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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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lush images abound
making Merry make no sound
writing letters down
our tankas abound
terse folliliferous verse
followed by no sound
one hand claps only
in time to the ancient one
it's all haiku fun
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Fooling around on a rainy afternoon,
I came across this.
I don't know how old the photo is, nor have I met this "the Larry" fellow.
My first reaction was, like,
"The driven snow could not be this white."
{Photo supplied by the Larry}
A License to Limerick
I blame it on the smut in the air.
Token men, mostly women, blonde hair.
FOXES NEWS, it’s more like.
I’ll just go for a hike,
Till it becomes much less biased, more fair.
It’s very distracting,
It’s very bad acting,
They all have a cloned sense of style;
And they all wear the same frozen smile.
They are told this from birth,
None will surpass their self-worth,
And they will pass from this earth
Hearing the sounds of our mirth,
As they finish the race in life’s mile.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jan 13, 2015 - 09:41pm PT
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Say what there?
[Nothin'.]
Say, what the hey?
[Nothin'.]
Hey there, say?
Now we're talikin'.
About what?
How 'bout y'all?
YOU
Jorge Luis Borges
(trans. From the Spanish by Norman Thomas di Giovanni)
Throughout time, a single man has been born, a single man has died.
To think otherwise is to be led into statistics, is to attempt the impossible.
Something no less impossible than trying to add the smell of rain to the dream you dreamed the night before last.
That man is Ulysses, Abel, Cain, the first man to make the stars into constellations, the builder of the first pyramid, the man who set down the hexagrams of the Book of Changes, the smith who carved runes on Hengest’s sword, the bowman Einar Tamberskelver, Luis de Leon, the bookseller who fathered Samuel Johnson, Voltaire’s gardener, Darwin on the deck of the Beagle, a Jew in the death chamber--with time, you and I.
A single man has died at Troy, at Metaurus, at Hastings, at Austerlitz, at Trafalgar, at Gettysburg.
A single man has died in a hospital ward, on shipboard, in bitter loneliness, in love’s and habit’s bedroom.
A single man has seen the spreading dawn.
A single man has felt on his tongue the coolness of water, the taste of fruits and flesh.
I speak of the one man, of the individual, of the man who is always alone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einar_Thambarskelfir
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_de_Le%C3%B3n
(samples of Fray Luis' poetry herein)
Where have all the ST poets gone?
Gone to climb and ski and hike and jive and most of all to dance, I hope:
with more phrases singing praises,
with more words honoring turds,
with more jingles about Kraft singles,
with more tongue-twisting turning twirling tankas
with partners who cannot remain silent much longer.
Winter is long, boredom heavy, but your poems may last forever.
And the dance will never stop if that's the case.
Thank YOU all, ST, for helping this thread along and all.
MFM
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jan 13, 2015 - 11:11pm PT
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From out there on the prairies of Cornwall.
Cowboy Song
by Charles Causley
I come from Salem County
Where the silver melons grow,
Where the wheat is sweet as an angel's feet
And the zithering zephyrs blow.
I walk the blue bone-orchard
In the apple-blossom snow,
Where the teasy bees take their honeyed ease
And the marmalade moon hangs low.
My maw sleeps prone on the prairie
In a boulder eiderdown,
Where the pickled stars in their little jam-jars
Hang in a hoop to town.
I haven't seen paw since a Sunday
In eighteen seventy-three
When he packed his snap in a bitty mess-trap
And said he'd be home by tea.
Fled is my fancy sister
All weeping like the willow,
And dead is the brother I loved like no other
Who once did share my pillow.
I fly the florid water
Where run the seven geese round,
O the townsfolk talk to see me walk
Six inches off the ground.
Across the map of midnight
I trawl the turning sky,
In my green glass the salt fleets pass
The moon her fire-float by.
The girls go gay in the valley
When the boys come down from the farm,
Don't run, my joy, from a poor cowboy,
I won't do you no harm.
The bread of my twentieth birthday
I buttered with the sun,
Though I sharpen my eyes with lovers' lies
I'll never see twenty-one.
Light is my shirt with lilies,
And lined with lead my hood,
On my face as I pass is a plate of brass,
And my suit is made of wood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Causley
Thanky, Amyjo. She tells me Causley never ever traveled to The Wild West.
