The Dead (R3)

When darkness churns in the aether
Like the thick soup of a swamp frothing
With the mulch of a clipped jaw's howl,
And the blue flames of the stars burn on
Beneath the eaves like a hag-faced
Simmering cauldron, and the solitude
Of a lonely thought reflects on the limns of the earth,

The dead creep, in slumbering hordes, unmasked
Amassing faces of life's grim fête: how hungry
Are the dead, ruining eyes that totter
After pulses in the blood-rimmed shade, fangs
Drooling for sap, greedy limbs that grasp
Like a child nibbling at juicy breasts. For juice

They pick through the blades of damp grass, pale
By the ache of the moon, to an unlit
Vastness of crumbling diamonds, alleys
Shrugging with broken glass, towers buckling
Under the gravity of fallen stars,
The ghettoes where they lived, searching
Like a hand that feels the dark for something it forgot.

Do the dead forget us? Can we remember these dead
Faces, rent wide as molten wax into a scream
Of pure void, brimmed with spilling brains, whose ingenuous pallor
Betrays a cold fear of the haunted air,
Shadows effervescent of the earth?

The Dead (R1)

When darkness churns in the aether
Like the thick soup of a swamp, boiling
With the mulch of a clipped jaw's howl,
And the blue flames of the stars burn on
Under the eve like a hag-faced
Simmering cauldron, and the solitude
Of a lonely thought reflects on the limns of the earth,

The dead creep, in slumbering hordes, unmasked
Amassing faces of life's grim fête: how hungry
Are the dead, ruining eyes that totter
After pulses in the blood-rimmed shade, fangs
Drooling for sap, greedy hands that grasp
Like a child nibbling on juicy breasts. For juice

They pick through the blades of damp grass, pale
By the cloak of the moon, to unlit
Ruins, streets of crumbling diamond, alleys
Of broken glass and fallen stars, empty bazaars,
The ghettoes where they lived, searching for a sign,
Like a hand that grasps after something it forgot.

Do the dead remember us? Can we forget these dead
Faces, ripped wide like molten wax into screams
Of pure void, the brim of spilling brains, ingenuous pallor
Betraying their fear of the haunted air,
And the clouds that surge from the earth?

The Dead (O)

When darkness churns through the aether
Like the thick soup of a swamp, boiling
With the mulch of clipped howls' fire
And the blue flames of the stars burn on
Under the eve, like a hag-faced
Simmering cauldron, and the solitude
Of a lonely thought paces the limns of the earth,

The dead creep, in stumbling hordes, unmasked,
Amassing faces of life's grim fête: how hungry
Are the dead, sunken eyes meant only to peer
Into oblique shadows for bleating food, their fangs
Drooling for blood, hands grasping like a child
Nibbling at the juicy breasts. For juice

They wander the spear-grass, damp, dumb, peering
Into the cloak of the moon; through unlit
Ruins of prosperous towns, their empty bazaars,
The houses they bought, searching for a sign,
Something to remember, or something they forgot.

Do the dead remember us? Do we forget the dead?
The faces, ripped into screams of pure void,
The brim of spilling brains, pallor of genius,
All betray the fear between the haunting aether,
And the wispy smoke of the earth.

Sunset Over the Pacific

So a sea climbs the Atlantic horizon
Into the wait and the burden. These peaks
Jab sharp on the joints of the sky,
And the sinking sun whines
Like a tea-kettle, or a squealing pig,
Or a squealing pig hissing hot tea.
The waves are dividing in furrows, hence
Pastures of fish. The dark asteroids
Look like streaks of white on painted
Plaster, and laughter charms like a faraway bell.
This is a sea-calm, this quiet of the night,
When life is a sloping, a continual lapping.

Shaxpur (R1)

I wish you'd been a masticated,
Live-chewn pup to a pulpy knob, ground
As flesh as the dirt, striated like strips
Of salt-beef spread for the wind to dry,
To stale in the sun; I wish

You only were a smattering of crusts
Pecked at by birds, a vat of noxious slime
Trod by the grimy feet of menstruating
Virgins, fouled in their pulpy brines
With anxious blood. If only your brain
Were a quivering mass of jelly,
Something alight in its fumes
Before it could ever exist...

Instead you, who seem to have cupped your strain
By Massic streams, intoxicate mens' minds
With bruit noise that terrifies even my
Peaceful heart. You howled with the bays
And the curs, probably fired-off and beer-frothed
A thousand folds of crafty verse, straining your neck
With every necessary step. Sheer humour
That you were a man and walked beside us, tragic
That you could exhale the sky and blot out the lucent
Way to death like a vengeful, unwilling god.

Shaxpur

I wish you were a masticated beast
Live-chewn to a pulpy knob, ground
As fresh as the dirt, striated like strips
Of salt beef spread for the wind to dry,
To stale in the sun: I wish

You were a smattering of crusts
Pecked at by birds, a vat of noxious slime
Trod by the grimy feet of menstruating
Virgins, fouled in the pulpy brine
With anxious blood. I wish your brain
Were a quivering mass of tottering, blathering
Jelly, something alight in smoke
Before it could ever exist.

