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by Donna Taylor Burgess
In a world closed to violators
They made their home in the iced pond
Of a December city park
Secrets held fast for a long season of white sleep
The Ice Nymphs worshipped the bloated
Form of a man
Mugged and beaten and robbed and rolled
Into shallow waters, forgotten until thaw
A god grotesque, eyes black like the ice-sky above
Like the leaf-rot below.
The Ice Nymphs hid inside his mouth sometimes
And they felt secure.
Reveling in bleakness, the darkness was safe
They danced and swirled like clipped-winged angels
Bodies thin and fluid as ribbons of flesh
Rather than muscle and bone
They wore feral faces like pixies gone awry
Pale as death's sidekick
Their pointed hands loved the cold touch.
But precious inkiness gave way to sunshine death eventually
And the skies of the ice kingdom began to
Melt, melt, and fall.
The god grotesque ascended toward the light
No longer bound by ice
He forsook them all.
The Ice Nymphs cried tears that ran
Down faces newly colored by agonizing heat
Pain within and without
The bleakness in which they thrived churned slowly
Bleeding in sick, revealing light
Vomit greens
Shit yellows
Pinks like open sores on a child's feet
With screams silent yet piercing
The Ice Nymphs surfaced against their will
And melted like the rest of their murky kingdom.
There was barely warning
enough to jump.
Opportunistically,
the mice in the walls,
as slanderous as old cracks,
stole the drug salesmen's pen.
They are at this very moment
forming lines,
having deciphered directions
to his flawless lawns.
by Colin James
by Vicky Pfromm
February 8, 1999. Another dream about trains. Seperated from my family, I go to the train station where thousands are paying to disappear somewhere else. The trains come and go, night and day in this place. This advanced train system, flies on wheels. Inside it is completely packed with people. Last night we all raced to the train, to see who would get there first. Always came in second. I met a monster that could spread underneath the ground and kill by going through cracks. We were face to face while everyone fled and started running away. We talked with our minds. He ran away from the temple, which was his base. I started to run like hell, terrified and screaming like the rest. I ran alone that night, everyone else was gone. Lover had warned me and fled that morning, and somehow my communicating with the thing allowed him to control me. How?
by Vicky Pfromm
Intense violence
Rushing through the veins
of the miserable
frustration abounds
through love this feeling aroused
put in this position
wanting your nearness
craving the stillness
and peace I find
in the presence of a lover
In youngness I couldn't have
what is found will never regret
but still remains the pain
my IV, an emotion
running far from here
I enter a new world
Demons are unfurled
Helpless to escape this
Stunning transformation
Once I enter the door
That is when I disappear
Soul a ghost adrift
Losing losing time
The blanket descends
Covers a caving mind
Gratitude in your pockets
Where is mine
This is where it overflows
Mortal sin turned immortal
Burn you will alone
Changing it around
This, a fallacy
Come after her again
Just to remind me
All that the powers that ever be
In the possession of false aristocracy
Gratitude, snatch it
Put in your bottomless pit
The curses spewed
Across my face
fuck god fuck fuck
Utter blasphemy
End it now, this is a disgrace
Heaven help me lest I relapse
Bear my teeth and then collapse
And...
crown and coke....crown and coke....seeing
double, my crown and coke.
spent my dollars on a bottle of crown
bought some coke,
dressed like a clown.
love me, sweetheart
my sweety sweet drinkypoo
how'd all these people get in my room?STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP
you made me wet myself again
why do you mock me,
my sweet, royal friend?
stop the dancing robots STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP
STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP
STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP
humanity must be destroyed
stop discussing business at dinner
barney rubble never laughs at my jokes
dont hurt my iguana
I'm going to the City of Shadows
where the madmen go to dwell
In the City of Shadows
there is no Heaven
and they never heard of Hell
I'm going to the City of Shadows
with all the secrets that I keep
And I'll lay to rest
on the Twilight's breast
where the shadows go to sleep
I'm going to the City of Shadows
which is called New Dunsany
where I won't have to run
away from the sun
because there I will be free.
I don't believe in organized religion
but I carry a rosary
I carry a pocket knife, too
Just like I keep a
sawed-off cue stick by my bed
and all the thresholds
in my house are consecrated
I dream of
Snakes & Blackbirds
and the Black Jaguar
trying to lead me
under the sea
and of cities the
sea has taken
and citadels on
snowy mountaintops
so high in the clouds
you can't see the top
from the bottom.
I dream of the Winter Man
and the long winter
that will come with him
and the horrible things
he'll do to the children
when he comes
I dream of the Warpriest
on cobblestone streets
and a ship on the horizon
whose name means nothing
and I wonder if that ship will ever come.
My life is a mound
of piled up papers
Mostly trash,
detritus of dead ideas
And ideal debris
Molted exo-carapace of
outgrown inspirado
like Alexandrian texts
translated into Esperanto
modernized esoteric
for a world that never
bothered to learn
the language they
all agreed to speak
like bibles translated
from Greek to English
when the Greeks never
understood Hebrew
in the first place
And I'm disturbingly
comfortable with that
gathering around me
my nest of tattered text
this decoupage collage
of fortune cookies and
newspaper clippings
strung together to make
a story of their own
Lunatic Mythology
of stolen song lyrics
and comedian quotes
alchemical arcana
scribbled on post-it notes
and stuck on the
bulletin board next to
a doodle of a cartoon turtle
I feel safe as houses
A piglet in a house of straw
A child with a cardboard sword
And a fort made of pillows
The covers pulled
over my head
To ward away boogeymen
under my bed
And even the ones in the closet
Because what remains unseen
was never real to start with
I am, after all,
an agent of chaos
unwitting at first
then unwilling
but settled into it now
and reconciled my place
and I'm rebuilding the world
out of paper scraps
like a pop-up book blueprint
of the way I want it to be
but the blueprint is exact
to scale so I'm building my
new world right over the old one
slapping a construction paper
veneer over the real to give it
a cartoon finish
making the world a
parody of itself
if only for a minute
before a strong wind
or a harsh rain or
the real realness of
the wrathful reality
rips it all away again
as it does with all
poorly executed ideas
because any idea not
executed properly
in purpose will be
executed expertly
by the state
as a simple matter of mercy killing.
Sean Gilbert
Pieces
Patches
Stiches
Mad tatters of once flesh
now quilted together
in a coat of leather
draped over a
sickening automaton
droning on and on
Morbid mangled mosaic of people parts
A person without a personality
A puppet made of people
Stumbling rot golem
with vague rememberings
of humanity
But you only remember
to be human
You don't remember how
to be human
Why did we make you,
you ask? We ask that, too.
We ask why we were made
and feel certain there
was no reason for it.
Therefore we must create
for no reason if we are
to be God-like
Maybe it's just a matter
of recycling
We made you
to make use
of all the flesh
left over from
when we made
ourselves into plastic.
That would make you even
more important
Maybe we made you to
remind us of what we were.
Sad stumbling mockery
of mankind piece for piece
and pound for pound
more human
than we've become.
So you, our perverse progeny
The lifeless dichotomy
that represents
our other half
our primitive past
You're here to show us how far
we've truly come.
Sean Gilbert
Everywhere I go, everywhere I am,
I look over my shoulder
And see them following…
I. Vignettes
1.
Milford came in late that night
Still wearing my favorite hat
He had live rounds in his pocket
Waving Satan's Shiny in my face
He scared off the Whiney Limey
and she ran on back to her place
I'm not saying that makes it right
But it was worth it just for that
Milford came in late one night
Crashing through the door
Shouting "If every bottle's a soldier
then I must be the War."
I didn't have the heart
to disagree with him anymore
But I couldn't help but wonder
What they all were fighting for.
2.
We used to go to the
Sports Fan for all you can eat
wings and all you can drink
beer on Sundays
They had a cage where
you could shoot hoops
This was before they shut it down
and it became a teenybopper dance club
I got so ripped I knew everything
and started telling people what
their problems were
The girl was a friend of a friend
Not my friend at all
But I decided she
needed guidance
I ditched my ride to follow her
until she finally ditched me
Some people just can't be helped
When they found me again
I was singing on River Street
and pissing in the river
Which you can get away with
Except on St. Patrick's Day
3.
We were at a pool hall
when Milford turned thirty
I still go there
but it has a
different name
He was no drunker than usual
But that's not saying much
He started shouting
"I understand the plight of the black man!
The Irish are the niggers of the United Kingdom!"
And the two black guys
he was talking to
were trying to
calm him down
and shut him up
Before he got his ass kicked
Then Bowler got pissed
Because no one cared about
what he did
He kept saying "I bowl!"
Like it was some kind of mantra
And it endeared him to me
That imbecile
In how pathetic he was
And made him part of our pantheon
The bottles won that battle
But maybe Joe will win the war…
Somewhere in the night,
Lost in the dark,
I see nothing ahead,
But in my wake I can still see
Flaming footsteps
Catching up with me…
II. One last gasp before madness
A writer is someone so outraged at life's inability to present him with a proper adversary that he creates one in himself…
I look back at my life
and realize that
I've accomplished most
of the things
I wanted to do
But I don't feel accomplished
I don't feel like I've done anything
This poem isn't a poem
unless you read it
A book isn't real
unless it's read
By reading it
you make it real
So is it not real yet?
Is that why I feel so
empty about it?
It doesn't matter unless
someone notices?
Does that mean I'm just
crying out for help?
Or have I just set the
bar too low?
And once the poem is read
Once it's real
Does this feeling
go away?
And what happens if
in becoming real
It negates
its own purpose?
Maybe I didn't
want enough
Didn't challenge
myself enough
So it's not enough
now that it's done
I just need to get laid I think…
A shock value rebuttal to Ani DeFranco:
Amphitheater. ANI and GILBERTO stand on the stage, facing each other. All seats are empty.
