# 209: 9/29/17

don't worry
my president
have no fear
I was writing yesterday
I was writing about

Flowers
Under
Clear blue skies
Kissed by bees
Yielding nectar all
Openly
Under the clear. blue. sky.

#208: another

it is hard to remember your song

but a momentary awkwardness need not wig you out

it will be miserable
you will want to die
but guess what:
this has been your training all along

wanting to, and not, has made you strong

in fact you would be surprised
how debilitated Pluto is
how circumscribed
in his luxury

he has never been to your school
and would be seriously dismayed
by a single day
in a head like yours

#207: Orpheus

with all the ambient noise of the kingdom
in that shifting red darkness and heat
and nonsense arguments
from damaged personalities
and (despite the palpable arrogance that reigns)
 no one in charge
and all the residue of floods
in states of overwhelming putrefaction
and all the insults aimed at your head
and crude plans being perpetually voiced
by the sinecure employees of this place

it is hard to remember your song

#206: my new truck

my new truck is smoking from someplace
deep in its center
and burning something within itself
with a smoke that smells like crack

but the sparkles

it is the sparkles
that will bring me back

#205: cuts

the scissor dragon, not unlike Wright's Swallow
will jackknife and swan dive
then again his bladed wings
shall dip and pivot him
cutting and then splicing
the viral minutes
fashioning the time
the light
the air itself
into something
really
horrible

 over the chained bay waters
liberty


and you will have realized too late, and with infinite sorrow,
that today, the day you were cut, is tomorrow

#204: Lumie di Sicilia

the octopus salami I had
at Lumie di Sicilia, Roma,
looked like a slice of brain
not a healthy brain
but  that of a murderer
or mutant

it was delicious
but at the same time it was no basis
for a system of government
nor was it a viable
conductor
of the slightest intellectual spark

but here we are


that's Lumie di Sicilia
the Gianicolo
Roma

#203: Kim is definitely winning the poetry contest

“I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard with fire,” Kim said of Trump, who is 71 years old. “Action is the best option in treating the dotard who, hard of hearing, is uttering only what he wanted to say.”

wake up man
Kim Jong Un
is obliterating your ass in the field

his verbal command rolls
like an amazing apparatus
all over your face

you got nothing
can you manage some improvement?
the poetry of Kim is flourishing
creating massive poetic events
that cause the utmost damned astonishment

i know you have a lot on your hot-plate
in terms of shit-enchiladas
you must eat

but it is time to wake up

for this much is obvious to all:
in the poetry competition of the known damn universe
we are getting
vaporized

#202: It is time

all right mad old king
bring your sleazy daughters to me
teach me their illiterate names
and tell me to whom
you have in mind to marry them
and what you think
is going to be left
after that

explain to me again
because I must have dreamed them
your mesh-and-lace notions
of this fidelity
and how it will hold these-all rats
somewhat in check

ok go

you now have my undivided attention

#201: Haud Perfectus

the well-wrought urn
eludes again
sculptor ignotus
who chucks it on the pile

meanwhile, scriptor ignotus
walks by
and picks it up
and writes a poem about it

that spontaneously disrupts
all marriage customs
destroying future genealogies
plunging history
into darkness

right: too much.
perfection again
eludes us.

mess.

back to work.

#200: HOW TO LIVE

eat

a rat

#199: Holocaust centers

but your head is the holocaust center
your mouth is the holocaust center

your eyes are blisters of film
your ears are the drains
in concrete floors
and those
are ashes falling from your nose

until I don't know which comes first:
your smile
or the ovens

but surely the question is academic:
tissue, ash, adipocere
    all of it
        drains into the center

        which is, in turn,
full of cracks
  and fissures

#198: Hazard

your brain

is like a christmas tree

with way too many lights

Poem 197: Cassini enters Nirvana

that loose part of us which is a weightless chunk
of metal,
sublime cylindrical trunk
with one arm locked out straight into the gulf
    of its own total sensorium
speeding
along that course that hath so wide a turn
and coasting the walls of Titan
and Enceladus
bearing its little light
     just crashed into Saturnus
                         and it was good

Poem 196: Neti atman

a wise person when having some murderous thought
will say: neti atman

when one has a hateful urge

she says: neti atman

when one swells with anger

or craves destructive delights

he says: neti atman

'that's not me'

*

not that I'm so wise
but I mutter it constantly

I even had this troubling thought:
will the atman ever arise?

in your case, I sure the fuck hope not


neti atman

Poem 195: Ahimsa

the principle of no-harm
is hard to observe
though it may sound easy

there are infinite ways
to do this harm
and google ways to forget

even vampires can work passively
and spread their contagion
dragging the innocent with them
through a valley of bones

and you can not-mean-any-harm somebody
right into their grave
I have learned

vague, barely motivated gestures
can sear the mind
or convulse the heart
of an acqaintance, friend
or lover whomsoever

don't kid yourself:
you are a walking field of himsa
and you don't know how to stop

Poem 194: Don't Think about Nothing

"We Came to Destroy"
Heather Leather
---------------------------------------
Destroy! You better lock your doors tonight, Don't think about nothing,
Don't try to pull out something for me, Or I'll blow you away, yeah,
Destroy...We
came to destroy, we will blow you away, we are hotter than hell, under a
spell, Destroy...Don't you know how it feels, when you're too young to be
dead or alive, don't burn me, don't let me down, Destroy... We came to
destroy

Heather Leather
descends on me
in my dreams
Sylvia Ruth and Sandie

first they play their murder song
and threaten to blow me away

which scares the shit out of me

but it also makes me laugh

but once they hear me laugh
it's all over:
the sisters seem to multiply
and I know I deserve to die
and just when they are about to try
to pull out something
for me
I see God
writhing in hell
--then sleep paralysis sets in
and I wake up screaming
like an infant left out to die
on a frozen mountainside
in Helotes

Poem 193: Maestro

I heard someone say of the Maestro
that he was 'absurdly grandiose'

grandiose perhaps
   excitable certainly
a trait one has noticed
in the Latin American intelligensia
generally

but who knows
he could just be on drugs, and if so
more power to him:
at his time of life what's he got
to be prudent about?

