ACRUX



A few nicks in the pate of

this the 3rd millennium & the

	stupor of 

this adolescent nation.  In the



name of hooligans or grosbeak

	or by the power of 



some latent prophet or the spangled

	helix, in these the hours



of our gross need, (4 or 5 fires 

in the archives): please invoke 



	some musty diety 

	or new limned 

	rupture savior.  We

	beseech,  by way of

this gurgled 



invocation through alien

red mucus, apples of lead

bubbles,the  rusty paps 

of our tampered olivine nurturers ,

	our fruit trees wither



in the shadow of the cross.



& I will bear every inverted

	little t upon my brow



or in bosom or bowel, & whom

must we adumbrate in this wasted

season, the monarch-winged Morningstar?

What prophet of inversion, what

	liquor of the firebringer's

ravenpecked liver engorges my

	scratched lips, unwinged



drooping shoulders, leady bristling

	clot of a heart 

		in this dark apex, Golgotha-stained

bruise-tinted night of tortured reason?



Our tomes, our hovels 

our every outpost or dojo

	encumbered by the wattle of the NAME that

unwholesome embryo ( & 

	I weep for each of your

	raped words, each of your

	flogged tenets, no son of man,

		those tongues are the 

		spleen's speech as 

			are these--I shall

never forget).



	Pox the blessors of the grey

	howitzers of capital,

	middlebrow 

	genuflectors, I expel 



negating seed over your 

fleshless texts. No brutal

	tongue this new speech of 

the aeon, no less holy



	& no bolt cast,

	no thing scourged

	or punished.



You backwards soldiers of 

	attrition, schism-bearers:



I whisper each of your names

to the slaughtered lambs, each 

of your sightless effigies

not set ablaze but burning

	with the tepid

	flames of its own lack.



I bid every dead thing return

	before your supposed rapture &

	sing the song of its nature, weep

for its lost flesh so belabored



by the base law of these petty

	somnambulists.

COR CAROLI



The worst of it is a waning

cloud of monsters (pink locusts)



that chip away at



the tensile strength of

daylight's anchors.



Perhaps there's something to be said

here after all.



What things occur on 

the milky stage of a room? This is all

the province of the drooling

envelopes of death--



Still she folds 

around him like an origami

box.



Still less time for speaking

at the toes 

of the century.  Its

kick, kick, turn:



I in the warm globe 

of I's falsified identities.

All the braided towers

& their sequined wrestling

masks look down on

this ancestral Twister.



The sweeping glee

of the kliegs, wry irony

expelled from the exposition.



	You seekers &

	dreamers, my 

	flaxen pedestrians



huddle 'round the

touch-pads,



a kind of gooey equity

goes right for a motherfucker's eyes.



Scalpel, chisel,

get this parser exhumed.



The lonely king, the goofy

	scepter



heard the sirens

& their phoneme parcels--



All agree this night

is very rich 

& it downsizes me.



	A bible of

barren pharmaceuticals

	& rogue brands.



I will love you

	while the hummers hum

	& the hissers hiss



& there's been biomorphic muck

fecund on the bottom of the ninth

	for years

		now.

My good friend the fantastic poet Jason Arthur Wood wrote this elegy for Yasser Arafat back in 2002 when he was under siege. While the circumstances of his death may be different, I think it still holds true today.

CITIZEN, DARKENING

April 16 -- 29, 2002





i.

Accept it -- a realignment from along-

side or against or without -- as necessary.  Witness 




action as gesture rendered 

upon itself.  Hope: for to bear witness; 

for to bleed; for to wait out this




summonsing.  Where this came to wake had been 

a wave in stalled motion, this land.  What formed within

only a membrane (stranded) felt as a flesh 

somehow (permeated in substance) multiplied 

with facets.  Then a retracting -- as if under-





ii.

scored.  Settled farther inland (this fullness of 

sound brought from the bed 

of a river, the back of a throat)  

then before (one voice).  Assumed form 

as only shapes, only emboldened gray shapes, 




calculating themselves, disguised 

by a sliding, themselves

into a direction, themselves becoming an allowance,




becoming a merging, as another 

awakening.  Only shaped (formed 

in the back of this throat), only folding





iii.

