Hush Hush

Under the rug go the verbotens;
foetids and foecals and fossicled
fish rots pile up beneath the tongue
like a fertile vault of what’s not
proper to speak of by the light
of dry days. Language is rigored
by love’s winnows away
from the mortally hot,
securing dayside domains for
home and office, its curves
bound flat and hidden from view,
its rhetoric remaindered
in terse nones of filtered blue.
God’s foot sits so heavy on the
tongue that its margins swell out
in bootyful bounty, raising just
behond the last light of town
rich mounds of forbidden rooms --
barnyard, bordello, honky-tonk,
playground, shitter -- each
mansions the delight’s reverse,
writing the Ten Shall Nots
with a scalloped and filigreed
hand, painting them on rococo walls
where cupidon and priapals
sport with the nymphs, giving
them a good jolly roger on
rogueish rolls of the tongue,
afloat on a vast vineyard’s
scat-singing tide. Such vandals
crow and pound at the gates
of my day, threatening Rome
with all a tongue slakes
singing the wild side of things.
Once -- I was eight or so --
I hid in a garbage can behind
our house while playing
neighborhood hide-and-seek;
it seemed like a good place to
try out my curse-words singly
and in streams. There was a light
above me, and I looked up
to see my mother aghast
holding high the garbage can lid,
finding her sweet blonde boy
cursing up a storm, drunk
on the paps of a gross suckling
pig. It was one of the minor
epiphanies on the road which
leads here where I sit at the
dead bottom of the night
fully awake and aware of the risk
of singing God’s privetest parts
to the world, with a joy reserved
for lovers frying in their oils,
crying as they coil. Praise to the one
who first hid out of view
to rollick the tongue in nasty
waves of sweet blue, delighting
in salty labials and pussy-breathed
moos, perambling the rooks
and souterrains of a naughty god’s
nookie juice, boldly going where
no good son would dare
to sniff lick and stare,
much less cathedral
the undertow’s blue underwear.




TALK DIRTY TO ME

2004

Talk dirty to me barks the sea
As I amble down the naked
Shoreline of a prayer. Shake it,
Shake it like a horny Pope down
Under. Angelic apes stand in
The wash stroking huge erections
& mouthing every name of God.
When old men enter puberty
It’s a rude uproar: Our lust is
Brown-eye ugly to those oiled girls
Sunning for young kings & hard hooved
Rings of fire. I’ve stopped caring for
Good press -- It’s time now to get down.
Watch me lower my shorts down to
This ankling tide -- I’ve seas to screw!





TANGLED UP IN BLUE
2005

Out the hall window
at 2 a.m. my car blares
silver blue and black
in full moonlight.
Wild light bulbs that
midnight blue; the two
are icy blondes writhing
cheek to cheek over the
abyssal mother of all moons,
blueblack and cooing
wave surges toward this shore.
My bluest fantasy
disappears into sex
the way sex fades
into something roaring forward,
a tide maybe, or an age
both newer and older than
any reckoning by saner,
drier, sated Dons. Blonde on
blonde I’m tangled up in
blue in a syzygy of sames,
moon and sea like
heart and sight like singer
and psalm and all halves of
bone in parting delight,
the one melting forever
out of sight, the lucent
gleam of all that remains.
My car in vast moonlight
takes me to a shore
where savage waves pound
wondrous grains now pouring
ineluctably from the window
glass, like a naked woman
walking out a door which closes
in a silver roar of collapsing
wild blue foam. And her eyes
which caught and held me
one in that so pregnant dark --
so blue and silvery with
desire for my blueballed streams,
amid a dark which nailed me
forever to a blueblack tree
of arching fire, evanescent now,
haunting, free, bone on bone
now dreaming of silver’s swoon
in blue, reflecting every sea
which delved the ache and
arch of me to you.




