intermission...

(``) I just got news that Raymond Hammond, that keen-sighted visionary & editor of the New York Quarterly, has accepted two of my poems for publication. I also have poems coming out in Slipstream, Main Street Rag & I think I'm in the latest print edition of Underground Voices...

These are all great mags (with great, hard-working editors) and I feel truly honored to be in them.

(#) My Boozehound story's coming along pretty nicely, but I wasted two of my days off being hungover... so I haven't gotten too far. Here's some Chianti-sopped maxims & scribblings in the meantime.

*the soul refines itself through suffering
(happiness therefore is
mostly counter-productive...
in the eyes of any god)
*every family is cursed
*it's easier to make sense than poetry
*only the living dead fear death
*our thoughts are organic
little dying creatures
*perhaps is only a so-called soul
*genius is mostly subaquatic
*most people are only as smart as they can feel
(and as dumb as they do know)
*courage fumbles lovingly death's trouserfly
*all that is earthly is a lie
*exceptions matter more than the rule
*a pastor is a portojuan with wings
*cellphone's defunct

time leaves its sordid tales behind

i'm planning on writing some stories for this blog, but i just haven't gotten around to it yet. i've got some pretty good ones though. Like the time i tore down an ex-roommate's front door because i was drunk on vodka and couldn't find my checkbook anywhere, or doing thirty hours worth of sheriff's work days on two hours of sleep and listening to the cop talk pyramids so i didn't have to go back out on the highway and spear trash anymore. I could also mention (or at least allude to) the time i tackled the old lady in the patio furniture store, or the month i spent riding the rails, sitting higgledy-piggledy with three barrel stiffs plus one coach jawrower and a gravedigger named slick fulwood, the five of us in glad rags listening to a hallelujah peddler before hopping off in winnemucca to score a spot in a globe-trotting samba troop, and then the car-salesman who sidelined as a stage prop (in another life) telling me, "you have to be qualified to drive a ferrari."
"qualified? i'm paying cash! what do you want a bag of money?"
"Step into my office."

i will get around to writing some stories, but for now, here's another poem:

Ship It

~ see: Oak Bend Review April '09

life is good, but contempt is better

(~) here's the scrubbed and disinfected version of the poem down below. i think this one is much better. i thought the other one was really good too when i first posted it, but then i came back to it a day after i wrote the thing and realized where i went wrong, which was pretty much everywhere... what a turkey (vulture). i don't know what i was thinking.

"i was probably drunk" ~ don imus
--

pre-socratic

how you tame a lion is with a chair
and whip, but with a man it's best to grab
a bible and beat him over the head
with it singing god and country
and man oh my... praise be to america's wet-nurses
vibratingbedsalesmen mudbug-
harvesters undertakers failed honkytonk
coverbands anyone who's anyone
whose half-a-mind believes
in the voice of a mob
and the pursuit of life liberty and
that which is wholly
purchasable with a preferred line of credit
at jose's flower boutique & whackshack
back behind that truckstop
off yeehaw junction where the nuns all disguise
themselves as french-
tickler dispensers
and the feeling one gets
having been raised irish-catholic
when your final thought
always involves a line of priests
jockeying for hand-me-downs
outside the xxx goat-foot-emporium and how
did you say
philosophy was
born?

the absinthe drinker

here's another picasso. he's my favorite painter by far. "picasso gives you things which bulge:grunting lungs pumped full of sharp thick mind" -- ee cummings

my writing leans much onto his painting. and it's still learning "to break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories which it contains." he was one of the few painters who used humor too.

but the whore in this painting... there's something strangely sexy about her. she's got madness in her eyes. something completely sick, like an open nerve ending touched by a slight breeze (slighted by a touched breeze). i understand how she feels. and that's where picasso's genius comes in.
-----

Night Shift

see: decomP ~ April '09

ri-tooral-ooral-addy

i don't think i have what it takes to be an official blogger yet. i just don't have the ambition or self-love or whatever it is. something about there being precisely twomenandamidget reading this doesn't help much either... but i will try to dredge up my voice. drinking beers (or blue nun qualitatswein-kudos-bottle cost $4.50) helps. the fact that i'm a slow typist (and reader and talker) doesn't.

