My Untouchable Face

SOUND OFF

(from the bo
ok of the sa
me title by
Spencer Selb
y)

without inte
ntion words

that have ab
sorbed the s
peech

columns sway
torsion

outbidding m
emory re-

collection t
hat g(r)azes

tense field
of forensic
parti-

culars, vague
clouds words

doors without
knock-

ing

CATACHRESIS MUM

hupid cupital
eel elm allusion
awl arch
emballing the lover’s ear
encircle a more in music
never mute
will hear the lowest bus

to the use of the tongue
chance dance a sovereign
throne torn thorn thorny squeal
peel! and fill’d feel flock of
forest all so hearted O lOve list
wish lust knot must longer longing
graze on my lips or upon ship
sip
rose hip tic
tock but her jesses (thongs
passOnion

As the height
corresponds to the length
of the possessing zone
neglecting the term of the sun
and defining
the mean residence
time is given

[this piece is for missmagicmorgan who likes ee cummings]

STANZAS FROM DJERASSI (for lou harrison)

Letters
float down among us
from “sky”

and say
words
“snow”    “piss”    “cat”    “euthanasia”

It’s possible you know
it could be
branches

        what are these words
        what can be done with them
        “elucidations”

Language

I held my hands in front of me

        what about these words
        what about
        them

(that is the point of “inspiration” -
the mind so agitated it doesn’t question it just)
what does it mean to be
in a “radical openness”
in a state in which “I”
is nothing more than the “site”
in which these -
what, here, is “liberty”? -

Dream-
time, she said,
and climbed into bed.
Lady of pain, lady beloved of Swinburne,
writing verses on his way to be flogged,
are You here
do You conduct
us to the “underworld”?
is it Your dream that admonishes?
is it You we admire in this living landscape?
is it You who opens your legs to the “thrust” of freedom?

a slow-moving, meditative poetry
something appropriate to your age
and circumstances

“nothing too much”
written in groups of three
(partly to demonstrate its status as “poetry”
and partly in reference to the great Italian, Dante,
whose rhyme scheme will not, however, be
attempted)

a slow, “wise”, thoughtful medium
which does not seek to shock with language
content or any other means

a steady
drip
of poetry

- is not exactly what we wish for here
(Violence, said the film director, I’m against violence!
But did you expect me to make a dull movie?)

a slow,                dull,

meditative

verse        (bleah)

- After an experience imagining himself to be a FLY moving around in a room, Tobey was able to develop a kind of multiple space, a personal version of cubism, in which the viewer has no fixed perspective, but finds that his eyes wander through the painting as though viewing a three-dimensional object from many angle…  “I have sought to make my painting ‘whole’ but to attain this I have used a whirling mass.  I take up no definite position.  Maybe this explains someone’s remark while looking at one of my paintings:

            ‘Where is the center?’”

“You are as a dead thing living…
Oh! remain not by the fountain of Human Sorrow;
The joy others seek, are not for you.
Return!  Return! unto the worlds from whence you came!”

language like Yeats’ - fin de siecle (but it is fin de siecle again)
death-longing - death as the erotic -
“delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain” -
Return to what?
To nothingness?

But perhaps for Tobey it is a return to light -
Magnificent paintings:  “Where is the center?”
How does one deal with death?
The mind which circles in “multiple space”, longing, centerless,
returns to that black hole (“as though viewing a three-dimensional
object from many angles”) returns with a deadening fierce
oppressiveness (how does one get it?  how does one get beyond it?)
    “Oh! remain not by the fountain of Human Sorrow /
    Return!  Return!”
    “All human beings are responsible to each other and the lack of this consciousness creates within communities restrictions and differences, for which the community as a whole pays the price of less expansion.  Society as a whole has shut the door to the artist and creative person because they have individually and collectively shut the door to their own creative sides.
Feeling people are too difficult and demand too much individual thought and time for the routine of their factual existence.  When people of any community learn that art may become a functional part of their life they will find more life and not only that but a new eye and a new ear - and the artist will step down from his ivory tower only too glad to become a part of the whole again and both will come to see these and similar activities as manifestations of

                spirit.”

