"Old, bearded fish"

Old, bearded fish

neglected in backroom

tanks delicately

negotiate the murk

-y waters of forget

-fullness.

12/2011

Florence

...

Aquaphobic Art Show

 

Alabaster abstracts in traction

interested in treble; fractured

interiors stumbling upon belted red

shelters, buttressed, in fact,

and transacted under heavy manners

by bruisers tearing shreds to shreds

and trashes to trashes, running dead by

some dumb track or other, dreaded

by a pair of wheedling stumble bums

in tandem. Some dumb luck

—in other words numb-nutted hockey puck—

needle-freak reminds our flying strumpet

to duck in order to avoid drowning.

12/2/2011

Florence

THE MUSES KNIT SWEATERS

THE MUSES KNIT SWEATERS

Underwire experiences of renowned censors: he who seeks to silence the mysteries of life and death submerges himself in them. To know grace is to care who won and rake the leaves off of no one’s lawn, ignoring the laws of Id and file. Whole tribes pass through the gates of ivory, gates of horn, forming in their fomenting identities. They get sold back their own sacred faces by the sweatshop seamstresses of fashion and art, daughters of Retro, goddess of return.

The leaves have fallen that are yet to fall but no one says so in the Daily Mail. Taken for granted, the naked deterrents of time round the bend down the far side of the track and die laughing at the rabbit. As if to bar the gagging wages of pensioners, no one reads the circular anymore.

You’d think all this silence were significant, especially under erasure; but it’s erotic after all, hiding the greasiest spot with a daub of kitsch. While the wives of Bath are busy boring children, the terrain reminds order to rearrange silence for its own ends.

Scapegoats rise to the priesthood here, riding in on golden asses. The fallen leave, the comings are rain, jiggedy-jig, the dancers fill their cards with horses’ manes and plead insanity. Verbs take over with the brief tenacity of red runway carpets sprinkled with holy rose petals. Trampling replaces worship here and...

...i laid lame as Armageddon’s carts strolled by, out of gas and un-newsworthy.

8/20/1995

NYC

SAN SALVI

« La follia è una condizione umana. In noi la follia esiste ed è presente

come lo è la ragione. Il problema è che la società, per dirsi civile,

dovrebbe accettare tanto la follia quanto la ragione, invece incarica una scienza, la psichiatria, di tradurre la follia in malattia allo scopo di eliminarla.

Il manicomio ha qui la sua ragion d'essere. »

(Franco Basaglia)

PART ONE

i

from the inside of inside, from a place inside each of us where no other approaches, i speak with a voice that demands quieting, even if such a voice can’t be heard outside, where we are all vulnerable, in our uniqueness, in our power, in our heartbreaking desire to desire, to be other than what we are by being with another, where we know we are like no other and can never be, because we speak, from the inside of inside, among the drowned, even as they try to save us, because we are outside of belonging, inside belonging's power but outside of its truth, inside an inside, put away, hidden even from the city that surrounds this city, the speaking deafness of our outward personae, the curse of humankind, drown in our own individuality.

there is a burning red wound in the night, a lamp lit before the madonna, another imagined other that some can hide inside themselves, here, where to make a sound would be a sacred taking up of sides, drowning in refusal, another symptom, the inability to take part, more than a simple silence, our fear turned outwards, from inside this inside, an internal escape, an illusory impulse to flee, down this tree-lined avenue, its omnipresent dogs, its expected squatters' graffiti, these desperate political measures, and the walking dead, its walls a monument to hiding my refusal.

survivors have some nerve, surviving, but the drowned drown easily, in politics, la lotta, in protest, committed to their causes, the ends supplying the means, mouthing others' words, other rooms, other voices, so many agendas, so many programs, we being committed because of our effects, the abandoned church here becoming central to our twilight perambulations, bleeding red and luminescent the whole sleepless night through, some nerve, surviving, our effects confiscated, in the belly of firenze, in the womb of the city, in san salvi, where they think that they're saving us from ourselves when really they're saving us from their own indignation, what they might do to us, and their church, built to faith, belief in something that they know to be impossible, the uncertain certainty that there is something called reality that we all know too much about, that could be squashed with a faked miracle or two.

i, on the other hand, have no faith, not in their science nor their god, their sacred belief in conquering disbelief, or the red wound they would cut into the night in the name of his mother, offer up to his mother, against the night's natural darkness, this voice spits on their desire to quiet the inside of inside, even though its speaking tortures me, i know that its silence tortures them, once and for all, the voice of trauma, the voice of protest, the wound, refusal and resistance, abnegation and fear, even in this tree-lined avenue, even in this garden-filled fortification, a silent fortress walled into the heart of the city, into the mind of the city—i will not say soul—images imagined or born of the day-to-day, the real, what does it matter? inside the inside, interiority itself, a new-town of non-belonging and refusal, an outsider internalized, encircled by san salvi, san salvi's walls, the drowned saved, drowned again in other voices, other systems, out of sight, misunderstood even as we un-wall our voices, from inside, speaking the speech of disagreement, to imagined companions, the freedom of non-communication.

but i will not be drowned, they tell me, i will emerge eventually and speak the fear of my naked aloneness in their world of agreement and reality, to their world of agreement and so-called reality, spitting, croaking, bleeding out beneath this abandoned madonna in a city of new uses, her candle slitting the night open, the night that must fall, a languishing wound in its comforting darkness, a world that must drown such voices before they are heard and cause some poor woman to abandon home and hearth by loving me and all of my quiet madness.

inside the inside speaks an isolated voice of disagreement, of madness, yes, and sometimes listening but never hearing itself.

