tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-150784602011-10-24T14:54:16.499-05:00Rants and reflections on poetry, psychology, religion, individuality, and dissent in America.Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comBlogger431100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1138300081544188002006-01-26T13:26:00.001-05:002008-05-09T09:00:14.475-05:00

“Your love is like doggerel,” she told me. “When I want my rhythm Sprung and Manley meters hung on my enjambments, you give me nothing but caesuras or go slant when I seek heroic coupling and crave the thunder of brute joy’s commandments. “Your lines are always limping with elision. Even after lessons on revision your archaic diction and contractions discharge their salty stresses in

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1138299901770452342006-01-26T13:20:00.003-05:002008-05-09T08:57:49.152-05:00

What began, began with a bang Or rather, bang! It began. So say the cosmic biographers, readers of the red shift, seeing scions of some singularity twigging out. Existence is an arboreal habit . . . lives in the treeness of trees, deep in seeds or in leaves or conifers’ cones or like long-armed orangutans, loping huge fruits, furry in the branches. Squatters, yes. All simians are

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1138299583693655472006-01-26T13:10:00.000-05:002006-01-26T13:19:54.320-05:00

Some miscellaneous poems that are not part of What the Road Can Afford: "Sonnet" for Patriarchal Creation Volta of Venus

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1129825240859729152005-10-20T11:19:00.008-05:002009-09-17T15:01:01.380-05:00

9/17/09 I haven't maintained this blog for years now. It remains as the container of my book of poems, What the Road Can Afford. I have removed the essays and other prose, as I feel they are no longer relevant to my current work and thinking. As soon as I find the time, I will be starting a blog at www.uselessscience.com/blog that deals with the work in Jungian psychology I have been

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1125943562948218522005-09-05T13:00:00.000-05:002005-12-14T16:01:48.416-05:00

for CM “A young man in the dark am I But a wild old man in the light That can make a cat laugh, or Can touch by mother wit Things hid in their marrow bones . . .” W.B. Yeats, “The Wild Old Wicked Man” We have an old man who lives upstairs. It’s my fault, really, I said he could stay. One day he arrived at our doorstep, it was the middle of February, and he was dressed as an inebriated Santa

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1125942989336035872005-09-05T12:53:00.000-05:002005-12-14T16:00:44.943-05:00

(Another American Messiah Tells His Tale) The purpose of wandering upon deserted towns is to run into deserted people, not, as it is commonly believed, to allow one’s own desertedness to diffuse through alleyways littered with anonymous metals into the loose swing of barroom doors down the frayed ropes of dead wells that have absorbed the western dust as men have absorbed the amber of the sun.

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1125942782284739862005-09-05T12:52:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:59:46.073-05:00

When I am dancing in the meadow with my sword, swinging it gaily and humming sweet verses, stealing the sight of monsters— then you are a child climbing trees in bare feet, noticing new graces in my form. When I am wretched with lust and dirty as a dead magpie, rattling about with hookers, impervious to your drug— then you with long finger nails and black dizzying hair will explain to me

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1125942699394713082005-09-05T12:49:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:34:58.960-05:00

I You have heard, I’m sure, that it is the blue flame that is hottest. This is the purest of heats. When Jesus roasted a lamb for his supper the spit would stick it under the nose of a blue flame, the flame, like a royal food tester, would lick it all over, smack its pale blue angel lips and say, “No, no poison in this one, no reason to ship off into the unleavened bread just to keep on living

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1125941686841926552005-09-05T12:34:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:30:02.273-05:00

I am a poet because I write about the sun. I say things are golden that aren’t really. And not surprisingly, the sky started looking down on me like a dog looks down on its food dish just before it’s filled. I now have a new pair of creek boots and everywhere I go I snicker and leave flittering salmon in people’s socks. I’m a regular Santa Claus when it comes to that. I’d rather be an inventor

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1125941643173184252005-09-05T12:33:00.003-05:002010-11-08T13:53:46.894-05:00

for T.S. Eliot We are boarding the train and steam is leaking out of its platform. It’s like a huge snake speaking in the cold that forgot to bring his body along. The voice of steam is curling up around us as we coil in a queue toward the train, our feet shuffling in a slow fall of scuffed dominos . . . ribs of belly muscle expanding and contracting. Or else . . . are we the body? (We are

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1125941531397374472005-09-05T12:31:00.001-05:002005-12-14T15:27:53.076-05:00

Dear whoever you are, I’m writing this letter because . . . I really just don’t know anymore, maybe I just shouldn’t get up in the middle of the night and sit back on my recliner in total darkness not watching but listening to things going on on my porch, to noises outside my house. It all starts out very quiet, and it really is late, but with time things start happening, poppings and crackings

