From jlehmus@cute.fiMon Dec 4 21:03:20 1995
Date: Fri, 1 Dec 1995 15:43:58 +7516517 (EET)
From: Jukka Lehmus
To: fowler@phantom.com
Subject: no subject (file transmission)
*****************************************************************
GLOSSOLALIA Issue 3
ASCII version
--------------------------- Cut here ----------------------------
_________________________________________________________________
G L O S S O L A L I A
Electronic Journal for Experimental Arts
Issue 3 - December 1995
_________________________________________________________________
Publisher: CI Acad. Poet. Aeth.
Editor: J. Lehmus
Stenbocksv. 24, 02860 Esbo, Finland
jlehmus@cute.fi
_________________________________________________________________
Copyright (c) 1995 by J. Lehmus. All individual works Copyright
(c) 1995 by their respective authors. All further rights to
works belong to the authors and revert to the authors on
publication.
GLOSSOLALIA is published electronically, 6 issues / year
(February, April, June, August, October, December).
GLOSSOLALIA is published simultaneously in two different formats:
ASCII and HTML versions.
ASCII version can be subscribed by sending SUBSCRIBE GLOSSOLALIA
in the body of an email message to: jlehmus@cute.fi
HTML version is available on the World Wide Web at:
http://www.phantom.com/~grist
http://www.cute.fi/~jlehmus/index.html
REPRODUCTION of any complete issue of this publication is
permitted. Complete issues of this publication may be
downloaded, duplicated and distributed free of charge.
Authors hold a presumptive copyright and they should be contacted
directly for permission to reprint individual pieces.
Contributors assume all responsibility for ensuring that the
submitted material does not violate copyright conventions.
EDITORIAL ADDRESS:
CI Acad. Poet. Aeth., J. Lehmus, Stenbocksv. 24, 02860 Esbo,
Finland
jlehmus@cute.fi
_________________________________________________________________
CONTENTS
~~~~~~~~
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
FORWARD!
POETRY & PROSE
\ Two poems by Jake Berry
\ NARDG.SAH by anabasis
\ Building by J. Lehmus
\ Two poems by Thomas Lowe Taylor
SOURCE TEXTS & REPRINTS
\ Book of Formation (Sepher Yetzirah)
\ "The Medical Knowledge of Shakspeare"
CORRESPONDENCE
1 fowler@phantom.com
2 fowler@phantom.com
3 Cathryn.L.Welch@Dartmouth.EDU
4 TOMT@ch1.ch.pdx.edu
5 TOMT@ch1.ch.pdx.edu
6 rbove@duke.poly.edu
RECEIVED PUBLICATIONS
ANNOUNCEMENTS
1 NETWORKER TELENETLINK 1995
2 From: cybercafe
3 From: u.principi@sapienza.it
4 From: jfelter@direct.ca (Jas W. Felter)
5 XEROPOESIA
6 From: StickrDude@aol.com
7 Erste Eschatologische Internationale
8 From: bbrace@netcom.com
9 CYBERGRAIL
CONTRIBUTORS
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fractal images by Aleksandr Koltsoff (HTML version).
The translation of Book of Formation (Sepher Yetzirah) is
from an anonymous print volume.
_________________________________________________________________
FORWARD!
~~~~~~~~
Let us dream the lucid language.
Submissions, review items, news, announcements, and comments
are always welcome.
J. Lehmus
jlehmus@cute.fi
Editor
Helsinki, 21 November 1995
_________________________________________________________________
Two poems
~~~~~~~~~
by Jake Berry
Phaseostrophe 128 (for Ivan Arguelles)
Anatolia, Ivan, must bear the the
rain
bull antlered temples surrendered
last witness before She was driven down
& the Trojans guilty as anyone
so melt the ironworks, railyards
gathered in pastie rot memories
we'll drink deeply from the bardic strain
and fiddle while dawn corrupts the house of god
power suspended
across heart-fed rose
(binds its
savaging)
(terse infusion:
bone meal and lime
cut into
death throe terror
activates salvent (feathers
her nipple
oracular
plains of myrrh
______________________________
Phaseostrophe 110
He went down to himself
length of rope
and lake of sin
listening bone ironies
close enough to shoulder the animal
he'd carve from absolution
"Nothing's changed.
Did you think a few lightbulbs
and combustion engines could
dispel the hunt?"
carrion
suitcase
ritual condoms
seal mainline righteous
scraping his wounds -
mumbling
mumbling
down to himself
nothing eyelash ruse
coughing genitalia (the gesture's mnemonic)
lone and clean strung
sardonically breathes
_________________________________________________________________
NARDG.SAH
~~~~~~~~~
by anabasis
I. REMBO.CAN
Love is drawn from the fabric of one's own life;
how then can one find love truly until
one has lived some of that life...
First Day
In the %you% of this, I hear tremors recapitulating
further information from our mutual interior, that there is
already a history fathoming out into the landscape. I'd
held on too long to see otherwise, and into mute sentences
cast afar too long aside no rumors persist among the
uncommunicative, who, after all, perfect their isolation as
if it were an object to become polished and pure. These.
What I'd skipped into, nor time out of itself, but rambling
around another old, familiar territory with no one in view
for the long ride home, and what was fashioned out of old
television images, that is, a cultural memory calling out
for chocolate and peanut budder; still the hero persists
within, as if solace were too much for such a blunder. No,
the arc persists, drawing you upward from your own station,
mists pushing inward from the dream state, it is something
which no longer has your attention, it is a part of it.
Somewhere, I call your name. My hand goes upward. The
pain has been removed, and yet the particulars of existence
remain in their own, uh, realism, wha, their own, uh, animal
magnetism; at this pace, no further discussion inquired.
But I see the mad fire diminished, and so it should, I
suppose, calm down, in the interests of survival. What was
assured a moment ago now has its hesitation, having seen
life's persistence at the hour of what passed for something
mysterious but which was ultimately something of a draw on
my _mentsch_, as I understand it, the life force, vitality...
"...an expanse of spirit in a waste of shame..." means
just what it says, he pouts. Or was the word "time" in
there somewhere? No doubt the typewriter is put to bed; I
heard a report which surrendered supposed typewriter moments
(taking it out in Istanbul and doing some "killer poems" on
the bed, nothing but you and the tap tap tap of it) into the
space of the nostalgia museum, where lifestyles, old
emotions and so forth are franchised out for the hopeless
among our masses of masses searching for a lifestyle
identity, but without a clue to how to access that space.
Why is it so hard to have an authentic life. I did, but I
paid the price for it, and after going to a few AA meetings,
I find my, uh, unique shit was really pretty mild, compared
with what you can hear at meeting after meeting.
But lifestyle is another matter, and for a poet, more
important, if one is to "become a new word". Giving up all
pretension in favor of something career-oriented is
contradictory enough, but to eschew life itself in favor of
those importances which befit the token, originality: why is
that itself such a nuance, not that each poem is the same
poem over and over and that the lifestyle itself could be
either a complement or a costume, an evasion of what the
work is and how one should be using one's span of attention,
to the benefit of fitting in, which one must do, or in
driving oneself into the reins of a new terror, encountering
the fear and insecurity of working into new territory, which
is the same, rather, of passing out from the doctrine of
one's safety into the palaces of the practitioners, who are
they anyway, passing judgement on the work of others, if it
is free war in the marketplace of the world's faltering
consciousness of itself, then it is of some importance to
address that clamoring, self-centered loneliness which is
man and declare the unitive no longer in exile, and make the
poem less invisible in its special realm, for what after all
has become of what is left of the special realm which poetry
occupies?
Poetry is not another shorthand for spiritual
information, nor a realm of special effects which tickle the
ends of the brainstem: its special realm is in the kind of
truth which is carried by (beyond, suggested) the poem in
its interaction with the conscious, in its stroking of the
unconscious, and in its relation to the will of the reader
(one is taken over, one gives into another out of trust),
all of which are a part of the creation of a community which
can take place in no other way: especially as the globe is
no longer (was it ever) a smoky cave with body language and
arm and hand signals playing as much of a part in the sacred
rituals as did the words uttered, which after all were
really the Word; we don't possess the Word in that we are no
longer in the sacred room, but the energies are/have been
franchised out over time in the pooling of syntaxes and the
relation of grammars to states of mind; after all, styles of
thought and mind control can be messed with just as the
words themselves.
And so message becomes less and less important as style
more and more becomes behavior. Entire cultures develop
through generations of lifestyles simply by the introduction
of facades and the force-feeding of behavior models via the
video, when after all, the video could be training us all to
be transcendent space captains, as for some it does....
Thus the dominant grammar resists any changes of form, and
when the change of form becomes a form itself, then the
experimental is in danger. Once a movement or mood or
whatever becomes accepted, it loses its radicality and its
bite, its do-harder approach in the face of unopposed
success. It's time to retrench in order to maintain
invisibility, for after all, one simply wants to be in the
here and now, and all this stuff about poetry and so forth
was more than we'd bargained for. And the intensity of the
life itself, who would want that; on the other hand, finding
yourself with a unique (or maybe even not-so-unique) life,
you just don't know what questions "others" (if so there
are) are asking. I continually run into people who don't
know what to do with their "spare time", and there I am, my
life always in a mess, and besides that, worrying about what
the fuck this poetry stuff is all about, that I could only
gaze at them in wonder/and the poets I met who didn't have
that sort of double life, those I worry about, afraid that
I've met a franchisee.
A ring clings, or surfer bowled, no fatter skeins were
foregone, nor concluding sensations where musked out
frankers were no longer impolite, I don't see why machines
like this shouldn't improve sentence structure since you can
always go back and change it; her own signatures seem to be
a great distance away from here, and the thoughts of how
would you spend your time with someone else, a partner, is
more a topic than a fantasy, like telling a friend I
wouldn't know what to answer to someone asking me what I
want from a relationship when I've never had one that
succeeded; the fantasies one has when thinking about it are
familiar, not just the sexual ones, but fantasies like
having her hang on my arm as we walk in public, leaning over
to stick her tongue in my ear or to say something incredibly
erotic....
You say this is to be expected, that as one heals, the
urges to normalcy might even be overwhelming, and might even
win, one might become normal. Interesting thought. People
have always been incredibly nice to me, and the only hard
times were the ones I created to mirror-out, act-out some
self appointed hierarchy of attitudes which seemed
determined to convince me that they constituted my reality,
made a difference, to evolve or survive in spite of their
committee approach to ruling my life, and when the results
weren't what I wanted, I really threw a fit, I'll show you,
I'll take my toys and leave, to which nobody ever ever said
well now Tom please stay around cause we sure like your toys
and want you to stay. No, staying around was always a
volunteer proposition, and if you wanted to go off and be a
looney, it was your privilege, have a nice trip, somebody
told me once when I was doing that in a kitchen in Missoula,
"have a nice trip, man" was what he said, not looking up
from his (whatever).
The score: what's the score. Units beyond measure are
called into the dialog. Various parts of the body confer
with eachother in order to decide how they will vote when
the chips are down, when the adrenalin rush finally "hits".
The other days are just too warm, and not remembered too
well at all. You spoke. It was too soon, I was not ready
to leave my state of expectation and move into something in
the here and now. Maybe that's why you won't send the
picture(s). "Take a polaroid, baby." A rush.
Slow music combines with patchouli incense to create a
picture of you. It is all embers and light, and the smooth
air between us turns into a viscous love glue, and the rest
becalms within a newer sign that we are alive. You've given
out, and call remainder another collar on the lam. You went
on further along, retailing out some newer calm. It's a
flaw, you might say, to stutter beyond seeming into clearer
porches, but the bright flow of chance indicates a freedom
in which we wish fervently to believe. Not too far. Only
so far as to, uh, deny denial, or stay within the comfort
zone. ComZo. Relux outer. Her sighs detached, like a
distant distance, you'd call ahead or fold no outer, in his
own fools replete, but sentenced, too. I am at the beach,
writing this.
