Carter Monroe - The Spicer Series

About the Spicer Series.

The name, Jack Spicer, entered my consciousness for the first time in early September, 1971. A professor at a small private crossroads college had read my initial scribblings and immediately loaned me the book, “Trout Fishing in America” by Richard Brautigan. Not having read a great deal of what might be referenced as “literature,” I was blown away by the book and even more so by the fact that a professor at the college had given it to me. I noted that the book was dedicated to Jack Spicer.

Though, I can’t recall exactly, I read the Brautigan book in either one or two days and returned it enthusiastically to the professor who then gave me “A Coney Island of the Mind.” It wasn’t long before I had exhausted the very few of these type books this person had in her collection. (She was not remotely a member of what at the time was termed “the counterculture.) So, it was on to the campus library in search of similar writers/poets. Of course, in rural NC at that time there were virtually none to be found. What I did find was W. C. Williams, Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and others. I’ve often wondered how my current view of poetry might have been altered had this library contained collections of Ginsberg, Corso, Kaufman, Whalen, Snyder, and others who I would read in the next 18 months.

In the fall of 1972, I decided not to return to college for my junior year. I had this glamorous notion of “taking a year off to write.” At some point, I wound up with a job in Washington D.C. My first weekend there, I walked from my meager digs to a kind of newsstand/bookstore and found “Book of Dreams” by Jack Kerouac. I was familiar with Kerouac because of an article written by John Clellon Holmes for Playboy Magazine that had been written about Kerouac’s funeral. Over the years, I’ve wondered how many people were introduced to this writer by that particular book as opposed to some of his more prominent ones.

I met a kindred spirit early in this city who knew how to negotiate The Library of Congress. During my initial visit, the first person I attempted to research was Jack Spicer. Because of his propensity to avoid publishing in what might be termed “major outlets,” the search was very difficult. I found maybe two poems before spending my time immersed in The Beats. It needs to be noted here that many of the books by said group of writers that are today in print were not so at that time. I think “Go” by John Clellon Holmes falls into that category. I read it back then in that library. I, also, read Philip Whalen, Lew Welch, and others of that ilk.

Summarily, in the fall ’73 after having received the proverbial wall of rejection slips, I returned to college and went year round in order to graduate in December, ’74. Having chosen marriage over an attempt at graduate school, I moved to the tiny town where I have remained ever since. I was over an hour away from any decent bookstore or university library and was immersed in the struggle to negotiate suburbia in order to gain economic sustenance. By 1978, I was making semi-annual trips to the Research Triangle in order to procure books and music that weren’t “Top Forty.” This continued for a period of 20 years. The first time I went I had twenty bucks. The last time, fifteen hundred.

In summer 1999, I gained internet access. While I was a late bloomer in terms of computers, I learned quickly about this most wondrous of tools. The first name I ever entered into a search engine was Jack Kerouac, the second was an old girlfriend, and the third was Jack Spicer. There was a seeming wealth of information on this man about whom a noted NC poet had once told me, “The Language Poets consider him to be a god.” The first thing I ever ordered online was “The Collected Books of Jack Spicer.” It also needs to be noted here that this marked the end of my treks to the university town bookstores. So many things were at my fingertips.

By 2006, my attitudes in regard to poetry had changed drastically and that was something that deserves no explanation here. I reread “The Collected Books” as well as the multitude of critical articles and copies of lectures that were online. At this time I began writing the poems that make up this series. My plan was to create a manuscript for purposes of submission, but outside distractions/upheavals deterred my progress to the extent that by the time the manuscript began to take on some “real” shape (if, in fact, it did) the book “My Vocabulary Killed Me” had come out and a chapbook of this nature seemed too obvious. Most of these poems have found placement, though I can’t recall exactly where other than Meat, The Wild Goose Poetry Review, and The Rusty Truck. If you are an editor reading this and your journal was omitted, please accept my apologies.

From the Provinces,

Carter Monroe August 2009-08-25

Carter Monroe lives and writes in the Provinces of Eastern North Carolina. He has hobbled around the small press for the past decade publishing poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews in multiple journals online and in print. His latest book is “The New Lost Blues – Selected Poems 1999 – 2005” Thunder Sandwich Press (2005).

The Spicer Series

Poems for Jack Spicer

I

The space that exists

as such

within that riff

occurring between chorus, rhythm, and melody

is the all encompassing definition.

The thing that brings us home in the end.

And, whether we get it

or not

says little in terms of vague perspective

or consciousness evaluation.

After all,

it’s just music.

I wonder

in the millisecond interim

when the over-the-counter-meds

have taken hold,

if I’m seeing this

or not.

“The thing that is left unsaid”

is what the poet told me.

And, I wonder

if this is it.

II

The net is ambiguous

like so much absurd reality.

To fight the overtime free kicks

forces discipline to the next level.

A cup, a glass, a bottle

become the proverbs in an inconsequential sense.

“To err is human.”

I heard on a TV show.

Yes, I know Mars is a planet.

Know it’s associated with the color red.

Know there was once a dark night fear

with black and white movies.

But, the ever present blankets were there.

Just like the pre-alcoholic shakes.

