Lord, what hell-bred beasts are these
That summon us to war!
Lunging from their secret lairs with
Razor-maws a-blazing!
Had I but fetched my vorpal blade
I'd certain forestalled a hazing!
Avast! Engage not this fiend's malicious eyes:
Surprise! It hasn't none.
Thou foolish knight brought down to size:
A monster? Aye ‑‑ a wee bit one!
see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ebloom/
Tell me of your fingers each, my love, tell me
one by one:
Ten short and perfect poems transmitted
day by lonely day.
Tell me of your toes, each tiny
nail precisely done;
Only then I might discern light infusing
these gloomy skies of gray.
An epic curve as each hip mounts up,
then fatefully descends.
A full week, I entreat you, on the strokes
when you brush your hair.
Brings us already to twenty-nine, my favorite
of my uninspired friends.
But save for last your devouring eyes that
pursue me everywhere ‑‑
And next month I beg you start
the whole affair again.
The distant crystal forests are burning
Paper parasols roll abandoned along dirt roads
Below black locust she just stands weeping
As each new wounded petal of life unfolds
A former friend whispered to me of your book
You're intent to inform the world of my sins
I barely recall those cyclic dioramas in which
You swore we two were forever friends
Ambulance lights ablaze on brick-lined nights
Fistfights erupt down every other alley cut
They say life's easy enough round here for those
Smart enough to keep their fool mouths shut
They keep slitting all the senator throats
In rarified palaces of conceit and dark powers
No one really wants to live forever, at least
Not those looking down from the castle towers
Sneering master's got his leather whips
Every slave girl's got thin, whiter scars
Drunken frat house boys all get their kicks
Blasting crude rap music from their speeding cars
From the stony hills of Gettysburg to the
Windy highlands and hardscrabble Scottish moors
Dead winds blow sour and unfeeling except for those
Looking to even up centuries of uneven scores
In this land of plunder and murder we barter
For fresh sensation with the spoils of bloody war
The meek inherit what's been condemned and burn
Old carcasses that luck deposits on the shore
She drinks too much to numb the closeness of
Accumulated nights of ripped nightgowns
Strolling among the graves of slaughtered children
All the headstone cherubs circled in thorny crowns
In another time's forgotten space
Your eyes looked through your mother's face.
-- Robert Hunter
Tell me true now, great God almighty,
was there ever any woman more beautiful than
Patti Smith? Cos I just could
not believe it. She and she alone can
still freeze me right here in my footsteps when I
hear that voice singing, soaring
like a furious eagle or an afflicted angel,
gouged and galled by so much useless pain
down along the ground. But she goes on
flying just like she does and always will,
so high above us, up so high on wings of
glorious rebellion.
Listen, you:
the universe is really, really big,
and the universe is really, really old,
and intergalactic space continues to expand,
and time's evincing no sign of imminently screeching
to a sudden stop.
Yeah girl, it's a tricky, tricky place out here
in spacetime, so much easier to find yourself
lost than found. And you know, it's all been exploding
for 13.7 billion years, give or take, now and then
accelerating headlong in lavishly dramatic,
anisotropy-flattening inflationary romps.
And let me assure you, I know quite well how
the fiction of time and space is perfunctorily dictated in our
pismire-eyed frames of reference, even as special relativity
goes on distending and dilating the heaving ribcage of reality.
Oh yes my darling, I'm quite comfortable enough contemplating life
on the grand scale, but I'm equally well enough aware of the
infinitesimal improbabilities that connect us like the
feeble filaments of disintegrating, forsaken spider lace.
So think about it. Now that we have found each other
in the Big Bang's violent and smoldering aftermath,
don't we owe some debt to the laws of physics and
quantum electrodynamics that brought us here at all
to grab each other's hands and hold on tight and never
get separated again? We can't let such simple accidents
as mistaken marriages and unhindered concatenating, joyless years
wreck any shot at happiness that our exploding cosmos still has
to offer the likes of us.
So baby please, please stop letting the miniscule minutiae of minutes
and miles come between us, we two, we who were so clearly born to
travel one single road in the narrow interval of shared sentiency, in the
microscopic drops of space and time that, in this briefest of instants,
comprise our temporary home.