 

INBETWEEN --5 chapters

I

All that winter they were ripping up the streets of Europe, the streets of Paris and Florence, the streets of Rome. Scaffolding circles churches, hides triumphal arches, strips of green nylon tarpaulin stretched across its planks and frames. Streets have been uprooted, cobblestones stacked against the walls of black buildings. They're turning hotels into museums, letting the steam out of the sewers, putting statues behind glass; policemen are looking on, machine guns slung over their shoulders. In Rome they don't have any portable electric lights; instead they use little pots of fire that look like the old-fashioned anarchist's bombs in silent movies to warn cars of the edges, where the streets drop off into dusty pits. 

He looks across a muddy hole filled with heavy machinery at a museum. Closed for renovation, the sign says. 

A whole street in the center of Florence has been ripped up; the exclusive shops face each other across a dank pit of reddish earth, and the walls of green-shuttered windows seem to close in on you as you look up. A little rain slips into the narrow streets as Persey hurries home carrying groceries. Other Americans and the well-to-do Florentines pass slowly, laden with colorful brand-name shopping bags. In Paris, between snow flurries, he watches them pouring out cement sidewalks in long strips down the Boulevard St. Michael; they were laying out the streets of Europe that winter. People pass in a hurry, nobody watching the police frisking some Arabs up against a wall.

SPARAGMOS

The perfume vats have spilled,

flooding the streets of Florence with sweet

stink and there’s nothing I can do about it.

We don’t get paid a living wage

for what we do, her boyfriend

doesn’t do her when she needs doing,

and there’s nothing I can do

but sit and listen. There’s nothing

to be done when the cars continue

to rev and the brakes on my bike

don’t work, and the bank steals your world

away 9.50 € at a time—month in

and month out. And there’s no point

in touching the computer screen; you’re

two months out of touch, asking

for Gypsy change, wishing you were

Penny Rimbaud with a country

retreat safe enough for an anarchist

convention. And Max is dead,

a knife in his gut on the bed

where he let strangers fuck him

so as not to feel so alone

when strangers fucked him, alone

in the slow dismemberment that Psyche,

the goddess, never could have predicted;

her womb the center of an archaic worldview

Christ knew nothing about.

And your resurrection? Will it pay

these bills? Will it wash these windows

we look through? Will it make us whole

or wholesale?

Oct. 4^th, 2011

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

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

WAKING DREAMS

 (An historical literary meditation dedicated to the followers of Virgil Parthenias, my double, my doppelgänger, literary parents and siblings, secret sharer, inspiration and copyist, – mon semblable, – mon frère! Frank Andrick, Gérard de Nerval...Nadar, Rodin...)

Cranial Nadar’s framed Nerval will sleep in my true dreams from this day on, defamed, the way the road is a kind of life confused with the night. Rodin smoothed such beauty out of hand and cold stone while Nerval’s fever revealed, in a peal of leprous bells, ravens sleeping in the tower struck down. That collapsing of ear and door, of rank and file, rood and pillar,  the livelong day in the nick of time, in the might of our kinship and piss.

Then the resurrection. No peut-être’s ruse to be surrendered back and forth regardless of the heart’s needles. Further from the center, along the city’s margin, the double’s pen creeps up and down to Hell and back between the drunk, the dawdling, and the debauched, wishing on the vaginal star that came and took him down off of the Rue de la Vieille-Lanterne, careful not to destroy anyone in its path.

Justicia is armed against them, arms them against Misericordia’s staying hand. Handy that, yesterday’s excuse of precedent as a philosophical platform for taking arms against a sea of have-nots, hoping to take something home, and harming them once again with desperation’s helping hand slap. “Don’t touch that!” gavels the judge, regarding the flimsy points of law, “you might break it.”

Alone with the night and a princess’ broomstick, the geography of the city betrays you at last. A descent to end the circling, you dangle between Heaven and the deep blue pavement: hands nailed to a cross, yesterday's god couldn’t get down to help you either up to or down from. Our Lady of Enlightenment put you too rudely out of doors that night, your taunting aunt Ada has her note.

“Merde!” you said, “the mere gawking of this madre dei corvi cawing will be the death of me.”  And it was. You saw to it with the saw-toothed practitude of the night both black and white.

The final gripe upon your pyre will be male, your lame coffin-brother’s translation from sloppy Montmartre to Père Lachaise. Death, the ultimate double. Finally to your grassy knoll of impacted cranial worms as they translate you back to solitude. The world will always have its regrets for being made in man’s image. You, and all of the followers of Virgil, will have Febilia’s fire and the night to make it shine.

10/1995

NYC

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

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