just call me mr. random

Hear this ringing in my ears
and jot the notes in longhand, please,
that I may see the tilting red
all up the scale, and maybe I'll
record a reverb-charged remix
with robot drums and cluster chords.

Anything to tell it's not
loose synapses or phantom bells
or evolution. While you're at
it, make a video montage
of all the sleeping images
projected on the insides of
my eyes (the ones I don't recall;
ignore the dreams of tales or fights
or sex). Anything to remind
me something's going on, something.

Perhaps the ringing cacophony
can soundtrack my odd, plotless sleep.

this is patmos

   Narrowly, narrowly
the boy sang his tune
and the sky insisted
that it was a
     (raindance)
storm and a doom,
the kind that will break
the clouds in three,
the blind that will slake
our hunger.

   Following, following
his last ragged wish
the notes pulsed through nature
like red blood through
     (molasses)
an artery, poured like
the sea, poured like
the end, like apocalypse.
Images blurred.

He saw through the chaos the lie that the chaos
could ever be beautiful
and nearly believed it,
wanted to believe it.
Dissonant chimes that hurt his head
made him growl through the song again,
though;
made him try for the rain again, the
     (snow O blizzard snow)
storm of the century.
I don't think he really wanted
the blind black rain.
     (O peaceful blizzard snow)
Nobody's sure really
what he was after.
     (O peaceful)

   Come pouring, come pouring
with your thees and your roses
your unmouldering pinnacles
jutting from shadowlakes
your two-dollar roses
     (rosaries)
filling the throat-tearing
mind-blasting labyrinthine
cornerless shapeshifting black black
silence,


he sang.

water burial: five experiments in sonnet form

This is what I have been working on lately. The sonnet is one of the most recognizable (and perhaps hackneyed) lyric forms in English. I've tried to alter that form in several different ways, while maintaining a loose "sequence" to the whole. The first one is a repeat from an earlier post.
[If anyone can see what I did to each sonnet, I will buy them an enormous beverage of their choice. Seriously.]

i.
Ev'ry time
the waters
make a rhym-
ing sound, her
breath and all
that misted
cold come fall-
en back, led
out of mind
by moving
pillars, wind-
ing, singing:
O, to hear
that danger...



ii.
That danger swimming on such an unwearied, soul-grey
Brow, all lobotomized and pensively aloof
With brave medicine eyes, should calmly blister all they
Had sung warble-throated atop abattoir roofs,
Seemed to him strange. Was this the world, the slipshod grammar
And incarnadine fruit-wet jaws of garden ruin?
This, this the blood and figs and serpentining stammer?

He thought it somehow -- unsettling -- the light and heat he
Felt (though dim, though dim and stale) at the words and sharpenings.
They would, the singers, swear in the flesh-roasted feet; he,
Even now, smelt their smoke imaginary. Happening
To glance around the room just then, he fell on faces
And lips, sullied perhaps, but bright with holy danger,
Hurting his doctrine with life-bleeding, pleading traces.



iii.
Late the rain-traced night when first the boiling
Call, unspeakable as stones, or moisture
Straight and sideways in a tempest, burrowed
All its tendrils in my sonnet skin.
State of inadvertent quietness, your
Fall and its attendant phoenix recoil
Blatantly exploded the old roads -- but
All I want is another cigarette,

And a straightness to my path. Descriptions
Stale as a lover's metaphor are
Stranded on my tongue. But nonetheless, these
Veils of inability, like oxhide,
Keep the rain and wine within me churning;
Leaping drops sometimes stain through my skin.



iv.
"My skin is white as parchment"
    I heard on the radio;
my Toyota was an arrow
    in a sea of wet cement.

"There's war in my blood"
    I heard my speakers say;
my needle, pushing sixty,
    was a stick of splintered wood.

"All I wanna do" + gunshots
    made me chuckle. Half asleep,
I fiddled with the dial: a heap
    of broken images, spots
of light assaulted my white ears --
the news of other nations' tears.



v.
She never could forget the way national tears
moved her to cry and dance
at once; her eyes brimmed with a glance
of fear
at never-outcomes, but her feet would dance
to celebrate that queer
feeling of life recovered in the throat -- just like the fear-
mixed carnival trance
of joy atop a ferris wheel: romance
and bile. Quickening in fear,
her pulse gained clear
distance
upon her thoughts, outpaced them. To the rear,
they wavered -- in distance or in fear?

improvisation on a disguised beggar in Penelope’s house

(loosely based on Odyssey book 19)

She.
I used to have a heart that beat with gold and
    silver strings, a universe where parted
    shades redeemed; I used to know a note that
    stung.
But now the in-between is of one part.

