Phizog

warm
sun
on a
sad
phizog

Beeves and Homan

Hogshead cheese on Melba with mustard, relish and chutney, and an After Eight to aid digestion, awl of spine, jurypost and cataract. It is darker than coal outside my bedroom window, the selfsame window I gaze through like a monk in a cloister, knees crooked in supplication to Beeves and Homan, whom I have never met, and probably never will. These are dark days indeed, so Beeves and Holman said, darker than soot and bootblack. I will hang a sprier from the hook in my ceiling, and moor it in place with Burgees, Claxton and Mulberry, just to be on the safe side, which I never am, never.

A Most Dangerous Method

Sabina Spielrein

Cuckold of Jung

In excelsior glorious, Cooper’s iron slewed from shoulder to hip, forging steel from animas-ex-animus, an unlikely bedfellow, alchemy, dross-pot and pestle.

Houellebecq, Michel, Houellebecq, Michel

Michel Houellebecq’s writing is like a Sisyphean boulder careening down a slipper slope. His novels, which I first discovered some years back with The Elementary Particles, remind me that literature can be intelligent, absurd and sensual, a trinity of riotousness, smart-aleckness and philosophical chicanery. Houellebecq writes like a whirling Dervish on PCP, never once stopping to look backwards or over his shoulder, but with ferocity of language that is peerless, exhuming the absurdities of ontological nonsense from the graveyard of literature. No one since Beckett and Celine has written with such irreverent incaution, such passion for language and the glory of the incongruous. Read him and enrapt in the passion of what can be done with the novel when it is done right, (whirling and spinning, but always in control) if done at all.

Houellebecq, Michel

Michel Houellebecq

tHE pHILOSOPHY oF kITING-tO tHE 10tH pOWER

Bread ends and livery sausage, Quaker oats boiled to placental mush, spooned into the scullery of my mouth with a tuning-fork. Day-old bread is a luxury, as weeks, sometimes months pass unnoticed as the food in my larder turns bootblack-black, frostbitten toes curled into necrotic wingtips. Philosophy pays 5 cents less than a turnip-cart of advice, which amounts to nothing, nil, zero to the absolute tenth power of one. Sheep’s brains siphoned through curd-cloth into a rusty tin cup, the sort used by almsmen and derelicts. I think I’ll eat my foot today, the left one, as I’m a much better hopper on the right. Or fly a kite, perhaps, made from garbage bags and coat hangers scotched together with mason’s tape; kiting acumen to the tenth power of one, maybe higher.

tRIPTYCH fREUD

The triptych Freud: grandson, Lucien, grandfather, Sigmund and first wife, Kitty, an oedipal slap-up-meal of Dora’s, wolf-men and O’s.

tHE gRANDSON fREUD

gRANDDADDY fREUD

kITTY fREUD

Andrew Tift, from the West Midlands, has won the much-coveted 2006 BP Portrait Award for three 'talking head' images of Kitty Garman (aka Kathleen Epstein).

ePISTEMIC jIGGERY

If I’m correct the soul can be found behind the pineal gland next to the basal-ganglia, which is a knotted mass of sinew, tendon, to keep the neck from flopping, and bone. Now if the soul, as Aquinas says, is a substantive form, a calescence of substance, form and agent intellect, than I could very well be mistaken, as this raises a number of difficulties, the least of which is the notion of intellect, cognition and epistemic jiggery.

hYPOTHALAMIC aLCHEMY

cRUMPLED bROADCLOTH

This pre-avocation I have for skeletal imagery; a faint simulacrum within an image, the body within the image of the body, the disembodied body. The inside-out of the inside, a cock’s neck wrung, bled and turned inside out, an inversion of vertebra, collar and cervix. The skeletal becomes the outside-in, a coat worn like a bony carapace, Kafka’s back turned inside-out, a rotting apple shored in soft tissue. When a bone breaks, gives into to the wreckage of age and time, the inversion begins, the inside becomes the outside, the wreckage worn like a threadbare coat, an apple rotting in crumpled broadcloth.

mRIDEATHmASK

oNE2tHREE

iNSIDEOUT

photograph by Larry Berman

vENTRILOQUISM*

I’m giving serious thought to taking up ventriloquism, even though I can’t talk with my lips pressed tightly together, much as I try, and can’t stand having anything on my lap. I do, however, have a fondness for tailor’s dummies, as I find the little fellows quite charming, and those high stools that ventriloquists are trained to sit on, magnificent indeed, and uninterrupted applause, especially from people in nice cloths and convertible automobiles, red one’s if I had my choice, which I don’t of course, for reasons that must seem quite obvious, the cars are not mine, or the nice cloths for that matter. I am practicing talking with my lips pressed tightly closed as we speak, well as you speak, as my lips are pressed tightly together, and as I have yet to master the ventriloquist’s act I might as well be the dummy, or a red car, a convertible if I had my choice, which I don’t.

fREUD lETTUCE aND bACON*

mEATHAWKER'S aPRON*

The sun has yet to arch above the housetops. Perhaps I live on a gray street in Corinth where cowslip flourishes and cowbirds twitter. Or perhaps I have been meddling in the dictionary again, meddlesome-lexicographer that I am. Madhatter me, I imagine a world never to my liking just the same. Meathawker's apron, strings pulled cinching; labiumice biting through windowsills, the gloomy-glomming bow-bowing. In vine-verities, transubstantiate the clotting-glottis with tallow-white biscuits and deepest pomegranate-red watereddownwines: in glottis-veritas. Quixote’s mandrill’s not so funny after all. This, so he fears, is all he has left to look forward backwards to, silly little crones’headless fool.

mARROW vOICES*

deep
in the bone
the howl of marrow
kill-saw’s hollow
ringing

gRANDDAD'S cOUCH*

Lucien Freud*

pREPUCE-lIGULAS*

Gilbert and Sullivan smoked crack, prepuce-excreta-ligulas scorched clear through to eyeteeth and jawbone; silly fucking librettos, enough to send you screaming, ears burning, to the nearest exit, crack-ash stuck in the folds of your trousers, tie knotted in a sheepshank-bolo; the prelates of penance, or the nickelodeon, all that cacophony and tympana, flutes, oboes and French horns, not a penny-whistle or a pocket-comb and wax paper in the lot.