Nor orthodoxy recalls his disco days and nights as a
complete blur of inattention, your house discarded again,
but palled silent nor mist your love's own anchor rusting
outside in the rain, your own tears unmixed nor shouted out
below, her signs, made intense and sad, continue to mystify
and diminish. Nor excluded, either. "The Jazz Referrals."
Appearing nightly, and too slow within chants to utter
disregard. Nope unintented. He got too close, once, and I
saw myself in him too soon to recognize and too late to
ignore. Outside on the street, I turned and ran one time
when I looked through the crowds and saw what seemed to be
the profile of my own face, and a familiar herky-jerky of
motions which could only be me. And I turned and ran, for
who wants to meet his Same and stop to say hello, better to
seek yr Others, and welcome them into some odd fraternity of
hangers-on. She waits twenty-three years in a hotel room.
Pipes clanging in winter. He went out and never came back,
but not me. I'm back.
The intimate is the union of the personal with the
impersonal. There you have it, voice interpenetrates with
what is real, and somehow it is your own voice you hear,
mocking the wilderness of dissent, but still a straight
arrow in the morning...he pauses mid-stride to see what time
it is on his wrist, he stops and looks down at his wrist,
now doesn't that tell you %something%? I've been there
before, I tell you, and it's a cold dawn when the sun
doesn't doesn't happen, because if it doesn't, we're all in
a lot of beeg trouble. I wouldn't know, I'd only had the
job a few months, and now it was winter and everybody on the
crews wondered aloud and at breaks who was going to make the
winter roster and who wasn't. I didn't say anything, a rude
stranger with Montana license plates on the old blue van
where I went to eat my bowl food warmed over the Coleman
stove instead of crowding into the lunch room for supposed
camaradarie.
"No room at the inn, it decides." There's a fatalism to
that, imbedded as a surface (not below at all)--tells you
the inner landscape is crowded with stronger ones than the
one to pay attention to you, and the decision has already
been made. Your own fortresses less distinct but lying far
beyond what has been described earlier as Moto Plenitude, or
Foregathering. An attitude or a position, in either case a
mistake. You'd be far better off to hold your own in a
distant hollow, and mix the two alternatives into one good
course of action: retreat. Here, however, your way is
blocked out from underneath in the form of something far
more accessible than you'd ever imagined: an escape hook, a
giant, rusting turn-of-the-century Escape Hook, gar-an-teed
to take its fair share of abuse, no longer a symptom of
doubt but its able messenger, and she wanted to do more than
hold your hand, I can tell you that.
Nonetheless, I've longer waited in the here than now,
you'd say a doubter then at bay, and your own senses tell
you that you have come to rest in a strange lingo out there
not at all from what he'd said, and even if your own spells
%are% strong enough, you might still carry the sun too far
to the left to smell your own blood scattering in less
pleasant rows of the dead and dying down; no hills remain
after his "flat earth" policy, and the Cat D-9s were grading
day and night to bring everything into a suburban
tract-builder's dearest dream, to pave and put instalawns
down over the entire continent, a coast-to-coast mall, think
of the parking meter contracts alone! But my heart is still
beating along, thinking of her in all her aspects, and where
are you tonight, Sweet Marie?
And you--I'd called your land a heathen one, with beauty
and darkness conjoined within a patois of power and
imagination, close to nature's ruin, somehow in the
geographical cloaca of an entire continent, how can it not
sometimes smell strangely of life's processes? And so the
beauty you have in your language is as much a combo of
mixtures which is native to the region, and though you're no
regional writer, there is something in the disjunkt combo of
the flow of yr poems could be endemic to the, uh, locale,
and in yr work a kind of sexual tension in its progress
which is sharp like a knife, the song goes. I'd even called
the even hours a target in regret, and made no longer any
tribes or causatives, nor made plain in anyone's other
dream, it's mine and I'll tend to it. Would you join?
And still no %other% skills the flame without intention,
nor finds the healing powers a realm and pleasance, in his
eye cast out from foam to friend, a pallor in remiss, though
a finer corner turns from down to out in prison stems
re-sight your power a namer or a trust, experimental in its
place a cause at work nor play you couldn't do a stammer but
to saw its unrelenting pride no further than yr snout, a
dreamer in your mists and plenty of it, stems no signs their
commas shine aside wd have yr plenty signs and doubt, his
answer ir-replete but shower, and so much work to it, is it
not another franchisee at the counter, asking lifestyle
management questions of the counselor, who really only wants
to sell his girlfriend (surely...) a guest membership at
half price and then only so he can hustle her... Weren't
you paying attention just now? I sure wasn't.
Luf is blahnd, he sang, his Russian accent barely hidden
by his meticulous pronunciation from the phonetic cue-cards;
and beneath his calm exterior, not a blatant choreographer
in deceit, you are thus, nor hidden beyond doubt the signer
from another scheme: this is the way out, and if you
follow, there are more seasons to tend than you'd like to
count on, though if this means nothing, then there is
nothing to mean at all, and, man, how do you feel about
that? Can you go with it? But the calm derides, and you
feel flavor in your favor of her mists unattended wires draw
along the floor without piety nor any other code word, nor
drawling at your cusps and farmers, the latter dude a
flatter spin than would detain. Sharp, the flooder skins.
No muler forests that should stop him cold and colder.
Tufts. The fever pleas insense or outer, Cadillac, no,
chevron, uh, what _was_ her name?
For awhile, I just kept away from them, women. I was
still hurt and afraid, confused, only recently aware of my
anger. I would practice, having the fringe of an intimate
dialog with one female, and the tale of another with
another, and so on, but that's just life and getting on with
women. The thought of a real relationship just didn't
occur. In the back, yeh, you're dying for it, and keep the
whining stranger at your depths, lest he scream with
insolvent rage about not getting what he wants, just like a
kid. The range of error is not so great, only its
magnitude, its range over time of having existed at all.
This you might have glossed over, or not seen quite so much
as a flaw, or a possible sign of failure, or its remiss
pleasant, document. Finish that! I'll no lessor pin than
spot, nor cue his own foment into calm and disrespect, a
piner at his glots.
Nor mute, nor insensate chaum, hil'd spot th forded
spline its' agronamic feam--hister thuts n'itage pluton
grots, then a nire wd mimble in his quaid. Park yr doter
nearer here than not, nor plough its glen and squid, a
parker at yr fists. Theen ack the dimmer spleen, a figure
quadding at the plusk; 'a theen th'd doober wast n'plain.
Eesks. Duds, a plumber. Planar Shock. News at eleven.
No, I'd not ignore you pushing at the walls. Nor wait no
longer for your heart to break again in your own longing
after love, it is not too late ever, like poor Ivan Ilyich,
falling in love on his deathbed as a possible malnutrition
or clause of affects. Null, as only Rembo Can. Flagellant,
migrant toker and leavener of the ovens, his angle of doubt
a spectcacular zero point seven. Oh, outer due, I mask you
in this angle of forgiveness, and hold your seven eleven
hostage to the moment, as another disguise relinquishes its
hold on you, chicken choker, bulb-snatcher in reprise, I
await your challenge, and love's, to become holden not
stronger, but a whole and sentient man, beating at his
trumpet calm enough to see, the rescue having been done,
there that. The total plus, afforded not be sense but by
discard, and in what was done no heroism but a calm position
from which one would not retreat, and when romance was
declined because one was not, uh, ready, was that a sign to
give up? Hardly. And now you are still available is what
they say in the books, available for what, for the mystery
of it all to descend throughout this returnable hook which
keeps baiting you with its own dialog, no it is further from
the truth than that, and you beckon willingly where no other
fears to tred, and they said that Star Trek had done more
for, uh, whatever, than the space program couldn't compete
when someone said, yeah, that's cool, but I saw it on Star
Trek last night, well, it's hard to compete with, ah %de
Toqueville%, you rule, and where there is nothing common,
there there is also no denominator, and so nothing divided
by nothing is yet nothing, where you might count on some
kind of intervention to release you from this eternal funk,
again.
And call your name into the center of my left hand again.
Second day
You'd plussed out the stringers in their own hesitant
endorsements of women as humans, thinking only that "they"
were or are some other race of life with which man-kind (or
not) had either fiscal or political relations, and while sex
was a pleasant memory, it was nonetheless the habit of youth
itself to enjoy that which it had little appreciation for,
and while sd appreciation might have come late, it sometimes
didn't come at all. I mean so much is made of the so-called
differences between them, men and women, that it is almost
impossible to see the similarities at all, that what is
going on in most coupling, if such it is, is a development
of the individuated personality underway, depending on which
partner you look at or which aspect of the relating you look
at, there is still a dominant and still a recessive in most
relationships, and to find a couple in balance one must look
far, for they are hidden in their ordinariness from the view
of those who look: there are no flashes of personality or
even of color by those who no longer look to the outside for
acknowledgement either of their sexuality or for that matter
of their right to exist.
You'd not reminded but occupied a newer space within me,
as if in the discovery of a hidden self I found you there
too, nor mystery but in pleasure follows, nor to share out
but hold and spin and grow, uh, that way--interior signs
fall ahead into the light become, a rose, a shower, a newer
spine & center, evolved from love and not its opposite.
You'd been there too. Or still a hurry or forgotten
implement, was toasted therein by expansion; so thinking of
you is causative in its pleasures, nor empty in its
imagining of what is real (enough)--later on you'll spell me
out against time, moving through declensed passion its own
reminder that you are here within time and space, existing,
you might say like an outsider on the inside and an insider
on the outs. Yo ho! Of course, the pictures are not
enough, but something to decide where to look when your left
hand calls out for a name, a face, a gentler act within than
wanting.... No stars willing these sighs, thighs, uh.... I
hold through the morning.
Distance calls the signs newer, more remote, assigned to
risk and its consequent declarations of chance &
committment, as you are imitated among those whose partners
remind or then assemble wherein, but noticed, her heart
beating aside your own, and in what is called to accounts,
called to action, you are speech in the making, but silence
in recall, a quieter doorway remained open long enough to
get through, and we got through it in the midst of silence,
the silence of reading signs and letters, and the silence of
the heart in its own growth and pressure to be real, how the
arc is triumphed in simple emplacement, the stain....
I held you once in firmer stars, and let my own
impassioned reasons intervene with what was storming from
the heart, only to ignore my self in reasoning that what I
wanted was nonetheless from the deeper layers which
permitted such feelings to exist at all, nor in reason
steeped but called affirmed to hollow-out her slated rhyme
nor season, but cold upon the layers of the old, I marked
your signs as something new and welcome, but stilled in wait
I held with caution from the way where something called out
for me to lean ahead and take the signs where they led into
forgiveness and re-time. But the heart's slow welcome
flowed from side to side and made me dizzy, or culled from
the cloud heights, some raster plume, some foamer-spoon,
delight your words descry from loaders in the skip to
schemers in the mist. I awayt yr only line remits then
clouded one-on-one recalls flight among the distances, a
yearning which is then fulfilled by less inert beliefs than
what would hold you down forever in these learnings of the
heart's way.
I called resistance a part of tempo, just as the skin
remembers the graft and the time before, and welcomes it
from wherever it came. Were you so preoccupied as to
forget? I never did, not for a minute, not in the depths of
what I knew was not real did I ever forget the sign to which
I was (am) drawn, whether it be you and yours or not I can't
as yet tell, but I know the inner drama indicates some
fusions and extensions do occur, and beyond simply enjoying
a mutuality at some vibratory level, and I have friends like
that, with whom one simply feels good, I know that beyond
recognizing that emplacement within each other, that there
is something unrecognized between us which is now in motion,
unrecalled, unfinished and potential, and what is a letter
but a part of the many, spoken softly without, but courting
nonetheless, as active and pronounced, even though there's
no one to ask for permission.