But 'absurdly' must redound
   on the critic's own head
his own pristinely
super-cooled
fucking head

Poem 192: Signs

--crying and holding head

--patient yells when turned

--refusal of meds

--patient lying on floor

--dark yellow or red urine

--sobbing at bedtime

--grinning / salivating 

--inappropriate performances

Poem 191: liar

Heriger, bishop civitatis Mainz,
once met a prophet who had been carried
bodily to hell, so the prophet said

among the many things he reported
he mentioned that hell was all surrounded
by a thick forest, very dense

Heriger laughed. I shall, he answered,
send my swineherd there with some extremely
skinny pigs.

Then the liar said: I was taken up
up to heaven too. I saw Christ up there
happily seated and feeding his face.
And John the Baptist, he was cupbearer
circulating  wine (which was top shelf)
in fancy goblets to all the saints
...

Heriger said: Wow. But come, tell me how
God in heaven chose to honor you? Where
were you seated? What did you eat?

The prophet answered: Me? O I just sat
off in a corner chewing a piece of lung
which I stole from one of the cooks.

Heriger had him bound, tied to a post
and thrashed with broomsticks
whilst he spoke to him harshly
addressing the liar in the following terms:

Should Christ hereafter
invite you to eat
at his high table,
do not then repay
his kindness with such
avoidance and thievery.



(from 'Heriger, Urbis Maguntiensis' 10th c.)

Poem 190: King Arthur's Goat Magick

bouc passant d'or 
mounted with tripping king

Cath Palug rampant meets Rex Arturus
on the path to hell
in the top of a tree
on the cathedral floor
at Otranto

Arthur himself may well be
on psychedelic drugs
at least he's just after watching Abel
feeding a cat to a jellyfish

but Arthur's head is right where it needs to be
he is seeing what he is meant to see
let him ride it out
when he gets to hell
he'll know what to do

meantime the goat he rides
is walking the razor's edge
to hell he knows the path
it is a derke road and a salvage

some critics have called Arthur's mount
'a hoofed quadruped (possibly a horse)'
or else 'a donkey or an ass'

but you don't have to guess, there is no doubt

      what Arthur rides to hell

in the top of a tree

on the Cathedral floor of Otranto:

it is an Ur-goat out of space and time

 for hym liste ride so

Poem 190: fire

you look just like, e.g., that gibbous freak

the super-saturated orange hue

of a cajun boy

disfigured by too-hot gumbo

 his brane is a
rancid roux

now

it’s running all over the scene

inflaming my impaludism

so bad 
I want to punch a plasma screen

the world is on fire
flooding the empty spaces
 leaping rivers

& look at this burnt-marshmallow poem

look what you made me do

Poem 189: wire

'down to the wire'
and the wire is
twitching

clearly it is a trap
no sentient creature on earth
would touch a wire like that

save me
and my demented cat

note: both of us are ANTIFA as fuck

if you come for our asses
let me caution you
we will be along that wire
like it was WICHITA
and we were working for the county

Poem 188: MORDRED IS CHOSEN KING

No one saw that coming.
The miscreant meant through forgery
and bad calligraphy
to bend reality
to say that Arthur was dead

then moved forward incestuous designs
for getting Guinevere into bed
and he said plainly he would wed her
which was his uncle's wife
and his father's wife

she got out fast,
took the Tower of London
 and, according to my author, suddenly
in an all haste possible
she stuffed it with all manner of victual

Mordred did not see that coming
thereafter he was passing wroth out of measure
and well nigh wood and so offered
to decapitate
the Archbishop of Caunterbury

So the bishop in his turn cursed Mordred
IN THE MOST ORGULUST WISE
THAT MIGHT BE DONE
a curse too horrible to be written down
a curse too horrible for words

and got out fast

but, at the last, Mordred had convinced a 'goodly parte off the peple'
that with him always was great joy and bliss
everybody just ate it up

See ye not what a mischief here was?

Quid plura? He was king.


but the ORGULUSTE CURSE
is in effect:
he will get no good from that

a curse too horrible to be written down
a curse too horrible for words

Poem 187: my head

my head itches.
there are rats in the walls
rustling. i hear crickets
coyote calls.

the big white dog is on his rounds
he will seek the causes of these sounds

but the head remains
my own
infernal debacle

Poem 186: Anecdote of uncreated hells

'...a teen reunited with her birth mother
...who then killed her and burned her body
...according to police'

all is for us
to learn this: all poems are about the Dharma

all poems
are about
the mother
fucking
Dharma

a vital lesson
but one is still in hell

HOWEVER: there is some good news about hell



which I will tell you later

Poem 185: mistakes

no-one makes mistakes
in hell

hell must be totally zen

poems written there daily
are all
completely correct

Poem 184: Chemical Futures

i can get used to a chemical future
there will be a science fiction glamour
it could develop into something really noir
really noir
not some dopey fiction anymore

our bodies warm with toxins and smoke
our wit sharpened by seeing
fellow citizens
declining into pools of rancid adipocere
on a regular basis

warm nights atop bank buildings
watching the horizon's burning jelly
glad of our
sub-par cigarettes
and disreputable booze

i wasn't using those national parks anyway
let the ice-caps flow
fuck it (I can already hear you say)
let's slither into that
very next tide