With life threatening to inflate beyond its
permitted perimeter, jostling your tiny
coracle in confusing, spiraling, surreal
seas, and inexplicable visions divulging
inglorious rips in time's ragged, bitten
bindings, and unbridgeable schisms
suddenly widening to divide you from
your erstwhile intractable participants,
then the day must come with inevitable,
unwavering destiny, igniting your nerves
with fear and alarm. When the scales
suddenly rain down from your worn out
eyes, revealing all the callous lies and
senseless cruelty that cages you behind
bars of naked wickedness, then you'll
know you're finally through. Just puff
your breath at them; they're not the
hardened steel shafts you think you
recall, but only twisted columns of
smoke and ash, which blows away at
long last, leaving you free to be the
woman God always thought you ought
to have been born to be.
The municipal halls are choked with colliding
Petitioners, and spies.
Crack oysters open and you'll behold their
Pale and naked, uncooked eyes.
Let's cane all of our
Unworthy heroes, and saints.
Did you have a good life when you died?
Enough to base a movie on?
‑‑ Jim Morrison
The bright lights and colors fly toward us outside the windshield,
rushing, racing, accelerated like the flashing skin of mad gods
in the filthy, trash-blown arroyos and ravines of glass and steel,
sirens wailing like never-too-distant banshees waiting
just around every corner. Gargoyles. We mutate ahead in time,
back, the petals of our possessions and friendships unfolding,
folding, sealing over, locked under leathery sepals, separating from us
all that we've acquired through painful births. Mainlining
hard experience, call it treason, never reason. Never trust, we thrust
our cracked torsos onto the hardened fence spikes where
broken glass bottles are set in concrete on tops of walls
to injure any unwelcome trespassers into the land of the free.
Plucking out our transistors, idly, randomly, one by one, wondering
what circuits might be interrupted. But neurons are wiser, and they
rewire around new lesions in legions of rebellious,
compulsive and driven awareness.
In the rising ruby and dusty dawn on pale blue highways
approaching L.A. the telephone poles make a mockery of Roman roads
lined with stinking crucifixion spectacles. We must
put ourselves on public trial, draining ichor from the selfsame wounds
so passionately lauded by Volumnia, that power-hungry she-wolf,
determined to win power. . . .fame. . . .fortune. . . .a footnote
in the annals of her hours. What kind of advertising is this, these
half-stripped women with arms outstretched, bleeding television
signal and the dream of the West? Horace Greely, that
infamous plagiarizer, never had this in mind, surely. Violent passion
and baby-brained innocence like spun glass cradled gently in your hand,
this Dionysus out of time, this drunken god-man twirling
on the high wire, always threatening to fall away from the stage
where we insisted he play for us night after night. So thin, these veils,
these veils, in those who seem so tough, but their hearts are delicate,
and they break them for public amusement, again and again,
night after worthless night.
Spurious transitions, not too far distant from quantum tunneling
and the Casimir effect. . . .These impossible cavorting minds
are blind fish swimming through some kind of weird dimensions,
while in darkened corners near the loudly rattling room heater
of this strangely stinking hotel a large and bloated, gray-tan form
may be seen, but only from corners of eyes, like a biomechanical tick,
lungs wispy sheets like paper, thinly wheezing, dry membranes,
creeping, creeping, with twitching antennae and mouthparts that whirl,
that lowly buzz, low frequency hum lost in the roar of the radiator,
or part of the radiator, aftereffect of our mycelial excursions,
a reflection, a mirage. Virtual photons whisper to us in our sleep.
Old Bull pauses now to mention how the stink is caused by the spread
of a word virus up out of the sink drain, and it's always too late
to clear out. That's just life.
"In the first five months of 2008, 218 confirmed cases were discovered
and suppressed in Los Angeles County alone, the majority of them
clustered around the bottling shops. The Ministry of Health
carried out secret fumigation programs to curtail the propagation of rodents,
but they continue to proliferate, especially in areas where there's
an accumulation of rubbish. Rats are suspected carriers, contaminating
bottles and other items with their urine. Unseen behind a spycam, I myself
once watched Lazarus the metaphysician at work on his porcelain table,
cold, white, cutting into his patient, which looked not entirely like
an enormous pineapple, tart yellow juices spurting out all over his gloved hands
and up his bare brown arms. Inside, the traditional xylem and phloem
had been pushed aside by the glabrous pink-brown fleshy organ which had
taken over like a fibrous, bloody, pulsating tumor, pink and frothy,
only much more organized, much more exact. You understand?
