Tag Archives: quote unquote

unabashed

06 Saturday Jul 2024

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“Give them pleasure – the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”
— Alfred Hitchcock


To the edge of the dream he comes; barefoot,
cloven-hoof, crooked goat legs. I do not know
his name, but from his pipes and his man’s root,
a cock from hell, garbled prayer-songs grow;
like a root, a tree, a mountain, vaulting
heaven and shadowing earth. To the edge
of the dream he comes; unabashed, playing
nightmare to my dreams. Passing a stone hedge,
a street, a market where ham-hocks and fish
dangle in the window, I follow. Dream
logic says I can do nothing else. Prayer-
songs on cobbles, his clip-clop, his goatish
delight that I’m there, to hear his obscene
song, to be the dreamer to his nightmare.

][][

Notes.

Aristotle said that for Heraclitus the soul was the “exhalation of which everything else is composed
of;” and Walt Whitman asked, “if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?”

wrothful

02 Tuesday Jul 2024

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but the anus loves

poetry

& is prolific.

~ Erica Jong

This horned god pierces until your lips numb

and your nipples perk. Call this old school

sex, with lots of smiting and wrothful cum

crusting on your neck. You sigh high, “it’s cool.”

Is it? My knees hurt on concrete. Bound not

gagged. You flip up your flouncy dress, straddle

my tongue and hold on. Pornographic plots

demand a touch of pain. Hints of hurtful

bish, bash, bosh. Rest now on my mouth. “Bite

‘dis,” you slur, all kumquat backwash. The O

of your ass spread wide. Songs of buggery

and the leash. Satyrs rutting in moonlight

while the dead gods sigh. Fucking quid pro quo.

“Rough, rough,” sang the nefarious puppy.

][][

Note.

Quid pro quo is defined as, “a favor granted or expected in return for something” … like mutual masturbation.

grows

08 Wednesday May 2024

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“La una era la otra/ y la muchacha era ninguna” ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

I am petty. Splintered bones, skirt of green

fire, the skulls of all my foes hung around

my neck. I am mean, ravenously mean:

a hog’s head worth. The ribs over my wound

are all bent outwards. That which was dwelling

within woke hungry. Decades go by. Greed?

A glint. A hint. It’s never gone. Growing

the way greed grows without logic or need,

until it wakes. Wakey-wakey, monster.

You mean, pretty cocksucker. Here’s my hog

sticking knife, pretty-pretty. Damnation

of queens. All that can curl closed my finger

opens. Grey greed blue hue greenish fog smog

kiss. Mist’s kiss of flesh. Wet smack of toxin.

][][

Notes.

The Garcia Lorca quote comes from a longer trippy poem, Casida de las Palomas Obscuras (Song of the Dark Doves) where the roots of this poem started, only to head off in a different direction by line 2. Inspiration can be a surreal beast, I suppose.

Por las ramas del laurel
van dos palomas oscuras.
La una era el sol,
la otra la luna.
«Vecinitas» les dije,
«¿dónde está mi sepultura?»
«En mi cola» dijo el sol.
“En mi garganta» dijo la luna.
Y yo que estaba caminando
con la tierra por la cintura
vi dos águilas de nieve
y una muchacha desnuda.
La una era la otra
y la muchacha era ninguna.
«Aguilitas» les dije,
«¿dónde está mi sepultura?»
«”En mi cola» dijo el sol.
«En mi garganta» dijo la luna.
Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas desnudas.
La una era la otra
y las dos eran ninguna.

In the laurel tree’s branches
I saw two dark doves.
One was the Sun,
the other the Moon.
“Little neighbors,” I said,
“Where is my grave?”
“In my tail,” said the Sun.
“In my throat,” said the Moon.
And I, who was walking
with the earth round my waist,
saw two snow-white eagles
and a naked girl.
One was the other
and the girl was neither.
“Little eagles,” I said:
“Where is my grave?”
“In my tail,” said the Sun.
“In my throat,” said the Moon.
In the laurel tree branches
I saw two naked doves.
One was the other
and both were neither.

tía

26 Monday Feb 2024

Posted by in Disaster –- Pain –- Sorrow, Poetry, self-portrait, sonnet

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“Surrealism is only shocking to those who are shocked by dreams,” André Breton.

Scads of old wounds, tía. Scads. El viento

muere/ en mi herida. “The wind dies/ in

my wound.” And in the blood, tía, its slow

flow, a queer smear. Horror under the skin.

Horror that keeps itching. Alejandra,

tía, I’ll still be your your fag hag that keeps

you from the night that gnaws and, mendiga,

begs in your blood. Infernal stone that weeps.

Sugar crusts. The crunch and chew of language.

An itch. A witch. I cannot stop, auntie,

I call you all: Necromancer of words

and wounds. This scar? Where I pulled my innards

out. Where I washed my old wound in the sea

and used your name as its heinous bandage.

Notes.

