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.