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Bushman
Social climber
The island of Tristan da Cunha
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Jan 17, 2015 - 10:32am PT
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'My Writers Block'
My writers block was on my neck where once my wrinkled head did rest,
I used to write and think of things whether or not I tried to wrest,
Ideas and stories from my mind I thought amusing or at best,
Would keep me centered or at the least would put acumen to the test,
The words that came so easily I might have put to better use,
To educate my simple mind that I should not be so obtuse,
To say I'm fine right where I am has always been my worst excuse,
If I'm right where I ought to be I ought to let my thinking loose,
To dream of journeys far and wide of voyages I'd seldom miss,
To coin a phrase or tilt my pen at windmills in my minds abyss,
To ride away with pockets lined with verbiage plentiful and this,
To catch at words that come and go if not for this I'd be remiss,
To grope for the ungraspable but falling short I still would bet,
The journey is worth all the pain the telling of it better yet,
But now my mind is cluttered with such bric-a-brac I'd soon forget,
Were it to wash out with the tide and leave only this brief vignette.
But cluttered as my words may be my life's disorder would be told,
Is more or less predictable as situations do unfold,
Where everyday occurrences are common and might fit the mold,
To say that it's more complicated shows I'm only growing old,
So clearing up the garbage that's been plugging up my busy mind,
I to hope find some satisfaction in the moment to unwind,
But classically, unexpected, and ironically I find,
The writers block that exited has lodged in my behind.
-bushman
01/17/2015
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jan 18, 2015 - 10:21am PT
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^^^Block steady, Bushman! Thanks very much for posting that.
Local wordsters: Published in "Tree" from Coffee Bandits.
Some UCM students, some Merced College students.
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Jan 18, 2015 - 10:34am PT
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yes pause for effect,yeah, Yeah, I See
try herd work the words , spend the time and post it here on the super Topo poetry thread!?m,.!
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jan 19, 2015 - 07:25pm PT
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THE TENTH POEM
for my son, Sancho Fergus, age one
Galway Kinnell
1
The skinny
waterfalls--footpaths
wandering out of heaven--strike
the cliffside, leap and shudder off.
Somewhere behind me
a small fire goes on flaring in the rain, in its desolate ashes.
No matter, now, whom it was built for,
it keeps its flame,
it warms
everyone who might wander into its radiance,
a tree, a lost animal, the stones.
For if one has loved,
(even if only once, but loved),
it burns forever,
because in the dying world, in some blood-soaked
heap of bones, it was set burning.
2
I know there is so much of my life
wasted, so much of everyone’s life
thrown away; so much
we could have been or done
that we held ourselves back from
out of fear
or out of the dream we had but one thing to be or to do
or out of a sense the richest life
moves through mystery—past doors not opened, roads not taken.
And yet I think nothing once touched by desire can wholly
escape us, can keep itself always
beyond the last flares of the brow-lamp of knowing
And how clear the air is, before dark.
3
This is the tenth poem
and it is the last, It is right,
at the last, that one
and zero
walk off together,
walk off the end of these pages together,
one creature
walking away side by side with the emptiness.
The wind
blows over a leaf, a jaw-bone
a stalk of witch-grass. Whatever
springs from sod, one day, the last day,
finds out
what it is to be singing.
4
Lastness is
brightness. It is the brightness
gathered up of all that went before. It lasts. It endures.
And when it ceases
to endure, there is nothing, nothing
left.
In the rust of old cars,
in the hole torn open in the body of the Archer,
to the river-mist smelling of the weariness of stones,
the dead lie,
empty, filled, at the beginning,
and the first
voice comes craving again out of their mouths.
5
I remember
that Bach concert I went to so long ago--
the chandelired room
of ladies and gentlemen who would never die...
the voices go out,
the room becomes hushed,
the violinist puts the irreversible sorrow of his face
into the opened palm
of the wood. The music begins:
A shower of resin,
the bow-strings listening with all their might
to the wail,
the sexual wail
of all the back alleys and blood-strings of our lives
still crying, still singing, from the sliced intestine
of cat.
6
About this poem,
if we shall call it that,
or concert of one
divided among himself,
this earthward gesture
of the sky-diver—silkworms
on his back still busily spinning
and already gnawing away
the chutes of his love, who could have saved him
this free floating of one
who opens his arms into the attitude
of flight, as he obeys
the necessity and falls...
7
Sancho Fergus, don’t cry!
Or else, cry.