What took finally held, or the reverse, what held,
finally, took. You too. I can tell though I am overwhelmed
by your Molly Bloomin %yesses%, or maybe whelmed, too, by
their fluidity and repose, in their promise-to-be-real, nor
spasmed-out, either, a fog left along your coasts and
valleys, nor earth to become real as she is the sign of what
welcomes you back to your existence in what receives, seed,
climate, opinion, and love's cool anchor in the heart which
says hello, or receipt, or golden hours recall'd with what
remains of innocence. It's hard on top. It's a hard-on
top. You know the difference. Did I say this before at
all? You'd lean back and give. What's life to the other
becomes one in yr heart assigned nor leisure, but competent
within chants. Alight. Furred into. I held your rhymes and
reasons were not there at all, but potential, coming into
view like a random fashion which clicks and holds beyond
what you thought might be the reasons for your continuing
this, uh, dialog with whom and its consequences which lie
far beyond the mere horizon of simple risk but follow from
time spent in waiting but before, nor a myth one has
hollowed out from his left hand clawing the air year after
year, it is a healing and a becoming which clears the way.
A space is made, then set. And time resorts to its own
relinquishment, as if. You'd polled that and found results
within your grasp, a chance worth taking, a sign worth
leaving, no longer a part of the movie which seems to run
day and night, but an allowance for an intermission and
perhaps a second feature would follow what could only be
described as something between an advertisement and a
cartoon. Another franchised lifestyle, when to purchase
originality with one's life led only to the exclusion of
others in their own misery, or joy, and yrself with that
special isolation one finally wants to rescind for something
a little more pleasant, a little more mundane, and yet the
special time has its own reward, like a cuteness one comes
to dislike in others only because one has suffered through
it oneself, or like understanding, finally, why those old
people act and look the way they do, you can sit there and
see exactly what happened to them in the cast of the voice,
the later-life posture (either of victory, or defeat, or
resignation) sitting across from you at the table at the
Grub 'n Stuff in town, her hair in its tight gray curls,
maundering on about some uppity female by whom she was
noticeably threatened, which accounted for her snide,
aggressive posturing while the hubby hunkers down over the
cheeseburger & fries, dipping each fry slowly through the
pool of ketchup which diminishes on the side of his plate,
the side of his life, you mean.
You've plunged into yr own stuff, too, I can see that,
which beckons some destiny, eh? Or wd've anyhow--naw, you'd
never run into me, nor I you, beyond this stuff we do. It's
a cling. Cling to a spin. To loop and tell, that where's
delight your own within straining to finally get out
(again); separated at an early age, the lovers reunite quite
by surprise, finding in themselves the seeds of what they
were as youths and lovers who [were] parted too soon to know
what they had in store for each other. A bit like
deMaupassant's fatalistic short story, the lock of hair and
the watch-chain; and in remiss you call no shorter than
before, but have meaning and tense to your adverbs, even, as
every day before dawn the moon sets inside time's own
permission to recall, return, restore what was once promised
but left aside in the hurry to leave what was really not so
awful but perhaps only premature squirms of passion and
reason which were left untold, unexperimented together but
which finally yeild to what calls you back into the dream.
I never thought I'd have this, a place to write, to be
alone for days at a time and fucking not worry about it, nor
did I think I'd have the time or patience to do so, I
thought I'd always live with the uncomfortable need not to
be alone, helpless clinging afraid-of-the-dark bullshit, not
that I was entirely, but there it was, a hamburger with no
meat, my life. Now it's there. Relinquished doubt scores
its opposite, and the light returns within you calling to be
free, which you are anyway, and that what you sought was
found, already there in the first place, placed first within
and found later, goes the story, calls the day, hums the
hummer in her own delight. Be a hummer.
Ancient rhythms chart their own rise and fall, or where
you are again resumes the day's own plans to do something
new today and go where no man has gone before, not so
difficult, if you think about it, a repetition calling
time's line away. I spelled the day. Here's a spoken work,
"Love" arching my back into you, what's called return or,
just, nice. Nice. It has an empty ring to it, reduced as
it is to a commonplace; though %en retard%, you are my
sunshine, falling as the rain, you are my sunshine, please
come again. Squish & plum. You'd sharpd.
I have this air besides what's unexpended; his field trip
is underway, no doubt, and here I am, thinking you'll arrive
tomorrow, when it's probably winter before you come to
visit, flowers filling the air with their own repleteness,
making a sign between sighs which would declare the new age
to have finally begun "against all odds" was how you put it,
which was its own sort of problem, or that I'd wait for it,
after all, the best should come in at the end, %n'est-ce
pas%? Nor occlude the outer liners to commit no pressure in
the portable room.
This is the portable room.
II. STUMBO.PAN
first day
Your curious self-portrait, eyes staring intent at a
camera with no one behind it.... A mudra of expressiveness
practiced for a real encounter, and the eyes declare their
readiness and intent, still it is a photograph.
"Power, you sang as we march in darkness...at the pure
ides of day, what know we of our dream, older than
ourselves?" (St John Perse)
**
I think poetry is the attempt to reclaim language from
the machine, from the force of darkness which exhibits
itself as something which is "out there". It is an attempt
or a battle as it were to make the word become flesh, to get
what is going on out there in your thinking about what you
are doing to a place which is deep within the core of your
being. I am the event, it goes. Not "I am the poem,"
that's a commonplace. And to say "I am the event" is no
solipsistic drabble, because it is the beginning and not the
end of the process of what, mastery of one's self and
emplacement within the scheme of things, you, uh, just know
where you are. The experience precedes the model.
"So at some point, if we write, we come into or towards
an understanding, and the page will no longer hold the work,
syntax and grammar and spelling, all of the wonderful tools
of communication, language itself, is no longer a vehicle,
but is a barrier. but we write, we are writers, so we begin
to do battle with the language, writing becomes a violence,
writing against itself. We eliminate punctuation, ignore
correct spellings, invent new words, invert syntax, scramble
grammar, scatter lines and columns of words across the
page-as-field. We lose control, discard control, another
barrier, ego at its words. We use chance, collage, found
text, improvisation, borrow rules and methods from other
areas of practice, other disciplines, from techniques of the
sacred, from the visual arts, from music, from science,
write chants, verbo-visual constructions, aleatory
arrangements of syllable and letters, mathematical
arrangements, lyrics derived from chaos theory, fuzzy logic.
We use computer assisted designs, random patterns, random
number generators, iteration. But we end with language on a
page, or on a screen, or maybe on a canvas, or as the spoken
word. What we have produced, the creation, the addition to
the stock of available reality, is not what we want, and is
not all that we get, and finally, is not what the process of
working, or the work itself, has to give. The process of
working against barriers, slowly, returns us to the source,
less intensely, and partial, but recognizable, a different
tilt of light stretched against the horizon. It is the
discipline, the work, the praxis, a sort of upaya, perhaps,
or kabbalistic inner magic, as in Abulafia's doctrine of
combination, that returns us, that opens the content that we
come away with, and it isn't statement, or communication of
any sort. It is text. Let's call it poetry, because of
those before us who have called it poetry. It takes us away
from our attachments. %It redesigns the dendrites%. It
opens into other realms, the innermost of each particular
which is the ineffable beyond. As far as what we do with
the writing, what we can do with and in it, is concerned, we
come to realize that freedom is the only law. For the most
part, this is best left unsaid. But it is the case." (fr
email of 7 Jul 95: JL)
Nowhere better said. It is text. It is freedom, and
what are in those? We are the progenitors of the sacred
codes, those repetitions of time (in space) which
_sahaja_-like bespeak of the access to the space wherein
freedom lies. In syntax in communication are the sacred
codes expressed in the timeliness of ones barks and growls
which signify communication there is yet the unspoken
invisible text which is (perhaps) as binary as the on and
off of rhythmic en-trancement of speaker to speakee in this
rite of sharing flesh to flesh, blood to blood, which is man
in the act of being how poem, how Vincent says "Life is the
poem" and means it what does he mean and how do we come to
it?
Nonetheless, we have taken back the streets and I think
that's what your list above indicates, that most of the
various available avenues of fuckin around with words
themselves are now under our control. The computer is
another matter, and that comes later, but look at Olson and
what is important is not so much the doctrines of the
proprioceptive but in fact that it get done by a man (sic.)
in his means, that one come to breath come to life and speak
in these rhythms like the muezzin at the top of the phallus
tower challenging us to leave consciousness for a moment and
bask in the glow of the nothingness of just being there.
Who you are to come back into my life when it was
"something ventured, nothing gained". But the truth is that
we bonded beyond measure and what is left is another story.
I mounted you, I mourned you, I put you away, I let everyone
go and came back another person, and you too ventured into
your life like something you needed to do, in order to
relive the pain or advance into the arena where you would
hold forth in your own battle to become yourself, and you,
too, stopped writing the codes and patterns which so
entrance you that, like the chinese dude-poet who was so
enamored of the reflection on the surface of the water that
he fell in and drowned, is it like that where you come from?
I loved you like a twin, like \Dylan says, somewhere in A
Simple Twist of Fate. But you know what I mean, it was like
hands across the darkness for me and I always wondered what
was in it for you, we never talked when we were horny as if
that was some sort of taboo in the long-distance love affair
which could not be abrogated. But deny it not, we fell in
love over a project and are left, each of us after an
excursion into the dark from which we battled out, you did I
think, or have, or want to, I know you want to or you
wouldn't have called and we wouldn't have caressed the past
so lovingly, we are still in love and wonder what to do with
it; at least I do--like ok, now what?
I know what I want: to feather upwards into the heavens
as a column of light [see end of V GER] in communion with my
other, my feminine my machine of light, in some caresses
made human by love; The Silver Surfer. So, I felt we'd be
twin singers, another part of the dream, uniting in song,
creating the new word; but I neglected to notice yr
corrosive edge and obsession with apocalypse, and thought
that in yr transformation, you'd experience a
rebirth-in-love wherein your tendency to lyricism & song
would finally predominate; but no, the human in us is too
much present, and we each descended into our plasm, me at
the end of my inappropriate love affair, and you at the end
of yours.
This is John Galt. Remember? He who controls language
controls everything. Having broken the sentence, having
mastered the avenues of transmission, the forms themselves,
all we need to do now is fill them with light, fill the
empty streets with the waters of life, fill the void of the
internet with poetry generating machines. [see Horndog^1^].
But I think the radical of what we are about is to rule the
world, no longer, uh, unacknowledged legislators of our
wankers but in control of the medium itself, we can make it
do wheelies. And the transmission of the unspoken codes
which we learn in our jazz-like suffering through
experimentation when choice is linked to pain or joy or
whatever, it is a mere internalizing of emotion, a
self-willed muting of speech and sublimation of its honesty
into the tapping of the fingers on the keyboard of chance
operations in an attempt to (re)write King Lear. Face it:
we have broken syntax and control the means of (invisible)
transmission, all we need to do is exercise that control and
the rest is gravy.
Certain syntaxes and word-emissions are liberating, we
learn that in the random fluxus of our jazz solos, and that
in listening, or re-experiencing, or whatever the
(ineffable) relation between singer and song is, we learn
that in his own mimetic does the witness relearn the codes
in his cellular presence that what is heard is also made
flesh, and as we are together in performance (be it linear
or mental or spoken/heard) it is nonetheless the word made
flesh, what we are talking about unawares that it is already
happening, has already happened. "moon & stars & signs
astrological/fling animal into phases of personality
or/inscribe symbol onto chaos: here I stand..." (SSN) "Grow
imploded stars in play, vertiginous spirit. Your portrayal
of hour fire...." (JL) And you, unbearable sign of my
relinquishment. Call at the mark of my own disaster,
relieve me of yr dusks and sentences at the morning of
light.... For I have heard you yearning in my own mists,
husking out these lesser terms for light, benign presence of
love in my own making out you were not alone is likening
what we do to something cosmic and prhaps satisfying but in
no way a substitution for the real thing, or else we
wouldn't be out here hacking away at the bamboo which has
grown into everything....
