Quite commonplace all told

Back at it where the waters swell and recede


Isn’t this again the same forgotten landscape that only recurs in dreams?
Always the same peculiarities on the expanse outlaid before you
The water at your left the fields and birches busy rambling on your right
And at the end the low solid weir and the dusty abandoned barracks.

Isn’t it maybe the traumatic paradise you were once told
A ticket had been already secured for you to easily reach and get in?

As an mere child chased from home great sinner that you must’ve been
A mere child not to death expeditiously exiled but young and good
Pledging never to turn back bent on perduring bound for planetary glory.

And suddenly the desolate void dark untried summer night
Where after the joyful sunny anabasis no victory comes
At the silent abrupt last stop where apocatastic instead you grow a tail
And your feline eyes scrutate then those cheating ways
That must regardless carry you home where at last from so far
Already you surmise at the balcony the eager presence of your mother
Who soon shall secretly shield you from the trite ogre’s hairy rage.

And then nothing learned a few months after ejected once more
That time in a definitive way for he the angry godly one
Never never he shouts don’t want to see you anymore
Don’t you ever dare come back again.

Winter frozen night where you can’t stop trailing along
Else you’ll turn into a petrified scarecrow at a scrawny corner
For the abstracted homeless workers traipsing from fire to fire
Maybe mistaking you for some other lousy sacred image
To fleetingly doff their pungent moth-harried woolen headgear.

After dawn endure still a bit and wait not far from your grandmother’s
That the gruff males from the house depart to their morning rackets
And then knock on and slink in and she’s in a tizzy right away
And there’s her bed still warm and how deep and how long your sleep becomes!

Now there it is yes quite commonplace all told the landscape
The curious landscape the strange paradise that suddenly
Winds up on the low weir and the ruined deserted barracks.

Mother of Jove even her won’t easily convince her resentful son
Your all-powerful hell-decreeing father who nevertheless swears
Even you present shan’t ever see nor hear you or from you ever again.

You’ve become the sneaky phantom haunting the same oneiric landscape
Where the water at your left progressively over the trail licks the fields
And the golden throne where the bulbous hirsute god hatefully sits
Seems ever so slowly but surely to be getting washed away
To be sooner than later slurped up by the hungry sea
Or else crookedly carried over the well-cemented end barrier
At the other side of which dangerously the new children play ball above
On the gritty terraces of the old crumbling empty meaningless buildings
No longer gray but ever gloomier darkening deeper and deeper.

(boy in yellow)

Comes a boy dressed in lemon yellow (why?)
A friend of my son (dressed in orange)
(Are they a couple of fruits, do you think?)
And the reason is he’s eager to decipher
And convert into his own tongue
One of my solid object-poems
One of those kept (in the shape of an unscrambled puzzle)
In one of those other nondescript boxes over there
(Were he not a friend of my son’s would he even had ever heard about them?)
Well let’s see
Does he know that the ultimate sense of that object-poem can only be extricated by one or several dreams dreamt by the decipherer?
And this only after two or three weeks during which the brain has been more or less able to digest it?
Digest (that is grasp intellectually) most (or better still all) of its insinuations?
The lemon seems in awe at my ominous words
And yet how meekly accepts the “challenge” (his word humbly)
So one adds the following
That here’s the box
That he’s free to use his own time to do whatever he wants with it (his time) (not the box)
That the box one expects to get it back with all the pieces yet there
And...
That under no circumstances will one’s help be (ok?) forthcoming.

(looking up from the monumental pedestal)

Oh yes yes sir (looking up from the monumental pedestal)



After he’d flown the coop he began to breed
His feathers racing at dawn when the storms of flirting were spent.

Lusciously he swam in a humdrum unhealthy nebulous orbit of glutæal breasts
Omnivorous plundered among the distraught members of the senile aristocracy
Winnowed their contrived wealthes as a pixie passing through waves of filthy macaroni.

Went afterward through a purgatory of giant unchronological gizmos
That apace discombobulated his erst ferocious strength.

His preposterous barometric memory coming to roost
At last among the otherly genocided.

Lovelorn the prevaricating bastard at first betrayed a proclivity for predatory oppression
Lumbered with ponderous schemes and an accrued sense of preeminence
He celebrated urbi et orbi with droning histrionics
And stressing the tantrums of sincerely-felt paranoia
The hairy proportions of constructive pretentiousness.

