Which Side Are You On, Boy?

The skull of Shane MacGowan haunts my sleep.

Octavio Paz is a Mexican who invented a new city made of words and bright shadows and a black sun.

In Paris Julio Cortazar imagined tigers roaming through the unused wings of colonial palaces.

In your heart you too are an expatriot. London Bridge is falling down...I am London Bridge.

Shane's songs are singing themselves. They are returning to Tipperary--commingled with grime and streecorner amphetimines.

The Catholics invaded. Protty Britain fought back...

Down by the Train

There's the same lack of life in it that you enjoyed about FM commericials. Not to belabor the point but that's an insidiously specious form of bullshit. The kind that's begun appearing in sociological studies out of the best American universities. All American universities are more alike than unalike. At least in the wider context. Force yourself to look at this w/o blinking. Force yourself not to think in the latest cliches. When I think of TV I've been thinking about the Greeks lately. Their "storge" & our "nostalgia" (which is there's too). My kitchen floats in the there where I'm most comfortable. Where it rings true though electronically. Broadcast a certain homely kitchenness with a fourth wall taken out to look through. Ha Ha Ha. Always three when written. Seldom transcribed accurately. Our letters don't do that. & they don't do much except what has been prescribed by tradition. A living but limited tradition. Think about limits. Think about insides that pretend to be outsides. Think about tourists & residents. Do you differentiate between travellers & nomads? Obviously. But not always obvious. At eight o'clock it's cold & the street lights are on & I dream of smoking. Warming up. So different when anonymous. Just another kid. Here they know everything. They're vast & disorganized but comprised of many eyes. I get intimidated easily. It's funny how little time it takes, how pretentious I am, how (impertinent) ideas about work ethic & commercial breaks impede better ideas. This stuff is so cheesy. How much skepticism is too much? Who yearns for pure being? What kind of battlements have been erected? Whose life's dreams have been inspired by the 48th parallel? The true Hibernians are not of this world though in it. Bass sounds can become part of you. Springs remind me of eternal return. Dirt & fuzz are drawn to crevices in floors & the body's folds. We become familiar with the smells but not the idea(s) of the literal microbes living within us. Or we are right at hom but have a little shot of something before bed to understand clearly what's all around but not what we're looking at...hey, this could be a punchline: false consiousness is looking straightahead & knowing exactly what's in front of you.

Collapse of Deer City

There never was a Deer City. To speak of its collapse is foolish fancy. But it is an act of imagination to conjure Deer city before envisioning its fall. The despot of the city taunted his adversaries with empty threats & coy dissembling. This was a game to him. He was a master of the carved wooden pieces on the ornate board in the game room beside the bedroom chamber within the fortified palace atop the once-strategic hill. Now the hill exposes him. The squares of the board are redesigned by enemies. There is a circle within a circle within a circle within.... Deer City, below the palace has began to erode from within. But it's nothing I can see. The citizens play their own game, mysterious, seeming to consist of arbitrary penalties for violating contradictory rules, seeming to encourage contstruction in the form of disassembling, seeming to make no distinctions amongst the game's mirrors. Tidal pools. Shards of glass. Unfathomable quarries filed with the century's rainwater. Screens of disused computer monitors. The planes have come & gone, come & gone. The palace now a market. The game evolves, remains inscrutable even to the players, who with a despot's guilde dissemble, while outsiders attempt to divine rules & strategies. I have come to believe all the games there have ever been are divine jokes: despots are the fools, priests the jesters. Players are the very pawns they move. Writers & other docents? Errant folklorical scribes, mistaking the joke for a ballad meant to sing children to sleep & hum to oneself when fitful.