On the body,
on the blued flesh, when it is
laid out, find
the one flea which is laughing.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jan 19, 2015 - 10:29pm PT
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The Climb of My Life
unnamed
no rating
I began this long-ass climb in 1948
the support team called out the rescue team
before I had made my first move
the umbilical was about 20mm
you might think it safe to tie into
...but mine was a "nuchal cord"
and had wrapped itself around my neck
they thought I was blue
I guess I was a little “smurf-like”
and sad
and weak
a lack of oxygen
nothing more
and so mom and I bivvied at the hospital
for two extra days while tests were done
and I was monitored not with patches and electrodes
but by palpation and reflex testing
and mom’s watchful eye
the first pitch was accompanied by my older brother
I don’t remember much
there are flashes of older cousins
the next pitch was a trip to Idaho
I remember much of it distinctly
but no one else has the memories
we had a younger sister about then
but I doubt she came along
it would have been too much for mom
so Lenna was probably still safely tucked away
in two separate places
we stopped for a night among redwoods
and the stars wheeled through the branches
we arrived at McCall where Sis and Roy
my great-aunt and uncle lived on a ranch
a chicken was slaughtered in our honor
we were fed dumplings and then the pigs were fed what we didn’t eat
I witnessed the sun’s rising over the lump of choss called Sunrise Mtn.
I rode the horsie and I was three and had been on an expedition already
the next twelve years comprise the second pitch
it was varied terrain involving first, second, third and fourth class
it sounds complicated
but the nuns, the den mothers, and the scoutmasters kept me on the right route
by the time I was learning about Chaucer and his pioneering rhymes
I had a genuine climbing partner
he introduced me to a girl
my, my, this was beginning to be more fun than ever
but I got seriously off-route here
and she became the family’s bugaboo
the cord with mom was severed
there was nothing to do but serve my country
and so began a series of pitches that led nowhere
and I found myself rapping down and starting over in another set of cracks
but my partner was always (nearly always) taking up my slack at belays
he was busy with his own conquests at this time and so we parted ways
I found a suitable female and gave her my ring and she gave me hers
this was a series of pitches involving lots of lying back and forth
a lot of aid and several more reversals of course
but it ended with progeny
another mouse to feed
and a woman who could not do any more aid but had to go free
so she freed herself and the child and bagged it
I was left holding the bag
she was the pig and I was the mouse
here are your papers and there goes the house
I climbed in a fog for several years
at Tahquitz and J Tree I shed me no tears
I climbed to forget and to enjoy the regret
I began to drink lots and then couldn’t get
why no more ladies were too sold on my style
I have an old man, they’d say with a smile
that seemed to mock
this drunken rock jock
and the VW fell apart and I lost my left eye
and came back to this town where I’ll be when I die
because paradise is only eighty miles away
and I may not get any closer
it’s a pity I’ll never see the summit
but then none of us do...
or do we?
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jan 19, 2015 - 10:37pm PT
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Yes, Gnome
paws for effect
you need to grind and grind and grind
unless you dance a lot
polished verse is a nod to convention
since when do I nod to that?
not that I can't appreciate others' fine efforts
but just effing do it
Mikey will like it regardless
and so will I
so will I
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jan 19, 2015 - 11:09pm PT
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E.E. Cummings
POEM
let’s, from some loud unworld’s most rightful wrong
climbing,my love(till mountains speak the truth)
enter a cloverish silence of thrushsong
(and more than every miracle’s to breathe)
wounded us will becauseless ultimate
earth accept and primeval whyless sky;
healing our by immeasurable night
spirits and with illimitable day
(shrived of that nonexistence millions call
life,you and I may reverently share
the blessed eachness of all beautiful
selves wholly which and innocently are)
seeming’s enough for slaves of space and time
--ours is the now and here of freedom. Come
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Jan 20, 2015 - 06:37am PT
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Cool!
Swami
Nutz n' Hexz',
.Molinar hammer with a pick
Four lost arrowz, those four Dolt pinz,
E.B's for shoes, a Royal crown chalk 'sack',
Save a pin for the belay ?!
He'll bring 'em up,
If he don't fall
Try it Like that.
Cool!
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Jan 20, 2015 - 10:54am PT
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Stellar's Gnome.A bird of a feather.
POEM ON A MOUNTAIN BLUEBIRD
George Young (1931- )
The Navajo stones never managed such a blue as you
nor the lips of the man
pulled from an icy river last year.
