Thursday

120VAC

The day is hot, no window shade can hold it back.
I finger a warm bourbon bottle filtering
the noonday sun like red tealeaves.
It sloshes spidery, no water this,
no stiff upper lip surface tension.
Tilting in my hand, a little brown sunset,
like old timey pittsburgh's august
when a steel god said push and the ore
mountains shoved, and the Ohio muscled
barges up her oily back.
It's noon and hot like a whole city in my belly.

Wednesday Post

I'm completely exhausted. So...I haiku.


eecummings yer
like jackson pollack. yer art's just
splatter. splatter on.

If you can't say something nice, say something surrealistic.

I know some of you out there in the blagowubbs aren't fans of out-there, surrealist poetry. But I am. Pretty much all of the DE crew is, it seems. I don't know if it's merely chance, or if there really is, as many have suggested, "something in the water." Then again...maybe it's the corpses...

Corpses

The "exquisite corpse," is a playful little method for writing poems (in our case), wherein one person writes a bit, and then the text is passed to someone else who continues where they left off, and so on, until the group determines the poem is completed. Often, additional rules are contrived and agreed upon at the beginning of the exercise, e.g. "Two lines per addition," or "Every line must contain an internal rhyme or half-rhyme (like that one)," etc.

We are quite fond of the exquisite corpse, and while most people strive for fluency of text and coherent narrative, we tend to delight in using "corpses" as an excuse to effectively backhand the English language, while pushing the limits of indecency and absurdity as far as we possibly can. Having said that, story lines, though utterly ludicrous, do emerge, as well as regular characters, though they are in most cases horrifically reprehensible. If the authors "corpse" together enough times, they they begin to recognize each other's regular story beats, develop a standard cast of characters, and create relatively coherent narratives without losing any of the absurdity and language "blendering" we love so dearly.

We have been corpsing since the Fall of '02. But we are not the first group of DE poets to fall in love with the insane capabilities of the corpse form. In the late sixties, a group of "heads" from Newark were doing the same things--albeit with significantly greater chemical assistance--storylines, characters, blendering and all.

The compilation which they created was finally titled, "The Black Angello Manuscripts," after their main character, a private-eye named Black Angello, and currently resides in the Special Collections of the University of Delaware's Morris Library. Many of us have read the entire thing, and every now and then while hanging out the DE crowd, you might hear us quote them, e.g. "Violence is like a melody," which we use as an adage describing effectively glorified gunfights, car-chases, Tarantino films, etc.

We, this current crop of corpsers, are now also beginning to bequeath our collections (organized in chronological order by year) to the Morris Library, and to our amazement, they are being accepted!

So, one day in the far future, some poor schmuck in the English department who needs a controversial topic for their thesis, can sift through our attempts to gaslight humanity via exquisite corpses, looking for themes, and weaving the tangled threads of our storylines into a huge, ugly sweater, or booties, or something.

Poo on me.

Ok, I suck. I admit it. I haven't posted since Friday. Yes, Friday. The timestamp is wrong, so my second Wednesday post from last week was technically Thursday's, and the Thursday post was technically Friday's. So that means that this post is....is....f*ck. Monday's. It's 12:39AM. I can't win. I just suck.

So...

Bless me, Julio, for I have sinned...

So here's a rough rewrite of an oldish poem of mine that it has been suggested I work on (please comment! I need some feedback. Tear it apart if need be.)...


Eat and Die

The gray dogs of old London dance flesh from my heels
like first frost churning at a jagged sidewalk.
The speckled tiles on the classroom floor begin to creak, locked
glue-heavy in fluorescent sheen.
A bulimic girl is sleeping in my bed
stinking of vomit and saliva and cigarettes,
trying to cleanse her sins with my dead skin.
I left her this morning, escaping my own room
with old jeans and a backpack
as she lay on her side still silent, concave and sharp, vertebrae like teeth
chomping out her guts, her sinewy knees exposed as she’s curled
trapping the balled up sheets between her small and neat breasts. I was cold
all night and she slept with her back to me, chewing at my lungs if I spooned her.
She only trusts her stomach to love and he ejaculates
acid into her throat like an alarm clock whispering
eat and die
eat and die
eat and die
with his pink hands pressing her head down
when she heaves to engulf him.

