other’s childhood strands
and onto the Outer Bank Shore
of (yeah, yeah) Mark Strand’s “Have
[not] we been down this street be-
fore?”
96.
Break the box and shed the nard;
Stop not now to count the cost
as there’s ‘a little sickness’
in the air from ‘too much fragrance
everywhere.’
Just Pluck the harp
and breathe Silent Try-
ster[e]o’s horn:
before–like some snail or (yeah)
unicorn–kicking out the bucket
of Pynchon’s dark oubliette
and buying another gun
or softening roll of toilet
paper.
97.
That Tom Cruise’s Church
of Scientology zipped out
these yellow-jacketed san-
itation teams of ‘oh my God’
who, door-to-door,
keep going ‘knock–
knock’ like something
out of WATT, offering
to sat*a*nize, or was that san-
itize offices. Either way, time
to pull out your golden tooth
and pawn it behind the barber
shop.
As then you might be able to buy
Sundays Litany of ‘bald-faced lies’
from (yeah) The New York Times.
98.
Come Down. H-
ear. And watch
the w.a.s.t.e. channel
by T.V.
whereby the intra-
galactic tube of this
snail’s hovercraft sits
like a scrap piece of
(yeah) space-yard
junk next to a stripped
mannequin with a razor-
blade, 1980*s-
extra hair-
(yea) cu[n*]t.
99.
YOUR ADD HERE
100.
THAT one rotten apple
keeps the Doors open
and the sharks and hounds
at bay as the DOW bot-
toms down the green bottle
in which the message plum-
mets ‘If you could do it all
again; big deal so what; OK-
CMPTR, O.K. CORRALL.
WH[e]RE I JUMPED INTO
THE RIVER STYX.
Black-faced angels
swam with me, swam
with me, swam with me.
a.
Notwithstanding that the child continues to moan–
not over the current Corona Virus Swell
but with 'plain-old convulsions of pain’
that, if not kind, are then quite
natural enough. …
Meanwhile, Hester Prynne
remains ‘still as death … .’
now ‘that I should take in hand
to drive Satan out her’ with
‘some stripes.’ It was Jack White
who by stereo and two steel harps
would bust the same two strings
as he clang and cranked out his
muted post-horn ballad of [yeah]
7-Nation Army.
b.
For this last quiet stab
of shit-talking
I knew not Lethe
nor Nepenthe.‘
'I felt no love,
nor feigned any.’
Already, like Pessoa
I saw myself as others
saw me: a man
of alchemy not to be
followed some days later
either by plague
or (yeah)
resurrection.
c.
‘thunderclouds, the dark blue
of Krishna’ ferry like sheep-
stealth chariots, each with
its own orange-blue nucleus
TicTac making another novel can-
hole for Alice in the forever-
receding ground for which
like that purple bush
the blue grass
smokes.
d.
Beneath this very branch of (yes) apple-
blossom(s) the same tidal wa*vv* [e]e can do no-
thing but sour for more of a punch to
the throat than this stew–this stew as one continues
to swell into the broth that, one and the
same, continues to stir beneath the
lamp [sic] inside the same idiot-hot
skull by which a stir-fried mannequin surfs
on (yeah) an inflatable gravestone. Mean-
while, we all float on like that Modest Mouse
smash hook that later would splice for the trap
song of cheese for which none-the-less we all
float on one bamboo raft, waiting for a
Mr. Hedgehog to dig himself out from
the dirt–as the means to finally break
out of dodge beneath the bug-brown, bluegrass
and attempt to chain smoke, yeah chain smoke; inside the pink to orange phosphorescence surrounding this snail as she might even now float on in-
to the there-there-and-ether-after; like a pretty broken flower before fold-
ing in the dirt for one of those German-endorsed Texas Fold-Ems, pill-shaped Orange amplifiers, or pink to, almost, (yes) flesh-tone TicTac(s) . …
e.
It should have been the simplest disguise
of the quiet sort of day
that people will often describe
for lack of language
as future-tense, picture-
perfect; a tall cloud-
bank left clue-
less
for someone to fill
the chalk-white blank
of an outline.
On the lecture hall
chalkboard
by which
I might have felt, more than once, over a teething
green sea of fractals, I was walking the plank
and into the village surrounding (yeah) Kafka’s
The Castle .
f.
The deft Pyramids and (yeah) Ferris Wheels
of West Virginia and Egypt having now dwind-
led to all but a few vanilla waffle cones
spied next to the River Nile or down the bone-
choked gulch of the New River Gorge,
as one might spy beneath God’s own white micro-
scope, for which my eye remains largely oblivious
to any Siren’s song as I swallow another orange
TicTac or pill and so numbly reside for another night’s
blue-light special inside this forlorn scene of folklore;
in another red-light district of rabid gnats and wild dogs,
counting the difference between the sawed-off sound
of gunshots and (yeah) a pick-up truck’s backfire.
The quote (section 7) was taken from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
The Blue Book, (Blackwell, 68.)
The words borrowed for adaptation here (section 8) were taken from Thomas Pynchon’s novella, The Crying of Lot 49
(HarperPerennial ModernClassics, 48-49).
ABCs (section 10) beyond the alphabet is in reference to Ezra Pound’s The ABCs of Writing.