A Perverse Honor at That

The temporary city-to-be gathers rounds for the ceremony. I was taught years ago by the custodian of the temple that the gap is wide indeed between the ceremonies of power & ceremonies of the commons. On my own I've seen the many disguises of the ceremonies of power. Folk ornamentation. Plain speech & idle chatter between the ancient incantations. & the incantations spoken with neither understanding nor goodwill. Spoken with guile. an acid rain. We won't realize the effects until years from now. Why am I being honored? Why today? & why have I submitted to be used this way? Why have I consented to be part of the spectacle--the well-orchastrated circus that mocks our traditions while wearing its robes?

For the chance to speak.

I Made the Traitor List

I loiter within the spring at the heart of every autumn.

It's long past curfew, the streets all but empty: cats in heat heard but not seen, always behind trash cans or around corners in alleys or in the shadows (in plain view were there light enough). Windblown blossoms cross the street airborn & embarrassed by their goodlooks, sweetsmell, & youth...or is that how I'd feel were I swirling about like that?

Outside it's fall everyday all day but in here the young flirt shamlessly then wait till dark to couple off on Half Moon Beach to neck & fuck on the rocks. Outside I was dying.

That is until yesterday when I turned you in & began loitering within the spring at the heart of every autumn.

War & Its Malevolence

What was it like--that country, that farm? They fasted through the religious season. Can't imagine how or why they'd do it. Why now? How with all those children? The babies thrived, she said, despite conditions.

The unimaginable grief when the first casualty came home. The trees heavy with fruit and the older children who climbed high. High enough to see the cavalcade enter through the city gates. The oldest of the young made a solemn vow unheard by all & crossed his heart & looked at a passing sparrow. You will pay and pay and pay. He spat on the ground just missing his sister on a lower branch who turned up without opening her eyes.

She climbed down, shook the tree, & claimed her prize of fruit & the wailing of her brother who landed across the wire fence. The other children held on though some had fallen onto lower branches. Those still hanging there answered my questions politely when I founded them there.

That night we feasted. Even the young were exquisite butchers after the men left for the front & their mothers & married sisters began spending the workweek in factories.

Or so I thought, until, while taking a piss in the commons in the middle of the night, I saw wolves walk into the children's homes. The wolves walked upright & massacred all the little ones and their older siblings, too young for the front & factories, including the girl who shook the tree and the brother who, though of warage, lay in bed unable to fight.

I screamed. What else could I do?

When I woke up in the middle of the pasture, the sun was high & the children were running about, galloping, chasing dragonflies, checking each other for ticks now & again. They told me I'd had a bad dream & that they'd had it too. That weekend no women came back from the factories & then one morning I was the only one left & there was no city.

[Range]

Beyond the fence the frontier was poemish
forested voices poured fermented longing over words in wide mouthed pint glasses
like a laundromat quartet lingerie & sox everywhere one short
lonesome threesomes of anguish & snake hiss
aimless salacious provocation zero machines for future
venture capitalize on the inopportune slip up my ass on the line
was crossed up double crossed loose lipped whereas
tongue-tied tight assed tongue lashed eye line the street
with a writhing multitude & riot cops feeling up
to defending the whole home in each human soul
violated my grand volition orgiastic, archaic, anarchic,
anachronistic wet dream now a dry town
media flesh wires tube to tube anchor
man to electric ground flights of fancy
bed stories he’s fucked with bed
time stories to go off in my head
out of here time mind full of
fantasies elicit illicit gasps never mind
the gap between hole & whole holed up
in a cell brains sells fetters to deforested voicelessness
once poemish now anthemic, anemic, & widely understood to
cover the UgliTruth with a syrupy liqueur.