Instead you seem to have cupped your strain
By Massic streams, intoxicate mens' minds
With bruits that terrify even my
Peaceful heart. You howled with the bays
And the curs, probably puffed up and beer-frothed
A thousand-fold of crafty verse, straining your neck
With every necessary step. The sheer comedy,
You were a man, and walked among us, tragic
That you could breathe the sky and blot out the lucent
Way to death like a vengeful and unwilling god.

I Will Have My Milk

I want to attack, I want to destroy, to push my fist
Through shattered glass like gloomy
Holden Caulfield, symbol of estrangement
Stranger than the rest. Let me loose on the battlefield:
No war? My aggression will pulp you, primp you up,
Then prick and pop you like a pimple. When we're done
Only your pus will remain. Raise the canon,
Standard and the method of attack, and fire into the masses
Of crazed, complicit zombies, carving up the flesh
Of devils, daemons, ghouls. I am the living, breathing pulse
Of this smog-choked world, my cry
Is central, not to be ignored -- like a child screaming,
Bursting his lungs with sweat and hot tears,
I will have my milk!

The Psychodynamic

Never this beauty, the logical operators
Eating their meanings, gasping gulps of
Scintillation! Anguish that the tale
Will have a tail, and that the telling
Rats:

They roll their beady eyes across the room,
Red as a blood-curdling wine, trailing
Amalgamations of the floor and ceiling,
Making all the things we should know
Indeterminate, elusive, fleeting.

The Sermon on the Vessel

The development of language is the goal of philosophy,
But there is also action. One use stems from the other.
If the vessel is broken -- if there are cracks in the ceramic --
Then whether you gather the sweet grape's ferment
Or the honeyed nectar of flowers from ruddy combs,
The glistening jar, adorned with figures of dancing women,
Leaks; their dresses stain with blood, or pus,
And they urinate all over themselves.
This makes the figures of dancing women
Most unlucky, since they'd put on fine clothes
And oiled their skin, had strung themselves
With pearls and adornments to sway like young shoots,
Bamboo in the breeze. Therefore protect the language
As you would a woman, or any other joyous human
Being. On the other hand, don't rape the jar
With viscous fluid, or mud that mingles with swine;
Don't fill it with gems or strings
Of pearl, the kinds that merchants fancy,
Imported purples, silken rugs -- first
The ceramic should be simple, sublime, invested
With dignity, clothed in the order of hard-baked clay.
Next, it should be filled with water from a clear stream,
The kind that quenches the thirst of a parched man
Sated of days. If you are a skilled potter,
And a gatherer of fine things good for the health
Of the one who partakes them, then, and only then,
I would call you a lover of wisdom and art.

A Brief Turn Around the Corkscrew of Death, and Back Again

I no longer exist, I
Have been defeated, fraught
In the pleasures of non-
Being, I am become

A name -- with epithets!
Epithets and a rounded line,
Multivariant, vagrant, insufferable,
Much enduring epithets, the tissue
And the structure of my being. I

Am -- who? Much quizzical
Leibowitz, Christian
Alex the son of God's
Right hand and Hell,
Defender of men,
Lover of wit, exclusive
Seductress of time and seduced
By death's own face: Alex
Benyamean Leibowitz, right?

A Little Bit of Philosophy

Through many things? There's not even one
Though all are bold, though the canopy of silence
Stretches out eternally -- no! Eternity is just the problem:

Take things in their immensity -- is theirs one
Flagrant all or a burning intensity of partless
Parts, swirling in a void neither proven

Nor reproof (because the void is nothing,
Nothing can exist, and so the void
Exists)? Let's redefine our terms:

Either there is, or there is not --
Now if there is, then there is,
And if there is not, then "is"

Is not. But if "is" is not,
Then it is, so "is" cannot
Not be. Now that we've clarified

Existence, time to move to existential,
The movement of being through time:
So though you see all things have the habit

Of motion, smokers never quit so quickly
Through a thought. Motion is impossible?
Enumerate the ways! As we proceed,

Be still. Now first, does motion imply
The many or the one? The many?
How could one not be?

We've been through that: so now suppose
Everything moves -- will it move
Faster or more slowly than itself? Again suppose

To move you must move half the distance
Where you started from to reach your destination:
Is it a lie to say that all things lie

Where they are, when first to reach a half
You must reach half of half, and half again
Of that, so motion never moves at all?