over onto itself only.  Then river only.  Then speaking with 

the dead (our dead).  Then soon-to-be-

storied-to-forget.  Withdraw, then

(I have grown impatient in this space)(there is no more space)

redoubt.  In these hands one thin voice takes hold.  Only




(legion, only)





iv

(an exacting of the observed)(neither desperation, neither hope)(from within the


 confines of a presence)(from one narrow eye)(watching another closed narrowing)
(from form entering into the walls)(can seem to hold)(no, cannot, not now)(exacting 


one slight eye to better)(one slight chording of vision)(these notes are not precise)


(these notes form)(from nothing)(fullness of voice)(formulate a promise, citizen,)

(darkening,)

 



v.

(as that which cannot be undertaken; your voice wanted in approach closer

to the back of your throat -- motion held down by this by action -- in impatient

waiting cast across an impatient spanning -- patiently make time wind through- 

out -- create space into the absence of which you can place only voice, only raised

in contagion, settled upon the press of wanting -- to do this only now, to make 

this count -- until wanting is beyond symbol, until wanting is the only 

column, is the wanting which has brought you here and brought you here 

again -- one man, blindly, given the chance they would watch you through this space,)




(always watch you crossing this space you have been reduced to, two walls, these 

sounds breaking, one floor upon which whichever one of you -- you, speaking; 

you, spoken -- they were looking for, drawn within a coiling, an emptied stair-

case, an arranging of cycles, hollow energy's hollowed gathering places, a reality 

designed of geographic, become an understanding stripped of incidence -- only by 

your name gathered in a superstition are these charges the air implicates)

 



vi.

then, on the seventh day, did you resist.  All along 

its wake -- waves crested in a a pass-

age -- you extended 

motion ("I hope I will be a martyr"), extended

one hand into one throat ("in the Holy Land.") and produced 




an avalanche of voice, one cacophony 

(these notes are not sounding) above all others (as

they were meant) as I have placed (to sound) ourselves 

here, where they cannot help




but find us.  Sleep -- as there is time to awaken, there is time





vii.

(upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence)

(a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence)

(for the people shall not perish from the earth)



--Jason Arthur Wood

Fuck the South

Courtesy of Aaron, this is absolutely brilliant.

Apologies to my buddy Todd and David Hess and anyone else behind enemy lines...

Courtesy of Shanna C., We're all very, very sorry, world.

ANSER

Recombinant incumbent rips a mutant future,

a little rabid grace to brook 

	environs like a fleshwound;

pay no mind to the clinking bronze 

	armor, these armored

characters who lurch & strut like 

	zombies filled with

		purple methane.




The curve of the earth shall realign

	the piles, the aeon divorces

the pink fizz of the end of the empire.




Red to blue hand to fist




	mouth to mouth-- 

a storm of dust, cloud 

	of locusts is a tenacious apocryphal

raven for these craven old boys, please




bow to the graven vulpine image

	of a fanged nymph,

you funky armies:

	listen to Wilhelm's revenant

beat 

	the inexorable steel drum.

Perseverers, please remain ithyphallic

as the cabin pressure adjusts to you.

Att'n NYC peeps:

Zinc Bar Talk/Reading Series Presents:

Sunday Nov. 14th @ Zinc Bar, 7 PM (90 W. Houston St., corner of LaGuardia Pl)
Albert Flynn de Silva & Mark Lamoureux


Albert Flynn DeSilver's recent work has appeared in New American Writing, Volt, The Canary, Crowd, and soon, an Anthology of Bay Area Poetry published by Faux Press. There is also a new book "Some Nature" published mysteriously by something called "The Non-Existent Press." You have to wear a special helmet to read the book (sold separately).


As for the talk, I plan on talking about "Emptiness & Form in Poetry" (still thinking of a good long & pretentious title) and reading a bit from "(a) chiasmus" this new work written around Richard Serra's "Torqued Ellipses." I'll probably go back and forth between talk and poem. Does this sound ok??