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1125941489132058562005-09-05T12:31:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:26:55.773-05:00

When I was a bad child I would be taken out back to the gazebo for a spanking . . . but once I got there, my parents only talked about the idea of taking me out back to the gazebo for a spanking. As I became more responsible, my punishments changed. I was told to take myself out back to the gazebo for a spanking, as it was known that when I got there I would most certainly think to myself

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1125941140161941522005-09-05T12:24:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:24:57.123-05:00

You’re just a featherhorse— you’re no “Pegasus”. I can see the paste slopping out at the creases, wings that don’t lift or flap, and if I’m wrong— leap off that precipice and fly. I hope your feathers have dried! Or that some swooping fart of Zeus will catch you in its craw and steal you off to heaven. Goldenboy is long gone with that hideous head— but the blood still gnashes at the earth like

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1124486087402178642005-08-19T16:14:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:33:35.753-05:00

I have stolen everything about you. When I set my ear up to your chest I hear a bog filled with phantoms. I steal your diamond ring to cut the glass to rob you blind. In the mud in the mire rushes fidget. I have folded into my trench coat your missing pigtail and concealed myself between your empty ecstasies. All the passings by limping on your heron legs leaving crooked

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1124486053441546072005-08-19T16:11:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:32:28.786-05:00

I fell or was pushed from a seat among angels and landed like an armful of kindling in a place where the footsteps of my father were deafening. I broke or was drowned in a river among men and sank like a pair of spectacles in a current where the hands of my father were baptizing. I shouted or was blamed for the waste of passions and froze like grass beneath the snow

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1124485730918726192005-08-19T16:08:00.000-05:002005-12-14T16:03:18.890-05:00

A messenger arrived at my doorstep with a message for me. “Hold out your hand,” he said. I held out my hand and he withdrew a small arrowhead dripping with poison from his bag and stabbed it into my palm. 700 things rushed through my head: to crumple to my knees, to choke him until either he or I breathed his last, to scream at the heavens, to run down the street shedding my clothes,

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1124485687171860532005-08-19T16:06:00.000-05:002005-12-14T16:02:48.030-05:00

I dreamed I was a red-haired girl who fell into a lake of semen. I locked my strong thighs together like holding a gulp of air. Strange things moved in the thick milk. A hand fell under my arm, dragged me out. I coughed on the shore, the bearded lips of Dionysus kissed me. I dreamed the Thousand Men hanging. You, as tall as a father, whispered, “They are the year gods of all the years.” A

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1124388248978424922005-08-18T12:59:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:32:49.223-05:00

Faith Fictions “Be turned to me with all your heart and do not cast me aside because I am black and swarthy, because the sun hath changed my colour and the waters have covered my face and the earth hath been polluted and defiled in my works, for there was darkness over it because I stick fast in the mire of the deep and my substance is not disclosed. Wherefore out of the depths have I cried and

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1124387754444213972005-08-18T12:39:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:10:30.376-05:00

Downtime for the Goldenboys א “A pianist dreams that he’s hired by a wrecking company to ruin a piano with his fingers . . .” Russell Edson, “The Marionettes of Distant Masters” “Lo, the ship, at this opportunity, slipped slyly, Making cunning noiseless travel down the ways. So that, forever rudderless, it went upon the seas Going ridiculous voyages, Making quaint progress, Turning as with

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123862787172625662005-08-12T10:14:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:33:27.413-05:00

I. When We Were Angels Maybe God died. And a little bubble of spit began to rise from his cold lips. And that was the world. And we grew in a most scientifically viable way, as something like bacteria, on the ductile globe of film. And we sensed, as we began to measure curvatures and things, that there was something beyond our bubble. And some looked upward and outward into empty

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123858199484117202005-08-12T09:48:00.000-05:002006-01-13T10:05:18.946-05:00

I woke up like a fawn in the rain wishing to be Forty Days And Forty Nights, but an ark was in me. “I am Forty Days And Forty Nights!” I thundered, and a small, stubborn voice answered back from within me, “But I have all the animals of the world, here, together, and we float.” I sucked out all the moisture from my belly in a great wind and tore all the fruit off every tree and

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123857585350554712005-08-12T09:37:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:35:03.316-05:00

What I liked about being sixteen was that my whole body was an erogenous zone. The mirage of starvation was all over me, the stains of your eye paint on my hipbones in wet incandescent smears of lapis lazuli— jackals could eat the flesh from my sides and I would constantly be reborn. It didn’t take your necrogenetic lips to raise me, your perfect tongue. The night cut open my mouth like an