So face it, the old order is corrupt. Finished. Of no
use and pertaining in no way to the problems of now. And it
is as Gertrude pointed out, that the art of a time must
mimic or contain those survival codes pertinent to that
time, and obviously the old order (it depends on you to cut
it off wherever from now you wish to) no longer transmits
the necessary codes, even as a foreigner listens to the
staccato bursts of sound which is poetry in a foreign tongue
and knows knows what is being said at the meat level.
This is dealing with poetry among humans. The computer
poses other problems, since each medium of transmission
(printing press, alcohol) has its own rules and styles for
what gets through, and so you always have to analyze the
medium of transmission at the same time that you analyze
what was actually transmitted: poetry on the computer will
have to use chance and information aesthetics to be "true to
itself", for what use is a message if it doesn't respect the
vehicle which transported it, as it were, from here to
there... Unless that's too much, uh, communication theory
for you.
Love, on the other hand, seems more determined by present
circumstances to grow out of what is there than from what is
not. And inasmuch as you are not here, how can I love you?
Too much in the realm of my dreams, I long for what is
unattainable and get what I ask for, a love which is, in
fact and at present, unattainable, yup, you get what you ask
for.... Now if I ask for you, fer yew, what wd I get? And
would you give it? You've proven admirably that your fear
of love is greater than your desire to have it, isn't that
what the recent episode points up?
"In advance of the broken arm" no longer rings true.
I've a friend, Connie, who's been a confidante throughout
all of this, my own thing, I mean, and I recently found out
that her own way was a lot like mine, the alcoholic husband,
a new relationship and all that, and it seems to be working
for her, and I asked her how they'd met. She said he was
someone she already knew and they like looked at each other
one day and said, yeh, maybe so.... So the whole idea of
falling in love with someone you already know is, more like
when you were growing up, if you did before now. I mean, in
my own case, it's just now. But what would we do? Ah, yes,
making due. Or the idea of falling in love with someone you
are already in love with. What do you want anyhow? Most
don't know. Do you want to be transformed by love, to unite
with another? Or is that all just another bunch of bushwa?
What's not enough, another spreading triumph outside the
law, your own remissions nor coded skins they've left around
the campfires glowing with the last signs of life on the
planet, no food in the alcoves and just too many souls to
recognize.
You'd ben thr, dun thet. Uh, yeh, too. More to spark
than triumph, more to have it centered than to feel any more
pain, there's enough of that to go around. This was plenty,
I'd rather have a life than whatever this has been, and that
seems to include relations with women, or a woman, or what?
What if we just didn't like each other, so many of my
relationships have been preceded by the body language and
dance of lust, that first one is attracted by a style or a
moment when "it happens", and to seek that physicality in
whom one has already felt the pangs and spasms (once or
twice, I will admit) of lust but never seen, thts another
deal altogether.
Which is to say only that the quest for the beloved and
the quest for the word made flesh have been parallel but not
undecided and not always aware of each other, but usually
so. Here enough at the beach without you, wherever you are
tonight, Sweet Marie. And the poem is without integrity, it
is all poetry and diction and voice and that's where it went
astray into something new, first the different voices saying
nothing and then the different voices wanting to say
something but having forgotten how to do so, and then voices
saying what they are all join in a transcent song unwinding
and yet joining into a column of light uniting at the
crescent at the sign of the millennium. All divisions
cease, let them have their material reality, the sign of the
planet must be made or its image will not exist in the
consciousness of man, he will live his brutalized, codeless
existence, not that the codes wd cease to exist, there they
are in blues chording, for instance, I am in the radio.
Clean my lizard.
We don't need to worry about what to do next. It's thrust
upon us, and the core dilemma is ours not because we are
poets but because we are human, though as we work it
through, whatever the illusion is that fascinates mankind at
the moment, it is our work to give code to our expression of
the relieving of the illness at its point of human contact
as far as language is capable of doing so, and when language
becomes phenomenal and no longer functions as a carrier of
illusions, that is if the illusions no longer work as
illusions and have become, simply, relics in our museums,
then how we sing and dance in our words is the message
itself, and the medium has become the message, to bear at
least that prophecy out, what that statement seemed more
than anything else, a challenge to make it so, as Capt
Picard sez, to make the poem itself the message of the poem,
as it were, and so we have by reducing image to its
redundancy in time in consciousness in percepts we see the
image as taking too much time when lingua structs can carry
energy more efficiently and with greater bang for the buck,
that is, more of a rush when it strikes you either to write
it or to read it, I mean we're not writing this way by
accident, but because it relieves the pressure that we are
trying at that moment to "write through" with writing, that
is as one becomes addicted to it, a kind of cosmic
analgesic, ah, there now, that's better, an erotic fantasy,
a cosmic fantasy a lingua fantasy whatever and you go on not
writing image-driven poems like they never ever existed at
all, leaving the old order in the dust, and of course the
question is where does the old order end and the new order
start, and who gives a shit really, but you'd guess that the
recent tendency (just this past year) to anthologize certain
periods of modernism or whatever you want to call it, that
those points of demarcation are also points of historical
maintenance, that as the thing is set, so it is. And then
what follows is, uh, after that. Tottel's Miscellany.
I would be your stolen ham, ringing with delight. I'd
hold you down the streaming times the hour called to touch
again no matter in your mists, a name declining expression
but come to its thirst and clamor; and inasmuch as "they"
are in possession of the language by virtue of, uh, making
the rules, that is for how transmission occurs at all, then
we who are diminishers of respect in the facts of the
unknown are also purveyors of disorder at the comfort level
where most humans exist qua language. Nonetheless, you
begin to see certain language-driven formerly poetic
constructions (statements in which syntax is disrupted, for
instance) beginning to worm their way into advertising
lingo, the current way in for new forms of language, rather
than fringe activities and their supposedly inside jargon,
railer skate frinstance. I'd be your friend just as I seek
my own, uh, companion, we have the killer giggles, you know,
that seems legitimate, something I've never had; and to take
control of the language is to take control of the planet,
and if what we generate is a superior form of communication
and begin to teach others in its use, the supplemental
benefits to a new grammar (such as the state of mind which
accompanies it) would be hidden from view, which they are
anyway. And you'd sing.
And so to the extent that it is all diction and voice, it
is therefore important, finally, just what is said. OK,
Joe, you've got the mike, what's on yr mind? And you begin
to stammer some sort of nonsense about the goddess and
getting high on adverbs, and the semicolon, for god's sake;
what next? You'd better have something in a nonsensical but
available vocabulary or you'll lose him to the sound of it,
and it'll be Wong Dong San, sitting there slackjawed
listening to Dylan Thomas do his Child's Christmas in Wales,
pure sound cascading through unknowing ears, does it make
any difference, in the %Euphues% of it? So there is a
signpost somewhere between jargon and the word. And the
word be flesh by being shared, but seeing the commonality of
all utterance, of mixing in the final collage of display and
tenure, of silence and the mumbo-jumbo of elocution and
magnificence. "I've got a porch light."
"betrayal of desire" it leaks out "I am flattened animal
corpus"
I believed my own technology, and felt alone. I got
tired of that. Rastier dudes portrayal, no loner in the
heart, but sufficed of that, too, no longer straining at the
midst to final aloner no more matter to the fog be-lined,
duh, blind to chance portions of doubt resist no more
aligned but left aside behind as memory but not one that one
has, really, but one that one had, one has the memory of a
memory, and what wanes in presence is that which has not
been reinformed or brought back to life.
"text gleams machine"; I thought that because of who I
was or thought I was and who you were, or who I thought you
were, that this was a marriage made in heaven or some such,
and that besides that I found you foxy and elusive and
somewhat interested in me, %affaire du plume% I fractured
it. Whch is good as long as it is good. But how else are
relationships made? And do you always have to end up
working out the worst? "But no phoenix I,
reconnecting/severed limbs & plumping out--/I am flattened
animal corpus...I do not away rise up and walk"
What stains purpose away from its infinite originality,
the elusive strain is not the worst nor necessarily what I
ask for, ending out beyond seeming who you are, as, who
_are_ you after all, now, disconnected friend of a thousand
battles ago, now we are panoplized benitent pressures
(accented-out), tomorrow came and stayed beyond expectation
occurred, but healing out the tempo of poetics is not a
poetics of restitution but of recovery, as I have come to
understand the term in AA, but in an even wider (or
narrower) sense, what our work has been for a hundred years
or so, beginning with Breton, Tzara, & Duchamp, though for
me Tzara was the most politically inflammatory, but with
that effort begins the struggle to free language from,
whatever, you know the drill, but that the struggle is now
over and there is another, more challenging task ahead,
which in yr discussion of vision and transmission must also
lead you to see that filling those channels with those
questions and answers, giving a form that _is_ to the void,
that's what the work is.
And you who furnish the seas with my opening sadness, you
who call to me in the isometric wilderness of chance, you
who sing in the forgotten languages of the foreign students;
unassembled discord gives way to the heart's own song, and
what was once disjunkt enables into a forward weakening of
its own rage, and poetic diction might be less inclined to
give up its dissimilar attitudes toward word choice in
flavor of more useful constructs, but then someone pointed
out to me that the inventors of things never reap the
benefits its the developers who later come along and
commercialize ("popularize" in the case of ideas and styles)
said innovations into a marketable enterprise. Syntax
Associates. you know. Mind Control. Only it's not so
insidiously self conscious out there. Sure, there's people
out there watching trends and gambling on what they see, but
the evolution of syntax from filling to emptying is a step
away, now that surrealist dogma is just about, uh, not
discredited, but it's used up in some way, the surrealist
styles made their way through the advertising and
popularizing intestines until now, where the whole style of
seeing is lodged in the cloaca, "in advance of the broken
arm".
But then, you say, in the hands of the same old machine,
every new idea loses its integrity (as new) (as
revolutionary force) and becomes the same old product, the
same old society changing the names of the innocent to
protect the identities of the guilty, and all the rest.
Cultural history is as much a series of coverups as
political history is. Though you have to believe from the
prophecies (and they are available wherever and whenever you
live) and the old stories, that the invisible substructure
of life manages to exist in the secret whisperings of the
militant mendicant priests and warrior priests, and so it
goes that when you listen to your own interior around the
campfire late into the early morning when the drugs have
finally begun to die down in you and you are empty and
vulnerable from within as well as from without, that you
hear the ancient growlings from deep within you, tumbling
out like the distances themselves, like another voice coming
from your interior. What does that have to do with our
dialog? Are we not speaking in tongues always? Cola non
rafa.
Horndog's secret mist, by chance encounters with the
other in his own secret, penetrates to the loins of the
prince of darkness, he strokes the outer loci of inattention
beyond what was provoked in the first place your own
whatever on the face of it no matter was removed against
your will and lesion would particle calm the doubter his own
restitution was palled forward in your heart's dimension
made a calm flutter of what was once flattened gumbo on the
plate of the stranger when you forgot everything.... I'd
begun the whole affair, if so it was, in my own outright
sense of need, I'd been honest with a chuckle as much from
my own need to confess (and to a woman, my shrink and I
worked on that one), and I did, and so now everything is
different, goes the story, and whether or not it is has not
yet stood the test of time, and in time's own beginnings
might I find the yew of yew, an' how it might have been,
Leon goes. I've made nothing yet, in spite of all I've
made. Now it's, uh, on the way. Rites have been observed
and yet the whole deal has not been tested.