cOMMON sENSE aND fINITUDE*

Freud spoke about the childish need to repeat to ensure a constancy of object, act and mother. By repeating the child feels safe, although the act of repetition carried into adult life becomes an act of repetition for the sake of repetition, a nausea-nauseous-ad-nausea. Obsessive compulsive disorder is the act of repetition taken to its most absurd imprecation. My own experience with the devil-repetition, this stick in the eye, this discontinuity of object, act and place, has been a constant struggle to maintain a sense of safety, a safeness that in its illusion is elusive, unattainable and childish. The most indelicate feature of OCD is the self-awareness of its absurdity, the dissonance it creates in the mind, thoughts thought forward, backwards and with little regard for reason, common sense and finitude. However I suppose things could be worse, I could be limbless, headless and syphilitic, so I best count my blessings, and count and count and…

sARTRE'S wRISTWATCH*

It’s 2:23 in the morning; Sartre’s wristwatch set to naught. My goodness-me, how time flies. Beanery and Time: what an extraordinary treatise, scrota in C-minor with fluting, a deontological jumpstart without cable and handsaw. Its 2:37 in the morning; a Profurn in D-major, sans flutes and oboes, but accompanied by a French horn and Basque bassoon. I must say, I do prefer the oboe, such a pleasant non-cons-anal refrain

pUCKMOUTH*

I took a puck to the mouth when I was a wee lad, cracked my two front teeth like dry Melba. No stitching, just a cracked lip and a penalty for hooking.

wHAT i sHOULD bE dOING*

Dominican University/College, Department of Philosophy, 2006-11-27
The Corpus Hispanorum de Pace {PH 521.3} Prof. Eduardo Andujar

Stephen Rowntree BA (Hons) MA.

The Natural Law, A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy, Chapter V111, Being and Oughtness. Heinrich A. Rommen (Dr. Rev. Pol. (Muenster) R. Jur. Utr. (Bonn)

Ought: to be compelled by obligation or duty; to be expected or likely; ought, anything whatever; aught (Archaic form). Webster’s

Oughtness: the being of ought, being-ought.

Being: the state of act of existing or living; existence or life; fundamental or essential nature; a divine {being}; fulfilment of possibilities; essential completeness; that which exists, can exist, or can be logically conceived. Webster’s

1. When the terms ought and being is conjoined, ought or ought to, becomes an act of being or being-ought. This necessarily occasions an act of being-ought, or oughtness. Ought can be used as ought-to or ought-not-to, as in you ought-to do this, but you ought-not do that. When conjoined with being, {the state or act of being} ought becomes an act-of-being or a being-ought. The implications of this being-ought, or oughtness are important for political philosophy, jurisprudence and theology.

eQUALS=*

{1+1=1+1=0}

[2+2=4=4-2+2-4=0]

aLMS aND tHE bOY*

pRECIOUS fRUIT*

This is not what I hired-on for; surely there has been a mistake, an error in reasoning and logic. I don’t know how much longer I can live in this state of penniless, this indigence, this alms-beggary. Hardship is distressing, a thirst that can be neither slaked nor coffined. I fear awakening each and every morn, the dread of another day in the trees looking for that precious fruit, a copper or a bronzed-nickel to keep my belly-teeming, lungs tucking, pain stayed and corrected. Sleep corrects all wrongs, even sleeplessness, so sleep I must, and quickly.

mOORHEN-gRAY*

A moorhen-gray day (so this is it) the morning after the night before, the daybreak at dawn, a simmering-blue-cuckold of sky, a sky too heavy and bloated to scarf up. Screw it (me) I’m going back to bed.

wOOD-tURNING aND pLASTICS*

For the love of Diogenes, Plato and Aquinas, why can’t I get my damn diploma into the frame? Maybe it’s because I bought it (well two of it’s) at the thrift store, so I suppose it serves me right. Before the night is through, and I’m close, real close, either I’ll have crammed it into the mounting or shredded it to smithereens. Just goes to show what a Master’s degree in philosophy is worth, or the paper it’s printed on. Maybe I should have taken shop, plastics and metals, or wood-turning on a spinning-dervish, milk and oil dripping like after-sex from the bore-wheel. Well I have three and a half years to figure this out, or when my PhD thesis is written and defended, whichever comes first; but I’m telling you, the shop idea is getting pretty enticing, bore-wheel and all, yes indeed.

bLACK dOG yELPING yES*

Scrod: I think I might have the impetigo…

Paddy: Starts in the legs, you know…deep in the bone.

Scrod: My legs are fine.

Paddy: Dogs’ legs…that’s what you’ve got…

Scrod: It’s a shame.

Paddy: Your legs?

Scrod: No…that you think I have dogs’ legs…with all we’ve been through, the itching and…

Paddy: That’ll get you nowhere…thinking like that all backwards…like a fool, I’d say…no?

Scrod: Water…I’m thirsty.

Paddy: Helps with the legs…?

Scrod: Impetigo, cuts the slake in the bone.

Paddy: Eats away like a cancer, so I’ve been told…festering and boiling up…

Scrod: And the itching…I can’t stand the itching…

Paddy: Like rats eating away at the legs, at the bone…

Scrod: With all we’ve been through…

Paddy: And what’s yet to come…yes…

Scrod: Yes…that too, the waiting…

Paddy: For it to come…yes, there’s always the waiting, never a moment’s rest…

Scrod: Never…

Paddy: Never a moment’s rest…

Scrod: And the festering and boil…in the bone.

Paddy: Always in the bone…like a cancer, so I’ve been told.

tRIPARTITE-tRINITY-tHREE*

To the best of my knowledge everything can be explained with a Venn Diagram; even Venn Diagrams. It’s the tripartite(ness), or trinity, the three in everything. Let’s see: Ego, Id, Super-Ego; Father, Son and the holy Ghost; either, neither, or; bologna, pastrami, cooked pork; Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake; BA, MA, PhD; radio, television, gramophone; silly-child, silly-adult, silly-adult-child, the combinations and computations are endless.

tHE fATHER oF tRANSACTIONAL aNALYSIS*

Hull-born John Venn (1834-1923) was a British philosopher and mathematician who introduced the Venn diagram in 1881.