If junkies can aim to become plants, then plants can get high on the runoff
behind the bottling factories, can't they? They're attempting a
meaty consciousness of their own, growing livers, the seat of all
mammalian biochemical awareness, and I suppose even Lazarus
musta been uncertain whether he should feel awe or terror."
In cool, dark wombs and THX the movies are watching us.
Like street corner pedestrians we pretend not to notice, complacent,
participating exhibitionists under the high-mounted cameras.
Downtown, bored and inefficient civil servants watch
the undramatic unwashed dramas run on and on. They are we though,
cells in the colony organism of the city like a coral, spewing gametes
into the rushing wind, pollinating at random, perpetuating the genes,
projecting them forward through time.
This is the world she enters, newly post-adolescent, breaking crack vials
underfoot, those lights, that glass and steel, those cameras, that soma broadcast,
podcast from every channel and blog. This is the river of effluent she swims,
and it clogs her eyes and ears and gills. Where is the beauty in the
filth and distortion and disease? How far can one girl be compelled to
open her eyes before she finally sees? But it is her river and her world,
and like Rimbaud before her, and all these other guides, she's
determined to make it her own.
Editing sound files,
I hear a ding through these ear buds
And my heart leaps, so I
Click on the Outlook Inbox, but it's just
Another alert about rabies in foxes,
Raccoons and bats in Pennsylvania,
Kentucky and Maryland, or Crimean-Congo
Hemorrhagic fever in the Turkish provinces of
Tokat and Yozgat, where bloody death is the
Natural finale to tick bites. Leaves me
Unsympathetically disappointed and cold, cos
All I need's to hear one
Peep outta you.
Back to Audacity waveforms.
The day cigarette commercials were banned from TV
Was a genuine milestone, and we could
Scarcely believe it. This was in January, 1971.
Not that we were politicized or radicalized or possessed
Any ax to grind one way or the other. My father
Was not political or a dissident of any kind.
I heard him say many times that, when faced with a
Difficult decision, one should listen to the opinions of
Many, and then make his or her own choice.
He was no troublemaker. So when he unilaterally elected
To discard all the ashtrays from our house,
This was an equally powerful and unheralded event.
In the 60s every house was full of ashtrays, whether
you personally were a smoker or not.
We did not know many smokers. Mostly this prescribed
Policy decision impacted my Great Uncle and Aunt who,
When they came to visit in our home, were consigned
To smoke alone outside, or to desist altogether.
The psychological blow I can't conceive of; like, perhaps, the
Humiliation of banishment to the children's card table for every
Thanksgiving feast. Over time, their visits decreased.
Cigarette smoke smells like money, and hogs in boardrooms,
And packs of jackal lawyers, and embalming chambers.
Anyone involved in this filthy commercial enterprise
Is employed by the death industry, and everyone
Knows this to be true. You can rationalize it, but
You cannot justify it. There's no justice or morality
In an enterprise whose business model causes
Widespread human suffering and death.
My foul-weather friend,
you come for comfort when black clouds are a caul
obscuring hope and drowning more conventional wisdom.
Like inky nets of midnight's stuffy sacks,
the tossing seas of lies rise suddenly to
confound your eyes. Only then do you recall your
long-time perilous voyage knows no conclusion.
My foul-weather friend,
I bring you counsel and friendship this time again.
I stand beside you at every crossroads where
menaces and monsters wait hushed, invisible. And though
the night does not always contract and recoil
from the East's dawning light, and this keen fear
infects me as it does you too, my darling dear,
I'm true to you in the lonely,
fair weather just as unwavering,
just as inevitably waiting, waiting for
one so utterly worth rescuing
as you.
