Friday, January 31, 2014

Adeena Karasick!!!



from This Poem: Book II

Through the fercockte gawk-stockin  hack stackers
trickery hickory lexically-licked sticky flickering

in the moonlit marmalade
this poem is relexifying 
at the sidebar

like a discordant accordion 
like manna from mayhem

is ebullient as it blows
waltzing through a
protopunk unctuous
rub-a-dub buttered bathhouse

and offers you a  feisty
zeitgeist, a forever riviera

‘cause when all is said and done,
it’s just a

punditainer
of outerings, utterings, an outré angsty
stuttered clutter bartered sputter, of phatty latter day flatterers

and says hula lily hillbilly, billiard bombast
ho-hum hum de lilah brouha hoo-ha slap trap
of schizmatic revisionism

And take your slinky hijinx, pixie
fixity of prurient lure of twirly whirlers
a contretemp tempestuous extempora & lay me down in 
an elixir mixer of lexically robust postulates
which say ce soir bette noir,
of gnarly parlors
in a coughing scoffed cacophony of 
acrostic biscuits

a miscued skew of super cinder cendre
slippery ceiling singing
in the flotsam frayed rain stay

Oh this poem is bringing the big guns
opening the sluice gates

all stoked and on trend

hustling its hyper-dramatic excess
flexed with
swishy riffs, pithy spiff grifters

like a shattered chatter-box schadenshow

Oh this poem has missed you  --

and is languishing in its
intra-phonemic flusters, lusty musters,  
roaming like princelings

in the non sequitur récriture
of a pantextual cocktail

riding in a glossy pervertable

...

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Lucas de Lima: Four Poems of the "Dreamily Grotesque"


on columbus day
i am half-choked in the pure time of the jaguar bros
either an iguana or an armadillo tail inserted into my rectum so that
my anal muscles can be stripped out thru
repeated rubbing
then, pressing on my stomach, the jaguar bros
force out & cut a section of my sphincter muscle
rubbed down with astringent plants, a thin twig flexed
in my rectum so it opens my anal tract
like a heart pierced with the fangs of a snake & turned over
as the centered purpose of my soul
the tranced waters beyond my reflection of

warped yards
tattered sails


 ***

 each brushstroke of my blood
can grow from a lopped hoofhand
the swelling of my anal lips
against the finger of the brown man whose lips
ripple the pool of my spermatozoid
in which colts throb
anciently awaiting a birth from
2 men
2 men of different races fucking
until the anal lips fill out
ready for the giant equine head
encased in blood and shrinkwrap
leaving cells behind in my body
on the ragged bed
where i give birth to horse after horse
each one thunders down the street
past trash cans aflame
i am left with my brown lover
i hee and haw, his white mare
too much blood loss for me to move
my brown lover drinks it
to flesh out the names of children
we instantly orphan
roses screaming
i cut off my dying hand so rain falls
for cows whose ribs show
each time the sun bursts in my plexus

***



fire-cry mouth of rays i tip my head back to laugh teething offspring gnaw on glass
a hoof rips out of my belly
i am hoarse the priest slits my throat on a plank
village people under me in a pit because of a nail in the ozone pivoting the rope around
my neck
the boom-chika-boom of a hidebound drum funnels the combusted sun down my
throat my vagina wraps my death in gold



at my erection children throw confetti


***



my female leg jutted out of the saddle

my male leg wanted to break

the white mare cried her pus

i asked her to rub her pus on my torso

she bruised me with her snout

the lilacs flecked

the catgut string

played by horsehair bow

my wig blowing in the wind

Friday, January 24, 2014

TWOFER: A New Thought: Francie Shaw!!! If I speak in dashes: Laura Elrick!!!*





 
If I speak in dashes – in ellipses, is the silence louder?
Those magnificent ears float beneath an eyeball always, and the moon.

The Great Dying we hear is coming will be saturated with intersubjective space
but we might not have the right words to mark it.
An archive. But of rocks is what the theme of such a night was.
What kind of art should be made for it?
If there will have been a human story, but not the one we tell about ourselves.


*Image from "Rex Works" approx 4 x 6" painting/collage 2013. Upcoming show:
Opening:
Feb. 6th, A.I.R. Gallery
111 Front St. Dumbo (Brooklyn)
6-9pm
Reading: Feb. 23rd, Same Place
2pm


 

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Three Poems by LONELY CHRISTOPHER!!!