A stained glass window in Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied and spent most of his life, commemorates John Venn and represents a Venn diagram.

j.k. rAWLINGS oN sPEED aND METH*

I’m eating way too much peanut butter; all that lard and transactional-fat. Who the fuck fiddled with Freud and came up with that silly therapy for scooters and castaways? Ego-this and ego-that (a fucking free-for-all) my child is speaking, or is it my ego-adult, the fuck-wad with bad grooming habits. That’s him, the bastard fat Tony, sly fucker; J.K. Rawlings on speed and meth. Trans·ac·tion·al a·nal·y·sis: form of psychotherapy that emphasizes the interactions within and between individuals and classifies these interactions as “adult,” “parent,” or “child” Now wait a minute there, fuck off, will yaw, cripes!

pETER dINKLAGE iN lAGERKVIST'S dWARF*

cALF-tRIPE gLOVES*

Morton Salk had skinned knees, a pug-nose and wore Birkenstocks and calf-tripe gloves, regardless of the weather. He ate celery-rot, frozen parsnips, glue and pastry-sugar, and was a wee bit taller than a Lagerkvist’s dwarf and twice as cunning. He disliked people who wore sunbonnets, capes, strapless shoes and a doctor of philology named Karl Millermanstein. He penned a book on cattery, a style-manual for those absorbed with stupid notions and catcalls. He scorned and belittled dog-grooming, chivalry and cock-sniffing; as he felt roosters were God’s scourge on man and chivalry for imbeciles. Morton Salk died in a brothel-fire in 1642, and was found day’s later eating celery-rot, frozen parsnips, glue and pastry-sugar, and wearing a sunbonnet, cape and strapless shoes twice his size.

sOURCES rOAD*

pUSHCART*

Johnston Smack stole the French kid’s moped, block-peddles and a yellow banana seat with sparkles, busted it up and tossed into the sewer. A child’s electric pushcart, oiled with smear, for fast getaways and easy drafting. Ponce bastard should a stayed on his side of the tracks, no place for a Frenchfryman, ginner ‘em the old Doc-heave-ho to the coalscuttle, sad pathetic cunt. We had your’s side and they their’s, and you didn’t pass over the line; made for a fucking mess and tumble, shit and piss-vinegar flying like cats’ fur, a sight for bloodied eyes and bash-in noses; fucking cunts the lot of ‘em.

tHE mOUTH oF tHE lIFFEY*

sEINE fEIN*

Cunningham begs for biscuits and tea; bitters to slough lye and foggage; seine-fein (cursed-roil) Mervyn (misses) Tallboys, whose job it is to clean pottage-trap and cistern; Dignam, Dillard and Doyle, with Crofton-of-Gumley, skink a pot of ale and lager, to drown the scourge of Eire. Kearney (of bastard-at-whore) eats jellies scoffed from tinsmith’s pantry, in lieu of bitter-stout and kidney, surd of Bloom and Dylan, offal of mincemeat and Cornish pastie.

a dEAD dOG, mESCAL aND vOLCANOES*

Moriches Bibcock eats things soused in oilseed-oil and molasses and wears golfer’s shoes, though he doesn’t. He is neither a wise man nor a learned man, nor a timorous man or a brave man. He is neither either of these. When I first met him he was drunk on pot-sherry and rinse and syllabised every word, half-word and partial-word, word. He had a bump on his head where he’d fallen into a light-standard and a scrap on his cheek, the kind left by cheese-graters or chafer’s-awls. He was muttering something about a dead dog, volcanoes, mescal and a blistering hot Mexican sun. He insisted that I address him as consul-general, which I did, but against my better will and judgment. He died a horrible death by incineration in a crockery fire, soused in rinse, golfer’s shoes and fully-syllabic.

dECLAN'S sISTER, wENDY*

Declan Lamasery wore lift-shoes with braces and bundle-straps, to prevent him from caroming to one side. His father had gamey-legs, passing on the recessive gene to his son; and a split lip from excessive chewing. Declan smoke Cameo cigarettes and liked nothing better than a cheese sandwich with pat-butter and onion. He salted everything he ate, carrots, rutabaga, parsnips and calf’s liver, and preferred everything boiled in the same pot, ladling the simmer from the top with the cup of his tongue, feet shuffling beneath the bells of his trousers, an eye on the clock in case his mother was afoot. Declan’s sister, Wendy, ate cardboard and mock chicken, and chewed elastic bands and tubing, and chased the cat around the house, the bells of her pants cuffed with nip. Mr Lamasery drove his blue sedan into a lamppost, taking out a newspaper box, a stray and the man who made the ice at the outdoor rink. He exclaimed to the policeman, ‘I’ve got gamey-legs, for Christ’s sake, what’d you expect of me?’ Declan’s sister bundled the cat in a burlap shopping sac and buried it in the backyard under the juniper hedge.

tREMPONEMA-pALLIDUM*

Syphilis-tremponema-pallidum, gonorrhoeal-mitochondriosis, discharge of stout and lager; Soave-of-bitters for the cockle and moan, embalmer’s-oil to encourage blistering and clottage, a most inaccurate science of alchemy and dross, but a science nonetheless; trackman’s-harp, tympanic-foil, {musical frottage} not for the weak-kneed, bubonic or deckle {flail-skin-of-feta}, a ghetto of dilettantism, poverty and bad grammar.

tHE sEA*

rain
drawing
stickmen in the sky
a corpse dredged
up from the
sea

sANDINISTA@*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista http://sandinista.guterman.com/

cUT tHE cRAP!*

http://clashphotorockers.free.fr/sommaire.htm

mESCAL, lOWRY aND jAMMY-jAM tARTS*

So this is it, there’s me and Lowry drinking mescal and eating jammy-jam tarts and this cunt comes up and busts Lowry right in the nose, splaying the corker all over his face. Jack-Ricky, who’s sitting at the next table, seeing what’s gone down says, ‘hey ya cunt, what the fuck are ya doing?’ So this is how it goes down, me and Jack-Ricky kick the bowels outta the cunt and leave him for dead, Lowry mumbling some shit about volcanoes, Mexican’s and a dead dog kicked down a cliff, or some shit like that. Me and Jack Ricky decide to give the worm to Lowry, cause he can’t breath proper and his nose is all fucked.

pOUR vOUS, mONSIEUR cLIFF*

I awoke disconnected to the thingamajig that haematites my fingers. This, so I was forewarned, portents a genocide of grammar and syntax, an elocutionary enchorial common to roustabouts and dustbin-men. Corruption, especially in the pre-frontal midrib, can cause horrid whooping and colic, night-sweats and coopery, a barrelhouse of shit-aphelia and whorish language. I will see what can be done, and rewire the cursor that attenuates the Babel in my head, next to Roget’s commode, a cowslip and the rector-rector’s bench.