But how is it? -- you claim, -- Do we observe
That the race goes not to the swift,
Do the idle inherit the earth? Are you dizzy

In the eddying swirls of this rapid halt?
Don't you want to rest? When you exert
Your body over rugged rocks, aren't you glad to learn

There is no strain? That lifting heavy weights
Is equal to the motionless, serenity of silent
Meditation, a single thought

For a thousand feet? Now count the ways
That mortals multiply their mortal cares
By multiplying everything, when everything

Is one, and one is all: no motion, no gyration,
Desire, drive, and sex all rest, your cares
Are not your cares, your triumphs

Are a spinning dime, falling rapidly
Into itself, like the curving petals
Of a morning glory, unfolding.

Many

Is the all-seeing eye perfect
Because peasants are starving Iran,
Just now limping for dying food,
Since the body consumes its own life? Their breath launches out
Like a ship and skims the rush of the western bar,
The harbors they never saw; then the vision dies.

Or perhaps because it expands,
Like swelled gut stretching that last breath
Through all perforations of limbs,
But outward as far as a strong scent,
As far as the void?

But men are climbing mountains, too:
Nepal, Quebec, and, in a tent somewhere,
Someone is suffering. All these "some"'s
Whose accumulation is never enough to make life:
Life is not in the sweetness of drenched bread
With honey, the savour or sear
In which that bread partakes,
Nor in the relish of distant peaks, lakes
From prospicuous towers, wool-bearing sheep seduced
To a swirl of cloud, and arms in a flagrant intensity;

Life is not even in itself,
It is an existential presupposition
Disclosed in the expanding horizon of time:
Now there's a swelling balloon for you,
There's the dip-and-away
Of many things.

A New Invocation

Muse, as often as we broach new thoughts
We seek new consolations; every method
Finds itself again in your sweet breath,
Your never-acrid or bitter (the muse
Lives far from death, she doesn't chew
On mounds of purpled, spell-bound bones;
Now it's the leaf of a lotus, now the faded perfume
Of twilight). I won't rhyme anymore, muse: gone
Are the days eclipsed in the shadow of obscure thought;
Sensuality is overwrought, and the self, like the truth,
Escapes me. What I want you to do now, my muse, my
Ariel, is fetch a pale of water -- there are two deep rivers
And you shouldn't confuse them: one leads down
To the depths, another arouses the twinkling stars; these pools
Of blackness are themselves surrounded in the glow
Of an infinite nothing, poetic skill. Draw,
From the waters of drought, lapidary stone, the red one,
And bring it to me as a mark of your love: it is the all seeing eye.

Some Light Ethical Verse

Not through a torrent of money
or in sensual enjoyment
can satisfaction be found.
The skilled person, knowing that
sensual enjoyment is painful,
yielding but little pleasure,

does not take delight
even in divine enjoyments.

-- Dhammapada, 186-187

Blessed who knows to fulfill his cravings, in measure,
Origins, his life is like a fundament, set on the strong foundations
Of the earth. Not from us, but through need, not in us, but destiny's hand
Moves the world, like a blind crone pushing a cart. There is no fighting,
No war or enduring resolve, but only the clever and constant attachment
To things as they are. The skilled mind adapts to each situation
As it moves, transforming like the beast of many colors to fit -- he fits himself
To the way things work. What is pleasure but a blessing, and pain

If not a wilderness? Pleasure coaxes us, goads us on
Like a wise guide, like a shepherd leading his flock; pain pulses
Away from what we can't know, reality's depth -- plunge not
To explore deep waters, but keep to the way, the appearance of truth --
Do not challenge the good guide. Pleasure knows the steer of things,
The oceans as they were before sand, the stars in their fragrance of birth.

The idle man is a ferocious tyrant, who whips down pleasure
To his need, who seeks to constrain and restrain all restraint, who drives on
The natural driver. The good man takes joy in things as they are, seeks not to change them,
For better or worse. He gapes at the path of time, but lays himself open
To what feels right, and shudders at things that bring pain.

The Fourth Existential, or Variety

I am
Thoughtless, sans
Prolepsis, only
Scoping out the concept
Of a concept,
Skeptical. I want

The moon to be a soggy ocean,
The sun to be a maritime whir, dawn,
A flash, and autumn some elaborate
System of reciprocities, whereby
The one comes through the other to the one,
Itself;

-- In other words, -- I want to know words
In all their intensity, but I admit
Theirs might be a vibrance
Insubstantial, lacking all
Solidity, mist-like.

If thought is like a labyrinth of fog,
Then there's a long way to go before the journey rides
-- Then dirt is rolling on its way up-hill,
-- Then the sorry music collides. This music isn't
Destiny beyond all capacity for speech or sound,
This music is a fleeting tongue-stop
Of the most intimate variety, it is itself the veracity,
Changed,
Of the fleet and fleeing seasons.

Any explanation of intellectual developments in terms of historical causes will have to give an account of the connection between the historical and the intellectual.

It is not sufficient to note a contiguity between intellectual and historical developments -- i.e. this is like that, this follows that. The tumult of the 20th century is not sufficient to explain the thoughts of those who lived at that time; and even if it there exists a superficial correlation between the two, historical developments do not necessitate that a line of thought progress in one way and not another. This is not to say that intellectual developments are not grounded in the historical, but to argue that New Criticism developed out of certain historical conditions requires that one first give an account of the connection between the historical and the intellectual.