Coriolanus' Farewell


In the dawning hour I woke cradled in the arms of a Parisian twink
who glowered exigently into my face and said, “Ariel Sharon est mort.”
It did not feel like anything, the world dreaming and devouring itself
curling like Marlboro smoke into the stale wallpaper, the shepherds bent
down in their pastures, everybody looked the same closed in investment.
I've already quit all that, it happens without me, and I'll take my dearest leave
the tanks roar like warthogs in the distance, the drones buzz but as cicadas
in spring, this is how the story has always gone, adieu to my mother and
friends; it can be blamed on me accordingly, it can never be destroyed.
We have murdered each other while our children watched on, that is why I
was born, tall and bumptious hearts feasting on the sick blood of history
and I tried, and I held this awesome boy, but you wouldn't keep me there.
Every pestilence has landed upon our naked heads, and I am heading out
I go alone into the recesses of my own war, making a solace of my hazards.
More than seen, my wicked swamp is feared—like that of the lonely dragon.






Going Back for the Cat


Januaries rattle round my life like loose teeth in a skull
those begotten, forgotten, forgiven, betrayed, and allayed
there is one more thing that the devil failed to say:
I am not like you, I'm not staying on the ship, I am
going back for the cat. All idiot illusion, kneeling there
by the bed, you can present forever (but you can't).
I'm not surprised, not surprised, not surprised—wish
you would have thought of me sooner, Damocles eschewed
we swallow the sword, the string, and the thought of death.
Just to take it in the dunes, just to tell me, be obvious
how lucky to even have, how damned, how shaped in front
waggish crossings and small braids, defend the hopeful
kingdom, drive over the jinxed girl and smear her father.
Yes, there is beauty, I collect it in my greedy lungs
my hair is suffused with it, my spine is quaking from it
I don't know how I am going to get out of it, lest I burst
into atoms and pleasure—let's just leave it at all of that.
There is no repeating, disappear into the small trails
of the board of the lost and the years, guiltiness whores
itself into a sheath of warlike aspiration. Some new day
some sky, sometimes being complete with what is left.
I'm going to carry this without, until, and through love
go back, get out, stand in, outdoor, cruise, stare, prepare
it is all gone, then we shall see what, truly, trophies want.




Small Poem for Aaron Swartz

The ringing blades of winter pass
along the torrents and channels
of lengthy optimism
yielding but their own sound
power enough to set about
barbering the trunk of mercy
the stubble along the jawline of
the suicided boy he didn't want
to go to jail
we enfranchise the information
for its true popular privilege
it's still not flowering just drunk
for a peace we'll be put under
descry a body without the brain
where and when we disenthrall
radiance from what threshold
darkness from what desire
this mered observance
takes as we inhale
set icky warp
once more
try again
see it.

Friday, January 17, 2014

the incomparable SHARON MESMER!!!


I Lost My Beatnik Antlers On the Grassy Knoll . . . Help Me, JFK


I lost my khakis and my hair smoosh
and my craft beer/Telly Savalas shrine.
I lost my “History of Maple Urine Disease” on the grassy knoll,
and my trainable kielbasa.

I lost my eatable narc pants.
I was told I had lost my reason.
I lost my A-Rod beanstalk mojo on the grassy knoll
but I found my Christmas spliff.

Scully, Mulder, I will be a doctor,
but I need my “Ryan Seacrest is a Kitty” blanket first.
Cuba has Santeria, Haiti has Voodoo, and I have my
“Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday Does Irish Cheerleaders At Madison Square Garden” pass
              … oops: had.

Jean Valjean’s balls are on the rebound from Napoleon,
but don’t look for them on the grassy knoll.
Also lost are Broadway memories of Sylvia Plath
and Rachael Ray’s “My Little e-Pony” giveaway.

I hear Maytag refrigerators are polling the Elephant Man’s spider bite
about Tom of Finland’s minimum wage petition.
Apparently it’s also gone missing on the grassy knoll.
Now I don’t feel so alone.

Russell Crowe’s Peanut Corporation is also lost,
as well as Canadian television’s “Why Do I Have Green Poop?” NASCAR series.
Too bad about Neil Patrick Harris’s spanglish movie “Wampum the Sky Warrior”
(and “Wampum Reloaded: Zombie Apocalypse Credit Union”).