**** by the way, i heard kerouac was an incredibly fast and proficient typer. that's great. what a gift the sonofabitch had to be able to do that. some people are just marvelously gifted and ya know...,THE STUPIDASS SHOULD'VE BEEN A GODDAMNEDSECRETARY... HE COULDN'T WRITE HIS WAY OUT OF A PROPER

nut(sac)k

here's a political conversation i overheard today:

person #1. "i just have a problem with people who are so adamant about saving the life of a two week young fetus (which is basically almost a tadpole), but don't give a shit about a twentyyearold vet who is maimed for life, or the family of any dead soldier... don't give a shit... yet the same fuckers have the gall to traipse around in camouflage hunter's garb, because they think there's nothing wrong with murdering animals (or wounding them for life) because it's a socalled known fact animals have neither feelings nor souls..."
person#2: "i know, i hate christians.
#1: i was actually talking about republicans.
#2: there's a difference?
#1: there's republicans who aren't christians, but not the other way around.
#2: well the christians are the worst of the bunch. the born agains.
1: i call 'em born again phonies..hypocrites.introduce me to one who isn't and we'll talk.
2: forget the hypocrite thing. they're sociopaths. they just know how to hide their monstrous souls well. with them, everything's about them & feeding the goat within.don't be misguided.
1: i won't

Alone in a Libyan desert...

i have a hard time keeping up a blog. i am not interested in telling people about the mundane things that happen in my life, and i don't think they are interested in them either. i write one or two peoms a week. i am not writing any stories anymore. i will write a novel in about 7-11 years (after i come back from germany, where I plan on going in about 1.5-2 years). and switch gears. until then it's drinking and poetry. and working. and trying to be by myself as much as I can. i don't take too many phone calls anymore. i don't have too many friends, and i want to keep it that way. to be an artist, to truly harness your genius (if you have it...or think you do) is a sad and painful thing. and oh so lonely. and oh so maddening. and I can tell you it has nothing to do with happiness, that's for sure. except when the magic comes, then it's real. and life doesn't seem like such torment. but the magic only comes to go, like everything else in the world. And then you're left living some more. your 3rd rate life. is it worth it? it's probably not, but for me... there's someone out there i'm trying to impress. another me. who probably hasn't even been born yet, but needs me the same way I needed... dostoyevsky, turgenev, e.e. cummings, bukowski, montaigne, schopenhauer, voltaire, jeffers... the ones who put the line down with blood. i am putting my whole life on the line (in unseen ways) for this... the trial muse, and the wine of my incantations. for the next line that may come to me, as i walk out into death any evening. i'm dead serious about this, and it all makes perfect sense to me.

you can't fake madness & time is the monster lurking behind all earth's horrors

Here's a question that's always bothered me: I'm not sure whether I'm entirely 100% sane or not. I suspect I am, but you never know for sure. I think I'm just touched at times. It's really easy for me to ACT sane though. Does it take being sane to act? I don't think so - see: Artaud. Anyway, here it is tuesday evening in the world and I am drinking a budweiser (my last, my next is a Chelado -Budweiser & Clamato - I don't know what the hell that's doing in my fridge, it's hangover beer) and I've scarfed down some Lorazapams and I'm waiting for the muses to come into this room and caress my eyelids and whisper something in my ear. Something I haven't heard before, which draws the curtains of my thinking down and reveals the hounds and fairies dancing around backstage.

Nothing's. Happening. But. Time. This time.
------------
At any rate...

Or shall a poet be content to languish
In the degradation of what heaven gave
To be his right? the highest human power
Frittered away to serve your little hour?

