Today the
postman brought
me Ernest
Hemingway. I
didn't know
what to do
with him, so
I gave him a
shotgun &
told him to
go off & pretend
he was fighting
bulls or some-
thing. A bit of
noise at first,
but he's been
quiet for the
last few hours.

Mean-
   while we
      mellow into mainstream.

e(r)go

I AM
Colin McCahon (1954)

Must point out

the wonderful things harry k stammer has been doing with words from my poem letters.


Terror 19 - variation - V eerily by harry k stammer

& yes, that is the right spelling.

Since tomorrow

is the end of September, it's probably an opportune time for a reminder that submissions for The Hay(na)ku Anthology, No. 2 are closing at the end of September.

Full details are available at Hay(na)ku Poetry.

Today the
postman brought
me a digitally
remastered & re-
mixed live
recording of
the Big Bang. For
my tastes it's
a little over-
mined. No
matter.

If / there were / no Benny Cemoli

"I have always believed that at least half the famous people in history never existed. You invent what you need to invent."
-Philip K. Dick

Osama
bin Laden
is dead alive

dead
alive dead
alive dead alive

Space & Time

(a note for Alex Gildzen)

I'm turning 65 next month, & for most of that time I have shared my life with cats. Or perhaps, I have spent time with cats who were gracious enough to let me share their space with them.

The first was a ginger tom with the mundane name of Peter, he so big & I so small that I would pretend to ride it around the house as if / it were a horse. Another time, another town; & a distraught motorist who came knocking at our door to say he had run over our – this one with an unremembered name but I know it had black fur – cat which had crawled away into a stormwater drain to, as we all thought, die. But hours later, at the open front door – life was much more secure then – this bloodied but not too badly broken creature. & nursed back to health……

I don't remember cats in Wellington, but Auckland, yes.

                                                                                            The
cat enters, all wet with droplets of rain, like a
grey night.

& Sydney, possibly my favourite, that would spend the day prowling & then, late in the afternoon, would come to perch on the balcony of the front porch, to welcome me when I got home. Who would go for walks with me , miles at a time, scuttling along under the parked cars for protection. Who would come with me when I went up to the shops, most of the way, & then climb up a tree in the park just before the main road, to wait for my return.

She died aged about fifteen. & then, somehow, we acquired three, all strays, who shared our house. One died peacefully after ten or so years; the second died not so peacefully from diabetic complications, after nine months of daily insulin shots, morning & night.

& then the third, a tortoiseshell, called Little One because at one time she was the smallest. Now large, & sure of herself because she has no competition, a lizard gut hanging down, & the only one of the three of us who has thrived in this new setting. She sits beside me as I write,

                                                   the cat
on the stool beside me & the hissing heater
keeping us company.

gets the shits when I'm late feeding her, is healthy as all hell & heading happily towards her third decade.

But she will be our last. & may even outlast me.

SEED MONEY

The cat, in
something like a
caterpillar
crawl, descends
the steps to lie in a
portion of shade created
by the corner of the
house. She sticks
her paws out so they rest
in the sun, drawing
on its direct warmth
while the rest of her body
at one remove
stays sheltered &
secure. There are a lot
of potential metaphors
in that pose.

Part two,

the colour part, of the print edition of issue two of Otoliths is on its way for proofing.



It contains paintings, essays, poems & vispo by Karl Young, Vernon Frazer, Sandra Simonds, Nico Vassilakis & John M. Bennett, Carol Jenkins, Ira Joel Haber, Thomas Fink, Geof Huth, David-Baptiste Chirot, Michael Rothenberg & Eileen Tabios. Glorious stuff, in full colour.

I'm in the final fiddlings with part one, trying to get a poem right that runs its lines over on the smaller print page. Made a bit more difficult by the fact that it's bilingual, on facing pages, & I want to keep the balance. But it should be off to the printer next week.

Sent to the printer last night was the chapbook out of issue two, Sandra Simonds' The Tar Pit Diatoms.



It's a wonderful sequence of poems, again using colour, & I'm proud to be publishing it. It'll be proofed in about a week.

&, in a fit of self-indulgence, I've done a print version of my own the allegrezza ficcione



that first saw the light of day as a serial on pelican dreaming. It's a speculative novella, too short to be sent away as a novel, too long to be sent off to a journal. So I've decided that since it contains what I feel is some of my best - or, at least, my own favourite - writing, why not get it out of the drawer where it's been languishing & making whimpering noises & let it out into the light of day.

The seven pillars

of mother/son incest porn

1.

Father is dead, or
done a bunk
or too busy banging
his secretary to
give his wife the
attention she
desires.

2.

Son is 17                            A survey
to 20,                               shows
7½ to                                George W. Bush
10. He's                             appeals to
always                               the 25 to 50
bigger                               group.
than his                             Those who
Dad. Only                            have a
his mother's                         higher
bra size                             IQ
gets a                               find him
metric                               un-
mention.                             attractive.

3.

There are
often mirrors.
Something
about the
angle of co-
incidence
equalling the
angle of
attraction.

4.

Either
one catches
the other masturbating.

Joins
in. It
goes from there.

5.

The protocol
of a royal
funeral. A
pre-ordained
order of
entry. Mouth.
Cunt. Ass. Thirst
things first.

6.

Son is

cock
consonant

a glottal
stop

Mother is

amenable
easily
influenced
over-sexed
unstoppable

vowel
sounds

7.