The quote (section 20) was gained from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
The Blue Book, (Blackwell, 71.)
The highlighted text (section 21) comes from respectively Paul Muldoon’s sonnet series, The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants (QUOOF, Wake Forest University Press) and Thomas Pynchon’s novella,
The Crying of Lot 49.
The highlighted text (section 22) borrows from
The Penguin Book of Classical Myths.
The highlighted text (section 29) borrows, and quite zealously, from the Tesla-coiled Wattage of Samuel Beckett’s WATT
The quoted text (section 32) borrows from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
The Brown Book, (Blackwell, 135).
The highlighted material of section 35 (either in the confines of a quote or italicized) borrows from The Diaries of Paul Klee, while also jabbing a little at the thematic punches and left hooks of Samuel Beckett’s second novel, WATT.
rw nw prt m hrw [Book of Emerging Forth into the Light] The original (uncircumcised) title for the apocryphal The Book of the Dead. (This refers to section 38.)
The quoted text (section 39) borrows from the opening text of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
The quoted text (section 41) borrows from the opening chapter of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
The first quatrain (section 44) is taken (word for word) from
The Crying of Lot 49, (HarperPerennial ModernClassics, 82).
The highlighted text (section 45) borrows from The Crying of Lot 49, (HarperPerennial ModernClassics, 95).
The quote (section 46) was gained from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s
The Blue Book, (Blackwell, 71).
The highlighted text (section 47) is gained from
The Penguin Book of Classical Myths (42; 45).
The highlighted material of section 48 (shown within the confines of quotes) borrows from The Diaries of Paul Klee (University of California Press, 290-91).
The Quatrain of section 49 borrows directly, word for word, from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.
The highlighted material of section 53 (either in the confines of a quote or italicized) borrows from The Diaries of Paul Klee
(University of California Press, 139).
The highlighted text (section 54) comes from respectively Paul Muldoon’s sonnet series, The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants (QUOOF, Wake Forest University Press, 55).
The highlighted text (either contained by quotes or (because of length italicized) borrows from
Samuel Johnson, The Major Works {including Rasselas} (OXFORD, 290-91, 130).
The highlighted material of section 56 (shown within the confines of quotes) borrows from The Diaries of Paul Klee (University of California Press, 137).
The highlighted text of section 58 borrows from Fernando Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet (New Directions, 63).
The long strand of italics nearing the end of section 58 borrows from Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (New Directions, 43; 41).
The opening lines of section 59 borrows from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics, 5).
From section 69, the opening text borrows from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics, 28).
The final lines of section 69 borrow (by confinement of the quote) from
The Diaries of Paul Klee (University of California Press, 27).
The final line of section 70 borrows (kept by italics) borrows from
The Diaries of Paul Klee (University of California Press, 147).
The opening lines of section 73 (specifically, the Prince of Darkness turning Patty Cakes in a Pigsty) refers to The Black Lips song “Hooker Jon,” track 1 off their country LP, The Black Lips Sing … In a World that Is Falling Apart.
The quoted ‘skull of an idiot’ of section 75’s second stanza borrows from Ted Hughes’ poem, “Heptonstall” collected in WODWO
(Faber & Faber Limited).
Following “like Keats” the following fragments of quoted material found in section 75 borrow from John Keats’ Selected Poems & Letters
(Riverside Editions, 270).
The phrase highlighted in italics from section 75’s last line borrows from
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49,
(HarperPerennial ModernClassics, 65).
Within section 76, S, in accordance with epistemological case studies, is shorthand for ‘Subject.’
From section 77, the quoted text of line 4 borrows from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics, 58).
The italicized text found within section 79 borrows from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (1881).
The quoted portion (‘on about Nabokov’) borrows from Paul Muldoon’s poem “The Destroying Angel,” collected in QUOOF
(Wake Forest University Press, 37)
Section 81. The italicized portion of the penultimate and ultimate stanzas borrows from Derek Parfit’s On What Matters: Vol II
(Oxford University Press, 588).
Section 82. The italicized text borrows from A.R. Ammons’ Garbage (Norton).
Section 84 borrows and springs off C.S. LEWIS’ STUDIES IN WORDs
(Cambridge).
Section 84 borrows and adapts upon RadioHead‘s track, “THE BENDS”, (THE BENDS, TRACK2).
Section 85 borrows (in quoatation) the gained report from Douglas Charles article Flurry Of UFO Sightings, Including A ‘Tic Tac’
Spotted By A Pilot Over Mexico, Sparks More Speculation (brobile Wed., April 1 2020)
Section 88 borrows and bounces off and from the Book of Daniel, CHPTR-12, VRSE IV.
93 borrows from The Diaries of Paul Klee
(University of California Press, 176).
Section 95 borrows from Fernando Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet (New Directions) as well
[the ravens and dead branches] of Mark Strand’s
final collection Almost Invisible (Alfred A. Knopf).
96 borrows from Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Major Works
(OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS).
Section 100.
ASK THOM YORK(e).
a_ borrows and adapts from the text of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics, 60-61)
b_ borrows and adapts from the following texts: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter (Barnes & Noble Classics) & Fernando Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet (New Directions)
c_ borrows from Gary Snyder’s Passage through India (GREY FOX).