And, I wonder if that’s where the drinking began.

And, I wonder if fear makes one transcend.

III

Scorn chasing me through sallow wheat fields

killed by wind and rain.

The challenge, ever present,

scoffing at signs of real.

Where is that long term

wandering romance

that shields itself from the grave

in a happenstance fashion?

Where is that line

that finds itself gently

with no guilt or forethought.

Looming like eagles above and beyond?

What are the repercussions

that belie a relegated forecast

all the while hazing the pertinent thoughts

of a loser destined to find nothing?

IV

They make me into this thing.

This surreptitious superfluous thing,

this thing that can’t hold onto itself

when mind and matter

get into a conjugal mode.

And, I succumb to this thing

and refuse to fight this thing.

Time being what it is

in the constant unnecessary resurfacing.

I mean.

You and Bird, man,

let the vocabulary consume

and haunt

until the ghosts became real

and nightmares

were a fucking way of life.

In objective terms,

the consideration seems obtuse,

but at night,

when the bed sheets are drawn

for a single moment,

it all makes sense.

V

To come to a point of seeming nonsensical relevance

is too obvious for those who kneel down.

If you don’t “hear” the words,

all is lost.

Striking gongs and explosions

are TV metaphors

lost in some exaggeration

of poignancy.

The trip was back there.

It’s not here.

Just a memory filed under “C”

for context.

And language always broods.

It broods like Miles Davis.

It broods like Mark Hartenbach.

It forever broods like Hemingway before the shot.

The assumption of narrative

is far too comfortable.

The admission of guilt

is far too real.

And I’m no one to resurrect anything.

Just a drunk with a car payment

who knows how to use a thesaurus

and how to lie.

VI

The sway is but a mere happenstance

when the line swaggers.

The thought is so far in the distance

that to notice it would be a lie.

The hands are tied,

but not in bondage,

as you wait for the transmission

to transcribe.

A drink, yes, another drink

and the voices gain clarity

when the soul comes alive.

Is it code

or just a mass of words

needing no organization

or interpretation?

Is there muse in the mix

or just the rap of indulgence

countering the desire to punch

into the formality of “should.”

When the final breath

has led you to sleep,

do you remember.

That is the question.

“Do you remember?”

VII

Words, demons, haunting as such,

the tune of relevance

playing forthwith.

The planets castigate

those who are attuned.

The madness seeps

in a methodical surge.

Genius

Where is your retribution

Where is that reassurance

Where is the coil

that pulls one back to what is not?

“danger/death/dead/droll/feel without”

I wrote in 1974.

Prophetic it seems

as I drink myself to death

and burn all my poems.

VIII

There is a line beyond which chance becomes the norm

within hermetic seals and coiffured options.

A quote becomes embittered by the lack of effort

put forth in the semantics of inconclusive doctrines.

The need to find soliloquy in all things rendered helpless

belies a formless and ever changing cloud.

The analysts are grouped accordingly

and categorized by sterile disagreement.

What metaphors can penetrate the hymen of understanding

sanctified by its own sense of permanence

and beleaguered in a mathematic womb?

The stench provides the only separation.

One more round of misfires

becomes ever pertinent to the cause.

When the chambers are finally emptied,

the prisons are totally filled.

IX

Coping with the substantive jurisdiction of fraud,

the eye is taken out by necessity.

Cryptic in its ambivalence,

the whale beaches himself for lack of other choices.

To find night in the meld of fixation

is an innumerable measurement

of quantum serializations

left brooding in a benign quandary.

Riffing hallucinations reoccur

within a tepid and cankerous vein

where the reparations separate color

and the blackness conquers all.

X

The matriculation lies passively,

alone and brooding in the next room,

waiting for a phone call

or an alarm clock

to counter the impulses

and deny the next step.

The radio surfs itself

as news, weather, sports

and three seconds of Lionel Hampton

connect in a discernable collage

making sound into something visible.

When the voice comes,

bringing the tide to a crest,

day and night will merge

and form an indistinct cloud

with silent thunder

and invisible lightening.

Words will fall like hail

and roll randomly across the page

like tumbleweeds on an imaginary plain

or hubcaps that find freedom from the wheels

XI

And, I stand to the side

in this passive mode

that places in reserve

all forms of conceptual medium

and waits for the inner ear to clear

bringing back my ability

to tame this tightrope.

The words are too strange

at this moment

as if they were coming from an auctioneer

speaking in indecipherable tongues

to a series of random numbers

and disconnected robots.

I counter with rationalizations and ideals,

but at best it yields something

too simple to make much sense.

I argue in this netherworld,

receiving no response

not even from myself.

Objects versus things and ideas,

rhythm, space, dynamics, construction.

The potpourri of madness

takes possession of the fringe.

There is no objective correlative.

There is no such thing as poetry.

XII

Nostalgic referential negotiations

are torrentially poured aimlessly

into intelligence leaks

shielded by concocted cynicism.

The post-dagger necessities

seem all too superfluous

except when viewed from the inside

where security is altruistic.

Blamelessly, the surrogate purgatory

imprisons conquered ideas

conjured in benevolent sanctuary,

muted by a vacant afterthought.