Then immune to wisdom tasked himself with fostering a gangster atmosphere
Through which the pernicious meritocrats could safely engage in the furthering degeneracy of the outdoors
Where the criminally thriving fraternities of fraudsters scuttled the last fallacies
That had kept precariously afloat the previously undebunkable proletariat in its uniform stupidity.

Rummaging through posterity he saw all the autoists up to their polluted gills in substrata of chaoses
Presumably he also saw that “as the nigger entered the castrated nazi”
And “hunger permeated the tropics”
The massive demonizing of eroticism incontrovertibly followed suit
So that all doorways became borders beyond which into a new jail forthwith were you framed
Whereupon of course better steroidal curios and a swarm of extraneous other doping gears galore
Further persuaded the inconsiderate featherbrained to suitably comply.

Plus added verities too long now to report plus then bound to be impugned by the slanderous adversary
Whose verdicts however verily stink stank and have sempiternally stunk...

Prone to etceteraize the sloven monocrat never gave precedence to the sphere
But supreme practitioner of destiny oratory
Rather to the foreseeable galactic anger
And above all to the quite traceable much annoying garbage the doomed same sphere
Having entirely surrendered to the lure of extreme consumption
Now then properly poached
Acceleratingly had for centuries been leaving behind in its wacky race toward fiery extinction.

He’d become, as plainly seen, a jocular moribund the while urinating ingrained pearls
Of self-perpetuating irrevocabilities.

Drowned in a tub of merdant dejecta sedulously produced by his own sanctity
His demise afforded his too often unfortunate followers ominous lodes of mirthful commentary.

Buried with nary an honor by supercilious reptiles
A phenomenally mistreated caricature
So warmly and strikingly (and filially!) (nicht whar?) (looky up!) preserved.


[His sundry apparent remarks being hereby selectively recorded
In order perhaps to promote his ulterior canonization where indeed?
All over the sphere surely.

Culled (the analects) by one here presently of them propitiously cursed partisans
The whom I mean the which (voilà cela va sans dire) dynamically rewarded
By monstrous providence with all kinds of virtuous qualities.]


~0~0~

Diminishing returns

Diminishing returns


Where teary she swore eternal love
in that small square with the single light pole behind the silent factory
she saw it again as she was passing by

Long after the man was gone long gone
the man to whom teary she had sworn eternal love
the man who became half a man cut in half at the waist
and that then wasted away rather fast
with her sworn eternal love that followed suit

An eternal love that if at first was cut in half
then it also wasted away rather fast
melting into air into thin air
into a little fog that a little wind swept forever away

And so it happened
it happened that she saw it again
the tiny square with the single phanal behind the obtumescent factory
the factory itself cut to size by now
just half a building now fast melting into nothing

She found it quaint she found the place odd
the diminutive square with the bent blind begrimed light pole behind the shrunken factory
and she...

She with no longing no regret
no remembrance she of having ever tearily sworn
to any man that if at first had perhaps been a whole man
soon had become half a man and then less and less

A wisp of a man more and more slight
the half of him cut in half again
a humdrum unbodacious weightless man
a man of no significance
a forgotten entity to whom once

Once perhaps tearily she swore she swore...

No remembrance... no...

Or perhaps just perhaps ever so slightly
there still aimless wobbles a tittle of a thought
a spindly thought indeed
a slight ever so slight thought
a thought evanescent evanescent...

Is she still the one who over the growing distance
at that remote bleary small quarrel of a square behind the muted spent factory
under an unseeing dead eye that...

Did it witness her hypothetical commitment...

Had she...

No... no.


~0~0~

Stickmen

Stickmen


Patiently waiting the arrival of the vultures
In that enclosure packed with wounded warriors
Who jest about the war with a light heart.

The dancing sliver of the slithering light
Throws on the wall the blueprint of our future.
The light is black that plots our cross-eyed end.

Sliver of black light each aspiring to thrive
Thwarted yet each by a crossed bar that bars
All access to the consummate geometry.

Wounded we stare at the unresolved flux
On the blank wall where our fate flatly stalls.

Call me a stickman wrongly doodled and all
Two slivers crossed of unwieldy black light
Illuded and elided — serves us right.

fifth and last from The River in the Capsule (p. 106-126)

Last from The River in the Capsule (1986) pages 106-126

IV of The River in the Capsule (pages 81-105)

fourth bit from The River in the Capsule 81 to 105