If Federico Garcia Lorca would be my uncle, then please let Alejandra Pizarnik be my aunt. These two poets taught me more about the craft than anyone else. And yes, I use the term Craft as in the dark Dionysian powers of the psyche and soul. Pizarnik wrote in fragments, as the language she used drove her insane. Artistically, she is sister to Paul Celan, who wrote in German and committed suicide by drowning in the Seine. Language as virus. Language as plague. The poem of hers I use is, “El viento muere en mi herida./ La noche mendiga mi sangre.”

19 Tuesday Sep 2023

Posted by in Historic Research, Poetry, sonnet

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Q: Have you ever wrote a poem or a song that provoked an emotion from you as you were reciting/ performing it? Did it make you cry as you listened to what you were saying?

Travel. Sudden lightning flash in daylight.

A word others use. “So from today I’m

trav’lin’ light.” As in atoms. The white

flash of a device going off. My grime

and bits settling down on your surprised

face. You. Someone had to plant these ghastly

boxes under this hill’s skin. You surmised

there are hundreds. Children have already

stumbled on four. We. Travel with me here.

I want you here when I mess up. Just once.

Wave your hands. Call out my name. You can hear

the light. Count the seconds. The short distance

it takes to get to you. A blur. Crayon

red. I rise up and all at once I’m gone.

The line, “So from today I’m/ travelin’ light,” comes from a Billie Holiday classic.

The background for this poem happened around 12 or 13 years ago when I had exchanged a couple of emails with a volunteer landmine deminer in the Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) region of Armenia who talked about losing a friend whose device that she had been trying to defuse went off. “She was there and then she wasn’t.” That image stayed with me for a very long time. I’ve done a lot of things in life but nothing compares to those people who are forced to deal with all the unexploded ordnance left behind, often decades later, due to somebody else’s war.

The United Nations estimates that there are currently as many as 100 million unexploded landmines buried around the world. Mines are designed to be difficult to locate and their clearance is costly in terms of both money and lives. It is estimated that, in 2021, more than 5,500 people were killed or maimed by landmines, most of them were civilians, half of whom were children.

To answer your question, I wasn’t expecting this sonnet to get to me as it did. I hadn’t gotten choked up when I wrote it. By the time, though, I got to, “Call out my name,” I had developed that sobbing-stutter one gets when trying to talk and not lose it at the same time. It was a very odd sensation.

Ö

08 Wednesday Feb 2023

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Pleasure, as they say, is its own reward;

for those of us who barter and haggle,

dreaming of more. To die wet. To die hard.

To die loved. To be more than a wastrel.

“He’s at work,” you say. “They’re outside playing.

Wish it was your cock and not” [here you shake,

drawing your phat butt-plug from your gaping

Ö] “This. Look!” [on your webcam you ache, quake

and crack.] “Guess it can’t be helped, fu-fu-fu.”

They’re not lost years, frenzied at my computer;

we’re the tribe that does what it must for lust,

without apology. “Play Siouxsie Sioux

and cum for me.” I stand: drunk, hornier

than the gods and start with, “Cities in Dust.”

THE FOOL [0] Soul of the Stukhtra

05 Thursday Jan 2023

Posted by in Feminism, Illustration and art, Tarot

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Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. ~ Douglas Adams

All stories must start somewhere.

In your grandmother’s Tarot deck the Fool is the ultimate free spirit, that proto-Flower Child who is the embodiment of beginnings, innocence and spontaneity. It is the first and last card since Zero is liminal, being both everything and nothing. We like to remind ourselves that, “We are stardust, we are golden/ We are billion-year-old carbon.” All this is true, and yet the gendered essentialism found in so much of that Tarot deck will only take us so far. Perhaps to the cliff for you, but certainly not over it for me. For that we need to find something else. As Nancy Baker puts it:

There’s a strong streak of anti-essentialism in Feminism, just as there is in Buddhism. It is the understanding that something like gender is not fixed or absolute, that not all women or men have some masculine or feminine essence that defines them. To put it in Buddhist terms, gender has no “self-nature.”

Western Pop Culture likes to claim that Buddhism is logical, agnostic and liberal in matters of gender and sexuality, conveniently overlooking all the misogynist views that the Buddha himself had about women, “of all the scents that can enslave a man none is more lethal than that of a woman.” For those of us who refuse or attempt to transcend such man-made concepts this critique is important because what we are searching for is liberation. There is nothing “enlightened” in any social structure that clings to ideas of rigid sexual morality and assigns half the world a secondary role simply by existing.

“Do not go where the path may lead,” Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us, “go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

How Syssk found herself marooned in ancient Japan, surrounded by folks who consider her unenlightened simply by existing is unimportant. The question isn’t whether she is capable of spiritual growth, we are all capable of that, the question is what are the forces attempting to block her and you from that growth? Discard everything that gets in your way and The Way (The Tao) opens before you.

This is Syssk’s path and so it will be ours as well.