When the rays break loose

after the explosion

the final cup of coffee

is acknowledged and revered.

XIII

approaching the edge of placid potential

the harangue is left uneasy

a palpable sense of wonderment

shadows all that seems workable

tension pushes the bellows

and time is forged within

the frame is indefinable

the meaning, inconsequential

from the stars comes the philosophy

in beams downcast and immobile

the bursting occurs

after the glass is broken

after the pieces slit my throat

All poems © Carter Monroe

Images by Megan Pinch

Megan Pinch is an artist and educator currently living in Florence, Alabama. She has taught at University of North Alabama, Texas Tech University, and College of the Holy Cross. She attended graduate school at Rochester Institute of Technology and SUNY Brockport's Visual Studies Workshop, where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree. Over the past ten years, her images have been featured in numerous publications and juried gallery exhibitions. Megan has received national recognition for her art, winning several awards and grants. More of her images can be seen at www.meganpinch.com.



Artist Statement: My images are narratives about relationships. In these pieces, I attempt to harness the contrast of the whimsical and the grim of the fairy tale we call "love." Vintage wedding dresses fascinate me; and through the lens I imagine the stories of the women who wore them. Sometimes there is a fairy tale ending; sometimes not. I often use the disquiet of abandoned spaces and barren landscapes to elicit the mood in my images.

(click on the images to view in another window at full size)

Expectations

Georgia's Mask

Flew The Coop

Entangled

The Moment of Truth

Alice's Shadow

Serendipity

Return To Sender

Scarred

On With The Light

Off With The Glass

Before The Threshold

Matt Hill - excerpts from PARATAXIS

During the 1990’s, Matt Hill was the editor and publisher of the fabled avant-garde Marshall Creek Press. Notable poets published included Sheila E. Murphy, John M. Bennett, Peter Ganick and Jake Berry. The complete series of the Marshall Creek chapbooks are archived in the Special Collections Libraries at UC-Santa Cruz, SUNY-Buffalo, and OSU-Columbus.

Matt has authored several chapbooks: Rouge Aurora (1994); Roxis (1995); and Triune Override Tractatus (1997). During 2007, he edited a collection of quotations (Extracts:A Field Guide for Iconoclasts) and published a book of prose poetry (The Cloud Reckoner).

Parataxis is his latest collection of prose poems and he is close to completing a collection of flash fiction vignettes: The Amplitude of Growlers. He continues to live in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, where he has been a life-long resident.

Defrag

In an exile of promise, in the isness of nothing, I invent sweeping preoccupations – The hell with the polemics, it’s the treasure of daily chaos that cancels out the world’s loathing – Each befuddled moment a seed crystal unpacking the glaring the daring the outrageous acts of this temporal stay – And yes, it is laughter that always works as the most brazen eraser of misfortune and folly ... On this sphere where the Vulgarati gibber on, senselessly disturbing the ether, the noise of mere words ceaselessly fills the afternoon voids – Here, cattywompus is actually a form of dork ballet – In defrag mode, I no longer need to hold a candle to the mattering brightness – The edges of my presence dissolve into a despairing focus as I observe that horn o’ plenty, the one we’ve all taken for granted, and yes, the very same one that is now quite empty ...

Ur Gnomics

Isn’t it Unreason that the philosophers can’t hack? – Yet bring up the subject of Nothingness, and it all turns into a feeding frenzy – The disputing gets all tangled up in which came first, life or ontology – You mean to tell me that knowledge is only accessible when the lights are left on? – If a sequence of words may, or may not, become a sentence, then the value of anything must be beyond language – This leads to thinking that rationality is an acquired disease that only produces further ignorance ...

Since the philosophers are never satisfied, what is called philosophy might itself be pathological – That horizon out there may be an illusion, but the unexpected surely brightens what hours remain – Breath, soul, fire ... I mean, how can one even dispute that guy Heraclitus ...?

Futility on Purpose

Who is doing the talking here, always a matter of dispute, the antiphilosophers still in the saddle riding hard, the Marlboro Man swathed in counterfeit smoke, “Gittin’ old ain’t for sissies” he mumbles around a dangling cigarette (rolled), the prisoners of net price are casting off the itching questions while the Unknown eventually solves everything, these Roadrunner reruns sure help out in the shuffle of my purposeful futility ...

This ink dries before it hits the paper – The rustlings of this creaking memory, like winds full of ash and embers – Disturbance is the constitution of the world, destiny not something that submits readily to secret knowledge – In other words, this daily existence has to either equal or surpass itself ...

Strikeout

This afternoon, the sun continues to bleed the way a stone captures smoke – My heart, reconciled to your akimbo stance, beats along with the fire in your hair – My charm now in tatters, I may as well finish off the goal of achieving maximum opacity – I ask her if she is still in the groove – She slyly slurs around her wink, “Naw, just pretending ...”

At a later time, there might be the merge of hand and breast, a dagger of allure deftly poised – Briefly we might be as hungry as Melville’s cannibals, our prayers composed of wide-eyed sweating – In the search for a puzzle to go with this missing piece, everything demands the torching of this wayward flesh ...

