surfacing from the shadows of sun and cloud; trees, squirrels dashing 'cross white oak branches stretching out like skeletons' reach, there is a new novel finished written and going-through revisions as i type. i set up a blogger website where i wanted to show the pieces of "exogenesis" as they assemble now and hoped all would go and peruse what i've already written and shaped.
i've been spanning ohio with amanda lately and come across towns with names like: Minster, Russia (pronounced with the same tongue-settline as Salman's last name that the Ayatollah set bounty upon); Rockbridge, Gnadenhutten; Hemlock and Gore. next, we encroach the world outside the heart-shaped Cuyahoga state: Maryland, Atlanta for Tom Waits' theatre show and South Dakota for South Dakota.
head over to the Literary Cafe website, Tremont Ohio treehouse zendo, where Beth Ann Sadowski and her stunning gridiron poesy and i gave a featured reading sometime in March that i can’t recall and they have posted video of the evening for all to joy with.
i'm stokin' again a blog i haven't frequented for awhile, just for the hell of it. footprints do well in rain and snow, washing away in both. let the words purge our stretching......
My parakeet is trying to kill himself He pops his head through the rungs of his ladder and tries to twist off his head Then he climbs to the top of the cage hangs upside down, and lets go He pops up, weaves on his feet, dazed then inserts his head again in the ladder like a soda bottle cap and tries to flip off his head Then he climbs to the roof of the cage and hangs dutifully upside down and falls and crashes Then he climbs to his feet and weaves around as I watch all this from the sofa wondering if it's the thought of spending the rest of his life with me in this little room in the Lower Haight that is driving him to such desperate lengths Jeezuz, it could be, it could be ... I know how it feels to wake up in this room's sad furnishings and realize that there's little more to do today than dress, eat and stare at the wall without a hope of getting out of this shit somehow I mean, writing poetry on welfare is a lousy occupation And all you can write about in the end is about writing poetry on welfare
Sometimes it occurs to me that as a favor to us both I simply should reach in and snap his neck I'm sure he would be grateful It's so hard to kill yourself when you're a bird Your wings are for flight, not suicide
It is sometimes necessary to act with unforgivable cruelty as the only way free of the illusion that you are free If I killed my bird, I would know for once and all what a complete asshole I am and what a relief that would be! I could then head out the door, unafraid to make the kind of mistakes that make us laugh The brand of mistake that gives us light in the dark Such mistakes as ease our pain through the long uninterrupted scream
i'm tired of the trees looking exultant mendicants praising the gossamer sky for it's streaked mammatus webs & muted presence the abject sun buttes against while people mill about boulevards tossing cigarettes into sewer grates, berating the heating bill, castigating a child's want to fashion garages from twigs & twine as being something of friviolous service to the real burden of cashing in energy on the drill press & cubicle stealthings for slips of paper embedded with secret money banks translate into currency counted out in car notes & electric volts of repay.
what struggle we meet with in dream & our conquering it as Mongol its Xi Xia means nothing if the the praising of rain clouds for rain clouds & not a gauzed sun that eventually will show it's radiance is interred with our bitter execrations lamenting wallets short on gas money, pocket-change not enough for the parking meter or twelve cinder blocks considered insufficient for home;
What earth there was formed itself out of shadows itinerant to umbra & penumbra. He dragged himself along by knotholes. The downy sleek onrush of river, separating morning from darkness, clattered a tympanic menace. He went to a knee in the soft mud as something grabbed hold of his ankle; he noted it's gnarled grip and held it there; the heels of his hands now set before him, bracing earth he reckoned a conveyance of the river somewhere south of his north. He licked at the slats of his teeth, pulling wedded bars of grease fat & tallow onto his lip where a gust of breath blew the miscreant out into the loom engulfing. He loosed his foot from tree-root, walked his feet to wrist-stump & went on, by knotholes.
The shapes of things stalked their graven progeny in the dark bowery encompassing man & sound. His own breathing broke from it's plume a kind of vertebra when touching the freeze; coccygeals turning as rudder in the fury. He took himself along, remonstrating the river's polyphony by fostering his hands to lead him without knothole navigate. Abdicating the caned balance, he slapped at darkness for steady. His feet kicked out from underneath him in chance discordbut he never touched the earth again. Two themes were picked out of the river's onrush: the first gave the taste of aluminum to his palette; water meeting rivulet meeting water again after unhinging around some obstruction the man first took as rock or agrarian implement bequeathed the river to erode it's beaten blunt. The other was unflattering, curdling, unremorseful to it's volume of disturbance. Something of Cocytus & desperation forged this consubstantial emissary; the man checked his pockets for toll, subsiding condemnation with a retrieval of three cold silver pieces between fingertips.