***

Mark Lamoureux descended from ordinary earthmen. During adolescence, he developed certain preternatural abilities enabling his works to appear in such places as Jubilat, Fulcrum, Shampoo, Carve, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, and others. His appearance may be hideous to ordinary humans, but in his heart he is the managing editor of Fulcrum Annual. Together with Ugly Duckling Presse he unleashed a chapbook, City/Temple in the fall of 2003 and 29 Cheeseburgers with Pressed Wafer in the winter of 2004.


"I will be adumbrating the life & work of Wilhelm Reich as they relate to a selection of work from my own Astrometry Organon. I will be reading from Reich's work & my own."

I guess the rat-bastard has already gotten to work on his plan for public schools in the U.S.

In case you were wondering,here is a chart depticting the red/blue to IQ ratio of our once-proud "Nation."

Nothing else to say about this.

Today is a black day. Worse than 9/11; the loss of life will be greater and the damage to this country will be greater.

Condolences to everyone as we mourn the next 4 years of our lives.

C'mon New Englanders, let's join my Quebecois ancestors and fucking seceed...

Anybody who knows me well enough knows of my intense disdain for The New Yorker, but I was shocked today to look at the cover of my boss's copy and find that I really, really love the cover. A perfect illustration of modern pathos/lonliness, breathtaking in every aspect. Upon looking inside at the illustrator I see...Of course!...It's Adrian Tomine of Optic Nerve fame, which was a brilliant comic and he is a brilliant comics artist.

Be sure to take a look at the New Yorker cover for this week. Better yet, tear off the cover and throw the rest of the flaccid and irrelevant waste of glossy paper away.

Attempting to maintain a veneer of calm and composure, though I feel periodically short of breath, panicked. Trying to remain optimistic. Unsure how anybody can be thinking about anything else today apart from this election. Well, anybody in the U.S. at least. Though I suppose if I lived elsewhere I would be concerned with the results given that the entire fate of the world part of the mix. The cycle of violence spills into other countries as we have seen with the Madrid Bombing and the hostages in Iraq, etc. etc. Thus the rest of the world is involved. If only the rest of the world shared our prerogative or hubris for monitoring the elections of other countries. I would feel better with a 3rd party monitoring these elections. The conditions of the last one were certainly such that the U.S. would have intervened, had it been happening on someone else's soil.

If you can think of a deity, pray to it.

Good news for any Bush supporters who cross my path in the next 32 hours.

There are a couple of narrative sections in Astrometry Organon which provide a kind of skeletal framework or context of the rest of the stuff. This is one of them, my own retelling of the Perseus/Andromeda/Cetus myth.

MENKAR




Said beauty shackled by 

	maternal hubris, a blithe

flicker in the great dark

	creature's eye as

gorged on ruin it lumbered 

	toward she splayed

on rocks, unabashed, as tho

	the matriarch can't know

what beauty's for, or even 

	chains, for that matter for what

are chains but mute reminders

	of the terror of circumstance,

what horror or what folly

	or coy indifference of she

who took the base beast between her

	lips, real horrorshow, & that

happy demon who curdled &

	with a shrug snapped those

same chains, & there on those

	rocks she felt the kiss

of the suckers on the small of her 

	back as the razed lands wept

for the spoils of arrogance

	& then the one hotter than said

nereids heaved the whole muddle 

	away under the rocking 

of that negator, liberator 

	never a father's kin, a karma

lumberer, what beauty knows

	is how trite conflict melts

in the crucible of a red sigh 

	& the creature knew what

beauty knows, who knew naught

	but struggle now naught

but love, the 2 of them there

	like a fuming reactor as it

is said the parched land would be renewed

	by those groans, transgression

erased by beauty & its double

	entwined on porous rock, until

Perseus, prig, came with blows

	of his father's father's 

father's sword: pretty jock

	darling of Athena who cleaved

the purring beast in 2 &

	so she savage beauty let fall

the bruised tentacle

	from between her breasts

& took her place with him though in

	her slept still the seed of the Other &

slept beside him who belonged 

	to the land & its wars 

& she who belonged to no-one 

	& the ghost of the monster 

who belonged to her & to the porous

	stones & the screaming waves

of the sea.

A shadow of things to come.

It's not the terrorists we should fear on election day, it's the incumbent administration...