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123857282852272772005-08-12T09:31:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:24:15.220-05:00

Father is in his workshop in the garage feeling very Black and Decker. He’s whittling away at a thick branch from the Backyard Tree of Life, crafting a magnificent phallus— ever longer, ever longer it creeps out its albino tentacle, too thin to bear the weight of its reaching, a rubbery prop from a golden age sci-fi, fishing tackle reflecting in the stage lights, the steam machine churning and

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123854650255634552005-08-12T08:48:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:32:31.923-05:00

There is a kite on the moon, probably in some crater, whose string I dropped a long time ago. How do I know it’s there? The string, week before last, began to protrude from my ear, to tantal out like a soft tent worm. When I pulled at it I realized an end was coming out my other ear as well, soaring away upward out of sight. Even on the moon there are breezes, but not many. Each

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123852894894227362005-08-12T08:18:00.000-05:002005-12-14T16:59:55.470-05:00

Your name will be Sagging Pants Picking Icicles. We release you from the Tribe, so go now into your claptrap Gondwanaland. Supercontinent of want—broken, adrift. Déjà vu of the Everything Monstrous, not recognized, not quite recognized . . . yet florid with your preposterous epaulettes, your extinction events and mighty dubiousness. You will be a paradox among your frozen things— thing that you

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123569775261837002005-08-09T01:42:00.000-05:002005-08-09T01:42:55.263-05:00

Release the Hounds!: an Introduction Manifesto: on Institutionalized Narcissism in the PoBiz Jung, Nazism, and German Romanticism

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123425220514944972005-08-07T09:21:00.000-05:002006-02-13T10:18:49.163-05:00

Notes א (Aleph) is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. There is a great deal of symbolic and Kabbalistic significance associated with it. In the conventional Rider-Waite tarot deck, the first card, #0, The Fool, depicts a young, well-dressed man standing in the posture of an aleph upon a crumbling precipice . . . and seeming to take no notice. He is the great journeyer . . . and also the

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123391128232072902005-08-07T00:00:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:36:00.983-05:00

I. I’ve decided to die a little today, and maybe tomorrow I’ll do the same. I’m going to turn my hands into powder. Spill them like salt on the forest floor. Spill them like new crystals in the water that takes and takes, and hunches away over the horizon. I’m going to saturate the juices that digest the land. I’m going to slow the sea’s appetite in my infinitesimal way. Today, I’ve decided,

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123388303418253932005-08-06T23:11:00.000-05:002005-10-31T14:32:54.390-05:00

Ship of the Demon Lover Going Down: A Review of Greg Kuzma's What Poetry Is All About I knew I had to have this book after reading a review by Jon Volkmer (“Poetry Love Potions”) on Poetry Daily in which he described its target audience thusly: “. . . for the snarling guy with the five-day beard, greasy hair, a dozen rejection slips in his pocket, and a pile of Charles Bukowski at home, that guy

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123387710933116602005-08-06T23:02:00.000-05:002005-12-14T16:04:30.756-05:00

“There is no invention to it, there is no trick, there is no fake; you simply lie down in a coffin and breathe quietly.” Harry Houdini For my next trick . . . a volunteer from the audience to be sawn in half or disappeared in a cabinet. Pick your poison. Please remove the largest slice of currency from your wallet. Please submit your most priceless effigy to my recursive folding. Please

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123387156015486302005-08-06T22:49:00.000-05:002006-06-22T15:33:39.310-05:00

for Steven Pinker I. The evening news cleaves to the palate of the television screen and cringes off a gauze of static. A man watches. There are holes in the ozone layer. Irradiation of the planet. Ice melting, coasts will disappear, landmasses rewritten by water. There is a new cable channel devoted to floods. And so, the man is seized by thirst and decides to drink all the water his house

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123386414424195142005-08-06T22:45:00.000-05:002005-12-14T16:00:15.836-05:00

He lived in the belly of a golden furnace, and every morning he would collect his charred teeth and string them through their cavities into a necklace. Then he would speak at us all in whalespeak and reek conspicuously of sea water. We despised him for his ecumenical airs. “Am I not the sun?” he would say, skulking with his painted chieftain cheekbones. Then he would die with that toad-lipped

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123385897141903372005-08-06T22:29:00.000-05:002006-01-26T12:19:47.583-05:00

Could you please not speak about his death, I said. Who is being spoken for? you said. I am speaking for him, I said. But, you said, it was the coarsest ocean that you damned him with. Well, I sputtered, the forest was filled with all that violent chirping, it was shimmying down the trees with its sashes. But, you said, you took your ax to it like a trooper. I am not the one to blame, I am