The Sound of Light

Forgetfulness usually sets in right after sundown – Has something to do with getting situated toward the future tense – Might this not be analogous to the way time decomposes as it heightens the profane moments? – Sure it’s tempting to think it may all be over, but the petty furors indicate otherwise – By using desultory verbiage, I now seek to outlast the frozen spots in this heart of mine – Perhaps an assault on the inevitable will underwrite further longevity ...

Meanwhile, the sound of light turns the aforementioned accretions into a much bigger ash heap than the flames of love never quite anticipated – This because time’s drool has always been a family favorite – We’re talking a plethora of insignificance as this body, designed for so much wear and tear, soldiers on through the wounding thickets – Holding back on the charm acrobatics, I duly tilt on in the lizard populated afternoons ...

The Marvelous

Nothing comes close to perfection like the lips of Athena, myth being proportionate to what? – Vectors of Orpheus call out for further ekstasis – As the higher magics diffuse, revelations happen in the intervals, the proof embedded in new forms emerging ...

Portents of soothsayers scribed upon their murmuring altars – Their tranced testimonies resonate in hermetic gold, divining the limits of con-fusions as the words become uttered – Birds awaken prophecy in their restless motions, a randomweave living in preservations of smoke ...

I rub my eyes endlessly as intuition signals distant events in far space – The synaptic leaps still boggle, while sudden smiles remain the best of investments – For the modern primitive, the mind yet provides a notebook for the Marvelous ...

Where I'm At

Agreeably, preoccupations with calamity have been deleted – My daily tightrope walk over the abyss nothing more than the gestation of reprieves – Through a series of half-deaths, even pleasure is nourished in its evanescence ...

Arms akimbo before the human window, the one I stare out twenty five hours a day, each viewing a crucial experiment reserved for the non-ordinary carnage of apparitions – Muzzling the negginators has not been as effective as siphoning off their gas, their identities hung out on the line like laundry adornments – As a second nature, this poverty and the sharpening of knives have always served me well ...

Poetry by Ivan Argüelles

photograph by John M. Bennett

For four decades Ivan Argüelles has developed and mastered forms of poetry exclusively his own. Rooted in sources as ancient as the Iliad, as modern as James Joyce and as contemporary as the latest rock and pop music he continues to challenge the mind and ear. He has published numerous books of short poems and has reconfigured epic poetry in the multiple volumes of Pantograph and Madonna Septet. He is retired from UC Berkeley and writes and regularly performs his work in the Bay Area and elsewhere.




INCOMPLETE CANTO
FOR ANNO DOMINI 2009


what’s the relationship between
bleach and blanch
and for that matter Blank
as in “blanche-fleur”
you was my bride in XXth century
furiously et cetera
goddamned how the troubadours
and the Etruscans on their shiny lake
a cargo of five hundred thousand
ducats and wearing velvet foolscap
the emergent picture is one of
ignorance drunken self-pity
“lussuria” jazz in the wrong hour
of days without memory sloth
in basements waking to sharp light
of conscience and dreary text
latin latin and more latin
catullus but not propertius
lucretius splitting the atom
near the corner of ellis and 59th
Bo Diddly the self made guitar
which it is being a Man
junction of time and space
“high” on roof top abracadabra
or that are perhaps fractions
from an ancient poesy “tying
her hair in a topknot” for a
divinity to manifest by the
and moreover the wellsprings
of sorrow ingratitude mockery
not understanding rightly the
Nature of things viz-a-viz
lucretius “antichissime mura”
undoing her girdle in the middle
because of the extreme heat
as lurid the pictures turn round
and round hands gritty soiled
from pornography and juxtaposed
the Seder waiting for the Stranger
anomalous pages torn from classics
to illustrate beneath the buttocks
a pillow in length the size of
memory itself agony and dreamed
over and over the divorce
papers signed in a dickensian
bureau shafts of ill-gotten
fire distributed among the heroes
philistines (i.e. Palestinians)
hauling ashore the alphabet triremes
sweating in sandstorms eating
leftovers of pig dog urine slop
who can but explain this plight
agony blinded at the millstone
in gaza question mark mysteriously
posited in her ovaries
the bunch of keys her hair her
ink-stained school books ABC
of love in 12th century ingots
plastered the junk shoved into a
just sat there staring for hours
darkness of history
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
“weaving the garments of the deities”
how sweet matter
the great greensward beneath
bunches of phlox fled
into the willow grove her feet
naked to read there
bucolics of Theocritus while
in the future wars rage
ponds fill with blood bile gore
heavens gape nuisance
to be alive amid rubble groping
here there was a
the letters no longer make sense
in the apartment a complete hush
waiting for rockets
hissing who once prayed
in the grass extended their shadows
love-making
whole afternoons consumed
in the skin read the literature
of sweat while bees knit
their intricate orient of sound
in the sleeper’s Ear

will we ever be allowed back?