This great and terrible, aching love,
This outrageous strength of reason and will
And unforeseen circumstance, this on-going collision
Of desires where possibilities buckle and meld
Into shrieking memory with all the horrifying screaming
Of colliding commuter trains that weld into one,
Where time turns crystalline, our elaborate, comely flowers
Of hopes and dreams plunging irrevocably down into
Liquid nitrogen, transmuted forthwith brittle-stiff,
Ashy and friable. Everything slips unflinchingly out from
Mistrustful grips; it's sealed over, enshrined in an
Ineluctable past.
This thrilling instant that is the ever-now,
Forever-now, this magic eruption of truth breaking
Through thin, taut-stretched veils, these arching
Roman candles soaring against an eye-dazzling night,
This glorious wealth of breath, of life, of infinite consciousness,
This birthright handed down from God, this supremely brilliant
Gift arising in each moment from the shadows ‑‑
Not shadows of what might have been, but what was ‑‑
Those amber-locked insects of amazing experiments in life
We dutifully, obediently engineer every last pressing second,
Each instant, the icy-fairy traceries recounting our passages,
Pointing like mock-accusatory fingers directly toward these
Radiant explosions of a single world wherein we touch
What's real.
See: http://psdessential.com/hr/inspiration/10-stunning-frozen-photographs/
The fine, white sand's submerged under a few feet
of tropical blue green: snowy-clean ripples in tandem,
below my bare feet, with gently dancing shallow waves in the
baking sun overhead, casting scintillating, lacy networks
of brilliant, reticulate light that silent disperses in the
cool quiet below.
Gentle giant with bumpy, gray-rubber spinal ridge
and narrowed, leery eyes, mutely cruising like a
magic carpet flying through this improbable middle-world.
You never have to return to a dry space crowded with
receipts and fax machines and hold buttons and jittery customers
kept too long away from anything that remotely resembles real life
at all. In my next incarnation I'd be more than content to be
your kind of bottom-hugging detritus feeder myself.
see: http://tandtnunley.blogspot.com/
Sobbing, she
fled from her persecutor, tears
pouring down her cheeks, and her
tow-headed, fearful little child she
tugged along by his little hand.
But the devil, eyes glowing, rage
clouding his molten, igneous
countenance, pursued her, he
chased after her in thunder and
blind fury.
But the great wings of a white
eagle were given to her in her need.
And so, wrapping the child in her arms,
she rose up in powerful flight and flew
long time deep into the wilderness
of sand and cactus and secret, rocky
caves. Here she received manna, and
honey, and fresh water from the
clear stream of a hidden brook.
For a while she stayed here, taking
comfort, and in the days that followed,
her child grew happy again, and so,
therefore, did she.
But the wroth of the devil
did not abate; his hate waxed, and he
unhinged his jaw and stretched wide
his iron lips, and out of this issued
a deluge of fire across the edge
of the desert, which he could not enter.
Tides of flame poured forth: his malice,
his hatred, his evil, and his requirement
for vengeance on the one whom he
did not love, but could only scorn.
From the entrance to her secret cave
she saw the flames coming, and then
she was afraid. Sending the boy
to the back of the cave, she
gazed out, fearful of the end. But then
fissures shook the earth before her feet,
and a deep rift split open below
the mouth of the rocky blade which
housed the cave. Therein spilt the flood
of flame, and the devil's deluge
rushed down into it and was carried away,
and she saw it no more.
Seeing this was done, the devil's
hatred compounded, but turning away
at last from his fruitless pursuit he
departed, preparing to make
unjust war upon uncounted other
unsuspecting victims.
Fare thee well, FictionPress!
I'd hoped to make it last until our first anniversary
(28 May), but alas, the thrill is gone.
I already have enough Lords of Chaos in my life, and I
won't be Xing Li-ed to anymore.
We knew some good times and bad, but I'm
disinclined to dwell on missed connections and opportunities, so rather
let's part in peace. Farewell. Adieu.
And for those of you who've reviewed my work,
whether fair or foul, I extend my thanks, and
maintaining subscriptions to many of your accounts, I
look forward to continuing to read and review your works,
for as long as you're able to endure suffering through the dread
403 Forbidden splash screen. I'll continue to receive PM's,
should you feel so inclined. My content published here shall remain
enshrined on FP, testimonial to the joys we shared, although
all new material I'll be posting forthwith at its new home:
bloomsite, which is easily found at: ernestbloom at blogspot dot com
(see why we must call it quits?) Likewise, comments and criticism
are easily added there, and if you like, at the bottom of the page you'll find
a little link called: "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)." Click on
that device, my friends, and continue to receive my updates.