These tiles under my desk are faded with the scratches of steel chairs locked
in the same spot third row third seat from the window chewing on my legs
licked dry whitebones click clicking as I’m dragged over moonlit cobblestones through the
bleaching fog I sit at this hard desk absorbing the math, the accents, the stale
breath of all the other engineers, fucked for a job in a couple years.
We all know it
but it’s never spoken.
We’re all silent, swallowing the chalk dust like cheap wine before noon,
drugged.

And she is desiccated. Her bones are dry brush
crackling in the flame of self-control. Burning fast,
her teeth are dissolving. Two rows down and yawning fangs out,
one of us engineers unwraps a peppermint candy,
trying to stay awake and fight the drugs with sugar high and
pancreas excrement. And my stomach is rotting,
aching for a taste of salt and protein,
smelling of vomit kisses.

I touched her ribs just before dawn. She woke up and whispered to the wall
eat and die
eat and die
eat and die
beautiful like rabies as the dogs returned for me. And I run.

I click click over bricks in the sun
that’s not warm enough but too warm for October
thinking of maybe taking up smoking
so I’m not always touching her breasts with empty hands...

But I guess she’s gone now. She told me to set an alarm for 11:00 and now it’s almost noon.
I left her a bagel in case she was hungry.

C-G-C-F-A-A#

Sludge is the downtuned
guitars dredging the delta
for old silted blues.

Math and Poetry meet again...

Today I went to a colloquium on the computability of self-referential machines...can you tell?

Game Theoretic

He told me I shut down and close off some things some times.
You cannot successfully argue with that assertion.
You can only circle down the drain of the Liars Paradox.
But I didn't want to argue, anyway.
I just wanted to ask
"When?"

Now,
I'm just arguing with myself.
What rooms in my own house
have I forgotten existed?
What windows have been shut for so long
I think the walls are endless?
I can circle myself in logic
but only as spirals.
Holding an apple
doesn't make it an apple.
Truth is relative.
But I...
I am lying now.

Very Old Poem(s), 9 Millionth Rough Draft

This used to be about 3 poems and I just recently tried to fit them all together to the benefit of all involved. Still working on it though...

Your Mother Keeps Finches
for A.J.


Your mother keeps finches,
works all day
at the hospital
and smokes a bowl of
your sister's finest
when she gets home.
Sometimes you smoke it together,
then eat Chinese food
from metal trays
at the chrome-legged kitchen-table,
listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn
tear holes in a condom
with his high E string.
After dinner, she yells at the dog
for chewing on the bathroom tiles.
You cover the finches' cage
with a table cloth.
The basement is yours,
the walls have
become your cave paintings,
and it's where we went shot
for shot with shitty vodka,
and you told me about your father.

The next day you tell me
he’s getting electroconvulsive therapy.
Driving on Main Street,
crossing the other Main Street,
with three fingers on the wheel,
you look at me like
a fawn slipping on slimy creekstones
and say, “He gets to forget
everything he’s done to us.”
I lean back into the vinyl seat.
“No. He’ll still remember.”
The change on the dashboard
rattles,
and you won't meet my eyes.

On your mother’s desk
is a picture,
a school picture from
second grade. You are smiling,
but the blue overalls
are a snug fit
like his fingers.

You told me you tried to
boil your brains with acid
in an Olds stranded
on a field of clover,
Tori's Little Earthquakes repeating
as you cocked
and recocked
your anger.
Just you and a gun.

There have been whole years
we didn't talk,
a silence during which I was never comfortable
imagining where you were.
Another heavy
forearm. A sharp
cigarette. A tablecloth.
Even in the air,
escaping,
you do as much falling as flying.

30 Days, First Post

I've been in a writing slump lately and I'm hoping this will kickstart my wits.

Thank you, Julio!