ANI: My cunt is built like a wound that
won't heal.
GILBERTO: (flicking his stoagie; mugs to camera)
Well, I wish I were the hammer that delivered the blow.
Rim Shot. Cue laugh track. Scene.
Is that rude? Or just wrong?
Or just plain degenerate?
Or worse?
At some point I started
saying things out loud
that I used to be ashamed
to think
but believe me, Ani, I do know how you feel…
Slipping, I think
No wait…
It's not slipping when you
Work this hard at it
It's not slipping when
You're already on the ground
When you're already on your ass
It's digging
I've been
digging
Digging
through
the topsoil
To the ruddy clay
Digging past the clay
Into the stone beneath
Through the heated magma
Through the earth
To the sea beneath
the world
And then sinking
Down deep into
the dark places
Past sleep
and death
and thinking
Past the Night Town
Past the Night People
Past the Death Factory
To the place where
the dark thoughts
Come from
And so I sink…
And so he sank
We shoved him down
Deep into a grave
we made him dig
But not six feet
This grave went
on forever
And graver still was
the way in which
we turned
on him
He was our voice
But we wanted
to speak for
ourselves again
The vision got tired
Of seeing everything
But never being heard
And the vagabond
Was getting scared
He'd never see
the vindicator
And then it
was just me
And the big V
And we didn't
Really care anyway
So
we
came
at him
All at once
Like a shadow
Turning on its master
And when he pulled the knife
Out of his back he had blood on
His hands and when he turned to see
The face of his attacker he could see only
A mirror looking back at himself and smiling
So is that
et tu Brute'
Or et tuteme'
Or would ego ipse
Be a better way to say it?
Well, either way I couldn't say
My Latin is for shit
So we gave him rest
A vacation of ego
Of persona
We gave
To him
Torpor
We let
Him sleep
And we
Were
Our
Own
Voice
Again
And I see him in the mirror
And I hear him speaking
When I talk to people
But no one thinks I'm him
They shake my hand
And call me Victor
Like it was my name
But they don't get it
They don't know me
They don't know
That Victor is
What I am
Victor means
"the one who wins"
nothing ahead, nothing behind
but from what I can divine
the flaming footsteps following me
are mine…
III. requisite requiem
I've loved my devil women
Been bedeviled by evil women
And woven in web-entangled
Tentacles of my own design
I've devised my own demise
Been demonized and criticized
And acted like the world was ending
When there was nothing on the line.
Of late I bait my own hook
Got bored and bit it
And reeled myself in with it
Just so I wouldn't go home
Empty handed one more time
I served the id and anima
The hybrid anidima
The unfathomable anathema
of the
antagonistic opposite
I spent too much time
Spanned too many lifetimes
I spent too many lives
Suckling the spent teat
Sucking the spoiled tit
Suffering the stink and rot of it
And tell me why again
Because it was
Soft like spun sugar?
Scented in Jasmine
and cinnamon?
To mask the sin of men?
Just to bask in sin again?
Is that how it's always been?
But not this time
This sucker's grown teeth
A sharp mandible beneath
the flaccid sycophantic flaps
of wet flesh
That once wept over spilt milk
and lapped at the linoleum
to lick it up
That once longed for
The sick and frantic flaps
of wet flesh
in your lap.
To lick it up
and lap it up
Only to find that
It had teeth too
No more of
This remora schtick
This bottom-feeding
This Plecostomy
This colostomy is becoming
A calamity
In enmity
I've intermittently
been smitten with
the thing that's
bitten me
but
This sucker's moving
up in rank
I've rancor in me now
And vigor to meet
the rigor
of penetrating them
Piercing the rotted breast
Bleeding the blackened pulp
underneath the detritus canopy
of her indiscernible sternum
Of exacting my revenge
While extracting
The exact thing I need
To take the black tar you bleed
And fill the cartridge of my pen.
And the succulent succubi
Succumb to come
to the succor
of this sucker
Just this once
And I've an
India Incubus
Waiting in an
inkwell incubator
For words to make
him real again
Taurus Animus
A bottled-up Brahma
Under a black cap
A black licorice Icharus
Longing for literary belonging
To be borne on quill feathers
And born on parched parchment
Just waiting to watch him fly again
To let him get so high again
And knock him from the sky again
Just to drink him dry again
So if the page is a desert
And the words are my seed
Looking for purchase
Looking past the malaise
To some Oasis in the distance
Is this just ejaculation?
Just an exhalation of elation?
Is it procreation?
Or masturbation?
And is there even a difference?
Sean Gilbert
I'm the first to admit it:
I'm a self-made cynic
A lot of people don't get it
but I think I'll stick with it
I'd take back the things I said
but I'll just press on instead
and set all my sights ahead
and forget the life I've fled
because I know I'll see the day
when you come to see my way
and then I'll come back home to stay
with those words you wished I'd say
You wanted me to tilt at windmills
and I swear I've fought my share
and I swore I'd fight
with all my might
but those windmills are still there
You shipped me out of paradise
but I'll the shake the halls of Heaven
to tip this pair of loaded dice
and turn snake eyes into seven
I never will forget it
I never was forgiven
you never were so giving
as the curse I got for leaving
I said you were unjust
you said you couldn't trust
so let's do what we must
to watch us fade to dust
I told you I must go
You said it must be so
So much we didn't know
so far away, so long ago
I rode off and bore your banner
when I pledged my self-reliance
I wore your standard
to claim the manner
in which I fought my giants
You thought I left to live my story
and you claimed I was to blame
but horrors wept to give you glory
for I slew them in your name.
Harsh words I spoke about you
but never did I doubt you
my heart my soul all cast out too
to find myself without you
you felt the fire burn
and said with grave concern
too late my love you'll learn
the price of your return
there is a vast iniquity
between reason and antiquity
for lost love's boon you'll give to me
on the altar of your dignity
I sailed a vast and crimson sky
beyond the last sunset
the price, alas, is still too high
for me to pay it yet.
I'll meet the dawn tomorrow
in silent's soft surround
but you'll sleep alone in sorrow
until the day I come around
Sean Gilbert
And the film ends with a group of zombies loaded on a catamaran, setting sail
from their tiny island toward the mainland…
And I wonder where they're headed, really
how they managed even some dim recollection
of how to navigate a sailboat
why they even need a boat at all
when they could slowly dredge the ocean floor
until they overcame the undertow and came
out onto the beach again
But maybe that wasn't the point at all.
Maybe it was the sunset they were trying to reach
like anybody on a catamaran
Maybe they wanted to feel alive again, just like
anybody else that sets to sea
with no clear destination
Maybe they were looking for the borders again
for the boundaries we all need to see to know
whether we're alive or dead
because they've clearly lost sight of them
or they wouldn't be walking around
like catfish at the bottom of a dam
growing to leviathan proportions
because no one ever told them
just how big they're supposed to be
A goldfish in a bowl knows its place
In a pond it can be bigger
But where can you put it
that it will know
without walls
that it's just
a goldfish?
Just a
fish?
Just
how
small it's
supposed to be?
I read in a review that
George Romero is the
last person who still
thinks zombies are a
metaphor for anything.
I don't think that's his fault, though.
I just think that in today's world
we've become too much like them
to draw a relevant contrast
We hypnotize ourselves with
entertainment opiates
and anesthetize ourselves with
chemical relaxants
and we satisfy ourselves with
empty false inducements
until we're just cardboard cutouts
of ourselves anyway
We've seen in
two dimensions
for so long that
anything else
is a pleasant fiction
a novel diversion
like everything else
we use to distract ourselves
from this existence.
So when our time is come
and gone will we still long
for something more
and claw our way out
of our earthly rest
To walk the earth
once more and
chase after
one last sunset?
Will we take
one last boat ride
and set west against
an unwilling sea to chase
after nature unnaturally?
And what will we
be hoping for?
What will we be
setting our sails
to achieve?
*
lighthouse (Tybee Island meditation)
I.
Buy a little lighthouse; set it by the sea.
A ship will come with a lighthouse built upon it.
You retire under the weight of a strobing light. Eras end
II.
In dust and microfiche.
"I knew the vast expanse!"
Said the arm-hair (no one knows
What goes on down here)
Under dust and microscopes.
This is the constituency, and a young upstart steals
A pack of cigarettes and dies a day later after a freak accident
In a forest and only the ants carry his heart piece by piecemeal
To a hovel in the crankshaft of a junked Plymouth
With an empty pack of Winstons on the floorboard full of larvae
Enough. Chop down wisdom and raise up youth
With an array of blurbs, spiels, slangs, and sales pitches
The renaissance period of mockumentaries
And the carnies are as best as they have ever been dressed
While holograms of mushroom clouds get sold
On keychains in gas-stations, bargain-bins have their souls
Imprisoned with no idea how to use the effluvium
Of all of our doldrums, ad campaigns, disclaimers, etc
we let the phrases splinter up into the heavens.
The puns ulceric upon our lips in boredom
And all this verbiage peters out
Around the second or third Plenitude anyway
We've invented sweet-iced-tea;
We've invented harmful leisure.
As the procreative urge leans on its rake
We try to outlive its heydays too hard;
We overachieve our own skeletons, but
Meeting god halfway is meeting god anyway.
III.
Time-displacement jacks us up; drugs help us lose time.
Grey zones inspire speed as laymen invent
Time-machines adequate for meridians of ego, pharmaceuticals.
Honor is what we named the new Gondwanaland.
I took poisons to remain poised on the savage edge of my own lies.
These ever-rising platforms of molecularities and peculiarities
Strip-malls of cell-structure upon strip-malls of cell-structure
And we are here to birth consumers
That create nothing but paper-dolls of themselves
That become more and more rigored.
IV.