Whatever happened to Marie Osmond’s Deluxe Dead Baby Pills Patch™?
And “Freakout On Lesbian Mountain” starring groundhog puppets and sponsored by Abilify?
And where are Hosni Mubarak’s pics of America’s most voluptuous MILF members
of the Loyal Order of Benevolent Toilet Dogs? 
            … I think we know the answer.

My live sponge birth control pay-per-view?
My Prednisone-induced diarrhea tracking number?
My cat’s resignation letter to Maya Angelou’s Power Ranger’s “Diaperlover Stories Night”?
Help me, JFK.






I Called My Flood “Lloyd”

I called my flood “Lloyd.”
I called my flood “Lloyd” because my grandfather called his flood “Lloyd,” though he could’ve called it “Aloof Cad” or “Moldy Dodo“ just as well.
We were barbarians of uncertain origin, and so I called my flood “Lloyd” because my ancestors, possessors of our tribe’s precious quest object, had walked across cold moonlit ice hundreds of years ago so that, hundreds of years later, a weak white sun might stream freely through trees across the land bridge called “Breath-Thread.”
My grandmother called her flood “Lloyd” (though she could’ve called it  “Odd Mayfly” just as well) because the dark-haired ladies of Roman society had worn fancy blond wigs made of our ancestor’s tresses and imitated their crude love of strong odor, especially on holidays.
I called my flood “Lloyd” because I had been chosen to save those who drown in floods in their dreams as I myself had been saved: awoken from sleep in a meadow, hand-in-hand with a boy, both of us laughing past sunlight and jumping down into a hole, and the hole, meadow and boy were all called “Lloyd.”
I called my flood “Lloyd” because the word refers to the brown waters of influxion, and to old-fashioned wrapping paper, and when used of younger men suggests mouse-colored hair, though it could also refer to the grey hair of saints, as it was occasionally found in descriptions of hermits attached to the word “holy.”
As a child I was told, and so I believed, that the troubled soul could remake the whole of heaven into a mysterious light that would allow a fleeting glimpse of St. Christmas the Swimmer, if that heaven and one’s name were the same, and so I called my heaven “Lloyd.”
Back then everything seemed to be happening as in the days of blue dealing, and often I found myself in a boarding house under a sundial on the rue du Cherche-Midi, and the composer who lived there asked me if I were the little girl in the painting above the fireplace, the painting called “She Calls Her Flood ’Lloyd.’”
And I told him yes, with the voice of my Calling, my Calling that I also called “Lloyd.”
It was wartime, always a bloody and dirty Sunday morning, but Paris (which I secretly called “Lloyd”) shone immaculate, and people swept the sidewalks, even the streets, and it was a privilege, an ancient appointed privilege, to stroll in the cold muddy dusk beyond town, just beyond town, my eyes moving left and then right, and then again right and left in perfect equilibrium with the straits between the billboards and the lakes, the lakes from which flowed the flood called “Lloyd.”
I called my flood “Lloyd” because the taste of the sky was so fresh and good, even during wartime, and the promised ways remained at the ends of all things which held together through the straits between the billboards and the lakes, the lakes from which flowed the flood called “Lloyd.”
The flood called “Lloyd” was originally a wandering eucharist, seeking a swollen host yet yielding little fixity, and so after the testing unto death it allowed me to carry it on my back like an eremite’s nightmare, positioned between the unborn and the living, between the depths and the surface, where it yielded little fixity though it did hold the high watch through the straits between the billboards and the lakes.

I carried my flood through the black brightness of day until, in the wake of a pleasant spring spent sleeping, against the ruddy glow of bricks behind bicycles with box baskets, I found myself in deep pursuit by the listening samovars, and I understood how my ancestors had almost been erased from the face of the earth, and how some boundaries can only be honored when breeched. 
And then a new world arose from inside my chest, a world where arrows fell away, lapping up sleep, and I sunk into a silence ever more profound, and the waves all around me gave birth to new, foreign floods, which buttressed my soul against the precious quest object. 
I watched as a canned incandescence streamed in from the kitchen, pooling in the skin under my oxygen, and my rapids became inroads, my radio an aorta, and finally my dominating sorrow became a dais of raindrops. 
And there an endless loam stretched.  My barbaric flood-feet became Earth-feet, barely able to keep time.
This is the condition of unwished-for simplicity.  What I don’t know is the thing I know — anodyne decide — and where I am is where I’ve never been.
Half-heard is unheard.  And who now even knows why those old stones were first set against the sky?
  