What happened stemmed from an inability to give, give in
to love's possession, and on the other side was possession.
In my own case, "compulsion ruled the nest". From whenever.
And so all the twitches which now accompany me into living
alone and liking it, no doubt, become proverbial causes for
alarm when isolated into being with someone. I've been an
oddball, long enough when I met you not to be worse by now,
or at least more of an oddball than before. Certainly the
rest is new, unmet, untried in its own time. But I know
that if they knew what we were up to, they'd worry about it.
The best is that they don't.
Your own personal observations are welcome, but I have a
problem some times knowing what is poem and what is self,
and I know how and when I hide behind the lines and how
little it works, it is all so transparent, like when you're
drinking and you think you're invisible, that you're getting
away with something. And what is a spell, too, has you by
the balls, and hand in hand you go down to the sea and melt
beside it in your own fantasies, but left to go aside in
what was once wandering outside the heavier fits besides
being filled with surprises contains the secret of surprise
itself, and in that unknowing trance, to accept what is no
stranger really, but an unfathoming of the deal to senses'
own left alert into and besides, where you were kept from
knowing who she was and caused you to go for all those
substitutes.
Or were they transmits on the face of denial? Love in the
absence of any proof has her face down on the bed, crying
again, or plotting my demise, or calculating my misconduct,
who needs it? What called out. Was real. The photograph
still holds me on that morning when we sat at the table, she
& I, and I took the snaps with my little Leica, bing, bing,
and there it is, and that what went down was no dream left
on the magnificence of what was remembered. No, you want
that magnificence to return in some fashion that doesn't
burn you into insignificance & on the other side of return
there is the downsizing of all that is familiar into its
particular location, how he sings in the background as you
fly along these particular moonlit trails and paths, into
more circular parts of your self than you'd come up out of
and from into the into, but there's the song on your behalf,
and you know I'd hold you in the moonlight, singing your
song....
I fielded properly, I dealt in musk and binge, and held
no favors too long nor for too much, if anything, a little
too honest, too ready to give it all away, and along the
time I met you here and there, no other gives you here to be
the same and not no other in the looting of time and what
you do recall in close houses, on cold floors, in the
remembrance of penetration and her cries to you, you
remember all that in the resonance of what has been there
for you to remember at all, though its mix with fantasy is a
lessening of each and not to the credit of either. Where
language permits me to exonerate my own conceits, I do
pursue thee in the manner of my passions in the cooler airs
between us sometimes unknown member of my other dream, I
call you in from outer space where you have spent these past
ten years, and I call you back into the air between us in
our more remote locations to hear the time you sent me a
letter unannounced questionnaire from the heart's
mumbo-jumbo (there it is again) where you made no takers
from their own specificity and in the time-honored crouch
into the leaning-forward position wanted not so much to, uh,
score, as to get revenge on the family, besides which I
always found her to be completely sexy, slinking around the
house like she was ready for it at any time, which later
turned out to be kind of true, at least from what the diary
let off to more than one guy in a day, was a little
embarrassed and not to say a little impressed by her ability
to, uh, schedule everything and get away with it for so long
and not get diseased or anything, that was before AIDS and
you wonder; then, a phone call out of nowhere from Florida,
I think.
But %you%, who do you think you are. I wonder, because I
know we both want to know, after all, never knowing what was
possible nor even a matter of interest, but you %were% the
model for one piece and continue to have some hold on my
ability to go off and write more than I thought I would. I
don't know if that's good or not, nor do I know even if this
is fer yew, but between time and memory, I can get this down
another rhyme and meter, calling the day into question not
like something you remembered but like an expectation in the
midst of questioning how you might remember that you'd left
something behind and wanted to know what it was and where
you might have gone wrong....
What's spent beyond recognition? They know we're here,
but don't realize yet that we are in control. Nor do we,
for that matter. It's a matter of behaving as though you
were in control, how do you think that they've been behaving
all this time? As if they were in control. Oh well:
submissor and submissee. Good money drives out bad, but I
think conventionally it's the other way around: and so it is
with syntax and the unknown, if you have a voice for it,
they will listen; if you build it, they will come. She
looks back with a certain smile from the photograph which is
now 15 years old. I remember every bit of it. And how she
called later and said, remember, we got away with it. And
we had. Until the last screaming episode from Patti, when
she threw that back in my face fifteen years later, that I'd
been sleeping with two women at the same time. Is that the
poem in its transpositions? This is a journal today, not an
epistle. Jimi Hendrix reflects out of the past in good sound
"You will rise again, Desire! And you will tell us your
other name. O passion....."
I found you down around my ankles more than once, I cried
my hopeless diagram of trouble in the provinces, and found
myself amused and alone at the end of another trail;
departing for where? Here? No more (mere) hesitation, the
boat is ready, it will carry quite a load; crossing the
great water begins to be more of a possibility than
something in the book. "Why do you want my picture" she
asked. "Do you take pictures of all of them, all of the
women you've had?" and her eyes widened pruriently. "No," I
said, feeling sad, "you might not be back." And she wasn't,
at least not like that. I paused her knots and seasons in
my run down to the ends of things, and I waited like that
for her to catch up with me, breathing hard against my
chest. What passed between us was an intimacy from which
there was no denial. "You'd be another loom," she called
into the wind. "No matter," I whispered. "It's noon."
At the unspeakable room, you deny your heart's outer, you
leave time astir; "form is the shape of a handful of air."
It is kinds of statements that take you here and there, not
so much what they say as when, and how the strategy works
toward making you think think you've been or are being
"talked to". She smiles from the photograph. The obsession
of the flowers. The other stuff too, what made it mad. It
is definitely the pursuit of the whatever, not love's. Pure
density and outer plinth. I'd musk. I'd dig you deep and
long, we'd stay in bed all day, just the way you want.
Probably asleep. You are time's memory of itself. I have
invested the wind with all properties. God is in the wind.
In the winding. Wintered out and smoothing. I've you in
mind tonight (O lucky me, she says), for something, uh, more
mental. Oh, great, we're going to think about it. There's
safety in that. No meter in yr mists. When you have 'em by
their syntax, they tend to get a little testy. Hey, boy,
get your hands off my syntax. Adjust! Adjust! And goes
down the long way winding out from here to there her message
on your heart, give again, dearest, I've in mind to come for
you again tonight, come for you in your dreams along the
long trail winding out as only fantasy can into the mists of
where we might have been....
I'd been gone too long; a paragraph is not a rehearsed
fragment but a whole in the sum of its parts, made coherent
by no disabilities on the horizon at least within its
internal registration--a shift from here to there made into
an alignment of possibilities, perhaps reiterating the list,
or the litany, along the way toward a solution; in the
composition, there is a solution, but in its paragraphs,
nowhere would there appear to be an answer at all, & it is
in the pure weight of evidence, style, and argument that the
composition makes its point, wins its day, as it were; it is
in the becoming that takes place during the course of the
journey of the argument that the word somehow becomes flesh,
becomes felt, that is, and then you've got the hook in your
reader [who] is as likely to go back and start over as
anything else--at least he/she will realize that going back
over means that you're looking at it with different eyes.
Each time. And you know that secret while you're sitting
there. And when you go on you've been changed. A little.
A little bit at a time.
It says, "Yes, that was!" And it was good. And so the
reparations have been made, at least from the point of view
of presence, at least there you've been plain enough to
reoccur in the presence of others at least their own
questions are the ones you listen to, not mistaking them for
the shadows from your own unconscious. Not in the presence
of others do you distinguish the closet cloth makers from
which their own presences delay and formalize, uh, evidence
of stopping. It was no fun, spending that year without you,
but neither one of us knew what to do with it, it was that
sudden. Not a topic really, I just got overwhelmed by life,
caught in a side track where I had no business being there
in the first place, some karma to live out, I guess, and
your adventure into what you'd been skirting all the time we
were talking, about yr love life and marriage and how they
were after you, and I sure as hell wasn't having that
problem, so what did I care; all the time the twinship
denied and my dream of penetrating the heavens in a column
of light intertwined with you went down the tubes, whoever
you were, subject of a couple of grainy
less-than-greyhound-booth quality, uh, snaps, otherwise a
voice on the phone squeally giggle over troublesome details,
and the tough poems of pain and language and whatever
elemental details attracted, not just another face in the
crowd; a relationship of 3 years' duration, or more, and you
want to know where do we go from here, when you aren't even
writing and seem to be going through some life madness
episode, me only recently emerged from same, after all a
year out is not so long, not long enough to consider a real
collaboration, but yet the whole game is rolling along and
suddenly the cosmic has reappeared to man just as Vincent
said, as the millennium approaches they'll get nervous,
raise up their collective head and wonder what it's all
about ronnie. But then I'm getting off track. when what I
know is that there's some kind of unfinished business
between us; like one of those relationships that goes
through an episode where they say, no, if we had sex it
would ruin a beautiful friendship, I've thought that a
million times, and where does it get you. All I think about
is that we finally meet and each doesn't really get that
particular squish and tingle from the other that is required
in a relationship that wants to be passionate. And the part
about working together, that's another story. But you can't
say I haven't thought about you and gotten along quite well
without anything in particular happening but talking for
half an hour the other day and missing you.
Says your other. I've been alone too long to think
otherwise, too. I don't suppose you've had a letter like
this for awhile, but then, who knows. You're right, I'll go
along and run into some SYT, as we used to say, a Sweet
Young Thing, and maybe have enough presence, support and
good will to keep myself together, and as you say, something
nice will happen to me. I'm kind of digging this, right
now, writing to you and smoking pot and listening to some
music I like on the radio, and what else is new? And beyond
that, who are we to each other? We had a hot affair once
and then went on, and now come back to say hello and what's
new in your life, and went on again in the back seat,
dreaming of writing another poem as much as of having an
affair in the back seat. Though there's that to think about
too.
Oh well, its a hole in the wall, a hole in the air, and
you go in to find what's there behind you in the other
ethereal realm, undivided as it is into any partitions or
changes made into whole cloth the realm is undivided, and
no longer reams chance in the butt for another quick fiver
in the dark her eyes her eyes told me everything, and it was
still more than I wanted to know, quick rhymes in the
passion of everything, where you went along so long and then
you spoke out, in the room full of everything there she is
in another hallway outside the rooms and in the mists
reminding that it is here and no other calls you back into
the sunlight where you started.
Yesterday.
Your panache. Smoking Shermans. The slow drawl of your
eyes. and when we were drinking, Bushmill's it was, that was
trouble. My heart was on my sleeve, as it still is.
Carburetors. Oh, yes, now is the time of light. Anything
printed can be shared, even this, even thus. My love for
you has no privacy. Wanker's Corner, a local bar. Number
nine. My love for you has no piracy.
Your panache. speaking in tongues. The latter porches,
or have allowed more. But spoke. In sense or outer in
these markers still collide, but meet you smoothing in the
lapses of inattention still have too much to say, as if I
thought every poke of the keyboard held some great interest
for other people, what a bleeding ego, and go on with it,
tapping out reminiscences of doubt, leaving the calm air,
besides. No other's outer. Her own room heal'd, too.
Roughed sheep asleep. And I'd gone on, too. Into number
nine. Your crushing arrows went deeper than passion's
positions on the nine o' tails, too. Butt exploded. In no
outer can than caning outers, others, too. I'd marked them
straight up and no other. Wheezing no repetition had them,
too, swelling out, or spilling. Spelled, was what it went,
and when you taled-in or spent, it was here and there.
Whence. Her eyes. Where are you now? Where is any of you
now? Now that I need you, goes the song. My own, too.
Where are you now, now that I can give. Goes the song.