We are here to write and sing
About how we should have never known
Language in the first place.
V.
The lighthouse reaches the shore
as a soft light sews your lips shut in reverence
*
waiting for 14-Abercorn to Southside Savannah
it's nothing interesting at all, an old bike
tied to an oak in front of the methadone clinic
as a fat tie-dye boards the north transit, I wait
for the southern. a radio tower looms above
all of us, and the recurrent image, and the re-
currency of bad pop-songs, all filled with melodies
plucking lullabies from our childhood memories, and the caravan
of ants by more sore feet, these recurrent images in my poems
providing theme, in other words, "I was and must be."
theme, delineation. a guy tries to bum a smoke. I tell him I never started
it. he calls me a liar. he leaves, meanders
back, boards bus behind me. I'm nervous, hair on back of neck.
well, I was called a liar and a loser only days ago in a stupor
in a drunken wrestling match with God-Language the Leviathan
and he kicked my ass that night, but I got a piece of him,
some meat like a part of a stray cat's brain in a stray dog's teeth.
this paltry parcel was the image at the bus-stop, cheap, I know.
still, longing to be famous never helped anyone's ego, and me? well, let's
just say that I'm infamous among half-friends half-words, half-miles and half
Saturday-afternoon drives away. I can take the bus to the ocean here, on the
East Coast. Tybee Island at low tide with hard sand like snowdrifts. waiting
for the 14Abercorn transit with a notebook.
I bake frozen bread all night for a living, bread from a commissary and bread
from the kneader, and so much depends upon the sourdough besides a white row
of government buildings. young art-college girls come to work and look at
me like a grey ghost; I'm always in overalls thinking of their older sisters,
and where they could be. and the drangstrum
of life, the slow tidal rhythm doesn't stop the tax-collector with Band-aided
papercuts from taxing the workers in Band-Aid factories. such as we go. waiting
for the transit.
we have all always been in the making, and on the make
and take, whether we are purse or persecuted,
still, there's nothing to see here.
a bike chained to an oak tree at a bus stop.
if only I could steal it off and ride it to work,
or to Tybee Island, feel the wind again
coming from my own legs thriving
like unpaid bills with skies
always too much alike, striated
yet thriving with radio waves and the songs of ants
*
The story as I've untold it, as so, infinitives
shackled, so. And likewise, it falters, slows
like glass does as a liquid, and these gates
to the cemetery, rusted together, a cemetery by a river
as squirrels dart around moss and lichen-stones.
names that could be afforded, the rest even more cryptically
etched . this city, a Gothic arabesque, Savannah, Georgia.
The pirates and debtors who founded this place
their names fossil in the ledgers, the archives
caught in Spanish moss. I've landed here
like the rest of the mosquitoes, a hymenopteron
of words, to sit here, on this bench, the grave
of Conrad Aiken. the Cosmos is veritable
worldview for all when sitting upon the headstone
of a poet. here, my southern juxtajunta, under oaks
and cypress, but,
enough of this rustic
*
I was wheezing across this wasteland, America
perpetual motion, a walking enneagram, America
brought too many wares, too many vendors visited, America
arrows, plastics, postcards, and feathers, America
we desire to lose so much and we just can't, America
we just can't lose, it's hysterically America
how prosperous we are, holy grails in the hatchbacks, America
everywhere the smell of polyurethane and fast-food
the fake leather of roadtrips, America
we all long to raise children who will finance
a critically-acclaimed cinema, i.e.:
they were lovers/members of Mensa on heroin/lesbians
broke the hero's wallet/car and heart (Winona Ryder the lead part)
Cinemamerica
*
evil, in its morundity, its morbid blood simply
the curse that courses us. a loose tooth. a promise.
a notion towards a knife. how close we walk serrated edges.
and the corpses never rot, they simply guild sunwise as
offerings under wonderfully stenciled parchments
bits of beehive bark upon silken swaths
bodies laid into their elements, discarded parachute fragments
from the definitive battle. scorched.
I broke my legs in the first rite of passage
fall. the dust settled, an epic came by
to remind me to crawl. a lyric came by,
said, "you will exemplify a great cause"
(that old Shakespearean rag again?)
I curse them both, epic and lyric. I'll lie here
in the crater I made when I fell to this Earth.
*
sacred.
there is a hummingbird and a church.
there is a guitar with three nylon strings left.
not enough for any choral piece.
green vines wrap rotten rafters.
there is a fountain that is dry it is the story.
there is a courtyard where we once had beers, once had coffee.
you wait for the horse-drawn cart to become
antique enough to auction it.
it is as rusted as cemetery gates together.
an Italian sportscar delivers the mail, all the sweepstakes
you've already won. the chain-link fence holds you here;
good fences make nosey neighbors. you were once a magnetar
skirting, zigzagging through the heavens
like an amphetamine zipper
holding back some luscious truth. bravado for its own sake
is wind, whatnots, and wiseacreage. is this golden age revisited
only colossal among the withering goldenrod's? send millions
of postcards each with a dollar bill attached to them. Antiquity
is not your family museum;
your musing lies in the cans and the heaps
of crow-ridden compost. you are too frail
to ride your own horse.
cap the flask. meander back to the porch.
this epoch makes your nerves ant-like
*
and so it always is, the high-heaven stench
the dogs lapping at the skirts and outskirts of it
you with crude instruments,
as if the stars had not already aligned themselves
you have to prove it to some ill-mannered conventionists
the sensuality of knowing every mote, its recompense
of ions that you can iconify, edify, "if-icate"
and we have all managed to fuck a dust-mote
or circle-jerk the last of respect out of a blood-brother
we have murdered the last of the silences from the Earth
the ocean floor moans with more thermal wombs,
megaplumes' moans
with the symbiosis sickness, I say no more suicides of lyric
no more death-defying leaps into syntax, I am triple-X
fully adorned, no matter what I wear,
I am a man walking out of an icestorm
with a torch, and I reek of it, a flesh-zealot,
what have I ever transformed? the Word?
No. the word made of me
a thief, a bulimic, a whore, a cannibal, a god, a worm.
or a process, or a procession of them.
It writhes through us.
A tiara of chakras is thrown into a void, cheap and disposed-of.
Don't choke on the knowledge, chewing on a Hanged-Man's rope.
The tongue is a crippled trapeze artist. Give up don't stop.
My symbology like a fingerprint (unique yet easily documented in ink).
Decoded. Decode it. I'll have a defense for stealing that particular fire.
Learn disappearance into the grotesque.
Ugly enough you are left to Be.
Learn the toad-stance. Learn
fat belly and wrinkle, Shar Pei
and sloth. Koala. Slow down,
study entropy for empathy's sake.
Enough this time, no, I mean it, really.
I once had a lamp in the likeness of the Buddha.
The thing never worked. The pawnshop of the mind.
White-trash baroque America, learning the New Age.
the Buddha does not work as a lamp
(a new koan)
*
Messages in bottles (bone marrow)
secret chain-link fence of language
secret junkyard dog of vocabulary
missing parts to the engine of the cosmogony
lies in this scrapyard of broken homes and poems
get the thing/machine/word running, avoid the rabid
dogs, hit the downtown Chicago of the mind running
*
the carney-barkers roll up the tents. the satellites
photograph it at a safe distance made even safer
by an internet of telescopic excuses to preen and pry
open eye into umbra. hysterical evil always wins.
hysterical evil of summer, of all of our successes, from
navigation to fiber optics. Hart Crane! I found the shirt
you threw from the bridge! It was no suicide after all;
you were just testing the poem. Delineations. Goggles.
How did this world become so crepuscular?
Kill the third-eye krap.
I can't de-program this viral fear of viruses. Span it all away.
Take the Dossier to a remote place; my own file and rank
is destroying me. Schizophrenic century, I salute me.
My mirror writhes under this torture.
The anthropomorphic mirror.
I was the one throwing the party (hiring the carnies, the circus)
the ebullient kegs frothing upon the burning bridges
a hangover is the only gap, it is
Heideggerian, you've lived through it again,
my host
migraine of Dasein is Dasein
*
this discourse:
TV dial, sundial.
Laptop, lexicon.
Space shuttle, caravan.
Data-Bedouin, Cerebellum-Bedouin.
The lepidoptery of synapses.
The electric eels of verbs.
The weather-vanes of nouns.
The cannons of proportions mis-firing their flare-guns.
Such manifestations, such galleys and galleries.
Arcana, the true name of our country.
I drank Mallarme's last bottle; didn't you drink it with me?
It is time to reawaken the miscreant gods! Gods on Prozac! Awaken! For
your children have charted the oceans for you
using nothing less than the selfsame stars
and configurations that you hide behind.
Time to let the laurels rain. Reward the spoiled
with love, lest we truly outdo ourselves
once and for all,
without you
by collecting the spoils
of this hollow tetragrammaton
of a planet
*
ebb or wax never tell the story never implore for the horse was impaled along
with its master for war-crimes navigate don't narrow the template for it is
all that we have the negatives of the lips of it the negatives foment in our
new Logos the dark room embryonic of syllables a tongue-forest a stalker there
with the scythe designed to rape its image into our own visage don't Smithsonionize
it this crude mutant
was there all along.
the jawbone icon
held up to
lightning-storm
*
the harness we've built for the stars is
Paranoia
the stars have built radiation for us
anthropic, anthrogenesis, anthroNietszche
if only Grace were a widespread
plague
Well, that's it. I'll molest the forests, figuratively for once
with an orgy of buxom phrases, a basket of swerving words.
What I bring to you on the cemetery grass is a picnic of sorts.
Behind us is a city of silences before a war when a brother
would murder another.
Many of them are buried under our blanket.
The architecture here is beautiful; smell the magnolias.
Yet every level of gray interpenetrates the next. Curdles.