tO rOBERT wALSER*

Walser’s prose work unsettles me; it is far too close to the marrow not to invite comparisons. Perhaps words, never as simple or innocuous as they seem, are only expressible in they’re utmost fragility by those of us blessed with a childlike innocence. Childishness so fragile and innocent, yet hardened and inured to the spitefulness of it all, eschewing any reasonable attempt at reconciliation between disparate wholes.

fONTANEL aND gROOMER'S wAX*

The brothel-maid wore a hat made from fontanel and groomer’s wax, and fought with the scullery-whore who slept in the shed at the back of the house. They were quite the pair, cheery faced, full of vim and rigor, binary opposites joined at the hip, windsocks bilge with Port and Sherry; a brothel-maid and a bedsore scullery-whore, what a fanciful fancy indeed.

fREUD, l*

hYLOMORPHISM*

wALLENSTEIN sURD fLUTIST*

Alulae, blasphemy, crossways, drachma, egress, flutist, gingivitis, hackneyed, imperious, jack-o-lantern, keelhaul, Loman, matriculate, nil, obstreperous, pixilation, queasy, Rasputin, scrofulous, timidity, ukulele, viviparous, Wallenstein, xylophone, yammer, (over)zealous.

Bloom in commode eating kidney soiled, fetter of surd. Denham dead rotting in bog peat, no such luck with trackman’s stub or adman’s commission, or coitus in porkpie hat, a wee Stephen begging foreskins for alms and mother, dog’sbody, jellyfish and undertow, and the Liffey runs round and back, over hillock, copse and morgue.

I conspire to conspire against myself, a conniving, a theory without a plot or narrative: incendiary thoughts, notions and dioramas, the cogs and wheels that drive the conniving machine. I reckon things out on the whetstone of my back, calculations and permutations, collations and computations, an adding up of figures and prime numbers; an abacas without beads and slide-rule.

wREN'S sKY*

rain
blistering
wren’s wing
sky

tHE pODIATRIST'S aWL*

I have a slot with the podiatrist tomorrow to scrape my feet. He uses a morticians’ awl and a wire-brush, has catacomb eyes and speaks gibberish, so he says. He wears loafers, black wingtips with yellow soles, and a cape that cinches round his hips with child’s string, the sort used for kites and postage. I will be shod in flip-flops and an ascot, a gift from my uncle Jim who has the curse of Saint John’s Wart and black teeth, and a cape similar to my podiatrist's, but without the cinching string or wire-brush.

sKINNED aLIVE*

cook’s knife flays flesh from bone
skinned alive, man’s inescapable horror

trees
speak to
fallen apples, and
lost children

bALTHAZAR*

gIFT fROM tHE cURATE*

Balthazar ate nothing green, olive coloured, lime, emerald or jade green. He had a sore-spot on his lip where the glass tube seared soft tissue, a chemical fusion of Cracker Jack and pus. He drew stickmen with a smudge-stick; alchemy he’d learned from a curate with whooping. Balthazar had one ear, a flat nose and a curlicue birthmark on the wad of his check, just below his eye, the ticking one. He had a three-legged dog without a tail (mange with fleas) and wren’s foot he kept in a thread-box, a gift from the curate.

cOUNTING mUTTON*

I need your opinion of something; does a blue sky in the morning foreshadow a red sky at night? How does a camera take pictures without having a mental image in its head? Do all dogs bark, and if not, which ones don’t? Are larks birds or sort of birds? Did Jung have shingles, which I suspect is true, and if so how many and where? Do cats litter? Does a car have a mind, and if so where and how big? Are clouds real or make-believe? Why do priests allow bazaars in church basements? And more importantly, why do churches have basements? Why do clocks have hands but no feet? And lastly, why can’t I stop counting and fall asleep?

dAFORTfORTdA*

eXSANGUINATIONS aND kIPPERS*

E-pluribus-ex-communion tabula rasa impugns. A fine and gentlemanly day, so it is; transubstantiate ex-glorious, wafers, biscuits and Port, a lolling good time {e-pluribus} on the nip of the tongue, exsanguinations from mud and water; Ipso recto abracadabra etcetera in VERITAS HUBRIS, one more for the kipper on rye Melba and lox.

dEBASEMENT*

A spoiled milk sky, a creamery of blue-steel, pox-clouds sullying a plainness of sky, whey separated from curd; lactose bigoted. No; a bowery sky, scullery with grime and sludge, a mire of brown-sky, a stain of sky; a debasement. Skeletal trees tonsured with pre-solstice fretting, branches at arms-length, a crapulence of rot and wither. Today I will purchase draperies for my bedroom window.

pOETIC pOLEMIC*

Having read Amatoritsero Ede’s polemic on the state of the poetic form I feel propelled to compose my own polemic, a leprotic row, a quarrelsome diatribe, perhaps. Plato’s greatest fear for a perdurable society was the sensual, riotous evocations of the poets. For they were the true antagonists of the Republic, the enemies of the Open Society, the purveyors of poetic sodomy, the sedition of the masses through meter and rhyme. It was Heidegger’s contention that the poet was the true philosopher, the Zarathustrian naysayer willing to plumb the depths of ontological insecurity. The poetic form is the Form of Forms, the template on which knowledge, both sensate and insensate, is predicated.

The German language, as one example, was irrevocable altered with the genocide of the Jewry in Eastern Europe in the 1940’s, never to be fully repatriated or re-appropriated. It was up to those who were subjected to the most horrid inhumane atrocities, a Bruno Schulz or a Paul Celan, to find a way to express man’s inhumanity to man through verse and poetics. They re-appropriated the German language to evoke the disturbing atrocities that man had perpetrated against his fellow man. To write, express and evoke such barbarity, they had to use the language of the perpetrator, the idiom of the genocide. It was only from within this language, this idiomatic slaughterhouse, that they could express the horrors of man’s inhumanity to man.

Poetry evokes the carnal appetite for the ugly and the beautiful. Poetry pushes one away as it draws one in, drawing one into the beatific and the monstrous, but away from acting on the monstrosities that it reveals through its unveiling. Poetry exposes, it does not hide. Poetry encourages dialogue, repatriation of language and emotion; it does not do away with both, with humanness. The poet is a curiosity seeker, a lover of the incongruent and the harmonious. The poet takes great joy in parsing together seemingly disparate words and evoking a sundry whole, a demulcent of the seemingly incongruent.