So where are we going right now is the question, and the
answer, too, to have fun after all enjoy the moment, it is
now our own, and lay claim to what is not taken among these
areas of the new territory which are just now being staked
out and claimed from inattention and neglect, an entirety
which is as yet hitherto relatively unexplored--we go beyond
the corner entry and check out the gloom beyond, it is the
here and now, and it is empty save for the echo of our
voices in a hesitant, gray atmosphere which is lighted from
somewhere, above or beyond, and where are you tonight, Sweet
Marie. Relative to what. Just as what said wait was
awaitment itself. No other ringed the court without piety
or transition. It was the empty shell, and you were light
at the center, in conversion and making small talk among the
pygmies where you grew up. It was also noon. Sit both
ways. At once. Duh.
^1^ http://www.phantom.com~grist/anabasis/horndog/
III. VENTO.MAN
Your beautiful but purple skies, forever amber waves no
fucking bullshit I too saw the best minds of my generation
but where are you tonight, sweet marie? You'd yarded out,
but held here among the natives where you want further than
you ought, we count the signs among us that there are no
lesions on the song caught unawares by the midst of plenty
in your sheeps astir. And here, woolen, ought, the reminder
of the significance of the chance we have altered in our
penetration of the outer husks of what there is left of the
altus mundi, the frotter pluden, the other half. And you
were caught no doubt in your own planter, cooked into
submission by your own doubt, whatever, and meeting her half
way is no feat for the indecisive no matter what you
measure. Up to. And in the chances we have taken with our
time, wasting it in the name of patience, for God's sake,
what we have left with the opportunity as it presents itself
is to make hay while the tractor is still warm is how Ross
Perot was quoted. I think in one of the shaman dreams there
were these two rocks crashing together back and forth, and
he had to run through them, and like they say, timing was
everything, and, bang, you were through into the next, uh,
cavern or whatever. And so the acquisition of voice
("verse") no punter squat, but hazeled in between history
and its opposite as the mere experiencing of self as it is
an obsession and not a gateway. I mean, you'd win?
Yod'd plud. North they wane, nor to get away, either.
I'm in no space but your own, that is, unwelcome as this may
be, nor transcend, transect a fictional "there" as opposed
to your own mark on the universe which right now you are
totally obsessed with, as if the Universe gave a rat's ass.
Nor scatter out these other voices coming as they do in
amongst David Koresh and his near Cousin the very rev Jim
Jones. Our heroes of dark hours remiss no love was ever
sung too deep to measure out forgiveness Amin the center
exploded with its "extra people" concept and the Malthusian
demonstraction, who exactly is in control and of what
exactly would you do with it anyway?
The document precedes.
First deep singing no hours left their clarity unknown
syntaxes relate the structure of anything to its random
sounds in the palette of the mondo structuro of the heart's
beginning to hook into spasmic reclamation within paragraph
structure at once the same no-man's-land of the document in
its own presentation of the facts, how are you here in
control of what exactly is the nature of the language in its
distribution across time in the sensory apparatus of the
listener, the witness first who claims in attention the span
of the message in its first delivery into the appetite for
what is new. Your own disorder might precede the witness
into the laboratory. Yod plud'd, nor bent her arm against no
will is left on the face of the planet save your own
pathetic paying-attention to the self inflammatory noises of
the feed me feed me apparatus of the mind's own bending into
the noise of the wind from the inside to hear the storm
roaring through in its asking for clarity of thought to
penetrate the mystery in its forgiveness and its forgetting.
But spent, the energy too far gone to realize and must
therefore be regenerated, Scottie, what the fuck are we
going to do? Displace that modifier, Captain.
And we are in fact going down into insouciance, or
displeasure with certain molds which have lasted far too
long for the emerging unity and recollection of its singular
past, to find an image or an energy or a specific code by
which the transmission of sd unity can be massaged, I
believe maybe what the harmonics of the tonalities of the
giant horns the Tibetan monks moan through. Whale tunes.
Delete. I'd held them responsible perhaps for what is no
longer in style or mere measure, driving harts no specious
derision, her hamper fosters light waves the ear denies its
hold on conscious endeavor, butter not within heart-shot,
another plume distend, and I'd held. Nor fashion, but
declares the matter of control and the islands of
contention, like for what or over what, I do think that
language is the issue and that what passes through the
conduit be in the hands of responsible people, no mere
mechanics of the blunted stripe. And so the singers return,
populace and throng, nodule to the mounted spin, nor
emptying into mystic froth, no matter how you slice it, it
still comes out baloney, but harries forth with a sense of
mission within still more silent binges on the internet, but
what of the suicide, what of the emptying of the silent hour?
I even tried to write you, but the letters to some
apartment unit down there in Florida somewhere, they just
came back and that was it.
And so love without or deprived of its obsessive quality
would be what, the calm glow of the silence of the heavens?
Nor that far away nor matter in the skipping glow of what
substances you've left afar too long to remember why or how
who was even listening the first time you read they all and
I mean all fell asleep, but it was ten thirty and after
three others. Still, I knew the trance quality worked, that
if you set up the right rhythm in the flux and flow of the
fragments, they with their own musicality and
interreferential sound patterns, would entrance (entrapment,
you might cry) as the staccato plump & pun of the word flow
calls you down into the deeper layers of association and
remembering, and you get a false nirvana inasmuch as that is
a low (whatever) wave in the top end of the spine lets you
down easy easy now into the couch baby and spin again in the
center of the song you remember owning another version of
the same thing went this away and not calling any more in
due time, nor falsifying anything but this sense of purpose
and desire in itself a memorable experience not any longer
being alone in this mire any more than anyone else, that is,
but calling out, there is more water in the pool.
And who is in control of what the language does, whoever
is in control of what the language does, whoever, that is,
is in control.
Punt. I'd held. Signifiers in time of essential remiss,
nor platter. Butt held, nor forms. In time, that, too, wd
give way to pure juice, at least in the time of composition,
that you do get loose and find the unexpected in control of
the loss of what is there besides the shadow, uh, you know
"falls the shadow". A spanker. Went further, held. Some.
More.
But here you talk more, and what is said among us becomes
our words are spoken out like something drinking water is
like that, when among your friends and outers, there is
agreement and spawn in the telling of the tale. Here among
the priests and fathoms. You'ld spin, her center of oracle,
the demands of the flesh, I understand you now in your
conceit, giving up the torrid dress, that was it, and in
that giving up do I see what has happened to you this year.
Nor robbed nor given, but told, OF SPITED IN. 2-wha/nor
outer, butt held to the innert ear. Your old can of
three-in-one oil had its own Mandrake quality in the bump of
the pump in your ear, where are you beloved, and what is
your name? In my own dream I fall asleep, a dark, internal
slut. Gainer-missed. At the rut, she held me down again
and again we came together. Once maybe. And in the
sentence, cast, alight, foreign, how we displace our grammar
without intention, more out of carelessness, our Random
Academy, wielding their shears and intents, making rules
about adverb safety and concentrating at last on the comma
in its five levels of use, through to its relation to the
period, the absolute. No more. It's dark and the sentinels
have left us alone with the waste we left behind, and I
returned to settle it out, Berkeley, that is, the first of
the dark, dusty streets of the here and now, wherein the
froth of the broth is still the same old bullshit, and we
are in control, we are in control, we are in control, etc.
IV. EAT IT WHILE I WORK
Doorwise mainframes recalled that messages were left
purposely incomplete, indicating rhythms unexpressed by
specific contents left in the realm of the implied; unstated
hesitancies become a part of the design itself, and noise,
leakage, or friction become elements or forces of intent, an
oddly ironic testament to form-warp, or something in which
an aspect of the development of an idea or stance turns back
into the whole and leads to a stylistic repetition wherein
reference itself is a causality rather than a byproduct of
process.
The exhaustion of one style leads to production of work
within a comfort zone, where the scent of the chase is
toward familiarity, resolution, acceptance. Where was risk
expressed? Was it in a color or an attitude? Only the
composition knows. Nor other flippant commentary leads one
astray, not into the center of the document (a source
outside the composite), nor do definitions particularly
matter in the fluxus of determination which is progress
itself. No, it is not the material itself which matters, it
is as though the progress of a material through to
expression were out of your hands, or should be, for how
does progress come about, certainly not by frontal assault,
that's surely the best way to oblivion; a hand is shown, a
way is made, then set. Nor occlude, but star-out into
evasiveness, there is certainly a tendency to skip to the
left, or just sort of sidestep the charging bull--he moves a
slight inch and a half to the right and the locomotive
charges on by, over the cliff, and into the berry patch, oh
no, not the berry patch, sez br'er rabbit, why I just loves
the berry patch.
Perhaps this leaves you feeling a little impatient. A
good wander does, but there comes a time when an approach
seems to work and becomes a little too comfortable, lulls
you into forgetfulness, and that's the time to jump. %One
learns how%. I'd missed the boat two or three times, then
swam. My own journey means nothing to any one but me. The
examples therein are made pressure in forgiving and in the
tenor of use which emerges from the voice one hears, not
particularly in the story itself, for there are infinite
stories, each one worse than the one preceding, or better,
or different, and finally a cacophony of implements of
denigration, a salience of the profunct. Finally a single
song or voice of sensation and emotion emerges from a callow
morass, he flickers into submission and, uh, %hears%; you
are alone still in the silence of self, alone in the movie
of mourning and encrustation, how your pitiful wails into
the darkness of your own soul go unanswered for maybe all
your time in step with your secret, but then another realm
reveals itself into language or hesitance an unbidden motor
of the heart's bestowal.
A light at the end of day reminds you that here is the
spoken tomb of the new beginning, and in that change there
is also renewal.
What speaks against us is an unwilling tendency to listen
again. It is no joke that the sentences come out this way,
it is a fairly new sign that something is taking place, for
what is worse than to revolve around the time one has in a
sense that nothing is taking place, and although the news is
dreadful year after year, still the houses on your street
always look the same, and suddenly you are at a meeting of
people with old habits and white hair and you realize that
they are you and that nothing has changed in all this time
but the beating of your undesigned romance with the quest
for perfection which you failed to notice was going on
underneath your eyes like a pancake on the plate of life,
syrup oozing into the profusions and markings of the butter
on the edges. Still, it'd eke. You'd nor mark, nor held,
nor phaeded in the plud off star, nix, plume at, somer at,
the fording skin of shoot, yr flamer hooded at the plume.
This is not new nor is it forgiveness in the heart but
spinning hours you call response or token push't into newer
realms of desire and flame.
I think there is new. We are falling all over it but
missing the specific gravity of reference, and that is why
it is new. Can one in process become aware of process and
yet not retard the forward motion of that history, given
that it is a salience slightly beyond the grasp of
perception or intention itself, like, no fucking around,
this is it in the locus of potentialities, and now is the
time to act is both a slogan and a fact of life always
present in the cellular larvae of intent, the slighter gasps
which precede action itself, how long will you just think
about it? Don't get left astir. You'd be encouraged to
scuttle all your lifeboats and just swim for it. Don't
forget to leave what's left beyond circumstance (if only I
could get the nasal twang).
So the footnotes and cross-referential dogmas have been
abandoned to the wolves, they'll chomp the baby you've
thrown from the sleigh as it races toward Moscow, that'll
slake their blood thirst and omit you from the sentence
proper. Somehow, you think, the observer is not the
observed, and that even so, within process, your very self
consciousness delimits purpose from its crust, its very
progress if only because one is carrying the extra
twenty-five pounds represented by the normal human head, if
only you could sort of guillotine-out of thinking itself,
then you could really go fast, like the chicken with only
half its head cut off, twitching around the barnyard with a
ten-point migraine, oh, if I could only finish this
paragraph I could go on to the next one.
