San Salvi event poster

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

ALPHAGORIA (An Introduction to the PARADOXA)

“Her dress was made of very fine, imperishable thread, of delicate workmanship: she herself wove it, as I learned later, for she told me. Its form was shrouded by a kind of darkness of forgotten years, like a smoke-blackened family statue in the atrium. On its lower border was woven the Greek letter Pi, and on its upper Theta, and between the two letters steps were marked like a ladder, by which one might climb from the lower letter to the higher.”

--Boethius, The Consolations of Philosophy

ALPHAGORIA

Now is this winter? Alpha to Omega or Pi to Theta? Another sine qua non embryonic twinkle in some discontent father’s zoophagus eye. Favors production, this world of eternal return. Dark clouds glower at the crash and burn, at the Intel Inside artificial insemination of ages. In saeculum saecularum. This alphabet is a tripartite world war of words: ZANG TUMB TUUUM! Its bold retreats and advance alarums retrace a column of text under attack by drawn slashes of bomb. A gaff forgets, abjects, is sagacious in such evasions. This sum of York offers them often, offends, and is forgotten before the Theta can claim ascention.

But i… Da rules—dem ol’ dry bones, t’ain’t janglin no mo’. That threat was not made true. The raven always gets the last word, remember? Kinda takes you back: crumpling up inside of womb-like spaces, flesh and feasting, sin and symptom, sense and insensibility. Simply living and graphing pleasures as old as opinions ass-backwards gasp nimbly in a lady’s chamber. ‘tis thought, thought i, baggaged self-packing polystyrene in its own anxiety not to be lost, arranged in advance retreats through travel agents’ itineraria. Thought is not sought out to be paralyzed by thinking, to fall and gain through comings and goings, to say yes to all nay saying an’ that sagacious hayseed fool’s sense of what’s not worth gnawing.

The ruminator threatens to run through his theories too hastily to erase all the paper a priori tigers burning in the bright sublime of symmetrical fear.

The burden of thought bears what’s not worth saying down payments' maid against that certainty that went without. What aims outside of thinking is borne in suffering and suppositions akimbo. A crumpled body breeds crumpling and rears its symmetrical back, unfolding. All these baroque bric-a-brac's gestures lead disintegration to the trough and pour themselves inside out. So many ideals embody liquidation—a thirst for fornication—or merely work, opus reticularum, in unthought-of constructions—that’s just the way we undo things around here.

2/14/2002 & 2/1/2003

Firenze

"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