The poet is a Nietzschean naysayer, a parser of the sensual, an evoker, a lover of the riotous and disparate, and most importantly, a yeahsayer. The poet is a dialectician, an ontological voice for those without a voice and for those voices that go unheard or are discounted as unworthy of epistemic validation. The poet is a theorist whose chosen form of stylus is the hammer, the hammer of ideological/social and political deconstruction. The poet is a blacksmith, the anvil his mnemonic sounding board, the hammer his Thoracic roar and thunder.

aMAUROSIS pRAECOX*

tHE hUMAN wORLD*

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement—that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life. And yet, in making a general judgment of this sort, we are in danger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.

Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.

Sigmund Freud

aRGIL gARDENER*

I have an audience today
with Bouvard et Pecuchet
for the job of le Gardenia
Deus Plenteous de loess

hOBBESIAN mALICE*

A medicate for a mendicant, and this ethereal cacophony, a hosanna Sanso for the herd of hearing and sylph. No Lilliputian’s or a one up the whole-end. That’d be a most unseemly monk and wallop. I say althea hosanna anal impetigo anon. never one am I to neither mince nor monger words swill-brewed and gulped upon gulp. Alabaster bastard’s wearied sole-shoed, neither shod of foot or Achilles’. Lance narks on the manse of his wee feats hackle sod and shoddy; fucking archly enemas for the faint of Intel and continent. I best get some sleep aft fore the mornings murmur puts a full stop to this murder of words et al anon so seethe me the cord all musty monk and lye.

This cannot go on, it will go on. Sleeplessness has taken its toll, axing bone from collar, scapula from rachis, yardarm from scaffolding, such colicky Hobbesian malice.

sOLIPSISTIC nOMAN'SLAND*

And now what have I, I have a sclerotic goiter hulled on the milady of my neck, breastplate (ed) next to an awful itching and new Copeland shoulder, resurfaced with ball-metal, Elm’s epoxy and shims. Wittgenstein took a shot at it, but never came close to an exegesis on pain, the solipsistic non-relational concupiscent nomad’s land that is pain. I will tell you about pain, pain and agony and the charnel ache that scuttles the skirting of the neck to the wooden wheel of the scapula. Pee in your trousers kind of pain; pain so merciless and ill mannered that it makes one think of ego-cide and dissolution by drowning. I could tell you but I won’t, because even if you were to listen and pay heed, it’d surely go in one paraffin-ear and out the other. Lash yourself to masthead and be done with it, no dilly dalliance and moot pointing round here, we’ll have none of that now will we (you not me, certainly not me, no never not me, never). You could, should you so choose, jam a ballpoint pen into the quail bone of my shoulder and I wouldn’t flinch a bit, a damn crumb. And that damnable Joycean file clerk giving me the once over, drawing a bead on me like a monk’s peeler bethel in glass oculars and wiretapped rims. Smoking incessantly helps assuage the pain, so I have discovered through persistent proofing and solecism. Smoking and bitter lye coffee trounced with heavy creams and unsweetened, not a dope of aspartame or Demerara cane for me, these two simple invasions seem to do the legerdemain. If Oedipus were to have met Dionysius, let’s say at a Marxist workers fry-up or an ophthalmologist’s quibble, the outcome would have been diarrheal and none too pleasing to the eye, purblind or not. All that cloacal self-importance would surely have driven Freud to self-castrate, on the skein of his cuckolded wife’s tatting needle no less, no more no less than more no more. I have put a temporary halt to writing poetry, as it tends to gird up the cushioning in the racio-Centrex of my thinking machine.

dIRGEWOOD*

hymnal wood rotted down to skeletal post
chiseling latch screws from ply-timber, tallness lines
penciled in level doorframes, they say he was much taller then
the crown of his head touching the edge of the pantry shelf

tHE aFTERGLOW*

Pumpkins strew in the ballyhoo, scabby rotting viscera. We took hockey sticks to the orange carcases, a sarcophagus best smote with a well-angled hook, sticky seeds and stringy bowels, pock guts and corm, a tuberose mess. The streets were a graveyard of orb and shrubbery, an embittered jack-o-lantern giving me the scornful eye, my friends re-taping their sticks, my mother hollering, ‘time for supper’, the streetlights dimming, pumpkins festering in the placental afterglow.

gOOD mORNING*

fOR sCROD*

Good morning Scrod, may the sky not fall on the tonsure of your heady-head. You, Scrod, are a mountblanche, a wastrel, a catechism without an offering plate. You are a boogieman, a phantasm, a Kantian nothing, an epistemic apology for bad reasoning, the poster-child for dullards and halfwits. You are the bent spoke in Mary Poppin’s umbrella, the silver in Carol’s mirror, the Gargantuan in Gargantua, the platitude in Shakespeare’s sonnets, the errata in Pound’s cake, a sandhog, a spinning wheel without a yarn-catch, a young cod, haddock split-cooked and served on a bed of wilt-lettuce, a latchkey without a keyhole. Good morning Scrod, may the sky not fall on your head.

bLACK dOG yELPING yES*

Scrod: Its cold dark…there’s no light…

Paddy: In the dark?

Scrod: None…

Paddy: Night, yes…

Scrod: So it is…yes…

Paddy: So…

Scrod: In the cold darkness…

Paddy: I ate a dog…

Scrod: Yesterday…in the cold?

Paddy: In the cold…

Scrod: Yes, I see… in the cold…

Paddy: It yelped, yes…

Scrod: Fucking black dogs…

Paddy: Roped its tail round my leg…yes.

Scrod: You ate it, the dog?

Paddy: Had to…stop the yelping…

Scrod: Yes…

Paddy: Cold…

Scrod: Yesterday, was it?

Paddy: The yelping, yes…

Scrod: Black dog?

Paddy: The yelping black coiling dog, yes…

Scrod: The yelping…must it be so…?

Paddy: Cold and loud and feral…yes, I suppose it must…

Scrod: Black Dog yelping and coiling…

Paddy: Round and round my leg…yes, it must be so…

Scrod: Natural Law…

Paddy: So it’s said…yes…so they said…

Scrod: They say it, don’t they…so the law…

Paddy: Must be so…

Scrod: Always…I suppose it must…

Paddy: Black Dog barking yelping coiling its tail…

Scrod: Round and round…it must be so…yes?

Paddy: I suppose it must…

Scrod: Always…I suppose it must be so…yes.

