God Is a Bullet

The bubble of your fear buys you a gun. Your new automatic fingers embody fear, load up, and get itchy. The bubble swells inside the barrel to bursting. The automatic metallic mind in your hand makes your prissy wet and your colic hard.

The neighbor’s dogs bark. They growl and cower. “Kill! Kill!” they bark, for they hate the people on the other side of the fence. The fence is their bubble, their defenestrating defense, the wall between their cowardice and false courage. “Kill! Kill!” they bark on the internet. “We love Jesus!”

Jesus loads his gun. He is afraid too. afraid of Christmas. of not being believed in. of the bad thief—he might be black. of the other side of town. of Muslims who hate his “way of life” crowned by death on every corner. There’s no other way out.

Mostly Jesus shoots his wife. or his wife shoots him (they are not always sober). Occasionally Jesus shoots up a school—but that is his own personal responsibility. Jesus, after all, will live forever. unless he decides to shoot himself—which is the most common use of a handgun in the United States of Jesus.

There is no greater hatred than the hatred of he who would take his own life for the fear of his fellow man.

All hail the gun, lord of lords and king of kings. To call for mercy is to know that the gun knows no such thing.

12/27/2014

Florence

Newly uploaded to Bandcamp, Sputnik, the aural companion to my anthology of stories and poems about the mystery of place, Sojourner. Here for your streaming and downloading pleasure are 17 pieces from the book and two others that didn't quite make the cut, performed a Capella, with drums, with music, and sometimes other, more interesting sounds. If you already own the book, help yourself to this free download, otherwise consider donating a bit o' cash towards all the artist's hard work here, or sending me a whopping 15 Euro through Bandcamp/Paypall, for which I will mail you a signed paperback copy of Sojourner anywhere in Europe, the US, or Canada.

Cheers!

 

Doing a spate of performances in August before I leave the States and head back to Italy. The first will be tomorrow night in Salt Lake City with the irrepressible M. E. Evans. If you're in earshot, show up!

Coming up later in the month: Inside Storytime in San Francisco (Aug. 19) and Poetry Unplugged in Sacramento, CA (Aug. 21)

The excellent people over at Visions with Voices have featured a Paradoxa prose poem of mine, "Zwariowany Kapelusznik" in both recorded and written form in this month's issue. Click on the image to listen and/or read.

Florence

A Dream

HOMO QUISQUILIAE (JUNKMAN)

 

HOMO QUISQUILIAE  (JUNKMAN)

Jest another cranky cobalt crook, a tethered brat’s one-trick pony trapped in a propped-up crack, cobras break her fall into all this paradise, and we are content to seek the one step before beyond—hands that held the head that cried human tears. There was a prize for cropping hair and drinking beer. A knight, a rook to queen’s pawn one, to rack and ruin, a young man’s only honest hearth and home. Such crumbs rumble like thunder in our hearts. Once in a lifetime he runs over her thumb and fumbles with the locks—hairdressers, window dressers, undressing becomes us, our only honest crabwalk towards that opening, love.

(No! I will never thumb my nose again!)

We run instead, comrades, screeching cables and brakes, labor over levers, throated throttles to ‘at toboggan’s banking ‘round some curves woven by breezes blown through sometime summers. We vote for the hive of love and arrive at this; we’re done, have been left out in the rain, timeless bicycles, unnamed dolls, our itchy scalps above shock-rimmed eyes rolling open and shut, open and shut, our Humpty-Dumpty grins a sin to each and every one of the king’s men.

A heap! A heap! My kingdom from a heap of trash!

Love is still the most revolutionary debt we could ever call in. Without usury, a first step towards the use of life and the evolution of value. No slogan, but the only surviving form of the word “interest” draws me in—fragment of a whole, the only alliance worth re-realizing, the mote that the eye knew as the measure of its sight, the parameters of entropic erotic enterprise.

Life! The timer ticks and we make hay—if we’re luckily disposed to do so—by breaking wheat up into flour, fruit-flowering ourselves inside-out for each other; we turn suitors without suits and ask for 31 favors, tear ourselves asunder, rending our dues, aping our axes, suing our lawyers for lax black graft in heaps out back, and we sit favorably influenced by another female-named hurricane called, appropriately, L-O-V-E-Y.

As the wise man was once wont to sing, “Love, it’s a broken thing.”

It mirrors all of my cracks.

12/2011

Florence

LIBERATION

 LIBERATION

There is nothing so liberating. Nothing. There's nothing. There is nothing so frustrating as that. There isn’t even that. No, nothing’s so liberating as the frustration of waiting. There's nothing so frustrating as waiting for liberation. There isn’t. Because we forge chains. We forge chains because we’re afraid of nothing. Except frustration. Except liberation. So? So what.

Because alone is not alone, because nothing is just so. Because there’s nothing so liberating, or there wasn’t once, as a chain. And chains are real. Rings are real links and there’s nothing so, no, nothing so real as our own forged link in a chain. Anglo-Saxon tradition even here—and there’s nothing as frustrating as that.

