“If these starkly purple shades of gassy essence could represent the modern temper somehow,” everything suffused with a lavender light on an endless plain, all enigma compacted in the living and dying surrealism of the lifeline, strange beasts shambling into each other with only sweet and painful secrets to verify a soul, burning from the inside out with truth, the animal sacrificing animality on the shrine of self, twelve selves at each cardinal point forging a superluminal voice in gleeful gestural arcs, angels from a nightland unknown gathering the decaying allegory of a million desiccated sunsets, the deathwish of the demisemiquaver impaling itself on the glissando, old gorilla yawn of operatic banal bowel movement of earliest percipience, barking at that blue and pregnant moon, handmaiden of tired hyperspace plotting a sodden romance in 6/8 time, Goethe's death mask white with time in a golden eclipse becomes a cipher, bleeding cubist tract witness to a dead text in turkey time anyway, just hanging around weeping about women you're afraid of, plagued and chastened by the disembodied voice of Mel Blanc, waiting for wonderland in the guise of serpent-mound exhuming, Genet fumbling in the dreams of Artaud, the great sun-barque glazed with amethyst tears and absinthe, Beckett laughing in the bed-sitting room of Godot, the consarned-frown of Moe Howard, the aside that launched a million sight gags and unburdened a million hearts-by-god, portcullis is shut and none the wiser, a million rainbows ablaze in the pouting gaze of our blessed daughters, the clock ticks the computer purrs and the tech and accountant can BUT follow, the sacral divan where perched the quiet fret, what crunching mandolin shattered the diamond joke wielding its GNOSIS? Who knew and who would see about it, only Harold Lloyd with Jobina Ralston in a swing working as hard as any ten Buster Keatons, fresh-faced and eatin', polyhedral lego empire bearing down on the rug's rough terrain, the tesseract of youth and dense pause of preadolescence in the wings, gothic rapture squeezed out of the head as a mordant nut, fields waving and raving on the edge of town might turn the tide, falling rocket of modern time, click track of errant heartbeat makes of the atrium a sculpted silence, dwarves and witches with wingtips traipsing in and out of the burning rubble, fire to kiss the pyre in the sky, giving the quantum bubbles in the blood a human dimension of wakeful suffering, pummeled in the parkinglot by the screaming screwball of fate bless it, walking in four groceries at once and not being recognized in any one of them as a parable for schizophrenic therapy, making of the seriality a tandem reptilian rebuke, bilking in a standing puddle of stagnant logical positivism as the volcano I recognized as my head realigned the spheres, princess of lost fantasies, endless redundancies of math class instructive of self, scalar witchhunt projecting garbage gnosis upon the pale minions who have ALREADY bowed their sciences to darkness, ripe with light anyhow in some tipsy bower anonymous, each timorous second flipping the unzipped cosmos, flowering swords of our fondest wishes piled in heaps in the corner rusting, swimmers take your mark! All in some carmel-coloured print the ancient daguerreotype with the quaint wink of fate, no time to lose, making of the old comic book a quantitative analysis for a stodgy academic treatise, whose book is that? wild horses couldn't usher in the pensive moments you've hoarded, long enough, saltpeter for sentiment in lazy circles reflects a soft sea quite despite the burning coast, a dance of oyster fisherman in a hundred drunken boats aflame, the church only hoarded its sanctity in the sixteen-millimeter shrine, winking at the clock crashing to earth in a slowing arc, any vertex a feast of friends in a ravishing amber wave, was there a whisper a heresy in the poem? to ignore the monkey is to ignore the monkey philosophy is to defend a high monkey form, tacking to the continent of MU was the quickest way to scream for cocktails standing nude in a Poundian canto, Erewhon anywhere in the canne brouillet séance of seasons, nervous managers phoning in sick the world over to front the lie, plaster cast of somber glory washed up on the insipid levee, ghoulish fantasies of the perpetual time-clock jello wane from view, tail pipe blurts a Zappian sample of civilization, in the rear-view, what cantankerous fudge won the contract on disco night bunting and swoon? Who could move in the shower with the music seeping in the cochlea, the rondure of the imperialist coup elicited a moue from the literary agent, how quaint! If taken in the abstract, only glee, smiling, continuity, beer snobbery, wine tastings, single malt-mavens, web-designers massed at the borders, gone to ground, wake up call of the new blitzes the faculty meeting with bomblets of depleted self-interest, one cannot trace the stock portfolio to a datum of death, can one? wouldn't be tasteful, upset the applecart of pleasant evenings, parades of consumption, my image, your image, ELF waves in pulses of control and electro physical tuning, interrupted the fuckin' game again! Wasn't there a liquor store on the corner? Some iron mountain head heliopter colonel rat-fuck jubilee monster mash with his finger on some red button smirking in a death ditch of his own designer off-world burger heaven, what magazine didja see that expose in? Bruce Willis winging it single snarfin farkin larfin with a rainforest wedge of steak hanging out of his face, lear jets over the lazy hangover of French Auterism, great concept, aching kids and despondent moms blank in front of virtual lives, on screen, tornado in the teapot hot smut tempest advertising black budget underground filth porno ufo empire, it doesn't exist, x-file joke fuck in the backseat, Valhalla never sleeps, we never close, the organic bliss of a moment free of entrainment whispering whelks a fresh algae to cradle the broken husk, dredge up the shredded history, the landing pad, the initiation grid, the funky-assed legion of dreamers in a purple dream of delight, wouldn't have it, quite, insect revelry in the sleeping city was a breath from subterranea, halos and auric jewels dripping on the sleeping bums and reptiles, the little yew tree breaths in easy light tuning the darkness to a meditative purr, peripheral circus of psychic trash acircle around the rave, designer drug abyss of antidollars pabulum of products, tired sex didn't care, jangling execs balance the books with a leer at their accounts, cars have lives of their own, service the debt or defer for godsakes, tears to the sea where the wind learns the song, to scry a nation and lose a world of suppositions in dawn's mauve light, kissing was all there was left, barking one's shins at the seals, Mars in the house in the red-light district, interdimensional Torquemada in a dervish draught of ale, death machine of clownish behavior waited at the doorstep, boorish, a paper of pins, that's the way that love begins, the egalitarian push to smelt the polity of poison, hush money, make it easy on yourself, put your seat belt on it's the law, planets and moons have been known to COLLIDE, you know, every time I see your face I free-associate, Dragon's Blood spose to get you damn drunk ain't it? Why you fook-air! Interstellar space, my brother, and the Velikofskian intoxicant I wanted anyway, desolation on parade, and the piano, and the drum, Vienna secession, moral values in clearest azure, Gustav Moreau wielded the lucid mad stylus to leave us all reeling, Dante and Pantagruel, one huge insatiable maw grinning in the headspin glitters of KIDDSAX, don't fake it, hep to the jive, it didn't matter anyway, little red school house, phantom swimming pool, don't make a spectacle of yourself at the playground, skinned knees and baseball cards, jaw breakers and jujubees, Chariots of the Gods?

(June 26, 2002)