I live where I still know who the shopkeepers are, the merchants.
Cobblestone sidewalks (although haphazard for the drunken).
The Monday-morning cataclysm doesn't touch me here.
Yet still, I long for the podium to scream from,
throwing transcriptions
towards a black gravity of hordes,
the words must get out, the etherized
Ego.
There is a crease that the tongue can never wriggle itself into:
My tongue got stuck in there trying to
*
every lock clasping shut asks as it does,
"(are you finally) happy?"
satisfaction is that handkerchief
that politeness and self-preservation
won't let you fetch for her
at the edge of a canyon. mockeries
are our vows.
Noir is lifegiver, although the tract
is insurmountable. We achieved base-camp;
that should be good enough, but, the fact that a corpse
lies a few thousand feet up gives us path and causeway.
At this altitude, there is not a breath left
for a cellular phone. Only raspy hacks
towards llamas.
And all that I know about the world
I learned from Cable. I'll sit on this grave
in the deep South. A poet was put to rest here.
The universe's closet-door has been left open for too long.
No one is left to claim the raiment
save for infant language, as always
it is
the most gorgeous failure
that I become gorgeous by failing
*
I. family portrait
your father was a scarecrow holding a radio
my mother was a supine rotting pine trunk
his sperm was sawdust and her ovum a silver raindrop
I bleed moss and lichens, pebbles and pewter fire
I would wear the trophy deer's head and keep silent
for your father's lectures. Mother hung jawbones
of wolverines and shells of dried tortoise on the clothes-wires
during the salad days mom became a wool shawl
your father became a set of dentures forgotten on an ottoman
I wanted them to finish me off. I was barbed-wire rusted.
they would try to guess my age over the sawmill of a static radio
mom pulled a grey hair from my head said:
"someone is out there hunting me"
the first whipping was for smashing a streetlamp
on our dirt road with an aluminum baseball bat
all I wanted was to be able to stand under it
but it was they who had made me a signpost in the night
without ever teaching me how to read the omens
II. self-portrait after all-night binge
bruises are muses
and for those who break wristwatches
over the bridges of formulas' noses
and watch rain on bonfires
or hiss of asphalt
but I don't do anything significant
just sit around all day eating bacon and egg sandwiches
staring at starlings
dropping their shit-parcels everywhere
and a bruise can be focus
on the crux and crocus
of a waning bloody lip from the night before
and I may call myself a warrior-poet
but I am the prep-cook allergic to garlic
the night past or its sexual repast
however you'd like to sum it up for the cameras
is mute moot under a steel-toed boot
and enough of that, it seems that nature
can be easily corralled
when we all have beer-bongs the size of Jupiter
we mourn the death of the fiddle player
and kick around dead dog skulls
paper plates stained with catsup
we grill our meat in iron lungs
Sunday or Tuesday night in Americana
all of our ex-lover's names rolodexed by water-beds
guns and guitars and eight-balls in particle colliders
so many meteors fell that night
that my hangover was like a planetarium
III. portrait of a lightning bolt
if all of existence is a storm
then I am a T-shirt in a tornado
with a lightning-bolt airbrushed on it
IV. quick sketches of certain listeners
There is a light-bulb wrapped in purple velvet. She shakes,
she jingles, she's spent.
There's an eye shot out and shut into a weathered leather flask of a face.
There's a never-once-opened bottle within which is a mosquito
whose belly is full of the blood of Christ.
There is a spy; he's deaf, dumb, and mute.
He carries a talisman made of owl-tongues.
In the corner leaning is a framed blueprint
instructing how to build the first frame ever.
One tries to be a bird carrying a bird by its feet over a field of dead birds.
He stumbles into the street.
A wing falls like a leaf from my poem.
If my soul walked into the bar
It would wear a robe of clocks
A rope of clocks
A belt of clocks
All stopped
There is that hour for light that won't breathe this smoke.
There is the heart in all of us scribbled with veins,
Etched with arteries.
The dichotomy we carry is one side always lying to its bisymmetry:
What the hell is it that keeps us from right down the middle tearing?
*
1.
hit my head on the tolerance canopy night before
now in the VW van roadsign reads ISLANDS, time to reconnoiter
a lump on my thyroid like a sore thumb, a roadsign
the disorientation of dead oaks and palms, driving
into the campgrounds get the assignment, the allotment
from the stark ranger, hide the contraband, park the van
neighboring sites all silent around our crude cairn
of stones, it's not camping season we hope but
for the best, no cougar tracks in the sand
we burn National Enquirer's for kindling
drinking beers like catching catfish in Styrofoam coolers
the ocean is like a guitar lilt, comes almost up to our fire
it's too cold for mosquitoes, therefore tonight it's too cold
for us, Shelton says it doesn't matter, judging
by the cooler, and my head, we came here to die anyway
Cajun burger patties (pre-made in a small-town butcher-case)
a bundle of wood, propane lamps, day-job subpoena poetics
we be kings like the kind that slink out of Sun Studios
we be rocka-Billie-the-Kids, satyrs from Savannah
the rich once hunted fine game here, Hunting Island
now high school kids come here to take LSD
the surreality of the shoreline chewing the treelines
there is nothing left to hunt here
but two over-educated rednecks playing at romance,
ignoring injuries, telling the same old college story
2.
The ghost of Frank Stanford chases me as far as Land's End
I turn to face my hunter as the spectral knives fly
Stanford threw Boo Kay Jack he threw
Loki's Tongue Hilt-splitter
Railroad Spike
Rabbit's Foot
Splinter-Under-Fingernail
Jesus' Tooth
He threw
Brown-Bottle all whistled past will-o-the-wisping
I knows America hunts itself down the coast
I faced the poet's ghost, said:
"I thought you couldn't cross rivers now"
I'm free from that age
said Stanford
I had three bullets in my pocket,
but I didn't believe in guns,
at least not yet.
He says he misses
ghosts and mosquitoes in early June
then dissipates, like so much foxfire
3.
You wait for the narcissus to stare up at you and answer but Nature has no
tongues nor tact for human nature,
its pale perversion, its frail evolution,
no truck in this at all your soul can't hold
its weight in cotton, the flax is in full flux
all is potentially a rape in the wilderness, and you have never been a noble
savage, still, you stare into this pond and expect wishes to be offered up
like some mythic, whiskered goldfish, his eyes bugging-out and wisdom on his
scales. You see, every iota of your blood, your very cellular structure is
for sale only a bridge away.
Here's how to maximize your potential; drown trying to love yourself, into
your own reflection, a convex mirror that swallows you as a lily pad shifts
softly above the last glance of your flower
4.
splicing cassette tapes in the van
to map memories with, Scotch-Tape
and old guard on duty here
we can both repair rocket-engines at this point
but this fragile music chewed up
by a tapedeck and low battery at a campsite is eluding us
our women are getting drunk somewhere
in strange towns while we hope for Steve Earle
and Will Oldham, some tunes, while drunk
counting one-legged gulls
and creating new curse-words
let's not think of what we've become
5.
I sew the days together
a real working-class hero
knowing secrets soft in the sphagnum
I drift through the harmonica rain
angelprow and its prowess
your aureoles sunburn
I used a warped cello for a paddle
overhangs of Spanish moss
we heads towards the waterfall in the dugout
they will hook me in from the dock
like I was a mail-bundle, something special
I was once a bull bucking with a china-shop in its belly
now I'm a buck with three legs and broken antlers
dark mouth of river opens on
I freshen my bandages and smell salt-air
I am before my time
I am Death's walking-stick
all day I looked for God and only caught one catfish
that should say it all
6.
Two days after the trip Shelton calls me at home.
The VW won't start anymore.
His great-aunt had a stroke while we were camping.
He's already planning the next trip.
The lump behind my left ear sings
Like a knife shines in the hand of a poet.
Writing poems is the naming of knives.
A ghostly knife whistles by, a woman's name in the night.
A cougar walks through the still warm ashes of our derelict site.
erosion island
1
Her hair across my chest spread intermeshed.
A wave meets a damaged shore. Never damages
the shore. I cup her ear to my ribs
as I read more lines in her crude dialect.
The ocean is the greatest acid.
Erosion is a starving contortionist
with skin like diamonds, exercising.
My thirst is as bottomless as
a shovel cursed to levitate over soft ground
2
Forever all morning your wife beats the coffee beans with a hammer.
She intends it to strain I go insane in the yammering.
I need that hot item. The countertop suddenly cracks, and she
too, in a small way, holding a hammer in a camper in her negligee.
She slides over a chipped cup.
I am glad for any gesture in the chaos
of observing this marriage. The camping trip
is full of murderers behind every map, is full
of rage behind every simple suggestion
3
Squirrels haunt the payphones.
I try to call you from the ranger's station,
no answer, I walk back towards the ocean
smiling in self-immolation.
I am a deer with three good legs;
I am no prow's figurehead.
Only the blues remind me I need a woman:
Lightning Thompkins, John Lee Hooker,
Howling Wolf hunting the island
4
There are three incredibly poisonous snakes:
the hooknosed seasnake (venom 60 times more powerful than a rattlesnake)
the Russell's viper (it has killed the most people worldwide)
the taipan (one bite can kill a mature elephant).
Man has a venom that is slow, and it only works
on his own kind. It takes years
after the first bite of the first
handshake. A beautiful blue poison we share
erodes our island everywhere.
5
The closer you get to the water,
the better the soul.
The closer to the desert
the better the mind.
The closer to the earth
the better the body.
The closer to the air
the better the words.
The closer to the celestial
(there is no such thing as being
any closer to the celestial).
6
Tried to dig the seashell out;
it was like a stubborn tortoise's spine.
Turned out to be the tip of a treetrunk;
shoreline is treeline here.
