ConvocationMid-morning late-August, sweating already in our too-tight jeans sitting here in slack
discomfort. The convocation speaker, bald and male, and in every otherwise clichéd, academically gowned, certified mundane. Silver-tongued he is not. The timeless pattern these obligations are meant to be. Full of generic boredom, bland declarative sentences float in hot toxic air over our heads toward the auditorium ceiling. I cannot suppress a yawn as flutters of orange and yellow butterflies escape from my mouth. A pretty girl beside me giggles, cupping from around my head whole handfuls of whirling lepidoptera. Her long blonde hair is jeweled in dappled white and blue butterflies as she smiles knowingly at me. And maybe the speaker too has mentioned something jokingly about the butterflies in his stomach as he apologizes for traditionally boring us so on such a beautiful August day, wasting our time in here listening to him. And as I yawn once more out roars a Pearl-Orange Harley Mirage Sportster, black and purple-edged butterflies painted on the gas tank, laughter bellowing out of its blinding chrome exhausts. Now the whole audience is hooting and clapping, on their feet and smiling as the beautiful blonde, with all the world’s butterflies still in her hair, and I climb up on the Harley. Cracking the throttle I lift the gleaming bike into a wheelie and up the aisle we varooom to hell outa there. Trailing Monarchs, Swallowtails, and Painted Ladies, vivid and iridescent, into the clear August day.
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Still Thinking of TravelThat austere beauty
a monument to stupidity: they cut down all the trees. Then for centuries they were owned, hungry, tough, stunted, religious, ill. Volcanoes and earthquakes, two continental plates rending a rockfield. Roots like cobras thread the voluptuous ruins. Only fools and rude children stop smiling. The Buddha encourages some killing. Wear white crisp short-sleeve shirts to the demo. A certain kind of hysterics is reserved for soldiers. But for the most part I stay home. When fever comes, a wet, cold – very cold – washcloth descends on my brow, and for the never-expected allover shaking cold, one that is well-wrung and warm, my eyes shut tight throughout. Two lovers meet in solitude of a damp alleyway, they stand silhouetted against a backdrop of burning moons and embattled stars flaming final glory across an endless night of dead space – embrace and click open an ornate cigarette case extending narcotic tube long and obscenely flexible. Twisting proboscises probe one another in passionate clinging, curl up like narcotic smoke in a hazy grey dawn of embers burning out and dropping to the ground mud-stained and metallic. Two lovers melt down into effluvium – let loose the clothes in hasty fumbling of pants and underdrawers – breath of rotten ectoplasm mingles with the blood and pus and sweat of an expectant orifice dripping venereal excitement. Ankles up about the ears, slither jelly on cock and asshole – states of love in fading grey dawn, moons burning out to luscious embers – shimmering translucent skin sheds snakelike in a trail of liquid jelly – makes you feel good just to see it... pubescent eyes from window and fire-escape jack off in fantastic frenzy arcing vibrant jets of jism in all the colours of the rainbow...
Hotel EternityTO EXIST BETWEEN ETERNITIES WILD NOTHING LIKE THE EYES OF THE SKY AXIS INFINITY DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE BLISS /COME FORWARD WITH YOUR VISCERA AND VIOLENCE AND SHARE MY WINGS/UNLEASH YOUR SPIRIT BENEATH THE RAMJET ALLEGRO TEMPLE OF THE NIGHT SKY A NEED FOR MIRRORS AND COUNTLESS SKIES/SHAKE YOUR INFINESSENCE SLOT CANYON HIGHBREATH NARCOTIC ERUPTIONS CLOUD NOTHINGS EXOTIC PULSE A NAME BEYOND DESIRE SEMAPHORE SIN PLAY AT YOUR OWN RISK TALKING TWILIGHT/ INTO A SPHERE OF YOUTHFUL SYMPATHY RIDES THE THIEF OF YOUTH THIN AIR ADDICTIONS MELANCHOLY BODY SACRILEGE TATTOO HIGHWAY INSOMNIA PUNK/ TEENAGE BLOOD REPETITION OF A THOUSAND HUNGRY EYES/SOMETIMES WE ARE ALL ETERNAL IN THE CONSTELLATION OF MIDNIGHT MOSAIC FACTION/ MY GREEN UNQUEEN GALLERY CRUSH HYPERRITUAL AUTUMN CRY OPULENCE LIKE A TRIANGLE AND A DUEL/SOME TALK TO MEN WHILE OTHERS TALK TO GODS DANCE IT VISCIOUS RIDDLE OF THE SANDS CHAMELEON CHARADE STAR CODE CHALICE/ASK THE DESERT ORACLE THESE POISON DECLARATIONS THE REAL UNREAL CONVERSATIONS WITH A NEW REALITY/NATURE’S SYMPHONY DRAFT INTOXICATION
The Piston GateMood was only a beginning