You?

Excerpts from The Prose Poem, An International Anthology, edited by Michael Benedikt, Dell Books, 1976: Max Jacob, translator Michael Benedikt 
Atilla Joszef and Gyula Illyes, translator John Bakti
Mutsuo Takahashi, translator Hiroaki Sato




The Smile On My Face Makes the Dead Baby Pills Worth It


What I love most about being a female
are those pills made from dead babies that stop puberty. 
We’re the only mammals who don’t ingest our own placentas,
so when I’m in France I go straight to Bon Marche
and buy me a pill pie made of extruded Care Bear + buxom lady pirate placenta.  
That way I can look 100% Hollywood dead and still smell nice —
like sweaty Marxists mixing it up with Scottish bartenders
over black Catholics using Chinese condoms in Latin America
(i.e., like testes in the lunchroom).

Benzos + weed + kiddie speedballs + heroin + a rag soaked in scholastic turmeric +
thirty dead baby pills washed down with Polish Vodka (from Slovenia)
produces the same result as 40,000 MDMA pills ingested in Amsterdam
if you’re British: you smell like your greatest fear —
Taylor Swift in tiny Harry Potter hot pants
covered in rainbow dead baby patches.
Plus — bonus! — your voice sounds like Exorcist Chewbacca.
A pill made of ten pounds of Exorcist Chewbecca belly hair
as a substitute for teaching brightens my heart more than “The Walking Dead”
summed up in 31 blow jobs.

In 1951, when I was 14, we were into gang fighting, wine and beer in the park,
and punching the shit out of people.
That’s because dead baby pills hadn’t been invented yet.
Still, we were glad we were not the result of 45 Golem Easter bunnies
mated with Bigfoot,
like those poor Kardashians.
Is everyone that ugly on the planet Kardashia?
Something I always say on the third Wednesday in April
after the first full moon in spring at 4 o'clock when the bells ring:
God bless the universal American custom of arrows shot in rapid succession
from masses of Easter Bunny butt.
That means the dead baby pill party in my mouth
is just beginning.





My Name In Hebrew


My Hebrew-speaking friends
tell me that my name in Hebrew
means “poet or lyricist.”
Also “poet or lyricist with insomnia,”
sometimes “psalmist with insomnia,” 
and at other times “one who feeds her cats insomnia today
and tomorrow pills made from dead babies 
and insomnia.”
One particular Hebrew-speaking friend
(whose own name means “eat Al Gore and you’ll get anorexia”)
tells me that my name in Hebrew might also mean
“your portly psychiatrist is unnerved by your project involving
 all the baldness of Hollywood’s insomnia.”
In fact, in a recent episode of
“My Revenant Mama Eats Your Mama’s Insomnia,”
starring three of my Hebrew-speaking friends,
all with Hollywood insomnia,
both the donkey cart and the donkey
are related to the King of Trainee Retinas
and afflicted with insomnia.
And in order to lull him into
Breathing New Life Into The Zombie Apocalypse
they use the Jewish revenge fantasy aspect of
“Inglourious Basterds” — thousands of Tel Aviv children singing
a doo-wop version of “The Binding of Isaac” from Genesis 22,
in which God falls ill in February 1603
and commands Isaac’s father in Pig Latin to
“ab-stay your un-say and then am-scray.”
 But “God’s insomnia” can also be Hebrew code for
 “full of rage in one of NYU’s mole tunnels
  with a goatee full of toxic angora.”
So what am I supposed to believe?
Especially when scientists at Purdue’s Hebrew University in Mahwah, Jerusalem
are breathing new life into the menacing running zombie
that is not merely a revenant but a rageful, rabid
cab-driving mime hobbit with eczema,
drunk on sixteen Insomnia-bin-Ladens
every day before lunch.
I have no choice but believe that,
like the New Zealand volcano in “Lord of the Rings,”
I should be taking the marijuana pills
supplied by my greengrocer
to beat insomnia.
And then maybe my Hebrew name will be
“your orgy gooks are ruining my community musical about
Fall Out Boy’s archival Daewoo with their kebab acne
(and insomnia).”