Faust Pt. 1

I love that line, because I am tormented by certain people and their little hours... especially when they come and try to murder yours (which you consider precious)... Most people can't survive their own minds, which is the problem. When they get bored and have to climb back into themselves for a moment... they look around, see the desolate wasteland, the thick slime-deposits outgassing... and then an image invariably bubbles up... your face rises out of the dung. it floats above. they must make it real to escape themselves... they pick up the phone... you don't answer (they're calling air)... it doesn't matter. They know where to find you. It's your day off (they know all your days off, by the way) and you are at home and they know how to get there. You might have even forgotten to lock the door.

---
Charmin

See ~ Zygote in My Coffee 3-16-09

In the beginning was the Deed

I was in Chicago a couple weeks ago, and got a relatively cheap room ($105/night) at the historic Ambassador East. It's a pretty okay place, although the Pump Room isn't what it once was, and the walls in the rooms are so thin you almost have to whisper so your neighbor doesn't hear you. One morning I woke up and my woman was singing and laughing when suddenly we heard a loud bang on the wall. "It's 6:00 in the goddamn morning!" someone yelled. It was a woman's voice, husky and unpleasant. "Where'd that come from?" I asked. The voice heard me. The walls got beaten again. "Shut up! Shut up! We're fucking sleeping!"

I rolled over in bed. "Exactly what kind of beast is this?" I wondered.

I never found out. We let the creature sleep and never heard from it again.
--
Later that morning, I walked along Lakeshore Dr., and around and about all the way to Wrigley Field. It had been about thirty years since the last time I was there. I remember watching the Pirates & Cubs play. This is when the Pirates had Dave Parker and Willie Stargell & the Cubs' great jewel was their catcher Barry Foote. He was a heel though. And so were the Cubs. They still are. I always preferred the Sox (White or Black).

Anyway, I lapped Wrigley and ended up at a used bookstore on N. Clark. I perused the place. Couldn't find anything worthwhile, but just before I left one of the employees was carting a stack of books and as she moved past me one book fell off the shelf and landed on my foot (my barry foote). It was Faust Part 1, by Goethe, Penguin Classics 1949.

I opened it:

"Well, well, keep at it: ply the shears and paste
Concoct from feasts of other men your hashes
And should the thing be wanting in fire or taste
Blow into flame your little heap of ashes:"

The exact book I was looking for. I just didn't know it yet. I bought it and went back to my hotel, which happened to be on Goethe St.
--

twentytwelve prophesy

Prophesy for 2012

Humanity won't be very humane in 2012. They won't bother to change their whims or ways. They will see red and feel blue, and green will be the color of their envy, and their cowardice yellow and they will tell each other white lies. They will devour everything and desire even more, yet nothing will satisfy them, and they will die for nothing too.

Mankind will never change, no matter what the pastors and prognosticators may preach. They will murder virtue for vice, and God for money. They will make gods out of knaves, rogues and thieves. They will edify lotharios, together with mobsters, sharpsters, harpies, bunglers, bucklers-of-swash, butchhaired mopes & rope-a-dopefiends.

Expect more of the same in twentytwelve.

Winter

Fools will rule in the first month, particularly when Capricorn holds sway. Men with misshapen skulls, underslung jaws and penguinfeet will emerge from their subterranean stumbling grounds and clamber up the ranks. They will obtain positions they'd been quietly eyeing all along. Some will become bigwigs and head cheeses in the corporate belly; others will carve out niches for themselves as mouthpieces for shitmerchants. All will be highly in vogue.

January 31st: As Eros glides past Earth, electromagnetic radiation combined with sleet & low atmospheric pressure will cause several different species to crossbreed. Polar bears and elk will copulate, possums and ground squirrels occasionally rendezvous & in Wood Buffalo, Alberta, an ape with messed up biorhythms will slip on a banana peal (his trainer's excuse) and rape a drunken rent-a-cop.