Paddy: Black dog yelping and barking and coiling…

Scrod: Its tail…a rope, it must be so…

Paddy: So it must…

Scrod: Onions, I suppose…?

Paddy: Yes…

Scrod: And garlic…?

Paddy: In the mix…yes, as it must…

Scrod: The mix is vital…

Paddy: To the whole…yes, always….

Scrod: And a rue…yes?

Paddy: And garlic and onion….

Scrod: In the mix…yes, I see, vital, to the mix…

Paddy: For the palate, brings out the palate, the flavour…

Scrod: Of course, yes…the mix is vital…

Paddy: To the whole…

Scrod: Black yelping…

Paddy: Part of the mix, brings out the palate…

Scrod: The flavour, you mean…yes?

Paddy: Yes…the mix is vital to the whole…

Scrod: Brings out the palate…yes…

Paddy: Of the whole, the palate…yes.

Scrod: The mix is vital to the whole…

Paddy: And the onion, the garlic…yes, brings out the mix…

Scrod: Which is the whole…the mix is vital…

Paddy: Yes, to the mix as to the whole…yes.

Scrod: The whole is vital…

Paddy: To the mix, yes…

Scrod: Stops the yelping, the coiling…the tail coiling and yelping, yes?

Paddy: The mix is vital to the whole, yes…

Scrod: I see; the mix is the whole…yes.

Paddy: So they say, yes…

kINCH aND sTEPHEN*

iPSO rATSO*

Had Rizzo know philosophy, the hermeneutical circle that whizzes round and round, he would have intoned, ‘ipso ratso’, and cuffed Buck in the back of the head, sending him careening into the lapdog ladies lap. Poor sad bastard sod: not a cistern to piss in or a match-striker to strike upon, just a can of shoeblack Sterno and a drag-anchor leg palsied with fretting and cold. Unstably plump Buck what’shisname giving it to those chancy old dowagers, the old in-and-out, cankered fret-holes reawakened with sweat. A cowboy and a derelict; what an inglorious binary-whole.

cORRIGIBLE cORRUPTIBILITY

What would Aquinas have to say about the unconscious; nothing. To concede that there is a form, a principle of the soul that is not intelligible in the sense that Aquinas attributes intelligibility to the soul, is pure folly. The unconscious does not apprehend phantasms, outward appearances of things, bodies, tables, chairs, Fido, but has representations, or imprints of them, rebuses, not perceived through sense or reason, unintelligible in a sensate manner, inner phantasms yet to be decoded or interpreted. The unconscious would be an example of corruption, or corruptibility, and as such disunion of form and substance. The unconscious would represent a contrariness of contraries, a meaningless jumble of nonsensical cognition, an unintelligibility of form and substance, a meaningless apprehension, a corrigible phantasm, yet a phantasm that can be neither represented nor understood as such. For Aquinas the unconscious is an impossible aberration, and in its aberrance an incorrigible corruption.

aLBERT sCORN*

Albert Scorn awoke calliope in the rigging of his bed linens, his eyes a mirror image of blackness and tar. The night had been troubling, fretful, worrisome, and syphilitic. He had read about men, who through intemperance and bad judgment, had been visited with gonorrhoea, blistered with lesions and soars, they’re mouths flapping like sailcloth, webbed with spittle and spume. He awoke again; this time with eyes closed, and began the day thinking thoughts untoward, from front to back, lacking in proper grammar, syntax and reason, a litter of misspellings and jumpstarts, calliope slumming in the rigging of his bed sheets.

gRUEN*

fOOLPROOF rEASONING*

Being one of Dostoevsky’s idiots isn’t so dreadful, or for that matter being called an Aquinnah first-principle or an absolute being, or being compared to a lawnmower with whooping Soubrettes. As you might well imagine, should you be so disposed, I think in circles, in syllogistic tautologies and catchalls, a foolproof reasoning that defies rumour and conjecture. I have a proclivity for fancifulness, am eviscerate and unpropitious, dreadfully impetuous, and prone to flights of fancy-panting. I have never owned gabardine trousers or a toque with a Habitat ‘C’ on the brimming. I have no dependents other than myself, which is quite enough, and see no reason to eat liver, boiled, fried or otherwise tempered, sweetmeats or an entrée that demands my utmost attention and gourmand expertise, both of which I am in lack of. I am one of Dostoevsky’s idiots, an imbecilic savant, a dullard, a portmanteau with a faulty hasp. I am an Aquinnah first-principle, a Soubrette with a whooping cough, a rumour of conjecture and bad manners. I am a syllogism, a solipsistic Habitat with a ‘C’ on the…

tREMBLING tERMINUS*

sTACCATO tERMINUS*

I feel like a garpike or a ratfish, I feel ferrous, a sulphur mine mined yellow and Braille. I felt feelings once, but while in a slumber. I am a gramophone without a flywheel, a cartographer without an I-rule, a slot without a slotting. I am a Kierkegaardian either or, a trembling unto death. I am a sarcophagus without a rolltop. I am terminus, a staccato repetition of neither either or. I felt feelings once; a terminus.

bLACK lOAFERS*

Ignacio had bad teeth and a periwinkle birthmark on his right cheek just below his eye. He chewed and spat and spat and chewed with little regard for proper manners or decorum. His father, a Moyle with arthritic fingers, wore serge linen, silk shirts and slip-on’s and had whiskey breath, yellow teeth and kenotic tremors, which he staved off with ointments, soaves and black tea. His mother, a seamstress with beehive hair and macaw eyes, wore taffeta dresses and leatherette pumps, red and black, sometimes blue when she was in a hurry. They all died in a house fire, Ignacio’s father dressed in a gabardine suit, black loafers and a red tie, his mother in silk stockings, a nightdress, slippers, fuchsia with tassels and a bow, and a hornet’s nest hairdo.

nIGHTTIME iN rABELAISLAND*

pANTAGRUEL aND mE*

I went out on the town this evening with Gargantua and Pantagruel and a guy named Romani; what a rope of a time we had. We drank our swill of Sherry and Port, ate like porcine swine, and drove a rickshaw into a confectioner’s window. We surely expected to be tarred and feather, boiled in oil and cast into Dante’s inferno; but we made a swift getaway, me on the back on Gargantua, Romani riding on the coattails of Pantagruel, all four of us laughing like foolscaps on PCP. What a gargantuan night indeed.