[an earlier version of the fool; the design of the xenomorph was much closer to h.r. giger’s original vision, though the blue figure was taken directly from robbie morrison’s shakara (2012) … always cite the sources that you purloin]

NOTES ON NOTES:

I have been told that my handwriting is almost illegible, so I will reproduce my notes here:

Sibylline Xenomorphia

In almost all the riddle-like koan the striking characteristic is the illogical or absurd act or word. A monk once asked, “What is Buddha?” The master replied, “Three pounds of flax.” Or a Zen master remarked, “When both hands are clapped a sound is produced; listen to the sound of one hand.” ~ Heinrich Dumoulin

I alone seem to have lost everything. Mine is indeed the mind of a very idiot. So dull am I. The world is full of people that shine; I alone am dark. ~ Tao Te Ching

Chaos is the Formless Void but the Void is not Chaotic.

My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. ~ Fernando Pessoa

Giving birth to nothingness/ Giving birth to death/ Such terrible words/ I heard on the border/ Between dream and reality ~ Yosano Akiko

because I don’t have spit/ because I don’t have rubbish/ because I don’t have dust/ because I don’t have that which is in air/ because I am air/ let me try you with my magic power ~ Anne Waldman

bootchy

16 Thursday Dec 2021

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“The Camellia tree would leave its place/ By the gateway,/ And wander up and down the garden,/ Trailing its roots behind it.” ~ Amy Lowell.

Fetch the axe, the poet said. But when you swung,

and bit deep, dark blood spouted, and when you

bent down to tear out the stump, the ground hung

open, “like a wound.” That you could, then threw

the foul thing ten feet, was lost on Lowell.

It was her ghost tale; as if a lewd tree

using lewd roots in lewd ways made a hell

better tale than you. Bull-dagger, Bootchy

-bitch, she called you. Boon-butch. Why the poet

of, “Two Speak Together,” shunned you, dunno,

but you swaggered like a boss. That macabre

bit of wood could only spew sap: scarlet

juice. You rose, aflame, but found your hero

didn’t notice, the one you called heartthrob.

][][

Notes:

This poem began with a line from the American poet, Amy Lowell, in, “The Camellia Tree of Matsue,” a curious little tale about a haunted tree. It ends with an anonymous gardener digging up said tree and finding it hemorrhaging blood. For whatever reason the gardener got my attention so I began doing research about Lowell and that led me to this asshole: Ezra Pound. Truth be told, taking Pound to task for his treatment of Lowell is the least of his crimes. As a fascist collaborator he ignored the massacres of Italian Jews and Gypsies in 1943, he ignored the Risiera di San Sabba extermination camp in Trieste, he ignored the Nazi occupational forces and Fascist militias running amok throughout all of Italy. However, much like with Gertrude Stein in Vichy France, when Pound’s name comes up there are still apologists who will hand-wave all this away by saying, “Yes, yes, the Holocaust was unfortunate but that was all Germany’s fault, all Mussolini wanted was for the trains to run on time.” I bring this up because long before he was Benito’s boot-licker he spent his time between Cantos attacking Amy Lowell in the way so many men do when talking about their betters: he ridiculed her for her weight, her “mannish” appearance, her love of other women. She wasn’t an Imagist poet, Pound wrote, she was a, “Hippopoetess … who wore pince-nez glasses and smoked cheap cigars.” Why there is still a cult of personality around this man to this day baffles me, except that it takes a fascist to love a fascist, I suppose. If you’ve never read Lowell before I highly suggest, Pictures of the Floating World (1927) which contains numerous erotic poems written to her lover and muse, Ada Dwyer Russell.

crosses

21 Friday Aug 2020

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Eldritch horror, mon amour. You lewd beast.
Ten inch tentacles. Phat cunt bravado.

You ooze more than swagger. In films a priest
gets called in, no sex-hating freak (although

he’s all that, too), for an exorcism.
I think of this watching the line of light

beneath my bedroom door. My heart’s rhythm
skips each time your shadow crosses it. Right

now there’s nothing more arousing. Horror
is my great love drug. I’d invite you in,

if I could, but I don’t. You’re indifferent
to my needs. In films the priest has power

over sin. In my world the priest is sin.
I’m in bed, dreaming of your eldritch cunt.

][][

NOTES:
The term, “eldritch horror,” comes from H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote about the complete irrelevance of mankind in the face of cosmic gods. The ocean is the closest thing I’ll ever get to that divine indifference; the great power that moves all life on this planet, from where we originated and completely apathetic to mankind’s prayers or needs. Man-made gods are just that; always curiously obsessed with humans, they have laws and pass judgment, they are angry or merciful, they save souls, things that only humans care about. We are a species that make up just 0.01% of life on Earth. Why would the divine exclude that other 99.99%? They don’t since they exist not to coddle human egos but to hold the universe together. Animals know this. As Walt Whitman pointed out, “They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,/ They do not make me sick discussing their duty to god,/ Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,/ … not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.” That’s my rock and faith.