Spring

Springtime will bring crime levels to new highs in the lower fortyeight. Pursesnatchers & pocketpicks will be in season in most metropolitan areas. They will blame the gas prices for their desperation, as well as pawnshops & their henpecking wives. In Miami, three underhanded Overtown men will pilfer an outsized Virgin Mary statue and get arrested selling the copper for scrap - a sign of the times. I recommend paying it no mind, but instead preoccupying yourself with lighthearted diversions. Play the sludge pump on your front stoop. Keelhaul a deadbeat dad. Kill your first bear. Wear stretchpants and moonboots & go potato sack racing in the night. And in the daytime, read the ancients - Xenophon, Aristophanes, Seneca, etcetera. And remember what Horace once wisely said:

"Well-timed folly has a sweet relish"

And Lucretius too:

"Eject the gathered sperm in anything at all"

...But for Christ sakes, do stop draining your balls in front of your computer. It will ruin your sex life, and besides, someone's liable to find the evidence you leave behind.

Summer

The summer of 2012 will be presaged by several oracles & omens. In Gemini, just after Venus passes by, crows and bulls will be particularly loud and unruly, and an eagle will drop a clump of earth on a tyrant's head. I'm not sure what this means in the scheme of things, but I do suggest keeping an eye out for signs like these, and also for unlicensed soothsayers, keeping in mind all the while what Pacuvius said:

"For those who understand the speech of birds,
and learn from others' inwards more than from their own
We may well hear, but not attend, their words."

Too much superstition, after all, is what drove Alexander the Great mad. It did in & did away with whole armies, ages, factions and nations. And I foresee that come midsummer, on the Rue Saint-Cyr in Port-au-Prince, it will induce a befuddled midget to shit his pants and walk crabwise.

Expect flash floods, mudslides, wildfires & thunder storms in August. Bird flu, killer bees, ozone depletion and human stampedes should also be expected, along with meteorites & dead flowers. All of these things coupled with cost-push inflation will pervade the collective unconscious on deeper levels, giving rise to spiritual & climatic discontent among the populous, and causing many to suffer under the weight of their most nagging neuroses.

I recommend as a remedy taking a reprieve from all the world's affairs. Get yourself in a dark room, and get drunk often on Irish whiskey & Riesling Kabinett. It will chase away your blues, and get you in the habit of comparing your life not with the lives of other women and men, but with marigolds and hummingbirds, with moon and star and any creature or thing uninhibited by self-consciousness. For they are the best exemplars of living correctly. They show us the way. They regret & dread nothing.

You'll understand this best in your cups.

September 5th-20th: As the Fall Equinox approaches, Muslims will be at odds with Jews, Christians will claim superiority over Hindus, and angels will avoid any dogooder whose deeds are stained by self-interest, i.e. by ego - every devil's plaything & the speaking thing for those who claim to know:

"The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider or some loathsome Insect over the Fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as Worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the Fire..."
--Jonathan Edwards, 1741

Yet rolling holy slimedeposits like him will be all the rage in 2012, especially when Libra finds its stride. Be ready for them. Beware of the branding irons they stash behind their pulpits. Beware of their lies. And be leery especially of the love they have for themselves. It is the most destructive force within them. It keeps them dangerous and makes them death to the Divine.

Autumn

Spinsters and frogprinces will crawl out of their personal ads & retreat back to the forests. They will hide high in poplar trees until the leaves begin to fall. Then they will come down and climb into spiraling gopherholes in the underworld, all leading to a desert plain from which will ascend a towering hourglass teetering on a cross full of eyes. It will morph into a mandolin sundial inscribed with Sanskrit numerals. Then it will whirl backwards & become a celestial waterwheel pushed by a bungling pair of conjoined harlequins. They will heave it wholly over a dune & argue it down a long highway whose floor is a fun house mirror. A mirage then will swallow them piecemeal, and a chrysalis will appear, inverting its wings & changing its form into a floating door that opens to reveal a spatial dimension where amputees, giantesses, and bandylegged elves are all entangled in a Bacchanal. All of this will be presided over by a carnival yodeler in women's underthings, and the following sages: Descartes & Kierkegaard.

Look for our newcomers to stay here for awhile.