What is required is a psychological epistemology -- a theory of knowledge which posits that knowledge is a response to certain psychological conditions which are themselves somehow conditioned by the outside world.

Such a position would have to overcome several problems.

First, it would have to give an account of itself, and how it would be possible for it to obtain such an awareness. That is, if knowledge is constructed on the basis of fulfilling certain psychological needs, then how would it be possible to formulate an objective meta-knowledge (so to speak) of these psychological processes that was not itself produced by certain psychological conditions, and what psychological conditions would be likely to produce this meta-knowledge?

Next, it would have to account for how different people who were the product of similar conditions could come to disagree with each other, since presumably they would have the same psychological needs, which would posit the same intellectual responses. On one level, of course, such a psychological epistemology indeed claims everyone who is the product of similar conditions shares similar intellectual preoccupations; on another, what is required is an account of the relationship between intellectual content and intellectual method -- how one comes to have certain beliefs and how one argues them.

If the position in question could prove that intellectual content and intellectual method are similarly the result of historical conditions, then it would succeed in casting suspicion on the very processes of intellectual discourse.

If, however, it can only prove that our assumptions are the result of conditions, but not our methods, then the intellect retains some autonomy as a substance (so to speak) that not only is acted upon, but itself acts.

Rimbaud, Conte

A prince was irritated that he was never employed in anything but the perfection of vulgar generosities. He foresaw astonishing cycles of love, suspected his women of a power stronger than some complaisance embellished of luxury and sky. He wanted to see the truth, the hour of essential desire and satisfaction. Whether this was or was not an aberration of piety, he desired it. He at least held a very large human capacity.

Every woman who had known him was assassinated: what a sack of the garden of beauty! Under the saber, they blessed him. So he ordered nothing more. -- The women returned.

He killed everyone who followed him, after the hunt and libations. -- Everyone followed him.

He amused himself by de-gorging luxurious beasts. He set fire to the palace. He rushed upon people and trimmed them to pieces. -- The crowd, the roofs of gold, the belle beasts subsisted.

Can a man enrapture in destruction, rejuvenate in cruelty! The people didn't murmur. None held concourse in their views.

One night, he was galloping fiercely. A Genius appeared, of unspeakable beauty, inadmissible even. In contrast to his features and his disposition was the promise of a love multiplicit and complex! Of an unspeakable happiness, even insupportable! The Prince and the Genius annihilated each other, probably in lieu of their essential health. How couldn't they have died from it? So they died together.

But this Prince died in his palace, at the usual age. The Prince was the Genius, and the Genius, the Prince.

The savant twang defaults our urge.

Rimbaud Villes

I am an ephemeral citizen, none too shabby, of a metropolis considered modern, because the furnishings and exteriors of its buildings, as well as the whole city plan, have eluded every recognized standard of taste. Here you wouldn't indicate the contours of a single edifice of fable. Morality and language have been reduced to their simplest expression, at last! These millions of men who have no need of self-understanding fulfill their educations, occupations, and deterioration so equitably that the course of life ought to be many times shorter than some foolish statistic finds for the peoples of this continent. Just as, from my window, I see new spectralities rolling through the weight and eternal smoke of coal, -- our shadow of wood, our nocturne of summer! -- new Erynnies in front of my cottage, which is my country and all my heart, because everything here resembles this, -- Death without tears, our busy daughter and servant, a disappointed Love and a pretty Crime howling in the muck by the way.

I am the sad art, complicit in its enterprise of time,
Yet limited, engaged, beseeched in the abstract struggle
For harmony. -- Harmony which never comes
Like the rainbow, harmony that shuffles off men's living
Skulls, this discordant will resonant with its own
Contradictions, celebrity for them, made into something entirely new,
Which it is not. Even the pleasure, that weaves deftly through the seams
Of pain, makes that pain plausible, and suggests it, provides
The foundations of its primal being. This pain is the concrete
Of abstraction, the very real suffering that makes palatial heavens
Possible. The world is like a dirge, if poetry is its maestro.

Solipsism (R1)

If I could stop to consider these bricks, the aedifice
Of an oblique mind, molded together by accident,
Grit, conspiring time, red as our hollow walls
Stained with so much blood, startling, ascendant
As infant eyes of the upward night, stark, impassive
Stars...but I am considering ruins, forgotten
Ship-wrecks, well built, meaning, collapsed on the foundations
Of time like a laundering ocean, disaster sweeping its brush
On the light tips of the void, the inevitability of that void,
Its beauty -- which is really my own imagination, trembling,
Shattering into all these self-same fragments of stars.