MINNE'S CAVE

2004

Hands as big as my lust for You
Surely built this love grotto, deep
Under this hill where sheep graze and
Slumber. The stones which vault Your bed
Could raise cathedrals, but instead
The Old Ones hid them far from view
Beneath the turf, to barrow old
Ferocities of star and sea.
They are gone but we remain, fresh
Heart inside stone ribs. Only here
Can we let ourselves go in the
Star and sea frenzy that first kiss
Unleashed. Here, my love, here we will
Coil on crystal linen and sail
Verbatim into wild blue hell.







BLUE NOIR

2004


Each day I mount this
pale white writing chair
and comment my verbal
self to waters wild and wide
with no oar nor paddle
or compass or sail.
This pen voyages where
you bid, or where I
fancy you remain as
I shut my eyes and
recall a trace of you.
Today I think of the night
I followed a busty
redhead home after
the bar closed down
in the year when I
had left my wife behind
and made my way
back home. Let’s color
that sinular night blue
noir, its saxophones
sexual and evil,
transgressing what I
knew was wrong
and flinging myself anyway
in the name of revels
I could neither submit
to without a wedding ring
tight around my heart,
nor resist as any
more sober man might
have. We drank burgundy
a while in that monied
professional apartment
and then she left to
go pee, leaving me alone
to stare out at the
streetlamped night
of 3 a.m., into that
maw of lost darkness
in the belly of the
whale. Everything
thick with drunkenness
and fatigue, Joe
Jackson on the stereo
& the door not far away.
So much in me still
demanding that I just
get up and go but then
she came out of
the loo wearing just a
half-buttoned shirt,
her breasts swaying
heavily into dark.
The embrace that soon
followed was like a boat
offshore at last on waters
profoundly deep and
wild. Oh how we went
out in the pure salt
of abandon, this way then
that, never fucking --
I didn’t have condom --
but going at it every
other way. Exhausted
spent & glistening with
all our expended oils,
we unclenched around
5:30 a.m. when she
told me I had to go
(she needed to write
a paper the next day).
And so I got zipped
and shod and kissed
her on the cheek as
she slept quenched
and sated, never to speak
to me again. I drove carefully
and raggedly back to
my mother’s house where
I was sleeping in a spare
room, aware at once
of such keen delight
amid the ruin of real love.
My wife in our house
20 miles away alone
in our queen-sized bed
with our cat curled
nearby, she believing
that I was gone for
good. A few months
later I told her I wanted
back, to somehow
find a way home.
A year later I moved
back home, sober,
sobered, all my errancies
named and laid at the
altar of a love
that promised nothing
but the love. It was
an evil voyage into
that blue noir night:
hurtful and expensive
& damn near ending
all the poems that I’d
yet to write. But god
the satisfaction of just
reaching into that
gal’s unbuttoned blouse,
to clasp and hold those
huge warm breasts.
How good that evil,
how warm that demon
spray at the the shore
I pray never to return
to nor ever fully forget.
My song here is pure
in the second sense of
things, not orderly
or moral but complete
as the sea is full
of angels with big
teeth. Whatever
shore I ache and
dream here, the
sea gods intend
their own beach.
In the spectrum
of my love there’s
a blue-black isle
washed in booze.
The ink that
flows from my
pen today is
pours freely that
salt ooze--a bit
of ichor of your
cape which
spreads this
waking dawn
with words
I’d rather write
than lose.




BLUE ARK

2004

The Great Flood became a
History of fresh-sinned worlds,
The emptied ark a skull for
Cathedrally lost innocence.

Judgment now is pounded on
A water cross, & harrowed by
Upwellings of blue radiance.
I live where mystery rims the

Tide with deeper surges than
Mere words reveal, a a marginal
Tumescent wood alive
With night and sea and lunar

Eyes: A Christian world
No more, nor one strummed by
The lover’s harp, nor modern
In the screwy sense of gears,

But a Christ of wet descending lanes
Aboard an ark of wildest names.