7
Shoreline is treeline in these lines
a mind sanguine on a horizon
a constant friction of fission
my sunglasses are missing
in this world of everything under the sun
burnt skin will peel like a page from me
like the ash of a burnt wing
8
Listening to the surf, I know now
how to name knives.
9
Looking for sponges, only jellyfish mutilations
wash up as you smoke and I drink
and we wish it all to fall to us, a manna on our bare feet
like new eyebrows, like now, like tan skin, like belonging.
We would walk on nails to get to The Largest Nail in the Region
and this is tourism.
As the barbarians build their arcades and we make love to women
and their agendas, we still have an undeniable urge
to hunt down all of our best wishes, stab fishing-hooks
through their lips as each shorewhisper murmurs.
The Word hears itself and writes like it doesn't.
I hear what does not write and mishandle silences.
I should have been on a copra plantation,
a Polynesian with my indecipherable rongo-rongo boards
making basalt carvings of this life, for
this life requires much thicker skin than mine.
We buy lawn-chairs and lotion and talk of flippant armageddons:
me, the disgruntled wife, and my best friend the husband.
10
In the Dead Sea the water is so thick
you can't swim. Level drops three ft. a year.
Such saltiness. Exploit resources, swim here. Don't
settle down. The loggerheads
only land long enough to lay their eggs on this island, then leave
life to its best marathons
11
DW loves RH
carved
in a picnic bench.
Any language that allows love to emerge
in a quadra-set of initials
is a language better than one
I have ever spoken
in a poem.
*
The shadow bus is coming
but not to stop for me
I hear the fly buzz as she dies
she did not die for me
the carriage reeks of mildew
of carrion by the sea
the shadow bus is coming
but not to taxi-cab
the lord of worms and mouths
has handed me his shroud
and this is a veil I kiss
and to kiss the lips of life
like an altar by an abyss
I say "I do" to my wife
who is the daughter of death
a gorgeous beauty who
has named herself Quest.
we leave a chronological timepiece
a collage of sundials spinning on cracked linoleum
a press-here-button on a statue of talking history
a dirty video-tape, a corroding stack of newspaper
robotic rays bring in snacks held by scantily-clad
robotic rays. refreshments ride fiber-optic backs
of rhinestones and the efficient. there is a plastic city
exhibit in the gallery of steel-wool. immaculate
facial features of future boys and the perfect shoes
of all future women. angels shine from their architecture
prisons. we were once curious creatures, way back when.
but now we never to care to ask when.
we once drank sugar-syrup by the case. we once
swam in oceans. we once strip-mined. we once
considered animals our kin. these artifacts are quite
peculiar. it is a wonder that our race survived.
we should have prospered. pass the macro-beverage
and semi-sweet pseudo-wheat germinates, please.
perfection is next to cleanliness and loneliness.
That grim reaper, that administrator, came for my hide
last night as I fell out of bed I said I ain't no golden fleece
no bloodline of Christ not even fattened up yet metaphysically
and he reminded me of several timely tragedies but I screamed
"I haven't written a good poem yet!" He had now heard it all.
He was accustomed to liquidating poets, or promoting them, depending
upon how living critics looked at it. With me he had met an immortal
of accident. I was always too spirited, a young buck with headlights.
The skull smiled at me, said he noticed me before in the mailroom.
But, he was one of those minimalist executives who likes umbrellas
in his bloody drinks. My soul just greenbacks, I told him. Invest
in scything others. He left the bedpost notched
with an iron nail and cracked my window with a black-black breath
wondering what it is like to be a cheerleader?
is that death emerging from underneath a flat shale to spy by the creek on summer lovers?
is that death brushing the dust from the leather jacket after the stunt?
death has a "MOM" tattoo on his obsidian black mother-less shoulder.
death's breath is pungent-sweet, a smell you have always known suddenly.
is that handsome gentleman Death himself?
is a god taking pains to initiate a winter?
is there a god wondering what it must be to be a man? a slug wonders things about stars.
is that the shutter I didn't secure? a fingertip behind the TV-set, an eye
in a medicine cabinet? a tendril just moving before I sit to recoil behind an armrest?
in every fingernail you manifest. the cat brings up a squirrel that is beheaded.
it drops you on the old mat like mail, death
into the saloon Death shameless
blood-glutton in mustard-gas electric guitars blazing
his favorite whore on one arm a doll of silent porcelain
he grabbed Lafitte by his freshly cropped hair
said IT IS TIME and a brawl ensued as proprietors
of the place, promiscuity and other well-fed weasels
all just summed it up to another Saturday night and got on with the fight
as gory as a surgery documentary spilled into the street
a dirt road gravel and ten-penny nails and Death
brought in other aspects of himself centipedes out of alleys
Gila monsters crawling from under family sedans bats
flying out of pipe organs and it appeared helpless
for our fair pirate but he charmed death with another lock of his hair
and later by a rotisserie barrels of rum tapped
Death and the young buck made a deal and Lafitte agreed
to keep up his dirty works
fighting an army of Ken -dolls with my bad credit bill-bullets
slaughtering Calvary's of stickmen
with sickles of 3-D moons beating up buff lifeguards on balconies
with boxing gloves of dissecting phrases
the Neanderthal intellectual, a sword-tongued Zorro
saving sacred cows from slaughterhouses only to sacrifice
in ceremonies of grilled cheeseburgers
stranding myself in deserts to diet and shacking up on cruiseships
to fatten back up for the wrestling matches
and hiding in cities to teach my shadow stealth against litanies
under streetlights while swordfighting clock's moustaches
across minefields of daily occurrences
where the Anything masquerades as the painted Everything
as the windmill slats transfix third eyes
as I lick my shoulders to shining aerodynamicisms
like a cat cleans herself is how I glow in the dark florescence
and writing with blue pens to fly writing
with red pens to burn and with green pens to grow
and black ink to authenticate truth, strength
and beauty learning dead languages for advantages above
corporate scavengers to be dogged becoming the scourge of the Coliseum
of my poems the tridents, nets, and tigers
and this astral humor my gifts breaking things in New Age trend-shops
claiming free will and destiny, not paying
for damages to windchimes and toppled overpriced incense-holders
and the Maenads are all the small details of life
the Orphic eye will not miss a thing
and so we are ripped apart, and though I have the eye, I have not
the capability as my head floats
towards an island, the son of Oedipus torn limb from limb
at sea in the ocean of eyes, an ocean of questions, daring to be land
a definitive in the sacrifice
of everyday life
Joseph V. Milford
Our hero, demigod-diva
when opposed to lesser backdrops
and cheaper scenery
steps out of the lens,
out of the
spaghetti-western-safari
to begin his race. He pursues
coins across the desert
as they fall with divine lace
from a charioteer
on the star-track
and he places each
doubloon in his mouth. This finger-food
manna, belladonna, each
morsel a miniature poison-oasis
and he would have visions
of harems and Dionysus
every taste of flesh and wine
entices more need
for nourishment, and so
each bite becomes pemmican
for the boiling broth
of the soul. Our hero
strides into the sunset
of another cameo
the smile of Valentino in stereo
*
Joseph V. Milford
A black market in my pocket.
The deals were made over
my decapitated head.
Magic Marker superettes.
Pants of centipede tweed.
Hot Bronx ex-porn waitresses.
Corduroy-craved naked boys.
Bluebottle-necks skybent.
Kissing veins on the models.
All the drugs' doors unlocked.
The kook contingent on its horses.
Magic words click deadbolts.
Something creeping in the night kitchens.
Electroshock hellions. Monkeyscreeech
fervors of dervishes with nitro-glycerin
tambourines. Booze syringebinge singed
zydeco. Music going up my nose
is noise. Bursting ear drums cracked
shaft of spears and teeth gnashers.
Overcoat envelops the entire scene
in vermilion of cities obscene
styrofoam latex fiberglass astroturf
cycle of synth-trash for our microwaves.
Curbsurfers banking on the pot holes.
Petrified over-saints on the steps
of cathedral big business your urchins
are punks stealing the best ideas
from other punks' needles in the sewage
*
Joseph V. Milford
can it all be rolled into a ball, ensorcelled
on tip of tongue tip-toeing?
I make checklists in my rattling office of rattlesnakes.
I stare blank pages down to their expensive pores.
I see the slant of ideas scant.
I find the feces of no writing of shit.
I want the un-natural to emit, I want
one aura.
The timeless position, the iceberg ballerina, the wingthrust
in liquid oxygen, the flower falling into a black hole
oblivion.
A crumb's genetic code
sold to a flake.
I want the slow feedback to fizzle off my tongue
as a last iota sprouts
its progenitum
like a burp
in a time capsule
like a God saying
ahem
*
Joseph V. Milford
A river is a caravan of wounds, rivulets
like spoons globular still riveted by mid-afternoon light
to the silt of banks. Chattahoochee, your fish are no longer
edible
save to one another. These large-mouths would poison a man.
We fish for sport, just like we father our bloodstreams
*
Joseph V. Milford
1. The boy ran up to his father with two handfuls of copperheads.
The father screamed; had he given birth to a devil, a snake-charmer?
The boy died fast full of venom and fangs. In his last gasp
the boy said, "why did you make them afraid of me, dad?"
2. Fish in nets not satisfied with the catcher's names for them.
They are about to be skinned with names. These machines we choose
for virgin terrain, the monikers we shackle our offspring with.