uMPHALOS*

spay-cords cut
from the witchery
of a crewel-sky

tHREE lINES aBOUT nOTHING*

bantengs’ wailing
swathing nights’ gallows
from heavens’ trough

aLBERT sCRIM iS gOING mAD*

Albert Scrim is going mad, so mad that his hat no longer fits on the crown of his head. This encephalitic swelling, which is how the doctor refers to it, has become a growing concern for Albert Scrim, one to which he gives much thought, and in turn causes him no little consternation and worry. The strain on his hypothalamus is considerable, as is the pressure building up in the cerebral cortex, a place where Albert Scrim spends a great deal of time and no little effort of imagination. He has taken to wrapping his head in broadcloth and soiled linens, feeling that these two fabric poultices might help lessen the burden on his cortex, and even if they don’t, affect a rather spiffy appearance, something he has been all but lacking since childbirth and thereafter. His doctor has warned him against such measures, but Albert Scrim refuses to pay heed, as he sees no harm in a makeover that encourages happy thoughts and lessens the worry in his head. Albert Scrim is going mad, so mad that his thoughts no longer fit in his head, a head that once played host to no little effort of imagination and time.

oTHER*

sELF*

sHORT pANTS*

Mr. Dolores wore a woman’s corset and short trousers with bell-cuffs hemmed at the bottoms. He wore a hat with a hatband with a wren’s foot cameo and a tortoise shell clasp with a mohair snap. His choice of footwear was negligible, as he chose turquoise pumps with flat heels and whalebone button-ups, as he felt that eyelets and laces were gauche and farfetched. His wife, Adele Dolores, a decorous and well-appointed woman with soupcon tastes and little patience for her husband’s chicanery, wore lambs’ wool halters and taffeta wrap-around skirts worsted at the waist and girded with an eye for symmetry and good manners. They died in they’re sleep watching a rerun of I Love Lucy, the lights off, the window grout with undergarments, Mr. Dolores in a woman’s corset, short pants and a hat.

sKINK*

The leaves have left, scooted off, decamped, fallen willy-nilly from the sky. A thighbone denude of skin, a breastplate skink to concavity, a lacking, an absence, a mortuary spade at the ready: the brothel that is fall, an autumnal scullery, this brittle evocation of death and rebirth, the mythology of creation, at least as it appears from the gander of my bedroom window, at this moment, in this moment in time, denuded and fallen, scooted off, skink.

tWO*

a pergola, into which
my tongue finds purchase, the scullery
between two halves

fAULKNER'S wHISKEY gLASS*

I was just now, just now thinking about Leopold and Molly, Millie and Paddy, lemony-scented soap, postcards, mortuary wood roily with worms and spoil, the river that runs round and back, and quillwort, a scullery of thoughts thought back to front, front to back, a thoughtless thoughtlessness of thought. I am the cogito that considers with little regard for proper spelling, syntax, grammar or linguistic decorum. I am inconsiderate, small-minded, petulant, cantankerous, sometimes maudlin, devilish, mean-spirited, non-compliant, rebellious and myopic. I eat with my mouth open, chew like an ox, and slough water like lactate. I wear my cap back to front and my shoes on the other foot, I unbutton when I should button and unzip when I should zip; I smell when I should see and hear when I should feel. I shave with Faulkner’s whiskey glass and eat Smarties out of season; I sell unsolvable solutions and decry symmetry and good manners. I wear tartan on Thursday’s and plaid on Good Friday, and beg for alms in front of the Rector’s Manse, my knees curded into the fob of my trousers, legs akimbo, arms outstretched. I live each day as if it were June 16th, as I am always in bloom, and seldom if ever wear culottes or underdrawers, am a roustabout and roughneck, a skink and a gerrymanderer, and refuse to acknowledge synonyms as equivalents. I am backwards and forwards, a sidling and a stutter, I am the equivalent of nothing, and prefer it that way.

cOWPOX oF tHE nECK-BONE*

nON-CONSENSUAL cOWPOX*

I have non-consensual referred pain in the cowpox of my neck, a vertebrate referral, so to speak. The u-joint in my neck, and I suppose there to be many, is calcified, spoiled and worn thin, a rash and imputable decrepitating. There is no room for ambiguity, as bone spurs and rotting have no measure, other than the referral of pain and discomfort, decrepitude, a corruption of décolletage and vicarage. It is best explained, if explained all, as a stifling of the neck-bone, a curio of aches and twinges, a rookery of menace and bother. I have learned, through checks and balances and an imitable need to connect cause and effect, that the best way to deal with unwanted referrals is to plod forward, as when one looses one’s balance and fro, decrepitating makes spoil in one’s joints, bringing with it a rectory of discomfort, pain and décolletage, a cowpox of ruin and decay.

wORDS, sIMPLE pHRASES*

there are no words, simply phrases, praxis
nothing more

salamander is a word, a discord, of sorts
Lorca is a word, a noun, poetry, yet
a word, of phrases, simple, yet out of sorts
nothing less: derogation, simple phrases
what, who is this, a word discordant, yet
like a salamander, a word, signifying green

red slithers, bone marrow white,
nothing more

I know, have never know, a discordant poet,
yet a word, a greenness that slithers, like
the salamander, or was it Lorca, a word, however
simple, or in discordance, a praxis, sword-mouthed
signifying a word, like poetry, yet smoother, glossing

red slithers, a phrase, at once discordant, flaxen
like wheat sheaths, crow wings rasping air, yet a
silence, in the bone stillness, white as maggots
nothing more

there are no words, simply phrases, reissued, in
an endless mortuary, signifying colours, of sorts

yet discordant, slithering greenness, red, red as
pomegranate, juice issuing, like a poem, Lorca
is a word, a noun, of sorts, mouth-swords, a poet
nothing more

sHIRTTAILS*

Hornets' Mud

aunt
Alma’s
raspberry
tarts
roiled in
butter
uncle
Jim’s eye
threaded
with
sweat
father’s
shirttails
soaked
with
hornets’
mud

Invisible Voices

Mr
Smith
has
an
autistic
son
and a
metal
plate
in
his
head
an
invisible
war
with
voices
and
the television

sUMMER rAGS*

Refuge

the
tongue
seeks refuge
in a lover’s mouth
the faint sigh
of a burning
wick

For Seamus Heaney

cocks wither in the summer heat
necks wrung like washing rags
languid socks of skin and thew

your hair twisted into cornrows
a quarrel of pale yellow sun
tracing the crib of your lips

cats prowl the silage for mice
tails scab with viscera and douse
the summer heat spun into shadow

my uncle’s gore callused hands
chucking necks like slough rags
into the silage trap

I lift the barrows of your skirt
revealing a warrant cat
a severed cockscomb in its mouth

jUICEBONES aND jACKS*

A Child’s Bed

the
roof
of hell
is broken
shell casings
and rain, a child’s bed
driven deeper underground

Idiot bombs sets fire to the whoreizon, mortarjackets tailored to severe head from collar, hand from wrist, anklet from juicebone. These addle-minded men playing jacks and balls with children’s lives, sitting in pikespit and oval, scheming ways to kill the same person twice. And the children sit in the drake of night, wondering when a yellowjacket will find purchase in the hole of they’re roof.