01-11-09





(sort of a love poem)

today it’s gonna be different
I wont go out and shoot anyone
what a kiss can do
melt your heart in two
“love you, Valentine”
world is such a crazy place
one day it’s indigo
the next it’s running amok
I hate crowds especially
hot days make me angry
where I went wrong was loving
you and only you, Angel-Face
only a pistol can take your place
manifest destiny in a stolen car
side by side cruising to heaven
could it be love at last flight
the necromantic girl imagine
stepping on the gasoline
until death do her part
hair so easy to plait in the hand
a soft bronze glow a mechanical
piano her mind what is it
going to say to the One?
afterglow of eternal rest
between the eyes a bullet
lodges so easily a clean sweep
as they say but I won’t
do that again follow her streaks
yellow and buzz like an insect
through the luscious foliage
peering through internet infinity
where she will put next a foot
down sides darker the ravine
tumbling if just to touch
the once and only You,
Angel-Face, freckled sun spotted
downy limbed lasting grassy
folds up and over the horizon
a sailing away a fleeting dart
glancing a last like a mist
the holy intangible way it should
be and never more


03-25-09



[a small poem about]


of all the lives, a life, this
one, air of sky & clouds of in-
transigence, walking as if to discover
or uncover an afternoon, in Love
with the idea, or else nothing matters,
flowers white dogwood magnolia
oleander phlox snowballs Your face
among the flora sleeping, what
green sap runs through yr veins
what tributary of blood exclaims!
seeing you is to know everything,
then oblivion, hell the thorny Hades
of Achilles, wound is eternal as
is the poetry of it, darkness
going down from the house of Light
into the miserable basement, how
can it be recovered that moment
when brimming with life you ran
from course to course to Understand
what little, sometimes the intense
blue is Too much, we waver as if
nothing to hold, the size of it is
what cannot be explained, you will
be gone in a matter of minutes a
shadow fled off the floor, ghost
a fragment of
to remember



03-27-09




[elegy for joel pugh]
for james balfour


a lifetime, disappeared
into which quarter of the sky
the chinese invented fabulous
celestial entities powder rockets
shining other things, loosely
involved the skin undoing by one
after another the desires
looking no more for the Cave
or else getting by
mirrored in a water far away
longing, called echo by a
different name with brightly
colored skirts a paradigm of
youth like a metal in summer
hot seemingly indestructible
until one day writing backwards
come to terms with, on lawns
of evening fade the chill
of alcohol and girlfriends
who come to be in the telephone
a section of cloud limited
to memory only the rest being
an acquired “second” language
a poem, perhaps, elegiac
running the fingers over a surface
which is music or night or
because there is no word for it
who are shouting into the wall
pulverized, I am definitely
this small organism called sleep
this portion of shadow that
clings to the enormous green outside
when water suddenly manifests
with its myriad faces of myth
drowning, a lifetime
is,


01-14-09



[darkness gathering, the]
“l’edifice immense du souvenir”
m. proust

not otherwise, for the moment the slender
blades a radiance, can it be sleeping?
imagine the massive subterfuge to be
nothing but air, or its absence, remember
nothing at all but for her passing
naked through the night, then echo’s
small and plangent grass by the window
where a god forgetful of his dress
waits for the planet, plunging
through a water so immense that
whoever said it could be kenned
listening, you were almost “there”
for a whole summer maybe becoming green
silent emerging outside the fragile
shell of the self, who arbitrary
and cruel ascertained that distance was
the dominant mode, the music of madness
sounding a little metal, because,
shifts from white pale merely sheen
invisible really or blending into
the bright cloth, other side of what?
expecting to be served a childhood
in a mansion carved out of sand until
all of space, a clock ticking red
within the Ear, “I am orestes” said
repeatedly to the whirring maenads
who are come to the Hill, take me
all the thing is broken
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
after all these years a century
poised like a droplet on the edge
a moon dissolving in the morning’s
one instant of oblivion, who will
change masks slowly going from room
to room glass in hand, asked to leave
the company of strangers, alone
for what seems
you are urged to age, to lessen
the maximum security which life is
outside where a weather darkens
it is afternoon gathering
a language lesson, pronouns remote
and honorific none of which apply
you are becoming ineffable
a pointillistic backdrop
to an already impalpable montage
the excuse is worn, nobody
believes you were ever
here
can hear the immense scaffolding
coming apart in the dream
like sections of her name
you can no longer recognize “it”
what stands
what falls
the unhealed wound
how long ago that was
until death do us
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
the middle is become the end

(for jack foley)

01-23-09


(“the” secret poem)

because can never, be, reveal
nothing despite rain and forecast
cloudy, how as many the years
rolled thunder in loose heads
margined by beauty’s self,
illusion, to exchange one book
for the map of skin and the,
other, for what has never been,
who will look askance at limitless
the sea, immense below sky equally
immense and, wounded, equivocation,
fault line zooming toward orient
to poetry’s flawed mansion, how
many housed in tiers of animal
and magnet, her face, Her eyes!
flashing iridescence & excitement
(does age matter?), this ancient
thought this manifest of eld, whose
and for what shapes green manifold
garden swarms luscious love’s again-
bite until, Dreamer! riot in the
welkin, planets aflame, puzzled page
the enigma of Minerva stalking
grasses of sleep, shakes the hand
this inch of desire in what map,
longing for the, has ever sought
ages in the Eye, what hear the Muses
then in their grotto, I am to her
what marble is to the mind, she is
to me, what, Ear, music contained
the unfurled in peals of rose and
ash, how much a horizon, how little
sea-bottom, deaf as a moon unseen,
cannot dare to Touch, following
the thread of her passage crimson,
at first, then whittled to a small
magenta, red involving, trying to
read editions azure, how far
distance extends into its Space,
initials in dissolved ink, nebula,
fossil, shifting, bone, cold,
the interior of History, causeless
her voice, Singing!