He.
I’ve shied away from centers, made ellipses of
myselves, my many minds; I blanch at human touch.
I shortened sticks and drew
my lot at twilight, where
Ocean stream delves on past the pillared straits. The blood
they drank. . .

She.
That doesn’t matter now. You’ve
    found the island’s fires; those dreams have vanished.
    Here these coals can thaw your weary bones, old
    man. Tell me your name. Servants, bring water.

He.
Beggarly--beggarly and wasted--
ask me anything else.

She.
    Have you heard of one whose name was like a
    voyage
of many wine-blue waves?

He.
That name was Pain-bringer,
Sacker of Cities and Death to loyal cattle-thieves.
I saw him once, years ago, before it all.

She.
And not since?

He.
There was a time his younger eyes were black with longing,
though food like the immortals eat was before him.

She.
Your eyes are dark too.

He.
    They are closed, fair one,
    with many troubles.
I rode within the windows of an ill-begotten
gain, their frames stretched vast as unhorizoned night.
I did my hecatombs in silence, beneath a towering
rain--

She.
    Now see the lattice-work, its squares in rows.

He.
You’re right. Such workmanship.

She.
    He is lost then. Servants, he is lost.
    Old sir, would you hear my dream?
A great crooked-beaked eagle
swept down upon my fledgling geese,
breaking their necks. I cried out,
and the eagle spoke: “Do not fear,
O daughter of far-famed Ikarios.
Your pets were insolent would-be kings,
but I your husband, come again.”
    Old sir, what can this mean?

He.
    He has told you himself.
It means that someday soon, perhaps tomorrow,
Odysseus Laertides will clean his house
with brimstone and with sulphur.

She.
I fled; I wrenched myself away from day; I
    cooled and drew the inky blackness closer
    than a dream--
I--I know not else--the night,
the night, I wore it bright. . .
Tomorrow, then, I’ll put a contest before the suitors,
those unending men who drink my wine and bed my servants
and spend their rich all-day inside my house, eating
up all our stores week after week, all so that they
might marry me and run the politics of Ithaka.
    I’ll bring out the great bow and
    quiver of my lost love;
    He who can string it, and shoot an
    arrow straight through twelve
    axeheads, he I will marry.
You. . . you should come as well.
They say only Odysseus can bend that bow,
that he could hit any mark, though it were
a hundred or more men feasting and laughing.

He.
Do not put off this contest any longer.
I will come to see it tomorrow.

new year's

The Middle makes
tears turn to black stone,
shining orbs of obsidian
caught up in midair.
With a timed word
they shatter like rain,
like water so splintered off
from itself.
I wonder, enigma,
at your grit and your grace,
the smokegrey thump of
an untuned upright.
Your youth rocks its sandalled
feet around chords
filled with parlors, and cries
of a plaintive upheaval,
and Jesuses leaving;
the bottle's sharp beads
of moisture staining
the wood dustless brown.
I'd wake my voice
and join if I could
but the bees in my throat
only let me hum.
Play on, play on; without
ceasing, play on.
And cradle your vision
that will explode like a river
the shattered souls
of gods.

the vernacular

Words filled brimful with salt,
As if shaking and burying and salting
Can revive an old flavor.
Why not a fresh meal?
Why not new meat bristling with spices?
The refugees grow weary
Of tinned tongue and dry jerky.
With wine, though, the older the better,
Unmixed in a bowl.
These, our drink, are the ornaments
And sacramental oak-barrels:
You may kiss the bride
And
This is my body
And
Buried in water.
These we like anciently performed.
But the words, the common sermontongue,
Are lunch and breakfast, and
How I am weary of them.
I cannot just drink wine.

Odyssey III.440-4 (nerd alert!)

It took me a few hours, but I managed to translate a few lines of Homer:


"And ceremonial water in a flowered bowl Aretos
came from the inner chamber bearing, and his other hand held barley
in a reed-basket; and an axe did steadfast Thrasymedes
hold sharp in (his) hand, standing by to fell the heifer."



(click to enlarge)