Have spent

most of the weekend putting the finishing touches to issue five of Otoliths. It's the e-zine equivalent of data entry, linking the internal pieces & making sure the links work, checking the externals, correcting the, fortunately rare, typos. Most of those get picked up at the uploading stage.

Been full on at it. Didn't even get my regular Saturday night reward - The West Wing ran its two last episodes last weekend, about a year after it finished in the States (which meant I knew who the new President would be some time back). The latter seasons were not as consistently good as the first three, but, even so, still so much better than nearly everything else on TV.

The aspirin I took to ease my aching neck & shoulders has just kicked in & all the links are in place. I can finally relax. Catch a few gamma ways.

Today the
postman brought
me K’ung Fu-
Tse. He’s
supposed to be
from Scotland,
just like me, but
I canna ken
the wee mon’s
funny analect.

He

joined
a cult

& be-
came

canon
fodder.

Today the
postman brought
me a new
edition of The
Selected Works of
Sigmund Freud. It's
full of what
appear at first glance
typos—though on
reflection perhaps
deliberate. Esp. when
you find such lines as
"…..he dreamt his
mother fucked
him into bed."

Dear Tom, you've set me off again

My girlfriend

is my Avatar.


Her name

is Jacques Lacan.


She changed my thoughts

to fairy floss


then flushed them

down the can.


(Fairy floss, or candy floss, = cotton candy, but that didn't parse.)

Today the
postman brought
me a book out-
lining the new
stringent
legislation on
Gunk Control. Such
a pity that plumbers,
mechanics & the
environmental
lobby don't have
the political clout
to nullify the
influence of
the National
Rifle Association.

In light of the happenings

in Baghdad & Blacksburg over the last few days,



Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents seems an appropriate thing to post.

An inappropriate thing might be the following extract from a certain famous document:

     "...the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

which is all of that amendment that seems to be mentioned these days. The rest of the amendment shows how out of date it really is, that it was written in the times of a civilian militia, that it has absolutely no validation in this current day & age.

     "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..."

For
Eileen Tabios
with flamenco kisses.

I dance, three/
four I
am.

Today the
postman brought
me the can
of worms
I'd always
wanted to open.

Today the
postman brought
me a suicide-
bomber's vest. "That's
too heavy for this
climate" I told
him. "Do you
have one in string?"

Martin Edmond

got the answer right to the question I asked a couple of posts below but for the wrong reason (& maybe I shouldn't have used "truckdriver", maybe used lorrydriver or teamster, since I seem to remember that what yanquis call "trucks" we south-of-the-border people call 4-wheel drives, & heap much derision on them).

Anyway, the answer has to do with what, if I remember my psychology lessons correctly, is called "associative" thinking or reasoning. We associate certain activities, traits, behaviour, with certain types of people. A book of poetry is less likely to be associated with a truckdriver than with a professor of literature, given an occupation-anonymous & neutral setting.

Think about it though. There are a damn sight more truckdrivers than literature professors in the world. Ergo, the balance of probability.......

a question for the masses

A man sits on his back porch immersed in a book of poetry. Is he more likely to be a professor of literature or a truck driver?

Courtesans a-
bound in the
grounds of
the Grand Mal
Croquet Club.

Have spent

part of the day working on the next issue of Otoliths. Which reminded me to post a reminder that submissions for issue five close at the end of this month this side of the date line.

ars poetica

I was al-
     ways
telling him
things. That
was the learning
process. Sort-
ing out truth
from amongst the
lies. Eventually
     he got it
right, got
everything      wrong.

Bird / omen! Bird / omen! Oh Shit!!!!

When I drove out this morning to go to the shops, there was a big dead white sulfur-crested cockatoo spreadeagled - spreadnoneagled? - at the bottom of the driveway. Judging by the newness of its corpse, it must have crashed to earth at just about the same time Gmail was informing me I couldn't reply, forward or download any attachments because it had swallowed my account for 24 hours. Basically it was telling me that I'd been possibly molesting the internet. Wwwould it even notice?

Anyway, hope that is what the omens were telling me, rather than impending doom is gonna come knocking.

Today the
postman brought
me a delegation
of NeoCon-
servatives. Be
careful with them,
he said, they tend
to drift. The last
lot I delivered
moved so far to
the right they
fell off the
edge of the Earth.

saying it twice, without redundancy

Another issue of Bill Allegrezza's great e-zine Moria is out. Another great issue of Bill Allegrezza's e-zine Moria is out.

Mozart was a
tit man.
In

an
age of
hustle & bustle

what else was
there to
be?

update (?) #1

I wrote my Betabet poems eighteen months ago. BlazeVOX published them as a chapbook fifteen or so months ago. In the acknowledgments was reference to their "previously appear(ing)" in a number of magazines.

One of those places put forward - And per se and - took so long to bring their next issue out that, by the time they were putting it together, the book had been published & the zine's editorial policy of not including anything that had appeared before meant they dropped the poems they had accepted.

Another of the places, Ping Pong (published by the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur - I love it! I love it! - appeared a couple of months ago.

& finally, the long delayed issue 15 of Ron Henry's Aught has gone live, with three Betabet poems in it.

update #2 - the voice of an angel

Miia Toivio reads six poems from my Moria book from Series Magritte at Marko Niemi's wonderful Nokturno site.

I am overwhelmed by Miia's interpretation, quite literally cried. They're beautifully done. Many thanks to M & M from another one.

(& I also know now how to properly pronounce Jukka-Pekka Kervinen. For which, also, thanks.)