02-22-09

Poetry by Tim Van Dyke

Tim VanDyke's poems have appeared in Octopus Magazine, Typo, Fascicle 1 & 3, 9th. St. Laboratories, and Cannibal. Find his sound collaboration with Brian Howe here. He has an upcoming piece in the journal Muthafucka and a suite of poems, "Songs from Slow Song," will be published soon in Heartbreaker. He will also be publishing a chapbook with the Cannibal Reading Series, hopefully by the end of 2009.


(Editor's note: So that the poems might be presented in their intended format the titles below are links to PDF files of the poems. To read each poem click on its title to download the poem or open it in a browser window.)

A RIVER FOR THE TIGER OF THE RIVER

ROMANCES OF ACCIDENTAL SKIN

TREE POEM

Stories by Willie Smith

Willie Smith is deeply ashamed of being human. His work celebrates this horror. His novel OEDIPUS CADET is available at amazon.com or from Black Heron Press. His story collections SOLID GAS, GO AHEAD SPIT ON ME, EXECUTION STYLE and STORIES FROM THE MICROWAVE are collector's items. More of his work can be viewed by googling "deeply ashamed of being human." Performances of his work are available at YouTube - click here.



BALLAD OF JERRY NERVAL


One day, maybe today, just picking my nose, walking past a picket fence, the slats begin to walk themselves; wobble along the periphery; rob consciousness. On the way out, catch myself coming to – eight blocks, two murders, one rape down the street.
Witness, perp, victim – take your pick. Too stunned at the moment to pick my own brain’s lute.
Regard pavement. Take my pick of the litter. Retrieve a Cricket, a Camel. Pop butt in mouth. Snick Cricket. Scrape thumb raw snicking. Hold sparks – because no fuel – to tobacco wrapped in poly-lipped paper. Leave Bud bottle with Newport drowned in it. Forget mustardy napkin, tampon, Puget Sound white fish, toothpick, Ziploc dogshit.
Have a puff. Think about it.
How do I know we just didn’t all die in a dream? The whole rape sequence no realer than epilepsy? Now the world has shrunk, we love to bray: Where does rape begin? Does murder ever cease? We meaning the media and me; all the eye of I. For aye and aye.
Ember scorches fingertip. Flip stub into gutter. Bounces off goo on newspaper scrap – fishwich tartar, kitty litter overflow, parakeet guano, common business-oriented barf?
Pick nose. Absently touch phlegm-stuck-to-index to lip. Consider turning around to walk backwards past those white pickets. Return arrow of time to undone quiver. Nibble sticky. Realize what doing. Spit.
Tampon now wears my snot. Nourishment for some eager slug. Bacteria, fungus, protozoa likewise wiggle to the table. A virus in a parasite in an amoeba inside the slug headed for the snot drools reverse transcriptase. God bless hunger!
Maybe I can uninvent the bomb. Or at least shrink the population; by, at least, one.
Pick my way home, delirious with teary logic. Sidetracked by a lamp post, unbuckle, take off, put belt to good use.
Takes a real man to whip a rapist. No real man, I take the noose exit. Kick chair out from under. Choke, jig, dangle; into afterlife blast.
Picket fence up there, too. Flutter by in absolute synch. Sink into holding slats still. Till see nothing between two thoughts. Still can’t tell if hear there. Chaos so perfect.

