After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes posted on February 22nd, 2009

After great pain, a formal feeling comes 
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs 
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore, 
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round 
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought 
A Wooden way 
Regardless grown, 
A Quartz contentment, like a stone

This is the Hour of Lead 
Remembered, if outlived, 
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow 
First-Chill-then Stupor-then the letting go

by Emily Dickinson

Chan Did Alright posted on February 20th, 2009

(For Mike McPhail, Thornhill’s early 21st Century Neal Cassidy)

Chan did alright. Though his head fell from the muck of fucking clouds, his eyes were white and widow-dim. The salad was never tossed too long in that part of the country and the bread was always hot. Chan did alright with his thermonuclear spring and his circular threaded past. He picked fights with druids and walked like he never jerked existence. You wandered in from the rain and laid down all your cards on the table. Chan said it wasn’t enough. You sat in a corner typing neon bibles onto soiled sheets yanked out from under the cheapest whores of the South-Pacific Rim (seed thus scattered will not rise again). Chan only knew half a song but he sang it goddamned well. He had an ugly face and hands that could puke a mule. His words were adequate. When a parched notion of sea came trampling up the driveway looking for a pitcher of salt, Chan split its tongue with the neutron bomb. He pickled lice in a bean-counting bucket, sealing them in jars to turn green forever. All he wanted was a way out of misery. All you felt like giving was a little bit of head, which Chan took with grateful silence whispered above the decaying  penthouses of an average city to the North. You’d like to try and milk Chan’s mother with this shovel or a large thermometer. It won’t do her any harm. You swear it won’t. You swear. Chan drove right through and didn’t stop. Inside the seeds of wisdom sat. Inside strummed a guitar. The balancing act was the ample trust of legend. Chan burrowed into night like a place of roaring water. He killed and ate three farm girls that year. He tossed grass onto screaming tracks and watched rain fall inside a rusty barn. That was the last year the fiddles worked their magic. But the old times weren’t quite dead. There was yet laughter, dancing, song. The sun rose and you went to work. The women all went home. The machinery began to melt (it had belched and hummed for centuries). Chan will show you his benign place if you’ll show him yours. You don’t want to see what he’s capable of when no else one is watching (blacksteel fences rise high in the sharp electricity of mind). It’s a misnomer to number him among the living dead. Still (and still), Chan does alright.  

“People expect listening to be more than listening…” posted on February 11th, 2009

Speaking of J.C., here’s the man himself.

#2 The Painter Addresses Her Pelvis posted on February 11th, 2009

A new era has dawned, and with it the final stage of my life’s work. To transmute the intransmutable—that has been the task I set myself since that near death experience, so many years ago, while urinating into a truck driver’s mouth. My ouvre is well known:  fromSelf-medicating with Crispix by Moonlight to Venice Beach, 31 A.D., you have supported me and caught my meanings well. For over forty years I’ve painted hand-buckles on the silver sleds that modern man has ridden through soundless blizzards of nonthought. Now the final stage is here.

 I was at a party last week given in support of a Welsh typist of my acquaintance, an inveterate social reformer who had developed gangrene while giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to a hamster. The unfortunate man’s chin was being amputated the next morning and we wanted to give it the send-off it deserved. As the evening wound down and the candles on the cake borrowed from William Burroughs’ 50th Birthday were blown out, I caught a glimpse of perfection standing in the corner of the room: 

 She wore two eye patches, both as black as the coked-out heart of an American male after a night of impotence in an Amsterdam brothel one week before his fairy-tale wedding. I will paint these patches, I thought, for the rest of my life. I will paint them in the pure darkness of the pre-created earth. I walked over and kissed her, hard. As our tongues met I lifted up the patches and stared into the twin holes of her skull. At first I saw only a vacancy as endless as my arousal, but gradually I began to distinguish a wheel of tiny green men marching solemnly around the base of each socket, and lo, they chanted some strange high creed. I leaned in closer to hear their pained murmurings, but could make nothing of it. I kissed the girl harder, leaned in closer still, and listened more intently.

 At last the faint collective throb of the chubby little men who marched round her blindness yielded its message: “She keeps her hands behind her back because she has none”. I bit into her tongue and warm blood filled my mouth as, in the distance, the Welsh typist wept for his chin.  

George Oppen Reads: posted on February 10th, 2009

“Of Being Numerous”

There Sat Down, Once, A Thing On Henry’s Heart posted on February 10th, 2009

I’m very pleased to be a part of this site. Sometimes I get terrible writer’s bloc(k), which almost always stems from fear and pride. One of the ways I thought of trying to get around this is to create a pseudonymous personality through which to filter work. An artist I admire who did something a bit similar was the American poet John Berryman, who can be seen here reading from The Dream Songs:

John Berryman reads his work

Yes, Berryman drank himself to death. I hope to avoid this fate. I also hope to use this space to interact with and be inspired by other artist as I develop an ongoing project entitled The Unexpurgated Journals of Heinrik Foibles (A Poet of the Home and a Poet of the Open Air). This title was partially suggested by Beau Dickson, or, as he is known to some, Beau DICKSON. Thanks Beau. From this point on then, you can assume it isn’t myself speaking, but Heinrik “I’m no stranger to longing” Foibles.

#1 Buzios 

Something’s lost in the atmosphere

beyond a table of laughing humans.

An elderly Iranian man circles the white room,

counting laps. He wears a grey, collared t-shirt

bought for him forty-three years before,

in Paris, by his eighteen year-old daughter.

Today is the first day he has ever worn it.

Slowly circling with shuffling steps,

he could be thinking about fresh water

washing salt water from a bloated female body,

or how a beam of light

shot from the plastic device on a keychain

will imperceptibly reach the moon.

But he’s not thinking these things,

because I am, watching from the comfortable

white couch where I sit trying to find myself

in soft pencil lines

on the small rectangular pages

of a black notebook.