Three for the Fool

The Arguments Eschew the Source at Their Own Peril

A gaping hole in the sky speaks silences
to the dumbstruck legions below, their heads
tilting up, their mouths open. Tune out
interference static, sorry ones & zeroes & what-not
from the gadget boxes & chrome tabernacle of circuitry
dispensing digital Eucharist to awestruck consumberbots.
Whatever temple is good enough – more matter of no matter,
as in who cares? A question I want answered
before another atmospheric airwave episode strikes you zombie.
Hey, quench your fist knucklehead & watch the returns.
The small hours are stealing the votes. Burgeoning hangover
despite expanded sobriety stations. So many channels.
Watch the intake, baby girl, first or last grail.
Jesus, the air’s heavy under this regime.
Belly up to the New American Century.
As the saying goes, what’s good for your goose is cooked.
No do over this time, Sisyphus:
On yeh go.
On ye’go.
On y’go.
*
You Were Foolish to Start with Ideas Instead of Language

Nothing could be done. You insisted.
Use punctuation to create ambiguity
Or clear things up.
"Nothing could be done," you insisted.
So it is what it is whether you’re listening or not
Or whether it ever gets written down
Unless the transmission’s on the blink.
How’s your freewill treating you?
What’s your name doing on top?
Except it’s true you’ve learned patience
& discernment, which can’t be taught no matter
the happy buzz of campus kiss-up & your colonoscopy fund.
Prorated mentorship on a grandscale consumes a counterculture.
Don’t look so surprised. Your soporific retinue leaves you
none the wiser. The amble bodied are maximizing
their learning potential & grazing the water parks,
esplanades & flea markets on weekends. What’s a wannabe to do?
As to the degree of selfinterest, You’re the doctor,
you figure it out. Is it the order of operations or a consenting adult
form? Maybe both. I can never get out of my own way when
Prolix keeps me up all night. (As if you’ve never heard
that one before.) I started working out &’ve never been in better shape.
*
"The Boards That Signify The World"

Die bitter. Die! Die welt, bedeaten.

Has your Faith Community gone south?
Who’s left to take your picture? to make an iconic image?
"Do you even realize how impotent that is for the TruArtist?"
Nothing is more imported.
Nutting is have as importunate.

Wake up to your real lice. Cleanse the sheets-- the curtain opens on the the first act. Making a scene in the minimal aisle. You’re so punk rock. How can you stand it among the peach fuzz & skim milk? Identity is performance. Name dropping creates celebrities. There is such thing as reciprocal stardom. Every New Yorker knows this & they’re starting to catch on in SF & in the Northwest & w/o it LA’d have no economy to speak of & as for culture…. who did you sleep w/? Don’t tell me you forgot to take notes. I was hoping to edit your Collected Emails some day. Did I say I’d sleep w/ you? A coy way of saying your work bores me. There are other venues. Try the gazebo circuit. I hear the public parks need more squirrels. Giddy up!

The American Dram

Once upon the rant, Elias-like, we prophesied the antimonian verb. In a garden hidden by a torment of roses, the quietists made the best of their split situation: half worm-eaten, half-reborn with carcass infestation. Those were days when it seemed the world would split open & suck us down into it – or the heavens’d burst & suck us up.

Later, after the days had passed, the quietists came out of their garden, nominally fighting off technological hegemony, all the while unwittingly buttressing the status quo with stakes & lattices.

We went underground, in a sense becoming quietists ourselves – in the dark under dangling roots. We started taking down for up & so finished in a garden of our own.

Elias-like, we returned, down into the old world, fighting gravity & history all the way. Our chariots gleamed with nutrient rich soil.

Upon the rant once gain, with the world turned upside down…

Cheap products of great size in hopes art is the ageless death.

Certain Holocaust of Art One day Embody Give Shape to the Calamity It's of Human Labor Which for Theories of slavery An art Might Embolden Or scale It through Calamity's Poetry for Rhode Island of our Art internment Apologists Touch to embrace The name It different So culture beside Impoverished Tunes & Cheap cynic

Etymology

[Middle English, from Old French, forethought, from Latin prvsi, prvsin-, from prvsus, past participle of prvidre, to foresee, provide for. See provide.]

Nouns

A person hired temporarily for a job, typically before having taken an examination qualifying the person for permanent employment: fire department provisionals.
A temporary stamp that is used before the official issue is released.
{capitalized} A member of the extremist faction of the Irish Republican Army established in 1970.