October 5th-31st: Pay careful attention to the dreams your days are rounded by around this time. If they are vivid and involve the dancing of pagans, vegans, or the bathing rituals of he-goats & spiny primordial creatures you must remember the psyche's intent - it doesn't undress itself in vain. Yin & yang. Ebb & flow. Second sight is clearest in the night. Dreams best dreamt are meant to restore balance in your mind.

November 11th: Unless it's absolutely necessary, avoid cow-tipping on this day.

As the Christmas season approaches, global consumer confidence will trend upwards, unemployment will trend downwards, and the old pastime of attaching highsounding epithets to dull and ordinary things will evolve into a mania. Just as now the garbageman has been renamed sanitation engineer, as the plaquescraper is better known as the dental hygienist, and as the lounge chair is called a chaise lounge, so new names will be created in order to confound the public & conceal from them the contemptible reality of so many cheerless commonplaces.

Hence the cockroach, I predict, will become the jaunty blatta; the Dumpster will be renamed a fortified refuse thingamabob; the small-engine mechanic will insist on being called an internal combustion specialist; and all plumbers will presently refer to themselves as crapologists.

"We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one." - Pascal

Winter

The Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar will complete its 13th Baktun cycle on December 21st, as the solstice sun reaches the southern terminus of the Milky Way's Dark Rift. The ancient Mayans considered this point the Tree of Life, the symbolic axis-mundi which joins the Underworld with the terrestrial realm and the sky. According to them the creation lord Bolon Yokte K'u will descend from the sky-earth cleft, and a Cosmo genesis will occur. The world will be reborn & transformed.

Some take this to mean mankind will undergo a great metamorphosis; that we will be spiritually enlightened & morally superior to what we are now.

I take this to mean the galaxy may alter its old ways, and exchange its primal mask & cape, but mankind won't change a thing (about itself).

Where the Tree of Life engenders the will-to-survive, the devil does play. The Absurd is the order of the day, and sorrow, always,
prevails.

when the hookers keep getting better looking you know you're in a recession

I first of all want to say I think the woman to my left is the most beautiful I've ever seen in a painting. Nothing quite like the good old fashioned ever-elusive giantess.

Secondly, I wanted to mention how bad things are, economically speaking, in the US of A right now. We're in a recession (and have been since about May of last year) no matter what anyone says. I know this for one reason and one reason only: because that's when the prostitutes started getting better looking.

Maxims & Reflections

^^^^ Here's some winesoaked maxims & reflections:

Never trust a man named
Bobby or Billy or Ricky

The weak will remain weak and the
strong will only appear that way

Fools are often better
educators than wisemen

It's better to compete with birds
and beasts and flowers than with men

Most men bloom swift, (somewhere between
ages 16-22) then spend the
rest of their lives
wilting

Consciousness is the shit-rift
between dream & death

Life is for the most part biding
your time being in time and
waiting

Wait until your dreams are as
ready for you as you are for
them; dreamchasing is a tender
act & cannot be forced

When dreams begin to write themselves
in legalese I will commit hari-kari

Putrid egos bulge
and pander for popular
approval

Egos eat themselves like second growths

Any dolt can (and does) have a
conviction regarding politics

The whisper of
oblivion is the breath eternal

Man plants his germs in the machinery
of the universe

Some hells are worse for their
plausibility

You must wear the
albatross of the people

Spirit & Body will never
find
one another
if they go looking

God made man on a Friday
his failures are ours
to
fix

(he had the courage of matzo balls)

I'm So Fucking ~~~~ kunk

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Schultze Gets the Blues

I just saw the best movie I've seen in about ten years. It's a German film with English subtitles called Schultze Gets the Blues (2003). The main character is the biggest hump of an accordion player & hardly says anything throughout the movie, but he doesn't need to. He plays his part of the froghuman perfectly without even trying.

The only other movies I can think of that compare are Sideways (Paul Giamatti = best actor of our time), and maybe Napoleon Dynamite, which it's similar to at least from a directorial standpoint.