In sweat-
stained
ecstasy
reverts to
baby-talk.

Mommy this /
Mommy that.

Fuck Mommy
harder.

Mommy's
cumming.

Yes.

Know.

Needs to
hide.

recipatrocity

 
 
inner sense

in a sense

innocence
 
 

Dear Ernesto

Today the
postman brought
me all sorts of
things with an
English flavour
that I was going
to repackage &
send off monthly
as some kind
of food parcel
but I dissed them all
except for the 1000
postcards that say
"I wish you well,
amigo" & decided
instead to post
this poem from Jukka
& my Pages from
Karl Marx' Rubric
Journal because
it has a London
theme & offers up
a couple of people
whose footprints
you might want
to walk in.

Rimbaud is in town & I’ve arranged to have lunch with him. People seeing the pair of us out strolling arm in arm will undoubtedly come out with something demeaning about the relationship. The aging German with his French toyboy — both parts are true but not together. I’m not inclined that way although I do find his anarchy quite exciting. The British. Probably jealous. They trumpet their propriety, but I’ve observed some interesting truths about them from my times at the Museum. Still, we’ll play along. Lunch with Arthur will be ham & watercress sandwiches, a pot of tea, perhaps some scones, taken at the proper pace in the sedate environment of a tearoom somewhere in the West End even though both of us would be more at home with coffee & croissants in Soho. A pity Wimbledon hasn’t been invented yet. Otherwise we could go there & sit in the stands & listen to the plonk plonk of the tennis balls going back & forth as he tells me that in his new untitled volume he makes the point Voici le temps des Assassins to which I’d say, returning his serve, Maybe so, but Demain sera le temps des Travailleux. People around would tell us to shush — Damned Foreigners! — but we’d ignore them. Then he’d tell me how they promised to bury in darkness the tree of good & evil, to deport tyrranic respectability so that we might bring hither our very pure love. I’d think about it as I chased this deep lob to the backcourt & probably reply that life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. Dialectical deuce. A satisfied silence from both of us. We’d smoke a cigarette & laugh, & watch the white-clad players below us try to get one over on their opponent. & then, at the end of the match, as we were making our way down the stairs, I’d turn to him & say You know you got it all wrong about the vowels. They don’t have separate colours, they’re all the same. Red like the blood of workers. We will not meet again. Not on a grass court anyway.

It's amazing

how much print copy an e-zine generates.

I'm putting together the print versions of issue two of Otoliths. Issue one turned into 96 pages for the b&w part one, 60 pages for the colour part two. Issue two has run out at 136 pages for the b&w, 84 pages for the colour.

So much good stuff!

9/13

This written for the future,
something to look back on, to see
what my thoughts were at the
time. A commentary on what
is now before me, how we feast
on the dead, play replay after replay,
from different angles, rewritten
as choreography, a Hollywood blockbuster
with the producers wanting to make sure
the audience gets its money’s worth. It is
what we’ve come to expect; but most
movies are cleaner, have stars that are
paid more for their one performance
than this whole episode would have cost
to carry out. Think on it. Brood on the
implications of what we’ve learnt
in the two days since. The stand-in pilots
had work visas, lived next door,
supported themselves & contributed to
the economy of the country they had
come to put on notice. The airlines
paid for & provided the bombs.
The extras paid for their own parts.
There was no need for rehearsal.


9/13/01

I apologise

for the turn of phrase, but they bury the obituaries in a part of the paper I never read, so I only caught up with this obituary of Sasha Soldatow by David Marr from Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald online a couple of hours ago.

Would also like to point to a couple of the few pieces of Sasha's writing that can be found online, his pamphlet What is this gay community shit & his biographical note to the Collected Poems of Harry Hooton which he edited.

A bird, a
pool of
water.

Walks
around it.
Defines the periphery.

Measures
depth. Maybe
flies up to

a
nearby branch
to gain perspective.

Then
one flight
to gather insects.

A second, lower,
washes them
down.

Couldn't let

the following URL from The Australian Society for Microbiology pass by unremarked.

http://www.asm2005.org/asm_awards.htm

A palindrome

There was a post on Dumbfoundry recently about the death of a Malayalam poet. Malayalam is the language spoken in Kerala State in India, but Malayalam is also the longest single-word palindrome I know of that's used in English. Are there any longer?

It's
one of
those days when

old people walk
hand in
hand.

da he
ma bgh
me he
fi half f
he alhabe

 
 
erudight
 
 

This week, on the Discovery Channel

Man
Ray

Sasha Soldatow 1947-2006

the cover of our 1974 broadside
A Season in Hell

Le

cadavre
exquis boira
le vin nouveau

Aw Tom, Oh Mousse

 
 
s_wordplay
 
 

Today the
postman brought
me the mummified
remains of
André Breton. "You
must have been a
beautiful baby" I
sang as I un-
wrapped them
"'cause baby take
a look at you
now.” Such an
exquisite corpse.
“When you were
only starting to
go to kindergarten
I bet you drove the
little boys wild."

a variant for tom beckett

 
 
s_word
 
 

As Texas governor, Bush would mock people on Death Row. In a famous interview with conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, Bush imitated condemned murderess Carla Faye Tucker’s unsuccessful plea for clemency. “Please don’t kill me,” Bush whimpered through pursed lips, mimicking the woman he had put to death.

He
compressed his
references by running

over
a small
dog (pers. comm.)