On Sacrifice

“Robertson Smith {in The Religion of the Semites, 1907} shows that sacrifice at the altar was the essential part of the rite of the old religions. It plays the same role in all religions, so that its origin must be traced back to very general causes whose effects were everywhere the same.

“But the sacrifice -- the holy action ... originally meant something different from what later times understood by it, the offering to the deity in order to reconcile him or to incline him to be favorable. The profane use of the word was afterwards derived from the secondary sense of self-denial. As is demonstrated, the first sacrifice was nothing but ‘an act of social fellowship between the deity and his worshippers.’”

-- Sigmund Freud, “The Infantile Recurrence of Totemism” (Totem and Taboo)

***

“The woman penetrated is a labyrinth. You emerge into another world inside the woman. The penis is the bridge; the passage to another world is coitus; the other world is a womb-cave. Cave man still drags cave woman into his cave; al coitus is fornication (fornix, an underground arched vault). And the cave in which coitus takes place is the grave; a chthonic fertility rite; Antigone buried alive, together with her ancestors, her bridal chamber the tomb. Death is coitus and coitus is death. Death is genitalized as a return to the womb, incestuous coitus.

“..The head, the husband, and the soul of the body. The classic psychoanalytical equation, head=genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The was up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital...

“... In the unconscious, cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archaeologist of language, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head. The soul-substance is the seminal substance: the genius is the genital in the head.”

-- Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body


Sacrifice has an older meaning than guilty
surrender. The sacred flesh torn wide open
poured out His wine for all to share that we
may enter one heart and feast forever there
inside the ritual moment. Later we added
the shame and remorse, turning the sacrifice
into something more nuanced, distanced from
its former sweet surf. Maybe we erred less
back then, thinking from lower centers
which were eclipsed then lost. Is not
guilt altared in memory? Before such sins
there was Eden. We offer our bodies to each
other in remembrance of our first joy,
entering it riven, sustained by its rapture.
The itch reminds us that we’ve been far
too long from our lord’s round table in
that chapel by the sea. We hurry back,
tearing off each other’s clothes in pent
abandon, knowing with our dark deeper brains
that we’re close. Greed mauls us off into the
errant realms, incessantly pounding on the door
which has grown ever heavier with unsayable
need. No wonder we grow nuts and strike out,
forgetting the crops in the field, scything down
our neighbors to furrow their wives. Sacrifice
grew guiltier, robbing all pleasure from the meal,
a communion for lost souls with a flesh
and blood idealized into an arid, comfortless
toast to eternally lost beds. Thank God
for the dark genius who rides on the brain
with his long balls hanging over each cortex,
his long straining neck and dark-capped
head hollering for the blue drain of the matter,
thos dewy folds where sacrifice awakens
back to its former upturned glory. The thought
of the heart forgets the art of the ritual,
opting instead to the sweet cheeks of the matter
and have at her again, painting a womb’s deepest
walls with bison and mastodons, sabre-tooth
tigers and prone dreaming shamans whose
song echoes faintly here. She’s behind that altar,
you know; I flip its guilty weight over to find
a smiling god holding wide the door by which
I enter through him back to her, into
the paradise of waking on ecstasty’s bright
shore which begins here. I’m writing words
today in long phallic lines, each a stair
descending as far down as they go
into what’s oldest and first. Here’s to Eros in
the saddle of my dolphin brain, riding
the waves of sursurrant desire, diving
the main into a mouth which rules from
down under where true north is most South,
a devouring congregational devout.

The Fourth Cup

FOUR OF CUPS

(the Final Outcome card of my year-end Tarot)

A young man is seated under a tree and contemplates three cups set on the grass before him; an arm issuing from a cloud offers him another cup. His expression notwithstanding is one of discontent with his environment.

Divinatory Meanings: Weariness, disgust, aversion, imaginary vexations, as if the wine of this world had caused satiety only; another wine, as if a fairy gift, is now offered the wastrel, but he sees no consolation therein.