You are a grace
never mastered by earth’s bluest eye
at the foot of a glacier, open to a cloudless sky--
nor recognized by idle school children
staring out the window at what appears to be a blue ribbon
tied to a telephone wire.
You are a flash of living, breathing blue.
And Lord what am I
that such a bird can escape from my skull and fly.
http://www.drgeorgeyoung.com/about-the-author
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Jan 20, 2015 - 11:17am PT
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He as, I see it, is Immune Form the doom that haunts so many now,
Among the reeds and weeds a seed of denial wells up within me.
FROM WITH IN.
A tower of doubt has sprung up making, me miss the dyno. . .
For if only I had thought it out,
in the positive and left the run out in ..
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Then fur shore, No gulf, no beach,
surely this missed jump
would have begun and not end todays fun!!
Happy big dat birthday Mike
Great minds and Climbers
Share more than
Fingers for
the mouse!
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Jan 20, 2015 - 12:45pm PT
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Conform me not,
trouble be hot
all far from forget me not!
Swing low the eddy of time
I see the time is drawing nigh
or nye
you be the judge ,jury and excommunicator
Chief executioner in chief, post not for if thy post is sheep dip it will be held up to ridicule forgettme knott
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Leggs
Sport climber
Made in California
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Wonderful, Sullly... just wonderful.
And so appropriate. You are so unbelievably thoughtful, and a wonderful friend. ~xx
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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INNOCENTS' SONG
by Charles Causley
Who's that knocking on the window,
Who's that standing at the door,
What are all those presents
Laying on the kitchen floor?
Who is the smiling stranger
With hair as white as gin,
What is he doing with the children
And who could have let him in?
Why has he rubies on his fingers,
A cold, cold crown on his head,
Why, when he caws his carol,
Does the salty snow run red?
Why does he ferry my fireside
As a spider on a thread,
His fingers made of fuses
And his tongue of gingerbread?
Why does the world before him
Melt in a million suns,
Why do his yellow, yearning eyes
Burn like saffron buns?
Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double-talking:
Herod is his name.
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Gnome Ofthe Diabase
climber
Out Of Bed
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Feb 10, 2015 - 11:46am PT
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THanx to z brown and Flames an de beat boyz who inspired this guy . . .
Howl
By Allen Ginsberg
For Carl Solomon
I
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, alcohol and c*#k and endless balls,
incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the motionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine until the noise of wheels and children brought them down shuddering mouth-wracked and battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford’s floated out and sat through the stale beer afternoon in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge,
a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grindings and migraines of China under junk-withdrawal in Newark’s bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through snow toward lonesome farms in grandfather night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary indian angels who were visionary indian angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight streetlight smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the brilliant Spaniard to converse about America and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,
who let themselves be f*#ked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman’s loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate c#&% and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver—joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses’ rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hung-over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open to a room full of steam-heat and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blur floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other’s hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other’s salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,
Pilgrim State’s Rockland’s and Greystone’s foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother finally **, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination—
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time—
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipsis catalogue a variable measure and the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soul between 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
II
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! C*#ks@cker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
III
Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I’m with you in Rockland
where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries
I’m with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the spinsters of Utica
I’m with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx
I’m with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void
I’m with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the fascist national Golgotha
I’m with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb
I’m with you in Rockland
where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep
I’m with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Feb 10, 2015 - 12:05pm PT
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1. BEGIN the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
2. Whatever this is that I am, it is a little flesh and breath, and the ruling part. Throw away thy books; no longer distract thyself: it is not allowed; but as if thou wast now dying, despise the flesh, it is blood and bones and a network, a contexture of nerves, veins and arteries. See the breath also, what kind of a thing it is; air, and not always the same, but every moment sent out and again sucked in. The third then is the ruling part: consider thus: Thou art an old man; no longer let this be a slave, no longer be pulled by the strings like a puppet to unsocial movements, no longer be either dissatisfied with thy present lot, or shrink from the future.
17. Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul of a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgment. And, to say all in a word, everything which belongs to the body is a stream, and what belongs to the soul is a dream and vapour, and life is a warfare and a stranger’s sojourn, and after-fame is oblivion. What, then, is that which is able to conduct a man? One thing, and only one — the love of wisdom. But this consists in keeping the daemon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy, not feeling the need of another man’s doing or not doing anything; and besides, accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came; and, finally, waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded.
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