He went on in accord with the river's darker etude making a staccato drumming upon something slatted so a constant, even-wrought hammering twined itself with thrashing ebb. His foot kicked at something cruddy & oozing as he absent-eyed veered from earth to river-bank. A volcanic slush ingested his boot-toe and he reached for it. The corrosion fell about his thick nail-stumps and he clasped at air. Again, he scooped at what ash caught the river by it's threads & sediment stuck to his beard as he wiped a hand across the mouth.
A smell of bourbon whiskey & burning, his tongue lapped at in the whiskers. His teeth bit down on something as unrelenting as lead rounds and he ground up what enamel broke off in his mouth. He spit out what he took in and looked in the darkness; at only the shapes of things. He kick-grabbed one last time at the river whittled down to motet and something grizzled hooked on to his valance his ragged coat sleeve made over his hand.
The river rang it's requiem as he held the bone-cage above his head and considered nothing of the bourbon-whiskey stink and burning intensified as a wind took the river across his muzzle.
A mewling bounded as he tossed it back against Chyron's counterpuntal poling. A yelp, as he turned back where he come, thinking he was moving beyond.
(yes, la biblioteca....) once punctured, the mud yields the shovel it's polygamy & turns sweet-lips towards for whose trespass awakened it's slumber from myriad serpentines; once breathed, her perfume flattens my haste & it is her cradle i slip into once i take her wings for legs & arms; her kiss, that throttle, set stirring.....
& the wind tells the dead which way the wheel turns; the gristmill, a palanquin dragging clouds, dragging sky a ceremonial Judas, cut-down from the hanging tree: rope, kicked-at stars lanced through mud-slathed toes, betrayed his vestment delapidate marking man's fall & arising though nothing's been moved but the eye from it's casting a river in the moon. Ringing the bell an inverted chime, a crippled breaking separates the loom; silver beadwork of stars fashions the river from incorruptibility as they lay – some informants of God's darker fist & the sound of a girl braiding her face with what gallantry reposes itself white & black dwarfs, red giants; things she can begin to dismantle when the limbs are sawed off, ropes are used only for pullin' and the ghosts give way to bone.
and if Brother Grover's poesy hasn't been seen by your mind & eye-rain, it should; his is a poetry that lifts & demands.
thank you for this review MDG.....mitakuye oyasin; we are all family.
Chapbook Review Time
Beating Wings Flicker The Moon
by: Paul Skyrm Self Published Chapbook Reviewed by: Michael D. Grover
Let me just start off by saying that it is downright criminal that writers like this are struggling and publishing their own work. On the other hand it is a show of the artists will and perseverance. This is what it is. Thirty-two pages, all photo-copied, packed full with fifteen poems. Very professionally done. Paul Skyrm is one of the most refreshing, and original voices in underground literature. Morbid at times, hopeful at times, at times spiritual. Always powerful, and brilliant at his choice of language. Of the fifteen poems every one is a hit, there are no misses. My personal favorites are Blake Spoke Of This, Bullet Brain, and after reading Tu Fu & Umeshu I honestly had to put the book down, and just say "Whoa." to myself. Paul as an artists and a writer should be read by many. If you know his stuff, you probably know this. If you don't you need to find out. I happen to know he is practically giving these gems away at a very fair price that would be affordable for even the most modest budget. Contact Paul at http://www.myspace.com/tonightthedeadprayforus and work out the details. You won't be disappointed. -MDG
Seagulls took to the salt-box church's palsied shadow somehow given rigidity with it's timid skeleton from the discordant slathering of stones and hot-buttered tar melted into the street & I wheeled Maj across these laying of bones, pushing our faces into the ocean's sour-brine swaddled breath, imbued with air and giving the skull I collected remnants of mailbox burnings & lap-dogs being flattened to paper clips under the slow-turning bald tire within, a kind of phrotinstery even Basho might only disseminate about by watching himself in the sparrow there take summer's clouds to autumn & beat his wings till Basho himself considered the tree was more the man than the man a Buddha, all the more reassurance it would not be razed or ransacked for it's blithering idylls as some relict for the candle burnt out under the bed's shadow dust.