This is also a card of blended pleasure.





THE FOURTH CUP

Dec. 24

One cup inspires with a flash
of recollection; the next one
gallops the breadth of noctal
steppes in its greed for union.
The third cup unites again
boy Cupid with his mother
in the nuptials of first bliss.
Three cups and you’re done,
the crooners insist: three nights
in paradise, three stations
in the heart’s purgatory,
three stanzas buttoned with
a song-ending couplet,
bedding with a rhyme
two heats in one final line.
The eternal round persists
in threes, refusing to fare
further, endlessly in love
the with the same old tale,
repeating it in every precinct
and station of a life, striving
and swinging for the same
sweet wife who shores Elysian
dreams with an ever-crashing
kiss. Such rapture never
bores of that grinding metronome
which enflames but cannot burn,
yearns but never welcome,
refrains but not conclude.
The fourth cup offers itself
again and again but we
refuse to hearken to its voice
sitting as we do dejected
at the base of the tree
with arms heavily folded,
jonesing for one more shot
of that first triadic blue.
New ideas get added to
the round but do not change it;
they’re just new positions to try
out in the same old
wooing of starry unions,
a bit of spice for a trice
of nights, a salt flavor to
refresh the tongue with
with some of that old ocean
quaver. Difficult indeed to take
up that fourth cup and drain
what it really offers, leaving
mother for the real wife,
waking life from its sloshy
sappy origins with slaps of
something truly else -- a leap
so radical it doesn’t have a name
nor fits an enquiry and yet
is there, like a bold new
road behind the mewling
manger just ahead. How to
offer this fourth cup a
surface for its leap,
free of culture’s sad gravity
and futurity’s mad gravitas?
Those ends are dying
of each other’s thirst,
enrapt and warped by that
fool who crowns the brain.
What speaks of its own accord
without certainty’s seductive
swash? It may not be
possible with a pen, or
the impossibility may be just
the door it needs to walk
out from the wilderness
and join the tribe at last
who are lost there too.
Let make of desolation
a scripture not so much
modern as post-cultural,
a divinely broken mess which
choirs salt agons with torn throats.
Those wounds are eyes and see
what I cannot, the one who’s
too shy of the blade that hacks
the feeding tube away, freeing
the boy at last to go and birth
a man. Lord, if this is the
ripening doorway of Your will,
then teach my tongue its ways.
Lord knows I’ve said enough
about the first three cups; to
drink of them past surfeit
is to nail myself to the throne
at the bottom of the brine
and age forever there, melancholy,
mute and misty for the bed
I never found. I pray You
free these wings at last to
turn the other way in
the song which offers more
than love itself, that love
be freed to pour the fifth
and sixth and seventh cups
that we were meant to savor.

Whale-Gut Lascaux

“For Deleuze and Guattari ((whose Anti Oediups (1972) states there is an inner fascism that structures sexuality and politics as well)), there is no structure, no boundary, no forms of idenity which is not a blockage of the flow of desire, a flow which they posit as the only and necessary alternative to inner fascism.

"Desire alone is revolutionary. It is not governed (contra Freud) by the Oedipal conflict and its subsequent repressions, nor (contra Lacan) by some even more primal lack.

"Desire is nomadic and universal, and 'does not take as its object things and persons, but the entire surroundings that it traverses, the vibrations and flows of every sort to which it is joined, introducing therin breaks and captures"; it is only ‘through a restriction, a blockage, and a reduction that the libido is made to repress its flows in order to contain them in narrow cells of the type 'couple', 'family,' 'person,' 'objects.’”

-- James Berger, "Cultural trauma and the 'Timeless Burst': Pynchon's Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland" (Postmodern Culture 5.3)



A growing poetics then would create then destroy the categories of its making: ever on the pursuit of a fresh perspective, a new woman, the next glimmer of possibility. Friction raises tension: the contained bursts forth in song and seed.