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123385205166998922005-08-06T22:26:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:31:17.426-05:00

I’d slaked myself in the dandelions, little sun manes weeding in the grass, fatting the summer with useless constellations. I was a cricket, unseen by the Mighty Ones, making my little sun song, chirping the blues over dirty strings of a cheap guitar, hoarding myself into the quarried lake of sound mewled with deaf steel, wanting the wind to open highways in the sky, hobo trains freighting

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123383665090279152005-08-06T22:00:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:57:34.036-05:00

A dog bites a man. A man says, “A dog bites . . .” but a dog bites a man again before a man can say more. A dog stops biting a man as if to invite a man to speak. A man, as if on cue, says, “A dog bites . . .” but before he finishes a dog does bite. A man is bitten by a dog as if, for want of saying it, it became a thing. “But I said it after the dog bit me,” thought the bitten man, “How could I

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123382863190889712005-08-06T21:46:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:35:33.156-05:00

I’ve trained myself to walk like a three-legged dog, but to be still for you, to imitate porcelain, reflect you back in white. You may preoccupy me with your shelf dust. I’ve trained my mouth to sound hesitation, near absence, the light tap tap tap of calloused paws against tile, invisible creeping, ghost around the house. I’ve trained my snout to sweat and be blacked as an ashman hauling

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123381903608144382005-08-06T21:26:00.000-05:002006-08-16T12:39:16.580-05:00

(from Frontier Accounts from the PoBiz Boomtowns) for Jack Spicer I. We’d all come wearing our cursory overalls, some to dress the dead, others, with tatty-handled grave shovels— jobless, destitute, each with his own ambiguous suspicion of the ancestors— victims of the seasons, all. Turned away at the soup lines We’d no other method of knowing the dirt than to act like trees and root down and

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123354730509387832005-08-06T13:58:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:32:15.313-05:00

A man threw himself on the ground face first. “I am gravity,” he said. The people passing by on their ways to places had to step over him. Soon they started taking him for granted. The man took this as further proof that he was indeed gravity. “People have always taken gravity for granted,” he chuckled to himself. Of course, before long, he grew tired of being gravity for everyone. “Let someone

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123354386626512272005-08-06T13:52:00.000-05:002005-12-14T15:31:05.726-05:00

I pulled off the road at the scenic overlook that teetered over the abyss where the Damned were kept. Hey Damned! I called out, how’s the abyss treating you? We cannot say, came the answer, we are only an echo . . . how’s the scenic overlook? Not bad, it’s what the road can afford. So what’s it like to be damned? Not bad. What’s it like to be at the scenic overlook? Like being nothing but a

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123354155286266752005-08-06T13:48:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:40:18.836-05:00

For Ted Roethke A loon said to a loon, “I am lighter than the moon! Drifting on the sky’s epidermal crust without a single wing. I merely trust that gravities will swoon and air will bear me up— a miracle babe thrust to the gods, a mug o’ grog lifted to the toast, hot vapor rising from a roast, a glory craving bellowing from a boast, a bang burst from a balloon! Infinity’s sylph-slippered

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123353683290292552005-08-06T13:39:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:38:51.076-05:00

I’ll tell you what to do with an angel. When you walk through the front door of a stranger’s house and lying stiffly in a hump of a heap is an old prayer-stained angel, take off your overcoat and throw it over the formless bulk where the angel’s body is lewdly crystallizing. Then walk over to the stranger and put your hand on his shoulder. Say, “It will be okay now, friend. Just try to sleep it

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123348474653814982005-08-06T12:15:00.000-05:002006-01-26T13:10:11.190-05:00

What the Road Can Afford Contents Downtime For The Goldenboys “Mother, Get My Ax!” First Blues Scapegoat Kite Thief Osiris Furloughed What to Do With an Angel Levity among the Loons Featherhorse Sitcom The Progeny of Behaviorists Nightlife How to Taunt an Abyss The Literary Life Fantasia on a Train Station Crucifixation Faith Fictions Creation Myth Polka for the Recently Exhumed Problems

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15078460.post-1123276041988790392005-08-05T16:08:00.000-05:002005-12-14T14:29:44.223-05:00

I. We Made a Deal with That Mysterious Man and Lost the Cow Then the poet comes in— rubs his feet along the floor, cosmic sloth in fashionably cheap pants—ascendingly, up toward the podium microphone, eyes turn like a sonnet— thunk-thump, the iambic gait, lamed hop-and-drag limp, his eyes deeper than worlds, crappy with despair, and his shoulders from the

Matthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01673989290048344335noreply@blogger.com