*
Joseph V. Milford
by the third trimester
love is already defined and defiant
an abstract in your ear, one inch more
and there are phrases of co-dependence
lingering around empty cereal bowls
in a winter storm you are beating your brows
into wise domes, you say that the ominous
light is hard to endure, a portrait
of an audience of embryos curled
like symbiotic question marks
amniotic thought, live, bloodmove
mother, father, the ominous light
is hard to endure without you two
in spring, third trimester, I
need you forebears
*
Joseph V. Milford
an origami airplane
lit with a lighter
thrown from a truckbed
70 miles per hour
*
Joseph V. Milford
the sight of rhythm the seen scene of sound
the synaesthetic sin against physics for them
sinus trap for rebounding recognizance
the hugely gathering technique called "your calling"
the mind-mouth learning
speak faster than yearning
urn of overflowing yearlings
lifemounts outrunning their legs
steeplechases of barnstormers
you see yourself outran by the self that you are racing
you hurl the football of all that is left
into the airfield of the only Fate
and you chase it down and catch
your own pass and negate your existence
a touchdown rockets
a trajectory unproven without a witness
to Cartesian
soundsight, wordgather, namethrower
gulpgallop, air-engulf, starslanger, poem-hangar
a haranguer in the blur enamored
by cursing at an endless sprawl with candor
my sounds I see splattered
upward suddenly off the paper
as the reading gathers up the parachutes
and then sore and bruised, the line
takes off its shoes and slowly sighing
*
Joseph V. Milford
I was found out on Decatur
had blood in my hair
I was trying to use my hands
to tell them something
as the equestrian bluebloods
circled with their nightsticks
and the glass jutted out of the walls
foreboding as a runic language.
I tried to point out the approximates.
I instead made approximations.
No coma of veils, no heraldic lights,
no near-death eyewitness reports,
no astral trail of angel's tails, no dizzy
spells or vapor squalls, no ticker-tape
parades to the golden ladders of truth,
but nevertheless it all came together
in my scribbled affidavit.
This whole enchilada, the final shocking
rectifying chakras. I knew I had to join
a jazz band. This perplexed them.
I had no instrument nor identification.
I should have stayed in Paris, Texas,
that is. They laughed. They got the chair
up their, don't they boy. I said yep
and one officer got off his horse and whispered
where to find the anti-venom, a clarinet, a black cat's bone
and the man who would teach me my embouchure
*
Joseph V. Milford
I kept Death close to me
as a means of living.
Like a black leather jacket.
Like a gun just in case.
I see the sad eyes of the old young men.
I see the women hunched over them.
Towers will fall as they always have.
I hold a key but can't stand the house.
I kept Death close to me.
I hid it in her silken hair.
She pretended not to know it was there.
I whispered in another's ear
about the quiet ships.
I kept Hope closer then.
And it stuck me like a splinter,
and though it caused a limp, I wouldn't pull it out.
I let it go in deeper.
Deeper past the Death I'd kept.
Deep to the solemn field where I
could have stayed forever.
I kept Death close to me;
as a gnarl of knowing
there, by my thigh, omnipresent
Joseph V. Milford
Hairshirt mantle hangs in pawnshop
always someone will buy it
*
one careful stone thrown
broke a forest of bottles
that one phrase of bullets
*
my demographic of demons:
bulls, colts, millers, pilgrims,
ki-rin, pirates, bootleggers,
kilts, stouts, loggers, rocket dogs,
rogues, saints all ensorcelled
upon labels priced with any
random volatile possibility, but
what price dignity?
*
the river of forgetfulness
can't be purchased
flask by flask
pint to pint
the tether between two worlds
can hang you
can tie the prow to the dockpost
can trip-up a stampede
can be a fuse both ends burning
like you are lit
you lit it yourself
*
your ornithology
has become the
oxymoron stabbed
into the side of me
*
always wade dangerous waters before drinking them
there is a war of cautionary tales
my soldiers now shattered into shards
my war was never mine was never even a war
had no progeny, had no country, no kin
no banquet, no vestal virgins, no sacraments
been this bent since I broke in
*
I've already lived an eternity
in every single night
I've woke to oblivions
to my own wake
every other morning
*
the book, poetic apparatus
an actual device of divisive-ness
the jaws of life between two covers
the mouth that gives birth as it devours
the umbilical cord you bite into
in order to tie yourself off
as you become an expert in ship's yarns
and nautical knots
*
a drunk at an AA meeting once said to me:
"alcoholics are just frustrated mystics"
now it's quite obvious what drives him to drink
that shaman with no social intent
is always the village idiot
and, usually, he will be continually
arrested
*
I've been as weak as can be
a bird with broken bones
hobbled under a fig tree
circling on rotten fruit
and the ants eyeing me
*
to fight a long battle with your soul
to fight a long battle for your soul
to fight an epic after selling your soul
to reclaim the used soul
to never know your soul at all
I say it is best to be road-weary, scarred, humbled
it's best to have had, several times over,
your soul's ass kicked
*
it took all of nanotechnology
a full phalanx of microscopic biobots
to rebuild me, to rewire
my skewered symmetry
after my own heart's mutiny
that contraction like an ion
what is not bound by what
charge, what freedom
that it longs for?
*
a dream can be a cage
if you wake up in the middle of it
as the electrons swarm your nucleus
*
my life was not
to become words
that I never got around
to looking up
*
shake it off
like a wet dog
in the rain
*
Americans can get away with anything
after all, the movies taught us that there is always
Mexico to run to
*
it's a fact: earthworms crossed the ocean
in horse's hooves on Spanish galleons
to repopulate the North American continent
which they'd not inhabited since the last Ice Age
and I will float across a river of fire
in a migration of my own diminutive kind
and do it on a barge of feathers
to get to my homeland to begin again
my worm progeny and kin
*
the dignity of the bull reverence
and pride of the bulwark purpose
and strength in the bridles and languages
and the sarcophagi of clues and intentions
and the relics and rites of shards
and bulls being mummified and revered
reverence, respect, and fear
a bridge at night, a bulwark under solid ice,
or my plaintive signature here
across the pale forehead of a page
*
I searched for the learned hermit
I leaned against a lamp-post
the regulars didn't know what mists he traversed
to some new gate of hell
there is always another gate to there
(trust me on that one)
I could hear the red words of his nova fire
and I asked, "are you my teacher?"
and I heard the leather of his wings
*
strange that my mind is only quiet of words when writing
and my silence is never much of a poem as much as it is
an admonition of a canvas painted over by a blind man
a million too many times and his every brushstroke is true
*
It all ended it all began
when I realized I had to live
what it was I was preaching
and this is exactly when
it all began it all ended
*
I love you like the infinite gap between two snowflakes
*
this truth serum burns my blood
(get away from me with that)
*
like the secret dialects of restaraunteurs,
of tugboat captains, of English teachers,
I waited for life to hike up its skirt for us
but, life had never worn one
what had I always been thought?
life never did anything concealing
and for that matter, it makes Hope more appealing
it gives me that good inside feeling, yes it does
*
Futility, you are the towel I use in the downpour of self.
I am a lucrative sponge, a beached being.
Love is a papercut drinking lemon-juice
and turpentine on an orange sluice.
I am a hemophiliac and you are the Romantic bloodbath ensuing.
*
Panther startled by sudden cello.
*
Sensual, like the sweetest earlobe.
*
Language, I have bullied you, so please kick my ass anew
around new lines, the jagged demagoguery's of the rabid lexicon menagerie
*
we stare into it as the Cyclops
glares back from the desktops
as our goggles fog up and we clench
with tendonitis and the hum is constant
and the keyboard more tactile
than a wife or husband's flesh
*
the best we could do
with our souls so far
is become greedy children
with more hands
than candy
in a candy field
*
as one embalmer to another, we all speak to and from our scars
we've been there you say to them
they speak to you these notches in bas relief
these waxen lips set deep and shut in your skin
they never age like the rest of you
frozen there like the only cuts ever
frozen there like the name of the same cut over and over for all of us
*
how much math
can you bring
expecting Beauty
not to sing?
*
I was left behind and angrier than the reason anyone had left
hell, I was even angrier than the last time I'd written about it
but I made due, paid everyone's dues at the house tree
paid them to keep quiet about it
I said stop wearing those reindeer belts out to the bars, boys and girls
*
a small town is so cellular
under your gossip's tumors
cannibalism amok in rumors
via satellite via towers
*
no poem has ever made of me
a mirror
in this language I look into
a sky painted
by Magritte
*
I have wished for complete total implosion
that black hole encumbrance
so to embrace the entire space-time continuum
with the atoms I have of theirs
*
a strange dissonance
like pissing in a toilet
as a trainwhistle blows
I am lackluster
flushing my nightly under a green light
I've got enough left
for a good tip
and one more pint
*
seeing the back of your own skull as you write a poem
is a delicious horror
*
I am an unhinged catch-clasp
there's no wealth inside this chest
so soon that a star did not know
I always use Johnny Reb-Ebonics
I am the box of fickle light
you gaze into my wounds
you only understand pain
as a predilection
I know pain as an epic
of insane proportions
*
it has never been an alchemical soul
it has always been an alchemical one
*
I recite Ghazals to myself
to constantly piss myself off
these war-songs about inside-fires
and for running distraction
the Devil gave me his carbon badge
and wearing Pride, the Star-badge, I walk
through the heavens brilliantly, at least until
I piss on the wrong hellfire
and then the politics take my wings
and make armies out of them
as I stand, can't fly
*
I was born under the same sign as Chick Corea and Egon Scheil
*
you are the last to ask, "so, what do you do?"
I cut out tongues I am a tongue-lasher.
my godfather was a postman, now a butcher.
this is no baloney; greater men than me have lost
their wit for speaking of one another.
once I was trying to tie my shoe for the first time
now I've tread untold when's in them.
I love watching rodeos, the rally of it, the gates
slammed open, the roughshod tumbling
of everything from a shed; it makes me wince
and pour salt onto my cut (a quarterhouse).
I love silent movies about rodeos the best.
Don't prod my bull with a spear; it speaks randy enough.
Now ask someone else, "so, what is it that you do?"
*
I am:
"Something with the wings of a bird, something
of anguish and oblivion, the way nets cannot hold water."