BUS COME


No acid test to distinguish dream from reality exists.
Dissolve to Linda Lovelace and Richard Nixon caught in Waiting For Godot. Stuck at the bus stop. Watches stopped. Jingling change. Constantly at odds with themselves. Uncertain who, deep inside Grant’s tomb, killed Cock Robin.
Linda lights a Virginia Slim. Titters, “Just to make the bus come – ya know?”
Nixon grunts, “Nobody ever does anything to make me come. The fuck stops here.” Then bitches how impossible modern times to public speak. No sooner memorize a lie than – due to information fluctuation – whole paragraphs inoperate.
Linda, blowing smoke, asks if he needs help getting anything down pat?
Nixon waves a hand at the smoke. Frowns down at the pavement. “Young lady – would you mind blowing the other way?”
“Sorry.” Linda drags, looks away from the aging sadsack. Sighs. Says to the frigid air that she herself is currently involved in memorizing a song, it being her goal in life someday to sing Happy Birthday to the President of America.
“Monroe already did that.” Nixon idly squishes an ant. “For that cocksucker Kennedy.”
“Oh, this wouldn’t be for Monroe,” Linda shoots Nixon the wide eye. “He’s dead. He was President, you know, during the Era of,” she leers, leaking smoke at Nixon’s ear, “Good Feeling. Now, I wouldn’t mind,” she sucks on the Slim, “if the President gave me a good feeling!”
“No voter,” Nixon grumbles at the tiny corpse, “ever expects anything less.”
“My trainer beat me with chains.” Linda tosses her butt. “Trapped me in a chain of events leading to the Feminists, who abused me worse yet.” Folds a stick of Wrigley’s into her mouth. “Just ‘cause I couldn’t act they ruined my career. What’s wrong with reality before the camera?”
“Couldn’t agree more.” Nixon scuffs at the corpse, mashes it into the concrete, till the ant appears never to have existed. “They threatened me with jail just because my men set up a recording studio in the wrong building.”
Linda pulls out a baloney and mayo. “Sometimes I wonder,” with her left hand she picks the gum from her teeth, sticks the wad inside her purse, “now America has stepped on the moon…” she eyes the new crescent slipping behind a Wonder Bread billboard… “is moonlight any dimmer?”
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear,” Nixon frowns reflectively at the concrete. “The trash we left on the surface was highly reflective. If anything, moonlight strengthened. Under the watch of my administration the very heavens brightened. And yet,” he winces, as Linda bites into the white trash caviar, “I was forced to resign, nearly impeached.”
“Was there any,” Linda asks with her mouth full, “sex involved?”
He shakes his head. Says never in his life did he fuck. He just likes to talk trash.
Linda gulps the half-chewed bite, licks mayo off lips, says, “But a man old as you – you must have children?”
“Done in a lab. They put me under. Extracted fluid. Shot the stuff into Pat. Sure, I had kids. But I only did it…” he appeals into her baby-browns… “for the image.”
Emotion sweeps over Linda. A cocktail of pity, greed, lust. Here stands a man in need, a man deprived, a conquest for the asking.
“I could make you come,” she whispers. “Right here. Right now. We could step across the street. Duck behind that billboard. We’d see the moon again…”
“Don’t be preposterous.” He sneers back down at the pavement. “Sex to me means nothing. My interests lie in securing power, control, leadership.”
“Haven’t you ever wondered how good sex feels?”
“Sex is no good. Period.”
“What I’m talking isn’t really sex. I think the President of America will one day testify to that under oath.”
“This a gag?”
“No. My trainer taught me to control that reflex. Through his leadership I acquired the power to swallow even the biggest.”
“I know a couple whoppers I bet you can’t swallow. How about: the insurgency is collapsing, we are winning their hearts and minds, the war will end by the end of this year.”
“Don’t be silly,” she titters. “That’s all hot air. Besides, America never lost a war; not even the Civil War; the moon is our fifty-first state. Don’t you ever masturbate?”
“I don’t speak Greek.”
“I don’t either. They beat me with chains to make me do it in the movie.”
Nixon buries his head in his hands. Sobs in frustration. He just can’t understand why the bus won’t come.
“My technique,” Linda chomps into the oozing sandwich, “is no different. Think of it as nurse-assisted masturbation. America’s gift to oral culture.”
“You are poisoning my mind!” he garbles into tear-puddled palms.
“That’s what they always say about pornography.”
“I suppose your trainer,” he glares up, “warned you about porn?”
“Chuck is a genius. America’s most artistic pimp. He could run for President, if he just wasn’t so intellectual.” Linda chucks the rump of the baloney-mayo into the gutter, belches daintily. “OK, now I’m well-fed, let’s hop across the street, take care of that little matter. Nobody’ll care, nobody’ll even see. Here, gimme your hand.”
“Explain first just one thing,” he hands her a fist. “How did blow come to mean suck?”
“Simple – in my trailer park we useta say: suck below. Hey, baby – you wanna suck below? And that got shortened to: su-below, then s’b’low, and finally how we come to know the word today: blow.”
“I often wondered,” Nixon muses. “I asked Pat once. She slipped on her cloth coat. Fell to her knees. Pressed lips; blew. She blew hard, too; till her face blued bluer than when she blew the candles out her fiftieth; cyanosis, I believe the term. Anyway, both of us shrugged, gave up. I spent the rest of the evening struggling with my income tax, and she failed once again to conceive. Thank God for that laboratory. We truly are the nation that stepped on the moon. No revisionist can take that away from me – those bootprints are forever. I guess Pat – through no fault of her own – simply blew it.”
“Don’t take it personally, Dick.”
Nixon bristles with suspicion. Halts in the middle of the road. “How do you know my name?”
“Because now I got your d-d-dick,” Linda quips, although, she’s such a lousy actress, her timing stinks, comes off in a stutter.
Nixon ignores – paranoia dulling awareness – the flub. Looks around for the Secret Service, forgetting he’s trapped inside Waiting For Godot.
“Take it easy, Dick,” she hooks an arm through his elbow, leads the rest of the way across the street, as we hear, offstage, the bus approach. “C’mon – be my friend, I might let you come in my face.”
“We don’t want…,” a befuddled Nixon thinks back to the tapes. “We don’t want to… piss in anybody’s face.”
Linda chuckles. Kicks off her heels. Edges barefoot over the gravel around behind the billboard, dragging along the dead President. “I suppose we could try.”
They slip into deep shadow. The moon dodges a smokestack.
Linda kneels. Gropes. Bobs. Dick sees himself underground. In the event, tosses over her permanent onto the sod.
“Oh my god,” I mutter waking up inside a bus, pants wet. Resigned to Nixon, vowing in heaven to vote Linda.