Katherine paced her syncopation with Maj's twisted foot in the flat-bellied iron stirrup; the light brown leather shoe affixed with a hinge to the iron bones he wore outside the skin & beneath his jeans that turned with a lifting from the hand's snap-buckle grip. He was stiff and with no rag or oil to loosen the cramp, my mind knotted and I kissed his skull through the tares returned to it's murk with those seagulls nesting shadows in the church's pneumatic bell-tower.She held his hand as we passed through shadow nebula, I minding she needn't hasten her trod to keep a'hold of his hand so I walked as I sit here now watching Grandpa grey with those tubes eulogized as small red holes in his arms, slithered over with sunken veins the way a nail hammered into it's wood is remembered with sweat from the brow staining it's planar head steel and sawdust obscuring. I recalled wiping sunlight from catching the signs & pitching off an oak tree's daisy garden bedded by cross-tie to the raccoon who hid in the bushes thinned out by electric shearing & pruning; amputating gnarled bones from thorax as they palsied, whittling the skeleton down so much as I went from putting teeth under to pillow to putting them in girls' mouths, you could watch my father's car at it's tires balance the turn from gravel pot-holes to dirt, watching silver hubcaps sparkle like stars in a pond. There was a quality of aeration as I watched my grandfather show the pillow cover threads with his head turned the side and mouth a maw, eyes closed, wondering if his hand was numb from being smothered under his thigh. I didn't want to move it and wake him; his chest-cage, the nurse told me, only seemed like it was moving because "you wanted it to." Or those spring blossoms compressed it as they lay across the wind and his mauve bed-gown. They wound an armature with their shivering geniculate song as the wind crack-backed their translucent wings, seeping as blood in rain slathering pavement where if you would step in the dark, only the stink would tell you something malevolent crossed here, but your sloshing validating only your hair damping into swamp.
I held a cigarette while Katherine slipped her hands under mine scattering off the rubber-coated handle-bars. Ben patted my shoulder blade. We were in Provincetown & I had to say it again & again before forgetting we were anywhere at all. Maj raised his hand against his ear, fingertips even with lobe and turned a half smile as his eyes lifted from the swelling, trench-dug cheek meat that hid the bone that hid the muscle that grew from the soul as my smile grew from his. I closed my grandfather's mouth and took off his glasses, propping one stem on his wallet laying there where Aunt Arlene put the thing.She wanted him to be posed before everyone got to the hospital but his body was to light to look natural unless you framed encyclopedias around him, almost a chalk-line to remember what the dead forget of their living. She hid in the bathroom and my mother urinated twelve times before she came out.
Arlene following behind her.
Katherine came out of the church and the seagulls were with her. Laying her head on the Picasso, she told me she loved Ben as if he were her own bones: holding her up, giving her balance & deed. She was joyous she was with Ben & they were here with Maj & I. The two of them slept down the street in Provincetown and met my waking with donuts, already breaking out the mugs and dishes from cupboards nearest the shower and it's plastic-folded booth before I hacked into my fist and cleared steam-shovels from sandy eyes. She asked me if it was weird taking a shower in the kitchen and I told her it would be if the shower had originally been in the living room. She asked if I thought Ben would marry her if she asked him the proposition so I put out my cigarette and took the elevator back to grandpa as they cut his wristband ID off him and swept his white hair into some order with a palm as they impaled a dime of light onto his pupils which didn't shrivel into black ants squished under boot-tread, but just lay there like fried eggs in a black skillet, a signature on white paper, mud on the toes of a sleeping tare. I saw that stillness again when I saw Maj wrap his mouth around the tabernacle of Christ, the flat host taken on the tongue, ingested only after it breaks down denseness into breath and tangles our bones, the reliquary, SAT TAT AUM.
That stillness again, with Grandpa in black suit, white shirt, black tie and a hideous Mephisto pale-face sewing from the lips to temples. He looked like a shaved peacock or Quetzalcoatl condemned for his plumage, relinquishing birth-right with a blood-letting that took with it, his blood-pulse. Someone said he looked beautiful in the box; I thought he looked this stone-sky and stone-ocean, but there were no seagulls crawling down the skulls of those who gathered to mourn and pick at the abcess.
No one sang.
No one talked til they walked out in the rain.
The wind smelled of cedar as they lowered his body. The shovels threw dirt on the box. A gravestone said "SANTO GIAMPAPA."
My mother walked back to his bed, drunk & screamed at the smell of his cologne saturate in the air like typhoon in the clouds where his hands had clapped together, dragging the wet aroma into the pores of his nape.
I told Katherine she better get on and ask the old boy to marry her; Ben took eleven days to name his cat and he came up with "Scoonie."
She laughed as the throng amassed at the tabernacle we could see through the window and she let go of my arm singing Ben's name as she went in such a way that I thought of scrap-metal, fiberglass, saw-horses,furnace coils & fridge doors all being shook in a great aumbry as if reminding the world the song comes from that which is summoned; all we have to do is nothing.
The word "die" is a progeny from the Indo-European word "dheu" which means "to become senseless" so let's name our children the names they give us. Let's love those who draw their faces in blue pen on napkins & are so cold with the moon they leave their jackets on in bed and blow-dry their bare legs eating pasta salad out of plastic tubs. Let's grab the street-seagulls by their stony-vesper necks and give them back their sky.
It's easier to tighten up a pipe with a monkey-wrench than with an elephant.
When you are dumb to love, you feel her cold lips against your lidded eyes and the grey-tooth scraping your breath.