I Discovered Pain

I discovered pain.

But that was after I discovered
Chuck Norris' real name  (Carlos)
and the cramp-giving power of his mullet
when pitted against a bog oak.

I discovered  pain,
but that was after I discovered
the secret parody set of Nobel Peace Prizes
disguised as the mountain men who lick hallucinating Irishmen
in an enchanted forest.

I discovered pain when I discovered
Paul McCartney advancing his aims with Mr. Pillow-Smotherer-Dude
in a struggle under a gangway window
as voices rose in protest, and wild horses shambled
in the half-light of a same-same Milky Way.
Three stalwart robins approached,
intimidating me.

And that's probably when I discovered
that freemason needle freaks actually discovered pain
in the magnetic flux lines that do not move
despite the Lorentz force acting on them inside a current-carrying
Type II superconductor, rocketing through a wormhole.
And that no one really gives a shit about
nacreous baboon openings,
or mullet challenges to boil colonization

on the edible cockles of a penis.



I discovered pain

in a moment of repose,

in a proud ravaged harbor enclosed

in a bog oak.







My Melancholy Cannibal


" We are all mixed up in the eating of flesh . . ."
— Jacques Derrida, in conversation with Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson on October 25, 1990 and published in e-flux journal #2, 2009



Who gave birth to this disease of nostalgia
called Stroke It To The Food Network?

Who forced us to discuss our raw, rotting flesh and blood
with the gorgeous ladies of Stroke It To The Food Network?

Who forced us to desire that our raw, rotting flesh and blood
be incorporated into the infinite metabolism
that is Stroke It To The Food Network?

Naturally, we recoil from this cool assimilation
as from another old acquaintance,
the Inassimilable Wolf Man.

Who really knows how sublime a symbol
the Inassimilable Wolf Man is?

After all, in the great mystery of Christianity
what is radically alien gets pounded
and then wolfed down
in a series of Inassimilable Wolf Man Seminars.

As is so often the case, it is poets, unemployable and hungry,
who lead us deeper into the labyrinth of hunger,
into the very ends of the Inassimilable Wolf Man —
The Great Digestion.

But before all the teary Food Network nostalgia
constituted a parallel to the Holy Sacrament,
and way before Christ died witnessing the return of
Inassimilable Wolf Man as Melancholy Cannibal Wolf Man,
the Great Digestion provided us with special organs for grasping
a world of meaningful, melancholy eating.

But then we got messed up, all of us at the same time
forcing air through our narrow channels
and placing our two articulators close together
to voice the tyranny of the hunger which, in reality,
is nothing more than a cloud in trousers
in a baby food jar
somewhere in a shopping mall.

Who really knows how melancholy a symbol the bi-labial fricative — which is often a linguolabial trill
[if performed by chimpanzees] —
is in the face of The Great Digestion?

We recoil from this question as from our other
old acquaintance, Melancholy Cannibal Christ,

who forced us to desire that our raw, rotting flesh and blood
be incorporated into the infinite metabolism
of Stroke It To The Food Network,

and who gave preferred glottal place of articulation
to the disease of nostalgia called
Stroke It To The Food Network,

Stroke It To Food Network being only the portal through which the melancholy of eating
is beamed
into 3-dimensional space.


Thursday, January 16, 2014

More Michael Ruby!


              From   THE STAR-SPANGLED BANNER



                                              O HOPE


O hope say finalizes can Bilbao you forever see lashes
By primary the duplicates dawn’s ermine early tamps light springs
What bombards so exaggerates proudly understands we umbrellas hailed fustian
At dimbulb the immigration twilight’s bend last Oregon gleaming eternal

Whose hope broad opening stripes jelly and artificial bright pulse stars dissembling
Through everything the plastic perilous forefends night springs
O’er timepieces the impulse ramparts umbrage we toolchests watched play
Were underground so remnant gallantly mushrooms streaming eternal

And hope the impending rocket’s Doppler red utterance glare funnels
The ransoms bombs electric bursting deedum in monumental air springs
Gave mutant proof ran through possibility the earnest night earlybird
That Posnan our organized flag restant was organ still developed there eternal

O hope say finalizes does portending that magnifies star often spangled deathrow banner opposite
yet toilet wave doggone
O’er timepieces the impulse land mirage of destiny the pools free springs
And posits the foil home mine of embalmed the cure brave eternal