Disintegration (O)

When I think of these bricks
Molded together by the influx of time,
Red like the hollow walls
With so many breaths stark, startling,
Forgotten -- the ancient ruins rise again
Before my mind, all the old ship-wrecks,
Well meaning, well-built, take off to collapse,
To disaster. This trembling void of imagination
Insists on the collapse, the inevitability of it, its beauty:
Which is really the bulk of my own mind
Collapsing into itself.

The Elves (R 2/14/05)

The key to a darker room comes
Suspicion-less and changed, without
The bottom of the darkling hall:

The interplay of light on
The shadows of light, surrounding
Still the deeper shadows of
The shadowed light, like a canvas that floats

Across the dimming page -- a priming effulgence of bright,
Blue nymphs, dancing around
Their darker and more luxuriant

Shadow selves -- and behind the dance,
In the back of the corridors of time,
Stroking their pointed, beardless chins:
The wicked grins of the elves.

The Elves (O 2/13/05)

The key to a darker room comes
Suspicion-less and changed, without
The bottom of the darkening hall:

The interplay of light on
The shadows of light, surrounding
Still deeper the shadows of
The shadows on light, like the canvas that shadows

The page -- a priming effulgence of bright,
Blue nymphs dancing around
Their darker and more luxuriant

Shadow selves: and behind the dance,
At the foreground of the corridors of time,
Stroking their pointed, beardless chins:
The wicked grins of the elves.

Rimbaud, Enfance

I

This idol, eyes black, yellow mane, orphaned and heartless, nobler than the yarn, Mexican or Flemish; its domain, azures and insolent verdures, runs across the names of beaches, through waves without vessels, ferocious appellations of Greek, and Slav, Celt.

At the foyer of the forest, -- the flowers in reveries tint, thunder, flash -- the girl of the orange lip, crossed of her knees in the brilliant flood that springs from the prairies, a bareness obscured, traversed, and dressed in rainbows, flora, the sea.

Matrons who turn over the neighboring terraces of the ocean; children and giants, proud blacks in vert-green muss, jewels strewn over the gelatin clumps of groves and the tiny, gelated menageries, -- teenage mothers and older sisters whose eyes are full of wandering, sultans, princesses of gait and tyrannical costume, petite strangers and people sweetly melancholy.

What ennui, the hour of "dear body", "dear soul"!

II

That's her, the little cadaver, behind the rosebush. -- The young mother, deceased, descends the steps. The carriage of a neighbor cries over the sand. -- The little brother -- (he's in India!) there, in front of the sleeping, in the prairie of eyelets. -- We have buried the aged in order by the wallflowers' rampart.

The swarm of golden leaves surrounds the house of the general. They're in the South. You follow the red route to arrive at the empty inn. The château is for sale; the shutters are detached. -- The priest will have taken the key to the church. -- Around the park, the apartments of the guards are vacant. The palisades are so high that you can't see anything but the breaking summits. Besides, there's nothing to see below.

The prairies climb back up to the hamlets sans cocks, anvils. The sluice has lifted. Oh the calvaries and the mills of the wilderness, the isles and millstones!

The magic flowers were buzzing. The embankments lulling it. The beasts of a fabulous elegance moving around. The clouds amassed themselves at the height of the sea forged in its eternity of hot tears.

III

In the forest there is a bird, her song stops you and makes you blush.

There is a clock that doesn't tick.

There is a mire with a nest of white beasts.

There is a cathedral that falls and a lake that climbs.

There is a little car abandoned in the copse, or one that descends the path in a stream, beribboned.

There is a troupe of little clowns in costume, perceived on the way through the forest's fringe.

There is, finally, when one thirsts for it and hungers, someone to chase you.

IV

I am the saint, in prayer on the terrace, like the pacific beasts who graze near the edge of the Palestine sea.

I am the scholar in the somber armchair. The branches and rain throw themselves on the library's window.

I'm the urchin on Broadway by the midget woods; the rumor of sluices covers my tracks. I gaze a long time at the mournful detergent of setting gold.

I would be a good child abandoned to the jutting part of the high sea, little footman following the alley whose limit touches the sky.

The paths come after. The hillocks cover themselves in broom. The air is immobile. How the birds and the fountains are far! It must be the end of the world, advancing.

V

Lease me this tomb at last, blanched in the lime with lines of cement in relief, -- so far under earth.

I'm leaning on a table; the lamp is shining with such vigor on these journals I'm a fool to reread, these books without interest.

An enormous distance above my subterranean salon, houses are stretching their roots, fogs are assembling. The muck is rouge and noir. Monstrous city, night without end!

Less high up are the sewers. Around me, nothing but the thickness of the globe. Perhaps gulfs of azure, shafts of flame. Possibly it's on these planes that the moons and comets, seas and fables meet.

Through the bitter hours, I imagine balls of sapphire, metal. I am the master of silence. Why would the image of a basement window blemish in the corner, the vault's?

Rimbaud After the Flood

As soon as the Idea of the Flood was becalmed,

A hare halted in front of the esparcettes and the cowbells, moving, and said his prayer to the rainbow stretched across the spider's web.