So the spaces between words are also the spaces between
atoms, and you'd finally notice that the vast darkness
inside prose is in the very *phlogiston* of the material
world, and that true communication with language might not
finally be possible, and so a kind of truancy develops
between the verb and its noun, and the diagrams seem to have
a lot of dotted lines in them, as if there were a kind of
obstinacy in the material itself, that which precedes speech
or language, the word itself before it is made.
A scrim or perhaps notice in the midst of plenty. You
are not yet complete. Still the monster gleams your heart
away. There is some blind intent driving the words from
you, he marks and you follow. Or she, whatever. In the
vastness of what you have ignored, there is simple
description, that's all I can do for now, talk about what
the room looks like, uninhabited save for the figure in the
chair in the center of the room, noticing. Yet scrim
remove. Nor push to pleasant realm. The doter and the
dotee. As in "owe." This declension is not held nor formed
apart from this. There is "that" and there is "this," the
doctrines yield into us. Like the sideways thrust beyond
which the incremental makes a foray into silence, boasting
of its willfulness to the heart's fancy, I'd not mention
this to anyone, but carry it forward and into the cellular
level, you cannot do otherwise; in the strategies of
self-healing in which you aspire to have one substance in
the body communicate with another, how about beating on the
heart/head thing for awhile, not noticing the absence in her
eyes when you can't "give," it's nothing mean, you say, it's
just the way things are. It's a hole in the wall. It's
another dark absence where you wait at the corner and nobody
comes. A sharp cool.
So I'm trying several things at once, perhaps to defeat
the loyalty one bears toward one's communicant, directing
the line of fire into the crowd, as it were. You'd not
notice in your electronic things that there is a crew of
intentions reeling within the paragraph, and as it wanders,
there is a naming taking place which eludes even your most
potent notice. He said he just wrote the first sentence and
the rest of the thing grew out of that. No plan, just a
copying out of what wanted to be said, and if there is no
directness to the spirit, then nothing will be said at all,
and you're still in there safe behind closed doors wanting
to get out, I assure you, the more you bet on it as a locus
of safety the more cold winds will blow up your pants legs,
streaming forgetfulness into the day's own tempos, lining
hours with their own vegetative calm. Into seeming sent.
Where's the beef to that?
Yet the master evasiveness is more than a clue to what is
not noticed. It is the cloud under which you operate, your
own private Idaho. Would you share, for that is another
call, requiring a *moto plenitude* of doubt, a release of
purpose into the order of following. Here you are
confronted by the sentence itself, and you rest within that.
You'd meant torpor not. Is it cultural history? We're
after naught, nor begun anywhere, it's that cool. And the
purpose of that stuff is self-serving, as are most purposes.
That's their purpose, you might say.
_________________________________________________________________
Building (blind writings)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
by J. Lehmus
I. The King in his dreams
BUILDING
H a tower
Builders' ballet. Alarum
_____
II. three figures
LAST LIGHT
WAITING
FIRST LIGHT
Breathe
Below wavely ~
_____
III. SYLLABLE LINE
Breathing
I am losing the hold
of my body. My hand
is writing my mind holding
the idea FORTH each word
_____
IV. I am sinking. Brood.
Above a chess table.
He'd like to build.
Fasten to earth to drill
_____
V. ALL CARDS
_____
VI. Ice formations
UNDER STARS
ASTRAL. Lighted
building in a ballet
_____
VII. PASSAGE
I
_____
VIII. SUN
All without a sense
of Time/place
arising from my feet
_____
IX. I am walking across
the Hall.
_
_____
X. TAB. RASA
some locked door
behind which there's
only
black space
_____
XI. TOME
Building
somnial work
Great building
_____
XII. WRITING IN DREAM
READING IN DREAM
OUR LIBRARIES HERE
_____
XIII. Hand. I feel sinking
I feel sinking,
SINKING.
_____
XIV. CONFESS. SONG
thus repeated lines
sinking. Branch the
I have sung
mind. Consciousness
VISION.
_____
XV. Still GUIDE
This.
Through a dark
passage. Red _fire in ink_
drawn.
_____
XVI. All IO SIN CATALOGUE
I feel like wise
___
KING
ORDERED.
????????
___
_____
XVII. CASTLE /dream building
White stone
dark granite texture
of paper documents
_____
XVIII. Tablets
law of
Medicine
Sin tablet.
_____
XIX. CLOUDY AREA.
______ Field of Flowers.
ARRANGE. words.
_____
XX. some thing
I am reading a text
The rubric says
REPEAT AFTER ME
_____
XXI. Script to celebrate
_____
XXII. Older Sense
A
_____
XXIII. With mottled skins
changing rime
emir. EMIR.
_____
Appendix: The Ruin of the Bestiality Legends
The relic text opening to retrace into the tightly ideated
psychosomatic union, the horrible gemination, singing
standards as blood-eye icons confluent to preside upon
twinbirth, prayer for these half hearts ill gaping, rose
aster emitter to twine cordial in heir-blood coexistence and
writhe in sealing the virgin sores (clad for worn), rotating
snare mantras in an ordered rhythm.
Upon the Lord Sebaoth scull the keyscale script to
coordinate the fratricide theory, the man against himself in
clone colonies addicted to gored blood.
Gilt silhouette: long legged birds of marshes, twin pelicans
to pierce their breasts.
_________________________________________________________________
Two poems
~~~~~~~~~
by Thomas Lowe Taylor
Daily Log June 11, 1995
I
Delay, she said, your arcing triumph, no meat `er
in yr mists, tracked below handles of door was
inclement disc her own private Montana of friction
refunds the dream's significance in parts bestrode out.
But the bee stings. I know that. They'd wheeled into
my own swinging Kung Fu of escapes no doubt the
apple itself an issue over what might become you
in sense or outer, heel'd-out and thrum'd a thalweg.
Love had you over me, and what leaned at first
forward knockers would stray intent calmer pines
are not reclined butter knocks out hammering lines
the pastor delimit from hoser dogs the outer air.
And hits them upper dares decide my own populaces
whirring remind re-wind or blowing skin away
from the business at hand, a hand in handed
hours I watched out how you came inside me.
These lobes of rhoda; not imprecise, you know, butt held
from indistinction in players also shelled out to
other hours sung perhaps away from all of this
infernal soup of knots. They polled me for this relay.
And dare your name my lips ahead & stammer outer parts
are inner scenes of light beheld inflamed passions
let under hand their own fumes and alt positions.
II
Your dick. The shielded spiner spoke out again;
at last a truer design was in the work no starts
too soon but was it just a dream away you
said the day would come again and stay & stay.
The collar answer'd, but there was none. My luck.
______________________________
Daily Log Jul 29.95
I
Neither abandon nor light all there is,
you are someone made intense by time's lines
from the heart, outer makes its way inside.
Yr art & sentenced marked illumined from within.
Nor foment staum, relax her outer tempos in
this is the timing span, I called you dream enough
to become present within circumstances favored by
what's come, come to pass, passing into the air to be.
Re-lidded repose no master enjoins beyond doubt
what's flooded sense a sign within at outer coils
have dotted the landscape, and you were there.
A flutter abides her presence, wings spread for flight.
This land so long unspoken of love's attributes along
said passion's positions more than tongue's convenience
into song along your long line into that as rides
between gasps becomes this, made flesh as word.
It's the empty hours that weigh so long, despite these
tremors to the contrary realm, as I am contrary , too,
and sped between alliances as if there were no in
between to spare these sensations of their thrift & song.
She came to life & spoke shuttered portions opened
out to my own arena of concord & spin to
lesser gods have opened up to give against you.
II
My dick. What'd been a calling turned out to be
an answer on the telephone from about twenty miles
down the downer dream what's gone from this
picture spares you the softer aliens denied love.
Tenor leaven. She turned around & laughed. My luck.
_________________________________________________________________
Book of Formation (Sepher Yetzirah)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
CHAPTER ONE
[1] 1. By means of thirty-two wonderful paths of wisdom, YH,
YHVH of Hosts, ELOHIM of Israel, Living ELOHIM, and Eternal
King, EL SHADDAI, Merciful and Gracious, High and Uplifted,
Who inhabits Eternity, Exalted and Holy is His Name,
engraved. And He created His universe by three signs: by
border, and letter and number,
[2] 2. There are TEN INTANGIBLE SEPHIROT and twenty-two
letters as a foundation: three are Mothers, and seven
double, and twelve simple.
[3] 3. There are TEN INTANGIBLE SEPHIROT the number of the ten
fingers, five opposite five, and in the center is set the
Covenant of Unity like the Organ of the Tongue, and like the
Organ of Nakedness.
[4] 4. There are TEN INTANGIBLE SEPHIROT ten and not nine, ten
and not eleven, understand with wisdom, and be wise with
understanding, test them and explore them, and understand
the matter thoroughly, and restore the Creator to His place.
[5] 5. There are TEN INTANGIBLE SEPHIROT whose measure is ten
without end:
depth of FIRST, and depth of LAST,
depth of GOOD, and depth of EVIL,
depth of HEIGHT, and depth of ABYSS,
depth of EAST, and depth of WEST,
depth of NORTH, and DEPTH of SOUTH.
Lord, Only One, EL, faithful King, rules all of the from His
holy Dwelling-Place unto Eternity.
[6] 6. There are TEN INTANGIBLE SEPHIROT whose appearance is
like lightning and whose limits are infinite. And they
speak with each other to and fro, and they run at His Word
like the whirlwind, and before His Throne they bow down.
[7] 7. There are TEN INTANGIBLE SEPHIROT whose end is fixed in
their beginning, as the flame is bound to the coal. For the
Lord is the Only One, and He has no second, and before ONE
how can you count?
[8] 8. There are TEN INTANGIBLE SEPHIROT shut your mouth from
speaking and your heart from thinking. And if your mouth
runs to speak and your heart to think, return to the place,
for thus it is said: "And the living creatures ran and
returned"^1^, and upon this word a covenant is cut.
[9] 9. There are TEN INTANGIBLE SEPHIROT ONE: SPIRIT OF LIVING
ELOHIM, blessed and blessed is the Name of Him who lives
forever, Voice and Spirit and Word. This is the Holy Spirit.
[10] 10. TWO: Air from Spirit. He engraved and hewed out
through it twenty-two letters as a foundation: three
Mothers, and seven double, and twelve simple, and they are
of One Spirit.
[11] 11. THREE: Water from Air.
He engraved and hewed out through it emptiness and void,
mud and mire,
He engraved it like a kind of garden bed,
He raised it like a kind of wall,
He surrounded it like a kind of ceiling.
[12] 12. FOUR: Fire from Water. He engraved and hewed out
through it the Throne of Glory, Fiery Angels, and Ophanim,
and Holy Beings, and Ministering Angels. And from the three
of them He established His Dwelling-Place, as it is said:
"Who makes winds His messengers, the flaming fire His
ministers."^2^
[13] 13. Three letters from the simple ones -- He sealed Air
through three, and set them into His great Name YHV and
sealed through them six extremities:
FIVE: He sealed HEIGHT, and He turned upward and sealed
it with YHV.
SIX: He sealed ABYSS, and He turned downward and sealed
it with YVH.
SEVEN: He sealed EAST, and He turned forward and sealed
it with HYV.
EIGHT: He sealed WEST, and He turned backward and sealed
it with HVY.
NINE: He sealed SOUTH, and He turned right and sealed it
with VYH.
TEN: He sealed NORTH, and He turned left and sealed it
with VHY.
[14] 14. These TEN INTANGIBLE SEPHIROT are ONE --
SPIRIT OF LIVING ELOHIM
AIR from SPIRIT
WATER from AIR
FIRE from WATER
HEIGHT, and ABYSS,
EAST, and WEST,
NORTH, and SOUTH.
