Syndic Literary Journal

The Syndic Literary Journal edited by LeRoy Chatfield  has devoted a whole page to my work in issue #11 in both textual and audio versions. You get: "Seventh Street," a short story fragment from Poison and Antidote, "What if Words?" a poem from Sojourner, and "Liberation," an as yet unpublished prose poem from my Paradoxa series. Enjoy! Comment! Share! Make me (in)famous!

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

Creations

Frankenstein's Monster

I would have you back, false desire! Impetuous thought, rash child, I would have you back in the grave of my imagination, spirit of revenge, composed out of decomposition, abandoned by god and despised by humankind, in all of the horror of your perfection, the Medusan power of your hideous beauty, the monstrosity of wishing for my own suicide to swallow everyone whom I have ever loved into its frozen and orphaned belly. I would have you and have you back.

1/26/2011

Florence

Galatea

For and against, at the same time, behind, in the crush, how meaning disdice anche, resigning oneself to one sign precludes the following, introduces the thought past, drags you backwards towards an origin: I will not contradict, with a paradox, that which I never signed in the first place since anything goes, from one word to the next, since signing takes pleasure not in the erasure but in the palimpsest, the mind's tabula conglomerata, in which even a poem takes heart, from line to line, revealing and correcting its course, a series or statements—no retraction possible—each gesture smoothing and crimping the matter at hand, slipping through the poet's fingers; that sieve, the page, in time, accepting meaning, lionizing meaning, then contradicting and burying meaning until the signing is all said and done and demands re-reading—only to surrender, eventually, to interpretation. That's when it comes to unnatural life.

                                               I have turned you to stone, my desire, I have refused to speak of you, well aware that your song is a kind of prayer and that the gods have no more restrictions to enchain me regarding your breathing.

1/26/2011

Florence

Sirens

The signing is in the air, poisoning the journey, stopping time, beautiful, beautiful. My appetite for lust, for singing, for oblivion is in the song of signs, the call of the island the journeyer home never could find; my disappointing nostos, the curse of surviving beyond the song.

3/13/2011

Florence