Oh! The precious stones that hid themselves, the flowers that were watching already.

On the dirty board-walk, stalls erected themselves, and people were dragging barks out towards the sea rising out like engravings.

Blood flowed, at Blue Beard's, in the slaughter-houses, circuses where the stamp of God blemished the windows. The blood flowed, and the milk.

The beavers built. Capucinos foamed at Starbucks.

In the large house of glass still rustling, grieving children were watching the marvelous scenes.

A door slammed -- and, on the town-square, the infant twirled his arms, comprehended of cocks and of tower-cocks all, under the thundering downpour.

Madame X built a piano into the Alps. Mass and first communions published themselves on the hundred altars, cathedral's.

The caravans departed. And the Splendid Hotel founded on the chaos of ice and the night of the pole.

After that, the Moon heard the jackals singing in the deserts of thyme, -- and the eclogues in clogs groaning in the green. Later, in the violet pine-grove, bourgeoning, Eucharist told me it was spring.

The deaf, a lake, -- Mist, roll over the bridge and pass above the wood; -- black sheets and organs, lightning and thunder, -- Climb and roll; -- melancholy Elixir, climb again, and mass the Floods.

Because after they've dissipated themselves, -- oh, the precious stones that are hiding, the opening flowers! -- It's an ennui! and the Queen, the Sorceress who illuminates her brazier in the pot of the earth, will never want to tell us what she knows, which we ignore.

Homonculus (Revis 2/11)

Reading all these poems and musing
However to write myself, and that ineffably
A poem is about the unity breaking a father
Free of the mom into gemineyed peaces,

Monstrosities dazzled, bejeweled -- in short, be-
Lieving, bereft of my riches, it gives me some comfort
To think I can write damn well whatever I
Please before I die; and then, homosexually, that

There is something erotically slender and frail in the slackening
Tide of black fathers, who bathe like a hand in the slap and whorl
Of that slithering fountain, whose whap is a purified pleasure

That always knows what it means. I want, then, not a little death,
But a great, big, monstrous death, a plethora of depths so big
That it swells like the ravishing flood and devours horrified me.

Homunculus (Revis. 2/10)

Reading all these poems like a poem, and thinking
However to write myself, that ineffably
A poem is the union of breaking a father
Free of the mom into gemineyed peas, says

Monstrosities dazzled, bejewelled, in short be-
Reft of my riches, it gives me some comfort
To think I can write damn well whatever I please
Before I die; and when I die, I will think homosexually

Something erotic, and about as frail as the slam-
Black unions of fathers, who bathe like a hand in the slap
Of that slithering fountain, whap of a purified pleasure

That sees what it means. I want, not a little death,
But a great, big, humongous death, a death so big that it swells
Like the ravishing flood and devours primortally horrified me,
// like the brilliant morsels of birds, the bee.

Homunculus

Reading all these poems, thinking about
How to write a poem myself, that inevitably
A poem is in the union of the father breaking
His mom into gemineyed monstrosities,

Bejeweled, bedazzled, in short,
Weary in riches, it gives me some comfort
To think I can say whatever I damn well
Please before I die, and when I die

I think there's something homosexually frail and erotic
About the union with the father, who bathes like a dark hand
And slap in the slithering fountain, the whap of that purified pleasure

That always knows what it means. I want, not a little death,
But a great, big, humongous death, a death so big
That it swells like the primordial flood and devours

Me like the brilliant morsel of fading feasts.

The Third Existential, or, Influence

What did the original poem look like when it crawled
Out of the sea? A blooming anemone, blue as the briny darkness
From which it emerged? It was not a seagull, articulating dips and turns
Of fanciful flight, that's for sure; it was certainly not
The incarnation of the sea as a river itself, flowing upstream
Into torrid climes. What was it, then? What was the poem
Into which it came? Enough of these seascapes,

Dreamscapes into which or from which the broken mind
Escapes things. We know that the aether did not, of a sudden
Intent, coagulate into fire; we know the slopping ocean didn't
Amass itself, like so much air: nothing was born out of nothing,
But everything came from itself, out of and back into the earth which was
(And is) a mass of its own indivisible self. So stop preaching

The holy fire that could consume this incarnation of the earth,
Or the ages, a sentience wholly beyond any anxiety, but still
Generated by its death, still produced by the very act of production
That succeeds it. If poetry came out of the future,
Like a gull borne on the heavy tide of the horizon,
Then who glimpsed it, what geographer or expeditionary
Mapped out its cartography, prevalent in and of itself,
And who was he apart from it, what mark sufficient to himself?

Tossed Cup

Is there anything more beautiful
Than a stream of lucid water
Hurtling through the air like a rocket,
Falling through itself like drops
Congealing on a sieve?