When nothing is so, or as it seems. When there’s nothing as it should be because of rings and links, because of chains and time—time takes shape in rings, time takes shape in chains. And then there’s nothing, nothing but time's image round our fingers. Well, there’s nothing so frustrating as that. No, nothing. There’s no nothing as frustrating as the forced nothing of a liberation, of losing a ring. Because chains and rings are real. Because real rings go round and round.

Chains and rings are real because chains and rings are forged in time. We forge them in time in time’s image—and there’s nothing as frustrating as breaking a link, as breaking the round ring of a chain that we ourselves have forged in time. No, nothing’s so frustrating as that. So? So what. Nothing’s so, just so, so liberating as that frustration, as waiting to break a vow, because it breaks up the rings of your time of day.

1/22/1997

Florence

On the radio

I read a section of San Salvi on Frank Andrik's Pomo Literati radio show on KUSF in exile in San Francisco last Sunday. Here's the archived show--I read about halfway through the second hour.

BETTI BLU'S MORTGAGE

Winter streets and frozen

fountains how easy

to forgive oneself the chill

leaves burning on the plain

'neath Orvieto. Your eyes

the same skewed colors as

my own, turned down

sterile, stern, on

our child in disapproval.

And now these giggling girls

you forgot yourself in

putrid memories this train

sunk in soggy ponds

and the bloody chamber

of Bluebeard's secret room

where you walled us all up.

           2/17/2009

           Florence-Rome, in transit

Betti Blu's Mortgage by Lee Foust

AUTOGEDDON TRIPTYCH

1.) STOLEN CAR

"I see your face driving like a stolen car" --Beth Orton 

Stolen car by Lee Foust

4/2011

Florence

2.) GRAND PRIX

Skirt around the sin of circling around a skirt, that soft cleft—a little Latin chin, a little original sin—I sin, I swear I did, and still I win—despite your theft.

Every song worth singing is blue but nothing about the poet's “I” cools the tune; the guy that saw you pissing in your wishing well swears he won't tell; still, why do you keep on hidin' that hidden devil so long up your flue?

I sees it through each and every day; then I throw it, toss it, let it drift away and it's gone, long gone—anyway—in all its inconceivably allusive staying on or maybe coming back in the chorus of some cheesy folk singer's cheesy folk song.

My memory of it—and you—is gone, yet the words I write are still trying to kill you over and over—and again—can only reach out further into the pain in the ass that you continue to become, a stain on the world I wiped, I washed, and wrung out to dry (still gardening at night).

Because that skunk you always were, it seems to me, the pug hiding its white stripe in all that black, came skulking up to spray and you stunk up the place with all your grip-less gripe in gray and endless abandoning of your you and he and I.

From love to lacklove, juice to must, and justice to dust in 60 seconds; you keep on waving goodbye but never leave.

4/28/2011

Florence

Grand Prix (Autogeddon Triptych pt. 2) by Lee Foust

3.) BROKEN DOWN JALOPY

The frill sin throngs forward, friendlier than the thrush but still wrong somehow, too wholesome to be so much more than low as were the holes we packed into the Albert Hall. How many? More than enough rough trade for a stinker like you, Sue Snoo, another literary character not of my owning. Only, such renown still alludes to all of the meeces that the fat cats hated to pieces. The immaculate trap of knowing the right cat flap through which to pass—insert Mark Bolan song here—O, frail-witted composer of white waifs and anorexic dolls in pencil skirts. The girl of my nightmares approaches—everything that I ever sized-up suddenly at the tip of my tongue.

One singular procreation, a composite of counter-espionage desires surrounding a central intelligence agency knows me and all of my intel inside quid pro quo attachments, Clarisse.

I keep on going in the wrong direction, appeasing my torturers in this false Stockholm syndrome that I can’t seem to escape without dire consequences of the third kind. I have come to love fatherhood now that we have squeezed the lie of smotherhood out of that dusty tube and brushed our teeth with it. An immaculate smile makes my false face yours when I still hope you have no way of understanding my honesty in all of your sickly calculated actions adding up to a long gone thrill of seeing me succeed where you had insured yourself that I would fail.

5/12/2011

Florence

Broken Down Jalopy (Autogeddon Triptych pt. 3) by Lee Foust

MORPHEUS

Red haze purple blessing alarms don't sound today

i can't get up the sun's so hot

on sister morphine's eyelids

along her way to all the heart-stopping o.d.s

in "tiny Greenwich village apartments”

living the New Science where

not speaking does something

to sleep's tyranny

while history's blue recycling bins

get dug through by philosophers of the needle,

by philosophers of Tompkins Square Park

where the Shadow's pigs go mad

again in their circular, again in their weekly

and if you sleep too long you'll never get up

if you sleep too long you'll never get up

and every movie you see's just another sonnifero now

every button on the t.v.'s another bitter

sleeping pill to swallow and the rich

are only happy 'cause the poor despise them

they don't own anything other than that

that's useful.