And if any of my faithful readers wish to join me there,
we can try that, too.
Until we meet again. . . .
~ E.B.
i come and stand before the thermostat, closely inspecting the dial.
i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience.
i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed, but am i some witless minion of thermodynamics?
i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed, but am i some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience?
i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed, but am i some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience? my thumb on the wheel may move cogs that jog more secret structures than mortal minds can guess.
i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed. but am i then some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience? my thumb 'gainst the wheel may engage cogs that jog more microscopical aggregates than mere mortal minds may muster.
i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed. but am i then some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience? my thumb 'gainst the wheel may engage cogs that jog more microscopical aggregates than mortal minds unriddle. what shall guide me? the rule of the law, or my conscience?
i come and stand before the thermostat, taking stock of my conscience. the law will be obeyed. but am i then some witless minion of thermodynamics? am i not a man with a soul, with a conscience? my thumb 'gainst the wheel may engage cogs that jog more microscopical aggregates than mortal minds unriddle. what shall guide me? the rule of the law, or my conscience?
conscience is the eye of the soul, the vehicle for lighting one's way through the darkness called life. no guide itself, it is an aperture through which we admit in truths and falsehoods, and how closely we adjust its sensitivity determines our moral character.
again, very crude words, but it's the bones of the notion that now require the poetic adjustment.
anyway, you see how these things go.
I woke up this morning with blues wrapped all around my head. Now
I'm listening to unreleased Dylan from 1962, heeding closely both how
he said it and what he said. The antediluvial soil beneath my feet was
dreamed up by the Ancient of Days billions of years before my species
was scarcely even conceived. Now I've just got the out of phase blues,
my darling, got damn little cause to cry or grieve.
Without expectation I implore you, my friend (though I just might
plunge down on my knees): let's let Nature's beauty arise like fireflies
in the night around us while our workaday obligations we fitly and
summarily forefend and let slip all the way to Hell. Why don't we go
and get lost just this once in the sweet water decay aroma of some
lazy summer river that's slowly plugging along, in life's abundant
detonations of bubbling sulfurous decomposition, methogenous eructs,
eternal propagation of thousands of species seen and unseen all
around us, you and me, under the lap lap lapping lime-colored
tongues of sticky breeze-fluttered cottonwood trees, chased by the
irritated screeches of a pair of big red-tailed hawks intent upon their
own courtship rituals? You and me; that's all; let's split; let's get
going, and let's do it now.
Ancient of Days: did you ever really think about just how old God
really is? Is the generation gap getting you down, my child? Don't
your parents understand what complications your life entails? Do
you think God's been your personal Blue Fairy, ever since He opened
up His stainless steel calipers to measure the dimensions of the
fireball blossoming out of the Big Bang? But maybe He does care if
Charlie asks you to the prom, so you just go right on praying, little
girl, cos I know sometimes miracles really do come true, no matter
what your cynical, disbelieving, sophisticated 17 year-old friends say,
and anyway sometimes destiny is more than just a trope hacked out
of the caliche of ancient Greece.
Time's not like a river, not even a sweetly stinking one, like Huck's
great big fat steaming Mississippi; time is ironed out of a psychedelic
ocean that's cross-tied through and through its twenty-six Polyakov
dimensions. Just because we failed by chance to rendezvous a couple
decades and a few hundred miles ago does nothing to alter the fact
that we two are one gravitationally-locked dyad. Now maybe you
don't know much about wave forms and 
No matter. No matter at all. Given the size of expanding space and
the duration of time, it was profoundly unlikely that, in our present
incarnations, by pure chance we'd have found ourselves rejoined at
a convenient point of mutual preference. But that's no matter, for
wave forms, once they share entanglement, have a way of converging
until they're fully in phase. And you and I are on that glide path. Call
it destiny if you will; regardless, I'm not wracked with Polyakov's blues
anymore.