CHAPTER TWO
[15] 1. TWENTY-TWO LETTERS ARE THE FOUNDATION: three Mothers,
seven double, and twelve simple. THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM,
SHIN: Their foundation is the scale of merit and the scale
of guilt, and the tongue of statute balances the scales
between them. THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN: MEM stands
still, SHIN hisses, ALEPH is Air of Spirit balancing the
scales between them.
[16] 2. TWENTY-TWO LETTERS ARE THE FOUNDATION:
He engraved them,
He hewed them out,
He combined them,
He weighed them, and
He set them at opposites, and
He formed through them everything that is formed and
everything that is destined to be formed.
[17] 3. TWENTY-TWO LETTERS ARE THE FOUNDATION:
He engraved them through Voice,
He hewed them out through Air,
He set them through the mouth in five places:
Aleph, Chet, Hey, and Ayin in the throat,
Gimel, Yod, Kaf, and Kof on the palate,
Dalet, Tet, Lamed, Nun, and Tav with the tongue,
Zayin, Samech, Shin, Resh, and Tzade with the teeth,
Bet, Vav, Mem, and Pey with the lips.
[18] 4. TWENTY-TWO LETTERS ARE THE FOUNDATION: He set them in a
cycle like a kind of wall with two hundred and thirty-one
gates. And the cycle rotates forward and backward. And the
sign of the thing is:
-- there is NOTHING in goodness above pleasure, and
-- there is NOTHING in evil below pain.
[19] 5. How did He combine them, weigh them and set them at
opposites? Aleph with all of them, and all of them with
Aleph; Bet with all of them, and all of them with Bet. And
it rotates in turn, and thus they are in two hundred and
thirty-one gates, and thus everything that is formed and
everything that is spoken goes out from ONE NAME.
[20] 6. He formed substance from emptiness, and made what is
from NOTHING. And He hewed out great columns from Air which
is not tangible. And this is the sign:
He covers and sets at opposites, and He makes everything
that is formed and everything that is spoken with ONE NAME.
And the sign of the thing is twenty-two countings like one
body.
CHAPTER THREE
[21] 1. THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN, their foundation is the
scale of merit and the scale of guilt, and the tongue of
statute balances the scales between them.
[22] 2. THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN -- a great secret,
wonderful and concealed, and He seals with six rings. And
from Him go out Fire and Water, dividing into male and
female. THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN are their
foundation, and from them are born Fathers, from which
everything is created.
[23] 3. THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN --
He engraved them,
He hewed them out,
He combined them,
He weighed them, and
He set them at opposites, and
He formed through them:
THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN in the universe, and
THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN in the year, and
THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN in the body of male and
female.
[24] 4. THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN are in the universe: Air,
Water, and Fire.
Heavens were created first from Fire, and Earth was created
from Water, and the Air balances the scales between the Fire
and between the Water.
[26] 5. THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN are in the year:
Fire and Water and Air, and
Heat was created from Fire,
Cold was created from Water, and
Temperate-state from Air balances the scales between them.
[27] 6. THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN are in the body of male
and female:
Fire and Water and Air.
Head was created from Fire, and
Belly was created from Water, and
Geviyah^3^ was created from Air, balancing the scales
between them.
[28] 7. He caused the letter Aleph to reign over Air, and
He tied a crown^4^ to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them:
Air in the universe, and the
Temperate-state in the year, and the
Geviyah in the body of male with Aleph, Mem, Shin; and
female with Aleph, Shin, Mem.
[29] 8. He caused the letter Mem to reign over Water, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them:
Earth in the universe, and
Cold in the year, and the
Belly in the body of male with Mem, Aleph, Shin;
and female with Mem, Shin, Aleph.
[30] 9. He caused the letter Shin to reign over Fire, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them:
Heavens in the universe, and
Heat in the year, and
Head in the body of male with Shin, Aleph, Mem;
and female with Shin, Mem, Aleph.
CHAPTER FOUR
[31] 1. SEVEN DOUBLE LETTERS: BET GIMEL DALET, KAF PEY RESH and
TAV behave with two sounds: BHET BET, GHIMEL GIMEL. DHALET
DALET, KHAF KAF, PHEY PEY, RHESH RESH, THAV TAV; a
construction of soft and hard, strong and weak.
[32] 2. SEVEN DOUBLE LETTERS: BET GIMEL DALET, KAF PEY RESH and
TAV, their foundation is Life, Peace, Wisdom, Wealth, Grace,
Seed, and Dominion.
[33] 3. SEVEN DOUBLE LETTERS: BET GIMEL DALET, KAF PEY RESH and
TAV are such in speech and as opposites:
The opposite of Life is Death,
The opposite of Peace is Evil,
The opposite of Wisdom is Folly,
The opposite of Wealth is Poverty,
The opposite of Grace is Ugliness,
The opposite of Seed is Desolation,
The opposition of Dominion is Slavery.
[34] 4. SEVEN DOUBLE LETTERS: BET GIMEL DALET, KAF PEY RESH and
TAV are opposite seven extremities, from them six
extremities:
ABOVE and BELOW,
EAST and WEST,
NORTH and SOUTH
and The Holy Temple is set in the middle and it supports all
of them.
[35] 5. SEVEN DOUBLE LETTERS: BET GIMEL DALET, KAF PEY RESH and
TAV seven and not six, seven and not eight, test them and
explore them, and understand the matter thoroughly, and
restore the Creator^5^ to His place.
[36] 6. SEVEN DOUBLE LETTERS: BET GIMEL DALET, KAF PEY RESH and
TAV are the foundation.
He engraved them,
He hewed them out,
He combined them,
He weighed them, and
He set them at opposites, and
He formed through them:
Seven Stars in the universe,
Seven Days in the year,
Seven Gates in the body of male and female.
And from them He engraved seven heavens, and seven earths,
and seven Sabbaths. Therefore He cherished the seventh
under all heavens.
[37] 7. And these are the SEVEN STARS in the universe: Sun,
Venus, Mercury, Moon, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars.
And these are the SEVEN DAYS in the year: the seven days of
creation.^6^ And SEVEN GATES in the body of male and female:
two eyes, two ears, and the mouth, and the two apertures of
the nose.
And through them He engraved seven heavens, and seven
earths, and seven hours, therefore He cherished the seventh
of every object under the heavens.
[38] 8. He caused the letter Bet to reign over Life, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them, Saturn in the universe, the first
day in the year, and the right eye in the body of male
and female.
-- He caused the letter Gimel to reign over Peace, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them, Jupiter in the universe, the
second day in the year, and the left eye in the body of
male and female.
-- He caused the letter Dalet to reign over Wisdom, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them, Mars in the universe, the third
day in the year, and the right ear in the body of male
and female.
-- He caused the letter Kaf to reign over Wealth, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them, Sun in the universe, the fourth
day in the year, and the left ear in the body of male and
female.
-- He caused the letter Pey to reign over Grace, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them, Venus in the universe, the fifth
day in the year, and the right nostril in the body of
male and female.
-- He caused the letter Resh to reign over Seed, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them, Mercury in the universe, the
sixth day in the year, and the left nostril in the body
of male and female.
-- He caused the letter Tav to reign over Dominion, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them, Moon in the universe, the Sabbath
day in the year, and the mouth in the body of male and
female.
[39] 9. SEVEN DOUBLE LETTERS: BET GIMEL DALET, KAF PEY RESH and
TAV through which are engraved seven universes, seven
heavens, seven earths, seven seas, seven rivers, seven
deserts, seven days, even weeks, seven years, seven
Sabbatical years, seven jubilees, and The Holy Temple.
Therefore He cherished the seventh ones under all the
heavens.
[40] 10. Two stones^7^ build two houses,
Three stones build six houses,
Four stones build twenty-four houses,
Five stones build one hundred and twenty houses,
Six stones build seven hundred and twenty houses,
Seven stones build five thousand and twenty houses,
From here on go out and think what the mouth is unable to
speak, and ear is unable to hear.
2 STONES:
AB BA
3 STONES:
ABG AGB
BAG BGA
GAB GBA
4 STONES:
ABGD ABDG AGBD AGDB ADBG ADGB
BAGD BADG BGAD BGDA BDAG BDGA
GABD GADB GBAD GBDA GDAB GDBA
DABG DAGB DBAG DBGA DGAB DGBA
and so forth...
CHAPTER FIVE
[41] 1. TWELVE SIMPLE LETTERS:
Hey Vav Zayin, Chet Tet Yod, Lamed Nun Samech, Ayin Tzade Kof
Their foundation is speech, thought, movement, sight,
hearing, work, sexual intercourse, smell, sleep, wrath,
taste, laughter.
[42] 2. TWELVE SIMPLE LETTERS:
Hey Vav Zayin, Chet Tet Yod, Lamed Nun Samech, Ayin Tzade Kof
Their foundation is the twelve borders of a diagonal:
East-Above border, East-North border, East-Below border;
South-Above border, South-East border, South-Below border;
West-Above border, West-South border, West-Below border;
North-Above border, North-West border, North-Below border.
And they continually become wider for ever and ever, and
they are the arms of the universe.
[43] 3. TWELVE SIMPLE LETTERS:
Hey Vav Zayin, Chet Tet Yod, Lamed Nun Samech, Ayin Tzade Kof
He engraved their foundation,
He hewed them out,
He combined them,
He weighed them, and
He set them at opposites, and
He formed through them:
twelve constellations in the universe,
twelve months in the year,
twelve organs in the body of male and female.
[44] 4. The twelve constellations in the universe are: Aries,
Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio,
Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces.^8^
[45] 5. The twelve months in the year are: Nisan, Iyar, Sivan,
Tammuz, Av, Elui, Tishri, Cheshvan, Kislev, Tevet, Shevat,
Adar.
[46] 6. The twelve organs in the body of male and female are:
two hands, two feet, two kidneys, gall, small intestines,
liver, maw, stomach, spleen.
[47] 7. He caused the letter Hey to reign over speech, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Aries in the universe, and Nisan
in the year, and the right foot in the body of male and
female.
-- He caused the letter Vav to reign over thought, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Taurus in the universe, and Iyar
in the year, and the right kidney in the body of male and
female.
-- He caused the letter Zayin to reign over movement, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Gemini in the universe, and Nisan
in the year, and the left foot in the body of male and
female.
-- He caused the letter Chet to reign over sight, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Cancer in the universe, and Tammuz
in the year, and the right hand in the body of male and
female.
-- He caused the letter Tet to reign over hearing, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Leo in the universe, and Av in the
year, and the left kidney in the body of male and female.
-- He caused the letter Yod to reign over work, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Virgo in the universe, and Elui in
the year, and the left hand in the body of male and
female.
-- He caused the letter Lamed to reign over sexual
intercourse, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Libra in the universe, and Tishri
in the year, and gall in the body of male and female.
-- He caused the letter Nun to reign over smell, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Scorpio in the universe, and
Cheshvan in the year, and the small intestines in the
body of male and female.
-- He caused the letter Samech to reign over sleep, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Sagittarius in the universe, and
Kislev in the year, and the stomach in the body of male
and female.
-- He caused the letter Ayin to reign over wrath, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Capricorn in the universe, and
Tevet in the year, and the liver in the body of male and
female.
-- He caused the letter Tzade to reign over taste, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Aquarius in the universe, and
Shevat in the year, and the maw in the body of male and
female.
-- He caused the letter Kof to reign over laughter, and
He tied a crown to it, and
He combined them with one another, and
He formed through them Pisces in the universe, and Adar
in the year, and the spleen in the body of male and
female.
He made them like a kind of sunset,
He put them in order like a kind of wall,
He set them in order like a kind of battle.
CHAPTER SIX
[48] 1. THESE ARE THREE MOTHERS ALEPH, MEM, SHIN and there went
out from them three Fathers; and they are Air, Water, Fire;
and from the Fathers are descendants, three Fathers and
their descendant