the first word of a new chapter the arc and wash of it as if they dreamed of cleanliness again a curtained register obscured by clouds across this wasteland distance * * * * * * * she provided a diagnosis which it seemed had sucked them into something resembling tenderness it was not the time or the place for other shards of consequence “this is not our time” they repeated as the light turned golden * * * * * * * did she understand the knifing pain the knowing pain that dragged him from the earthy bonding of mud into the shrieking scream of birdsong it was a sound that needed to be heard before he buried himself behind the piston gate. IS THIS LOVE? In her years away from me
she learned to make a red-coloured soup from stones, and yellow tea from dying hay. She offered me both when she finally let me find her, knowing I wouldn't drink such things. But I surprised her, drank the soup and tea down with a smile on my face, even asked for more of both. I was violently ill after, blood in my stool, teeth in my spit, but it was all worth it, seeing her face as she realised she had been wrong about me across the years neither of us would get back. TempleWalk, saunter, crawl, gallop
For what felt for hours long On a path of tent’cle Functionality bent To those bars Liszt had wrote And whose paths Escher would Ink in for viewing mass Until at a day’s drudge I arrived to floating Temple, Synagogue, Mosque Of cubes stacked snowy beige Of dungeon doors, iron bars Of rooms breaking logic And glyphs etched among walls That relate thousands like: ᄌ Ⰽ K ʞ Ж た Just to keep going for Miles past eye’s range they go Never revealing me Sagas, poems, stories, epics. The Illusions of Other Sides No matter how much I shower I still smell the dirt on me, the decay of my death hidden beneath the still strong sting of chemicals used to preserve me even as I wasted away, the satin inlay of my coffin like the scent of a child’s favourite toy, the wood, oak, I broke to rise, gathering multitudes of splinters in my stained skin that I cannot remove not matter how much I pull and drag at them with my cracked nails, shadows of clay deep beneath their paleness, as unmovable as the splinters, all to reclaim air, sunlight, life, my life, the life I never wanted to leave, the life I missed as I missed the breath in my lungs, little realizing at the time, though I would learn it soon enough, that the life I led, the life I was so eager to return to, never existed anywhere but in my head, and I had wasted a good death – a sudden passing in my sleep, a blessing when measured against the manifold ways a person can cease to be - for nothing.
Days have passed since I broke back into living, and, after discovering the life I knew was nothing more than imagination, all the places I searched that it was never a part of, I have spent that time showering every hour to remove the traces of death from me, even though I suspect that I will never remove that smell, its weight in the air as true and real as the life I sought was false and fake. And yet I will keep showering every hour of every day until the water runs dry or the rest of my body falls away and I am nothing but bone shining wetly, absent of all identity. I would clamber back down into the dirt, barricade myself back into my coffin – I returned to my grave soon after I saw the life I was seeking never existed, not wanting to be a dead man lost in a world with no place for me - but some disenfranchised soul, someone doomed to believe that any death is better than the worse days of a life, has taken it, covered himself up with all that loose dirt and broken wood, his earth-muffled cries of joy rising sluggishly towards the unfocused sky which looms mockingly above me. After KubabaNo man in the village stood among the scorpions.
But she arose like the sun from the node of the frozen night. Her story proceeded like parable, the sergeant opening the door to the Elysian Fields, then the escape from the desert’s turmeric tides. She leaves the village’s withered men and heads for the prophecy of the horizon. The stories of her father provided aid in the raft bed and blew through the seabirds and stars. How well the dead run with the sail. Eventually, on the third day she battled pure silence with a bronze hammer. The rain threw her a rope into the fire dark, and a house emerged on the reef of stones. But it did not delight. She needed a sliver of kiss to decorate the edge of the moon. She needed a god to appear as a word in the head. But the island kept its word. It kept it on the cusp of a visit from an enlightened being who is not possible, who is not home. The men of the treeline came together, and they saw the ascension of song and breath and medicine. They performed as they were commanded and claimed their understanding. They had brains to help them interpret their emotions. They scarred and healed, inked by the fog of happiness, and quickly spoke to the maze of infinite circumstance . . . in tongues. |
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