***

“The woman penetrated is a labyrinth. You emerge into another world inside the woman. The penis is the bridge; the passage to another world is coitus; the other world is a womb-cave. Cave man still drags cave woman into his cave; al coitus is fornication (fornix, an underground arched vault). And the cave in which coitus takes place is the grave; a cthonic fertility rite; Antigone buried alive, together with her ancestors, her bridal chamber the tomb. Death is coitus and coitus is death. Death is genitalized as a return to the womb, incesturous coitus.”

"... The head, the husband, and the soul of the body. The classic psychoanalytical equation, head=genital. Displacement is not simply from below upwards; nor does the truth lie in simply reducing it all downwards (psychoanalytical reductionism). The was up is the way down; what psychoanalysis has discovered is that there is both a genitalization of the head and a cerebralization of the genital...

"... In the unconscious, cerebral is genital. The word cerebral is from the same root as Ceres, goddess of cereals, of growth and fertility; the same root as cresco, to grow, and creo, to create. Onians, archaeologist of languate, who uncovers lost worlds of meaning, buried meanings, has dug up a prehistoric image of the body, according to which head and genital intercommunicate via the spinal column: the gray matter of the brain, the spinal marrow and the seminal fluid are all one identical substance, on tap in the genital and stored in the head. The soul-substance is the seminal substance: the genius is the genital in the head.

--Norman O. Brown, Love's Body





MY WHALE-GUT LASCAUX

Dec. 23

Heavy spats of rain keep rolling
over the morning, unfreighting
Hel’s bilges on the trees and
roofs of our town. A drowning night.
Yet this is all the home I know
in my deepest bones.
The music of such wet sighing
repletes my dry ears with
the its low tones, harrowing
them with the sound of
Leviathan swimming overhead,
fanning up fresh rollers of wild
rain with his sea-clabbering
flukes. I’m here alone in the
belly of my song, O Lord, writing
these verses just to you, and
I don’t know if its with the steeliest
tongue of devotion or the flintiest
sickle of defiance that I write
on about the same old old things
in the same old chanson,
singsonging with the ardor of
drippy droll blue freeze.
What’s a singer without a tribe
or whose clan is long dead and
deep buried, too long unseen
by the light of real days?
Is this the poetry of poetry’s
own death, a wheezy geezer rattle
of old-frothed frenzies
geysered brittle on the page,
a dry soul’s sotto cunt canto
dressed up like mashing tides?
I’m just a fool in the saddle
of self-addled contretemps,
stubbornly clinging to a clanging
black bell’s overblued balls,
clabbering the same set
of wrong-headed devices
for so long that they
smack of a faith, a sotted poetics,
the leys of a dark myth?
Is that bliss enough
for the age and mine,
that smack of the lips
sufficient for the kiss
that never comes, for
the taste of delights
lost in lost nights?
First light will come soon enough,
erasing this sweet dripping dark
with a pale sigh, draining all
traces of ink from the page.
I’ve tossed a hundred
comp books like this one
into two boxes in the closet;
they’re all I have to show
for these duly daily
forays out on the blue of a
song’s womb-aching soak,
shouting salt matins to
a congregation of one.
A hundred cheap headstones
whose one meter is mired deep
in the silt of latenight aeries
which fell between the moon
and the sea. Give me enough
trope and I’ll hang myself
high in those drowned trees,
propounding the sound of lost gods
with my bones turning and
knocking in the blue that
song my real hand
couldn’t carve out except
the wrong way, across and
down the tree-ghosted page.
Daily I scythe myself at the hips,
spouting white nonsense
back to the wave I was
born in and reborn through,
celebrating the joy of
union even when there is
none to be found. It’s not
very noble, just all I can do,
a dirty white boy stuck
in the brine gut of Lascaux,
writing down and singing aloud
every song of the God who lives on
in the blue-swooned fabliaux
of an old maker’s halloo.