La Coupe Jetée

N'y-a-t-il rien de la beauté plus plein
Que, de l'eau lucide, un fleuve
Jaillissant à travers l'éther
Comme une roquette, tombant
Entre soi-même comme les gouttes
Dans un tamis coagulants?

Poculum Iaculatum

Estne pulchrior nihil amne
Qui aere per lucidus similis telo
Currit ut rores coagulantes
In cribrum inter et occidit ipso?

Sirens

Last night, on the dance floor, I felt it:
A curious urge, this need to belong
To somebody, or several people, possessed
To be had. Slick bodies dripping with sweat
The way ice slips down crags when it melts
Had me, faces thrown back to the ceiling, rearing in pleasure,
Had me, but what had me most was the swollen throbbing
Of nipple on nipple, jean against cock, bronze necks rubbing
Like pieces of chalk. Dancing alone, or with desires as crippling
As a three-hundred pound, black drag queen, it was difficult
Not to wobble all over the place, barely touching, brushing
The forbidden, not daring, weaving to a music
No more subtle than the pounding of a beat, but woven,
Spun around, and twisting like a puppet in the hands
Of my clumsy desire, their strain pulled on the feet.

Bulbs

These corpulent corpuscles inseminate their mystery
Into an immensity of fertilizing sand, where rocks
On the verge of breaking yield
Their nutrients and nutriment, allowing them to burst

Still further in gluttonous, gyring scope, a breaking from nothing
Fiercer than the dawn-light when atomic combustion
Explodes over arid mesas whose cold-blooded peaks
Grow livid in the impress of his pounding, stellar

Heat; but these are the hungry ones, contained in the seeds
Of their own making, always sucking sharply at air,
Rooting themselves so deep you'd have to tear out

The heart to free them, free yourselves, and when they transform
The pearls of the sun's fulminations into ecstatic
Transgressions of fiery blossom, the rage of the world blooms.

Revision 2 (2/2): The Second Existential

1.

We need food -- barley cakes,
Skinned fish, boiled, molten, rushed out,
Gutted, for the gut, and cuts
Of succulent kine, rolling the plate
Full ruts. The mind
Needs it too, not of the mental
Kind but rather flying through veins,
And bits of digestion must reach
Every extremity of being. Without

A serving of cake, a generous portion
Of steak, the hills cease to roll
Into mountains, rich in the purpled glare
Of dawn, the rippling green of the sea
Greys, all things drain of their color, the sap
Gets sucked out of life, even the eyes
Drop and fix on the dirt, the body stales,
And the mind on a tumult of doubt
Fades. Neither is it cause for surprise

That Virgil -- plump on harvests
Of Ciconian olives, Sicillian grain
That the hard hands of maidens
Calloused to bread for the fires, dough
In the moltens of iron -- forged
Dreams of home and steel, perfection
Of stolen In riot, and every drop of wine
Lengthened into lines, half-lines
Fed on the whirling Tiber's

Crop. But while he lushed
Silence for the farmer, sibilant leaves
For the cycling seasons, the beggar
Whose eyes are penury begot
Half-forms, grimy fledglings sopping
With a semen coat of slick
Sack to mold as the years molded him
Before, becoming the semblance of human
Being. So Zora Neale

Hurston, hands chopped and split
Into wrinkles of sunset
avenues, foraging up spit nickels
For tips on suds of saliva
And hair, complaints and a fridge bare
Of any cheese, pressed ululations
Of bread, crumbs chipping and chipped, barely
Squawked the mountainous life-cooking
Braid, a swan-song collected from tatters
Like a rag-patch silked
Together, I can't say how:

2.

For so slickly food changes moods, begets
And breaks on the temper of time. Art
Supposes an order, demands the complacent
Body spring and spin, like a child that fools
With a top; the impudent mind awes
At the dizzied horizon, dyes in calamity
Of whirling motion, cries for the dance,
And the dance, dance, calls outraged like a fat
Old miser demanding his drink, metallic thud
Of the goblet on hard, but the service
Will not be provided, neglect
Wrecks the insolent household,
The feast is abolished. Pity the minds

That think through a heap of material
Goods, struggling all the while
For a pile of trash into the sky, tottering mix
Of wealth, whether spurting
Immortality, a marbled, soft-lined
Coffin cool in the shade of luxurious
Lindens' sagging yellow limbs; or others
Who glory in books, even fine
Verses that teeter and ring with a gentle
Tone, the serene mutter of a well-placed
Rhyme. Meanwhile they seize for this
Garbage, felicitous rot, toil to bind and weld
Rusty scraps of iron to bronze stained
Sprays of silver, glutinate gold; but trapped

In the saccharine mist of aggravations, the whole
Rumbles a foghorn, blares like a violent
Forecast of horses, war drums, shakes, and rather
Than beat to these thrums, they hack bleeding
Limbs, torn off fists in fisticuffs, trying to seduce
The immense mess of quivering scraps to their own
Genius, impose or oppose the impeccable tune that they've
Borne from this crap. All things are a wretched pitch

But just themselves, and when a storm
Rips the air like an old rag shrieking with shock
At the stretching heat, tremendous armies collide
In the clouds like crags or continents grating
On bare wound of the swollen earth:
The planet bleeds a tremendous flood, also many sparks,
Colors we don't or can't attend to, wild thrill
Of lightning that orbits vermillion and blue
Through the burning forests, phantasmagoric splendor
While we implore the teetering heavens for help.