USHIO SHO (homage to)

distance
image
dance/

dance
image
painting/
(think / of a pre-historic / come to mind)

drawn
other / than language
(as if / hid…)  (other than / language)

cave
(I see it)

cave
(flat / splits / pro-jections / rock)
pass my eye

the painter
in the cave
(with the painter)

the painting
drawn
(memories / copy of the world)
images
(directly)

standing in the cave
face to face with (a) wild animal(s)
Me
(chases / watches / me chasing)
passing
Me
(distance)
Me
(sees / listens / seeing / to look)

(I)
recognize
(I)
react
(I)
stop seeing / to look
the cave

For New Followers

Thank you for following.

These words are for you:

i painted words
into her navel
i told her
the piano wire tracing
my heart
was from blue and blonde
skies
blonde and blue reserves
of hair and eyes
and matted fur smoothed
along the harem vein
stiff and mute
i tear the page free
below the eyes, a
torn edge
gone to the
ambulance prarie
and i push the
hands away
push the hands into flame
flames through open
curtain’s gaze
my hands gather
curtain hair
spread in her reserves of
drapery flame
of hands on a blouse
searching for a moth
stoves will clothe the
supple gaze in
amber, i would not lie
i would not bare an open
vein
to skies of blonde and
blue
where in a far acre’s corner
a tongue sinks
and moves
under a bed of rotting
apples, smoldering
in age and air
so the curtained hands
of flames and blouse
of drapery willows balanced
tall
in the grass of green hotels
a flame rises through
a hand gathers smoke
eyes
a hotel gone bitter on the
tongue
with rugs lifted away
and a tongue dissolved
in the milk morning light

And I Shall Call Him “George”

There’s a creature
and it lives under my bed.
I’ve never seen it,
but it’s probably beautiful.
It says it loves me, but
monstrous love is always suspect.
I think it would only
run as deep as
my rich, red, human blood,
which creatures love the best.
When they can get it.

I’ve heard it say,
it can also live off of
(with less relish)
just about anything else I have, too,
like, small talk, or socks -
I’ll tell it how my day went,
(just enough for it)
though it wishes I would just leave my arm over the side
of the bed
for it to bite off.

Would it keep me warm
if I asked?
I think,
that you would be cold…
and I bet your toenails are too long
and you do not bathe,
which I suppose makes sense,
if you’re a monster,
and all.

Sometimes,
when I lie awake at night,
the creature…
well, it talks to me,
and, aside from trying to scare me,
or give me bad dreams,
(being a monster still)
and hoping someday to eat me,
the monster
AND IT LIVES UNDER MY BED
will tuck me in.

James Brown Poem

Well I was a hitchhiker
at the love parade
and I caught a bum ride
on the biggest ass I’ve ever seen
and the inside of her pussy
was like tire treads
jamming on the brakes
and when I pulled out
it was me bleeding, not her
so I said,
“Fuck this shit”
and bought a subscription
to Bad Karma
and now you’ll find me
in the want ads in the back
of Young Lust Magazine
looking for a pickup
at the eunuch’s festival
playing flicky flick
with pubescent girls,
just one step ahead of the heat,
caught in a scandal
doing the duck walk
with Elizabeth Taylor on MTV
because baby
my hormones just reached critical mass
and I want to meltdown
all over you.

Sylvia Plath Meets D.A. Levy in Suicide Heaven

“fuck that garble of intellectualized
depression, lady, take a hit of some this celestial dope…”

levy’s face blown apart, rotting,
tip of golden pipette in a black, meat-ripped hole

“death is the mentalness,
debris remains of orgasm
this dream-soul Life created
this timelessness…”

sylvia is sizzling with happiness.  she don’t want flowers
& the flowers implode.  she wants pain

& nothing is felt.  she enjoys the works of d.a. levy from a british
distance.  levy loves sylvia’s
transparency & pink psychic energy.

they blend together
perfectly compatible
molecules.
they blow smoke
laughing
mummy-like over History -

“the first idea is an imagined thing”
    -wallace stevens

this house is wet, soluble,
soft. all wood wants liquidity,
to mush to honey & melt into
earth sponge. even plastic possessions

push towards becoming colored paint
seeping deep thru black mile-thick
slabs of shale; everything here
can melt in this rain, fall in dew-

drenched grass like applesauce and ashes
broken repairs, stubborn hunk of
refrigerator a ton of frozen butter barely
leaking, twigs stuck in knuckle

& skeletal system,
plus a bag of blood; rain & trains
slosh thru the fatty heart
sound cuts molecules

& the hold of gravity
how brazen
shit
is real.