THE ALL NEW ADVENTURES OF DICK HEAD


The head of my dick woke up with a hangover. Splitting headache. Throat parched. Forehead turnip purple. He needed a Kentucky fried chick. Rolled over on his neck; one good eye squeezed shut, chin dug into pillow. Behind the gloom…
jumped into jeans, headed out the door. Slipped behind the wheel of his refurbished 1942 two-door Bad Karma. The oriental jalop started with a bang; headed downtown where some chicks he knew lived.
His face burned scarlet. The headache stank. He stepped on the gas. Stood on it. Hyperwarped out. Hit downtown in no time.
Slammed on the brakes. Leaped out in front of the Bashed Inn – a cheap hotel where scum accumulate. Out in the street the double-parked junker smoked.
He burst into the lobby. Raced upstairs like a gasoline fire. Kicked down the chick’s door, by way of knocking. They were friends. He had already been there once or twice. Her name was Kay or Sue or something. They got along super. Once or both times had a ball. And he knew she knew he tipped heavy.
She was fat as a lardpacked medicineball. Lay on the floor. Little guy perched on top. The head of my dick sprinted over. Zicked out stiletto. Cut down the guy’s pole; collapsed inverted-Indian-rope-trick-like.
The head gobbled the chick before any time could act. Was licking fingers when he discovered the urge to split for another piece. Hangover still throbbed. Schmalzy fatchick failed to suffice.
He shot from the room, leaving the remains to reek. Exploded back down out to the idling two-door. Down the street he tore like a run in a stocking.
Now for a class chick. Seen her a number of times. Five maybe three. Punched the lighter in. Snapped on the radio. Sat back to daydream while barreling through redlights, crashing out of the way tenpin pedestrians.
This chick more gooey and golden than a toasted marshmellow. Actually a piece of white meat, she could pass for a latte, she was that exotic. Lived out on Twilite Boulevard in the Neon District, just off Jerk Circle, around by the Halfway House. Thought it was End of the Rainbow Inn, or maybe The Lightning Arms.
Pretty arrived damn quick. Had to wait five seconds in the lot for the lighter to pop. Lit nose. Kicked way out of the smoldering wreck with overhead cams and a new paintjob. Headed into complex. Spit up in the elevator due to retarded.
Hustled up to number. Tugged off knob. Barged in.
Six guys stood in there. Axed their poles quicker than you can say “Whu?” Lay in a heap like so many cigarette butts.
The room smelled bloody, hot, frustrated. Made the head of my dick homesick. On the bed lay the mouthwatering Kentucky. All breast, drum, thigh. Skin done to a T. The giblets of her soul moist and tender as nuns marinated in some spa where the virgin sprang up once in the imagination of a nut.
This his oasis. He leaped, losing jeans as he flew. Cannonballed. She was one gone chick. Sacked before time had a chance to pass.
He burped on the pillow. Still the hangover hung. In the giddiness of it all, licked fingers to the bone. Realized that, yes, it had narrowed to the last piece. He had to place all his balls in that one aboriginal slot.
He’d met a queen once up in Ballard. Had a cousin down in Ardenwald. Cousin’s mom owned a bishoprick over out down there around by in Vader, along the edge of Outer Wyoming.
Snapped fingers, said, “Why…” gone before “not?” could materialize.
The radio in the ’42 redone heap announced the weather, but he boomed way out of the stuff before elements could gather over area discussed. “The weather is just a buncha hot air,” he thought in disgust, blazing up her driveway out by the coast of the Pleistocene.
The mom appeared as a Hindenburg of a sea cucumber, bobbing beyond the breakers.
The vintage Bad Karma jammed in the sand. The head jettisoned jeans. Rocketed nude through the windshield.
Over the combers hydroplaned. Hit the mother in two shakes of a gnat’s womb.
She was musty, maggoty; smothered in green cheese marbled with kelp. Smelled like a cross between limburger and the garlic panties of universal suffering. He ate Mum with sixty benign dynamite sticks; fuses sputtering gibberish – mother tongue to both.
Came a whale of a slurp. Grew dark. To the mother of all gulps – he flashed – the hummer of a migraine had, against the grain, split.
He turned over. Opened that one eye. Raked a skeletal hand across dimple.
Limped from bed. Hobbled for coffee; wondering where to find the change to obtain the next snootful.

Visual Poetry by Nico Vassilakis

photo credit: crystal curry

Nico Vassilakis lives in Seattle. He is a curator for the Subtext Reading Series. Nico works in both textual and visual poetry. His visual poetry videos have been shown at festivals and exhibits of innovative language arts. TEXT LOSES TIME is his recent book. etc etc. Quixote, his son, is entering high school. Autumn is coming.

Nico lives in Seattle.

fixed in space bricks atop make a spine the head greater than supposes to be. distended frames collapse into
dilution weakens color bonds and cellular families disband - red pales, blue softens but black stays

ideas bloat, collisions occur
precision blurs throughout uncommitted areas

expenditure of a finite source runs round your ears
exposing light drifting off pleasurably at first