Pablo Neruda
*
poetry is the daily advance of unsung stupidities towards my own weaknesses
they cut off Che Guevara's hands when he died; I did not know he was also a writer
*
"We're like fishermen living off the sea," says Taghlaoui who spends his life digging fossils out of desert rock, "Except that our sea is dead." Lawrence Osbourns, NY Times Mag. Oct. 29th, 2000
*
Joseph V. Milford
avant archaism
idiot savantism
the aggregation
of this soap operatic
lined text
get to the deaths
this story-board in a rainstorm
like they all are
(my head is on the block)
no, not ever so easy
post-traumatic syndrome
for indeed the worst
has already reached, breached
its quickening
the horse must be shot
more for us than its own
idea of pain or lying
onside with colic
I was only fourteen
its language was a languid groan
poor old bed-sore roan
my sister was crying
that's when we broke up finally
she would cry more
I would one day confuse
this event with a poem
the hole erupted in the roan's skull
the brutal finality
my step-father
was never more beautiful
in his mercy, "put out of misery" is
what he called it
my first real violence
because of the size of the horse
I once rode her
across Mr. Williamson's acres
later, step-father would show
me and my brother had to clean
the gun and Mr. Williamson had
the roan hauled off
my sister would leave home
less than a year later
I'd be the next to leave
one season soon after.
*
Joseph V. Milford
Cuts Veal Like Butter
Willow's Banjo
Driftwood Splinter
the Negotiator
Carwreck Femur
Tyrone the Torch
Surgeon General
Engine Fan Blade
Sax Saber
Kamatsu
Barnstorm Shrill
Glass Slint
Karmic Avenger
Three Shots in the Dark
Unspent Shell
Ocean Photo
Swordfish Sceptre
Starfish Tetanus
Slow Meteor
Caffeine Cross
Sawblade Kiss
Cockbone Key
Punkrock Mohawk
Rabid Rat Tooth
Coffin Liner
Forest of One Knife
Scared Granny
Scarab Leg
Silver Surfer
Selectric Machete
Genghis Mirror Shard
Seahorse Spine
River Dragger
St. Louis Song
Rusty Fandango
False Tooth
Cincinnati Shard
Taut Guitar String
Appatomax Bayonet
Key to Your Heart
Shoulderblade
Bicycle Spoke
Satan's Shiny
Icarus Feather
Sting Ray Tale
Lightning on a Weathervane
Junkie Hypo
Mason Jar Shard
Abednego Tarsal
Pig Rib
Pierces Prick
Story of Cutter
Brittle Dactyl
Radio Signal
Blunt Death Knoll
Born in the Camp With Six Knives
Sarong Rip
Publisher of Soil
Unknown Girl at Funeral
Her
*
Joseph V. Milford
1
then I must be the war
of sidewalks vs. mirrors
and the sidewalks are mirrors shattered
and I'm in tatters
you drugged me through the underbelly
I caught things in the hooks I have
under my belly
gleaming horizon teeth my resolve
absolve me from days
as brigades of clocks wipe their faces
with sharp concentric gesticulations of frozen gerundives
the sleeves of a minute's shirts are tattered
as are my patterns, slow-motion,
I went to accept the keys to the city
the fans all paid their fare pinwheels
I had a city in my hair, fireworks above
they say there is a city on high
that is a glass mountain range
that only takes one ray of light
to cut to its ore, it explains why
that's me, harlequin and assassin wannabe
just can't procure a day job, however,
I have learned to juggle, bake bread,
hold liquor, echolocate, divine water, etc.
judge me not like a paycheck
not wearing bullets around my neck
not an albatross or pegasus mane for sale here
no snake oils, no unguents of eternal life
no omens hung around the necks
of buxom beauties or shackled oddities
nothing but packages that were wrongly addressed
wrapped in headlines about miscreants thinking sidewalks are mirrors
as they walk into themselves over and over (sorry, sorry, sorry
crosswalks are always shattered)
and I'm in tatters
scattered shards of jukebox parts litter the parks
read the spilt songs like leaves in paper cups
2
as I say these things to you
someone is being stabbed to death
as they lie dying they think of saying
inane things to a loved one
the inane things the most important
3
the viola begins to play.
the way we are disheveling
is a ragged epic, no one's fault
that the winds have always required
that the sails should be sewn
from previous epics, the shirts of the past
minute lyrics, the rips in the apostasies
and there are Sumo wrestlers with Alzheimer's
diseased, grunting in the sun, expressions
of elemental gods personified, wrestling in saltspray
with candorous grace, the object is to take the weight of the world
off of your back
and put it on the back of your opponent
a noble and honorable sport,
an attack upon one's own self
is a heart. what is a heart attack then?
sew the epics together
and the wrestlers trample on the sails
making mockery of the wind
circling in slow elliptics, concentrics
the violas continue to play
as we attack our own hearts
4
the surrealist may not interview me
I said to the praying mantis
the camera kills its mates
after clicking fornications
the Dadaist may not interview me
I said to the ceiling fan blade
but, the dumbass over there, the entomologist
is allowed to show me the paintings of his lucid dreams
the ones with the cameras like insects
5
my muse is sick,
she all inclusive
cacophonous endorphic
6
a trawl is a large cone shaped net dragged along the sea bottom for fishing purposes. like walking across the ocean floor with your eyes open
7
I made love to the moon last night, I said.
The man who had just cut down the moon
with a broken lightbulb shard calls me
a braggart,
he then tries to sell me a piece of her
8
the Sumo wrestler is a stargazer.
the entomologist fills tunnels
with moonlight, and its murderers
will always be here, the epic writers.
I am simply the heart's braggart,
the heart attacker, the inane war
of sidewalks in tatters, the song
with swagger trawling forward
the song with swagger trawling forward
*
Joseph V. Milford
oh shit.
my odyssey probably continues.
oh shit.
*
I had a preview of hard-knocks
in front of despot's doors
no one meets god
without a little lipstick
on his collar
*
no one says the secret password quietly
we'd rattle any bones we could just to rattle them
*
it's not as big as you
might think it are
as the big screen
encroaches with its mean
ideal on the median
and you make sure that
the dolly is positioned
over the doll
in the station wagon
that was never really wrecked
until just now
when the floodlights
cued
*
time to tie up
some noose ends
*
we thought it would be too late when we caught up.
we never had a dime on it.
we thought it would be too much when we fessed-up about the new quantum mechanics.
decimation across a field of spyglasses all wired under the grasses.
the fires ran and run that deep.
I fly in vain towards an imagined Ukraine or other easy rhyme full of mail-order
brides glowing
from Chernobyl half-lives like unspeakable crimes.
but then, I just take out the trash among a gaggle of grackles.
I see how steaks make people happy in the commercials.
I watch the happy hour brigades careen onto the streets of sand
on this island as the strobelights slash from overheard like scythes through
our invisible hearts
full of tone. I want to learn the qualities of wood and what it can conduct;
I know what it can make.
I want a wall of foliage around all of your homes today.
a piety of piebald horses in two rolls of film.
I remember your pillow's smell. you curled your hair;
I curled your toes.
you sued me for my lists and I kept writing them affidavits.
this never claimed to be a poem or not to be about a pelican breaking threadbare
barely above a crash-landing into my Volkswagen as he shot upward into a zenithal
stab as I crossed the causeway
to St. Simon's Island.
it will be a foggy tomorrow-the last thing the radio says as the car door
slams.
*
a coven of seagulls
in shell debris.
not afraid of me.
the sky blue
except for sporadic jet
fuel dragon-tails.
and the pelicans plucking
strings of fish
from the tide's music.
the wind carries
no signs of a splash.
all plash.
*
the trouble knew me well before I had the chance to be unborn.
it was the only signature I'd never sighed.
there are no poems but in stings.
how we love to complicate sunsets.
the space shuttles pander to the pondering
celebrities as stars pay to orbit stars.
blast the hatch, crash the asteroids, dodge the asterisks,
blackball the logistics,
hide the ellipsis, read your manuals.
we can all wear belts of alibis and overcoats
of policies in the parade, over and under the arches,
banging on the pearly gates
the sidewalk squares for our heads and the streetlamps for our souls.
*
each of us
is the gut
of a clock
I hear the punk rock
and see the gardens grow
evasive pinion, residing
behind the cathode rays
adroit bolt in the particle
collider, atomonster, genomonster
geopoliticalite, roots
like ganglion
take me to that quantum
heaven with your engineered explosions
make my face spiral
in the bubble chamber
*
it was all a negative forced to foresee
its own imagenetic
no eugenics of light
a hero among men
will often forget
that he is one, but
his remembrance
will be unsavory and
painful and all
who await his heroism
*
"mirror of the causes of all things."
Robert Fludd
*
Plato's "Great Year":
the time the point of Spring takes to cross the entire Zodiac
is 25,868 years
*
Here we reside within
the snowglobe
full of glowering
glowers and cowards alike
*
the universe at about
10 -34 seconds
0
(ACTUAL SIZE)
*
ZERO, nada
infusoria
of protoglossia
I could get
tinnitus in a vacuum
over-sensitive in a field
of iron dandelions
rusting away let it rain
neurons
all over my other crippled ones
*
"Quark Soup" where the protons and neutrons came from:
a liquid net (3,5 minutes)
*
I don't kill myself
because
I would kill me for that.
*
poetry only works as juxtaposition.
that sux.
if it is on, then give me some back-up.
if it is off, build a papermill.
I will work there
and posthumously steal.