9/20/94

NYC

Morpheus by Lee Foust

ZWARIOWANY KAPELUSZNIK

(For Jeff & Karolina and also for Magdalena, Chris and Anna)

“When you live in a place, you must eat the bread of the people.”

–Jeff Gburek

Will the Mad Hatnik ever relinquish his hoary grip on our hearts? He is a fickle fiend who desires his own undoing above all other enterprises. He met the Devil at the crossroads—Zürich, by chance, when his flights were rerouted—and had no need to sell his soul, having recognized in himself his own single double indemnity policy’s sole and only beneficiary.

Hitchhiking back to Algeria, by way of Abernathy, he consoled himself with erotic daydreams and vodka suppositories. However, even in this he was not alone. Alhambra Akhmatova, his accomplice, has laid the road bare by vanishing again and again into imaginary existence. The very trees trembled at the power of the misadventures that they silently vowed never to actually have.

And lies? He could tell nothing else, not even time, and yet his cell phone bloomed yellow and blue in the sun through cracks that led, all too predictably, to the underworld.

Yet suicide might actually be a way, so say I and James Hogg, of rooting out the Devil’s truffle. However—no, not “but,” anything but “but”—however, descent was unnecessary for this, our land, turned out to be that of the dead, a salvific portal to all places, a Slavonic city of the central plain, so necessary to the nomads of the steppes and the rioters of ’56, a place of heartening renewal, where union is celebrated from the bottom of beer glasses upwards, where love cannot matter and, devoid of matter, is ever so lovely.

Craven indeed is that helpless double who cannot look himself in the eye, buy at least half of his own soul, ring his imaginary lady’s finger, smile at the camera, doff his hat, and save himself through the suicide of a lady’s man.

Poznan-Florence

 6/21/2010

Zwariowany Kapelusznik by Lee Foust

LUBBOCK ELEGY (for Billy Boy)

Texas is a great hot

hollow balloon here

in Lubbock, a swollen

membrane; lethargic & frustrated

with bluegrass underfoot;

breezy and indifferent

storms pass, they soak

& they electrify

the red clay earth;

bobbing here at the end

of its tether, about

to feel that crack

of thunder; about to feel

one pair of feet fall

on its back, forever

and be gone, say, day

after day, after tomorrow;

and shudder in its own

slow rumble of thunder;

and be gone

forever

           8/11/1993

           Lubbock, Texas

  Lubbock Elegy by Lee Foust

FIRES ON MONKEY ISLAND (an honest to goodness parable!)

Penguin Island was once

Monkey Island

but San Francisco is

too cold for monkeys

so they put up

heaters on Monkey island

but monkeys (being monkeys)

tipped them over

frequently creating

fires on Monkey Island

that's how Monkey Island became

Penguin Island

               9/22/2009

               San Francisco

Fire on Monkey Island by Lee Foust

Florence (For Debra Arlene Zeller)

Florence,

Like a lover, spread

before me, unrelentingly

itself, indifferent to me

and all my bitter euphoria

Florence,

in the rain, clouds seeded

with desire spent, desire

regained and that sad old fucker

full in the sky, over my shoulder

            followed me home

—then, when the smoke cleared—

An habitué of years

of lonely Florentine nights

I pissed on the Fortezza

walked along the Mugnone

invisible as Calandrino

—no heliotrope in my pockets—

writing text messages as your train

lurched towards the Apennines, the Alps

and I found your scent

            in my room:

It was like coming

            face to face

with my own ghost.

I named her Florence.

12/14/2008

Firenze

Florence by Lee Foust

POMPEII ON THE PO

Broken bones. Broken bones and banks.

Streets long and narrow with poverty and spit. Spit spat up outta sore summer throats. Fever under a blackened sun. Perched on a porch in a plaster cast. Tequila—and broken bones.

Broken bones. Broken bones and banks.

Don’t have a dime—or belief in. Fever. Sneezing up a sore summer throat. You want to scream through the broken glass feels like your throat. Spit on your hands. Plaster, poverty, and penalty.

Broken bones. Broken bones and banks.

Cities buried in ash. A TV Pope and the clown of Tangentopoli sing “padania” for fun and profit. Oh, he’s alive all right and spewing ash over a culture that gets in the way of his bank breaking, cash. Hands up! They break your bones in the back; you spit on the streets. You’re afraid to talk through your shattered throat. Shoved down our. Fever-blackened sky. In plaster casts, centuries pass, still huddled by the sea, covering our faces with plaster hands.

Broken bones. Broken bones and the beat of the waves.

Waiting to escape. An ash-blackened sky tears at our eyes, tears at our throats, tears at our hands. Your breath turns black, your back turns blue; beaten, despised, when the racists bank on a government backed by bankers.

Broken bones. Broken bones in ash.

Your sweat dries in the plaster cast.

3/13/1999

Amalfi

Pompei on the Po by Lee Foust