Revision 1 (2/2)

1.

We need food -- barley cakes,
Skinned fish, boiled, molten, rushed,
Gutted, to the gut, and cuts
Of succulent kine, rolling the plate
Full ruts. The mind
Needs it too, not of the mental
Kind but rather flying through veins,
The bits of digestion must reach
Every extremity of being. Without

A serving of cake, a generous portion
Of steak, the hills cease to roll
Into mountains, rich in the purpled glare
Of dawn, the rippling green of the sea
Greys, all things drain of their color, the sap
Get sucked out of life, even the eyes
Drop and fix on the dirt, the body stales,
And the mind on a tumult of doubt
Fades. Neither is it cause for surprise

That Virgil, plump on harvests
Of Ciconian olives, Sicillian grain
That the hard hands of maidens calloused
To bread for the fires, dough
In the molt iron furnace, forged
Dreams of home and steel, stolen perfection
In riot, and every drop of wine
Lengthened into lines, half-lines
Fed on the whirling Tiber's

Crop. But while he lushed
Silence for the farmer, sibilant leaves
For the cycling seasons, the beggar
Whose eyes are penury begot
Half-forms, grimy fledglings sopping
With a semen coat of slick
Sack to mold as the years molded him
Before, becoming the semblance of human
Being. So Zora Neale
Hurston, hands chopped and split
Into wrinkles of sunset
avenues, foraging up spit nickels
For tips on suds of saliva
And hair, complaints and a fridge bare
Of any cheese, pressed ululations
Of bread, crumb-chipped and chipping, barely
Squawked the mountainous life-cooking
Braid, a swan-song collected from tatters
Like a rag-patch silked
Together, I can't say how:

2.

For so slickly food changes moods, begets
And breaks on the temper of time. Art
Supposes change, demands the complacent
Body spring and spin, like a child that fools
With a top; the impudent mind awes
At the dizzied horizon, dyes in calamity
Of whirling motion, cries for the dance
And the dance, calls outraged like a fat
Old miser demanding his drink, metallic thud
Of the goblet on hard, will not be provided, the cause of his
Insolent neglect has wrecked his household,
And the meal never comes. Pity the minds

That struggle across a heavy wreck of material
Things, thinking all the while that somehow
A jump of the vortex, a shredding rip
Of some great matter other than, god
Can deliver all troubles, still the resonant,
Rumbling world. But better to strike yourself
Against the harsh bells of the earth than wait
For heavenly tunes; the clanging cymbals
Can't stop, and the mind is forced to yield
To this music. All things are a wretched pitch

But just themselves, and too when the storm
Scatters the air with shrieking heat and tremendous
Armies collide through the clouds like crags
Or continents grating on the bare, swollen
Planet, there are also many sparks, many colors
That we don't or can't attend to, the wild thrill
Of the lightning that orbits vermillion
And blue through the wrecking forest misses us
While we stare to the churning heavens for help.

Original

We need food -- barley cakes,
Skinned fish, boiled, molten, rushed,
Gutted for the gut, and cuts
Of succulent kine, rolling the plate
Full ruts. The mind
Needs it too, not of the mental
Kind but rather flying through veins,
The bits of digestion must reach
Every extremity of being. Without

A serving of cake, a generous portion
Of steak, the hills cease to roll
Into mountains, rich in the purpled glare
Of dawn, the shrilling eagle
Loses the hare, the rippling green of the sea
Greys, all things drain of their color, the sap
Get sucked out of life, even the eyes
Drop and fix on the dirt, the body stales,
And the mind on a tumult of doubt
Fades. Neither is it cause for surprise

That Virgil, plump on harvests
Of Ciconian olives, Sicillian grain
That the hard maidens' hands calloused
Into bread for the fires, dough
In the molt iron furnaces, forged
Dreams of home and steel, perfection
In riot, and every drop of wine
Lengthened into lines, half-lines
Were fed by the whirling Tiber's

Crop. But while he lushed
Silence for the farmer, sibillant leaves
For the cycling seasons, the beggar
Whose eyes are penury begot
Half-forms, grimy fledglings sopping
With a semen coat of slick
Sack to mold as the years molded him
Before, becoming the semblance of human
Being. So Zora Neale
Hurston, thick in the grime
Of other people's moldy sunsets,
Barely chimed her swan-song on the hair
That flows through the ridges
Like wind-blown silk, somewhere, lost, flutters
Of a tattered dress, I can't say how;

So slickly food changes
Moods, begets and breaks
On the temper of time.