*
how do I tell you,
Nascent Star,
there was no
space nor matter
in the place
from which you
start or spark
*
Vulva-Universe, my heart is a pussy come nigh
*
"he sleeps with the telescopes"
that's how we knew he'd been offed.
we got the message, awright.
the garden variety imagination and tulip jargon.
dumbasses driving herds of oxen towards cliff dwellings.
toughen up you Georgia Copernicus's
'twill be Ragnarok on a fishhook soon
*
opine the layers
unwhittle the little sculptures
what can't be requisitioned
won't help the myriad
followers of these specimens
we tried to make it simple
gave primrose path and diluted it
with yellow lines, but you had to
embezzle a soul into all of the great
organism of it, you made the pipe organ
sing and then wrote histories
only on musical notation sheets
but I'll be damned if you slam the piano lid
down on my plans I need to get paid
for at least a smidgen of this fodder
I've delivered it's made me nothing
but a little smarter and a lot fatter
*
our ameliorization
by the river of cities
or city of rivers
we forget which
but the ironic cajole
brings us back in
to the bets we'd placed
outside of the ring
and the ones we took
our rings off of
to knuckle up to the plate
to do so, and to do so well
is never saying so, but
we talk of youth and concerts
like atom bomb films at stag parties
you need to be solemn or have
a sovereign and there's no room
for the evil niceties no matter
how many swoons have cluttered
the galleries, the spore collection
escaped its culture and dished
out rosy pox cheeks to all but
the elders who knew to stay
outside the place and it spotted
trout running through the rivers
we got so old that primordial
was scratched from all tomes
and rewritten opioidal
we write in reconnaissance
what history was rewritten for
like ink-whores in a mausoleum
eating ash with flour-scoops
just wipe the birdshit off the bench
and sit, or hell sit anyway and talk
of angels and their spit
upon Vatican spires and the garrison
of documents there retires
in every sentence of politics
in your seduction
Ulysses should have been named
apt ellipses and he could eclipse
his own odyssey by bending
the space-time continuum with such
inarguable punctuation, and caesura
laughs trochaically, but this isn't
about crude music, it's really about
that alter-me that is allowed to reflect
in cities by rivers, genuflect
of orchard-sun in its flexing
and the wave washed over me silent
like a film or paste everything stuck
in the repast of the wordplay for I
am guilty of making fish-gills into
guillotines but I have had lethargy
impotence of status, promiscuity, localized
leprosy, and anthills full of apathy
just like you and the burgeoning rest of us
await elect the first star to cuss
we know how logos cuts throats and emotes
*
I echo that.
Great bird flies to its only perch.
The name of a cliff.
*
The endangered species list is an endangered list.
Repast and repose. Darling, expose'.
Enough, shed the skin clothes.
No more aperture.
The wildebeest is cold.
*
that land we record and call sublime
I am guilty catalog
here, where the meter-maids eat their young
cut me in and cut my out, I am a hat
and that which we do in wonderment
I am skinhead lawyer in New Guinea pro bono
what will never go away
like a swarm of a phoenix gnat swarm
what is anyway but an offhand comment about a yodel?
we don't do nothing in wonderment
watch the flying fish jump in the net
wow and whoa
I would never piss on a fire here
I would never ask for a pint of blood there
why is it that bad credit is good when you walk
through the greatest gates and they smile at you?
*
"And that's the way/ we get old with poetry.
Comes a time when no one has a notion/
of anything else, and the odor of fried brains
contends/ with the damp of vacant ancestral
halls, to their mutual/ betterment, actually.
Here, hand me that cod ..."
John Ashbery from Dangerous Moonlight
a primula is the primrose is of primrose is primrose-like
I through a window flip-off the lit-phonebooth on the corner of my block
of current life for no reason for-no-reason the flush of the toilet-tonight
the zither was an instrument with 30 or 40 strings or stings played
with the stickiest fingers of foliage zigzag ripshod disgruntled-ness of
of-the-behoovement-of-yes calvacade and the dirthole we can't be stopped
from crawling to the heart-heavens from! promised land of bloodclots
those chocolate-covered cherry-bombs of aplomb aforementioned!
we can't make a treaty with the sand because of beauty's offbeat hand
(but at least with wind there is no reprimand) "be advised; he is westbound
now." I made a best friend on a crumbling foothold calamity ... his name
was
necessity ... he is fuckin' bad at cards. the vestal swoopings
that I keep ducking just biding some bought time with strong
bindings and I can come by finagling and dickering and dealing
running like a horse of Jehu to escape what the flight leads to
we all die under a flag in the wind and some die better than others
I am gonna leave here soon or live here doom, you betcha
die as you live unfettered in hope as the heart explodes
it has always been an incendiary kaleidoscope
*
a worshop: a cross between a workshop and worship
a workshop: a cross between worship and a sandwich
a warship: a cross
a wasp-shop: a workshop on a warship
a ship of shops: a language poet
a shop of acrostics: a warship and an epic poet
a shopworks: a shock treatment
a crossing is a lozenge of slalom of grinding
a worshop is the only good war workshop
*
I've been fair to middlin'
the greater half of my country-fair county-life
the casino boat calls from the other side of the tracks
but the damn trains never ends in their push-pistons
the mundane level is much like the lie of this and there is
enough cleaning work to be done here (you will find
so much change!) and in the air of the paper mills'
bilge, pipes keep horking out hovering white zeppelins
of afterbirth all day. don't call the strippers squaws,
or especially by their Christian names. everyone here works
on the same chopping block and must be accorded remittently.
Dawn rises with the help of pulleys not like a cheap production.
It all reeks of manufacturing and idols burning, in a good way.
I smell the anchorman's hairspray. I hear the call of the intern.
Olfactory lingual experience brought to you free of charge
and federally disavowed. let the talkshow gladiator pits
provide some onion-skin levels of respite. let the world
be awash with scintillating gewgaws. just go around plumphing
all day among the stark-naked picnickers. the need for those
cosmochemists and skyrocketing internecine price-margins
due to an interest in seas and ice-caps apparently once on Mars?
our points have no sysarcosis. neurosis of aptitude and resources.
we have so little trouble here we make robots
to look for Martian fishbones.
blunderbusses firing salutes as the timeclocks garble digits.
name all the sons Buster and all the daughters Bridget.
rampant eisoptrophobia has really hurt our appearances but the phenomenon
is uniform. when hoping for the best of men to come floating down from the
altocirrus clouds of one's mind to begin a meandering and a way to map the
territory of gene-slanting.
the fruit flies and the fish on Mars and the answers that fit well in fragile
bubbles on the standardized template.
no mo' mamby-pambying!
hang with the neonascent.
bang the gong of the googol
and let the vibrato days clang in the sonic dome.
*
mesomorphic
hand
relax!
we will take a stand
in her hand
I've seen it done before
a million times
mesomorphic hand
relax!
in no time at all
light will get
stuck in your
gel
*
O Polyhymnia
I sang
the right song
to the wrong
gods
see you next time
the harp sparticle strings
are plucked near
my dimension
you said that Modernism - Romanticism = Postmodernism
I said that
the lyre has always been
superhuman
I sang that
and I broke
my strings
good oil spilled out and floated
on the water of your skin
O Polyhymnia
I will wait until
we do it again
O Polyhymnia
you showed your thigh once
under the aurora curtain
I laughed like someone running
*
(no one in their right mind will ever publish this)
Joseph V. Milford
good world knows, I've got stimuli-eyes
help this hapless lord of lost word lights
to pass over the scintillating gates
so that I may and may have so in May
and in return, in my love-bag, I might get
a down-to-Earth-Autumn, if not, the barbells
still swing low in a strong man's chariot
and in my heart like a swamp, many have found
a Cosmos, it is veritable
I was always asking for it, I guess, as betrayal is
forgiveness that can be carried upon your person
but never given away fast enough, like voodoo
or banana-peels in a worn knapsack
and only a monk or saint of different moderations
will dally over a river on a tree-trunk carrying that
in rain, that is, or a torrential downpour, that is
if I was cut open you would see shadows of men
meeting men that I once was
and I understand this, but, I would have to be
cut open for it, but, then again
the world is a whirling scalpel of several scissors
whirling around handshakes with fragile wrists shaking
blood pumping over the compost heaps
I carry a war in a bag that no one fights but me
poets and business-men should have conventions
shit upon shit and such
and then what would fertilize this excursion
we would grow fucking rain forests
all of my great men are doppelgangers, cloinoids, monad-copiers
etc.
I was once a great man
and then I stopped writing
and then I was weak and full of shit
and then I started it up
started writing that full of shit shit again
*
Joseph V. Milford
that grail we passed around
must've assuredly've been holy
don't you, wouldn't you
say so?
blindfolded, the last poem
is pushed off an exclamation point
into blindness
the rewording
of this genetic code
makes boring mutants
comfortable clones
line after line after line
*
I am the offspring
of common valor and curses
where is my tongue of legions
like lesions leaving a battlefield?
*
my legion of tongues?
these are hanged men
they speak through scars
through jugulars
your tongue is a hanged man
the minute you learn to talk
sometimes he comes back to life
and you say what you should and shouldn't
*
entomology is the study
of trails left in prehistoric rock
by grubbers
I want this innocence
so furiously badly
I grub for it and leave
tunnels through life behind me
*
every idea that I have could potentially decapitate me
*
I have as many ideas as the nine-brained hydra
with its infinite identities waiting to manifest
when a head gets severed please cut off my heads
*
after its mutation
the headless horseman writes many poems
many of them involve
blindfolds, valor, innocence, pumpkins, courtships
gone awry
a sense of the world clavicle-up
only living in the suite between two ears
above a trash-compactor mouth
and home-entertainment-center eyes
and fast-food nostrils
and a cranium overloading
all of its
reptilian mammalian human
potentials
*
my fingers reach back upon themselves
I have too many ideas, too many brains
*
that grail we pass around
and the cup we seldom drink of
to teach the word "plate" to someone
I would have my head cut off and brought to them
upon it
I can think of no other way anymore
to make a word impact
*