Diorama

the
mirror
reflects
someone
{a pictogram}
a shimmer
of light
breaking
fast

uNNAMEABLE*

she lives
the memory
her father’s hands
pressed into the small
of her back, legs splayed like peels
the smell of sweat, courier
and rye

sHERBET*

tRICHINOSIS*

tHINGS I hATE*

I hate oysters, incontinence, soft ice-cream, tofu, crumpets, scoliosis, mitosis, refried anything, acid jazz, acid, threadworms, lungfish, cowpeas, green or otherwise, sac-clothe, albacore tuna-fish, fish, lip smacking, bad breath, catchalls, Sherbet, any flavour, speculums, rectal mitosis, sponge toffee, old people’s mints, humbugs, bedbugs, garpikes, mild arrhythmias, pottery ashtrays, applejack, golf, table-tennis, super-structures, tall or otherwise, molar algebra, vectors, subtractions, pluses, minuses, straight lines, trichinosis, but most of all, I hate the blues.

wITHER aND bLAIN*

A mealwormy sky, the eternal return has returned. Overnight the leaves on the tree outside my bedroom window have vanished, withered, dried up, fallen willy-nilly to whereabouts where. What was once a foundry of colour, yellows and browns, mercurochrome reds and oranges, is now the absence of colour, the wither of wither, an autumnal necrosis. Death has overtaken life; wither sway, polychrome monochrome, a mortuary of spoil and blain. Autumn is like a Mahler symphony, a Wagnerian mimesis, a Kierkegaardian either or, a trembling unto death, the eternal return returned, death on the instalment plan, spoil and blain, wither and rot, a vanishing.

bLACK cOFFEE*

Bootblack blackstrap molasses black coffee, a sewage best imbibed ad-dulia, tongue lolling, feet shuffling, a spicy oleic treat. Goes down like rue of castor, a cure-all for heel sores, Gomorrah and colic whooping.

rOUGH hEMP aND bURLAP

I would give my right arm, shoulder, wrist and elbow, up to the crook, for a bowl of pinto beans and cruet; a commode of creamery corn and navy pods, simmered in a cistern thickened with allspice and cumin, a delectable Cornish rue. I would pay dearly for a heel of day-old bread, Pumpernickel or rye, a festive loaf pitted with raisins and currants, red, blue or green, some black as roofers’ tar, fennel root and caraway, Aquavit for the loom-wearied and downtrodden. I envy your foodstuffs and larder, your dinner plates stove with sweetmeats and rutabaga, a concomitant of potato, blue-kale and yam, a beanery of pot stickers and yellow-corn fritters. But alas, I eat stale yesterday’s and almost tomorrow’s, an armada of castaways and no-goods, an Upanishad of crabber-grass, hedge clippings and mulberry suet, a feast fit for a delouser or bootblack, a palsy-legged troubadour with ill-fitting dentures, stoma-eyes and a quail’s-foot hat made from oilcloth, rough hemp and burlap shims.

aUGUST aUTUMN*

dEATH aND wITHER*

paper leaves stained

nicotine brown, yellow

the advent of death and wither

in decay and perish, such life and advent

an august autumn, a time

of fester and blain

mY lOVE fOR yOU*

I have fallen in love with your fetching smile, your too-straight teeth, your blue-sea eyes, that fetching fetchingness that only I can appreciate and love. I love your smile, your too-straight teeth, the cub of your nose, the way you draw me into the beauty of your soul; your fetching smile, your blue-sea blue eyes, the cub of your nose. I have fallen in love with your fetchingness, your tartish hat, your drapery, such white whiteness, such joy and love, such fetching fetchingness, such blue-sea eyes, too-straight teeth that cut my lips, the heave of your breasts, your smile, your fetching hat, your hands, your too-straight teeth, your blue-sea eyes, your fetching fetchingness, I have fallen in love with your hat.

fRESH dAISIES2*

fRESH dAISIES*

A slate gray sky, another day in penury, another night cowered in the rigging of my thoughts. It would be a step up were I to live like a pauper; at least I would have a heel of bread to eat, a demi tasse of brown turbid water to drink, less moribund thoughts to think. ‘The Writer’s Life’, so the festival exclaims, where the untutored can meet a real live writer, a wordsmith, a poet, a struggling literati. Perhaps one, or all, could tutor me in penury and famine, as they are two things I would be eager to learn how to overcome. But, as would have it, the festival has its cost, an entry fee for the untutored and down at heel, so I will sit here in the rigging of my thoughts, thinking up ways to feed myself and smell fresh daisies.

nOCAB*

yELLOW sUNFISH*

Mister McCormack’s wife has a lover on the side, the swaybacked that makes bagels at the five-and-deli down the street from the sewage pumping station where I fish for crappies and yellow sunfish with cloudy bubbly eyes. The swayback has mutton chop sideburns and a cheesy moustache that he twirls with machinist’s oil. Misses McCormack has skillet-flat breast and a clove in the middle of her chin, where her bottom lip protrudes over the space between the top of her chin and the bottom part of her mouth. She doesn’t fish, nor the swayback, who shit his pants when he overheard Mister McCormack talking about his wife’s bottom lip, yellow sunfish and sideburns.

pHILOLOGIST 16tH cENTURY*

Agnolo Bronzino(Italian, 1503-1572) Portrait of Cosimo 1 de’ Medici as Orpheus

rEBUSES/rICKETS/rEBUSES*

On the effects of thermodynamics on the brain of a philologist with rickets: the world is all there is, all there is, is of the world, the world is this and that and that and this, the world is a whirling ball of rebuses without end. The world is rebuses of a world once thought of by a philologist with rickets. Thermodynamics is the world, a whirling ball of rebuses. Whirling rebuses are worlds. Is, are the world is, are rebuses of rickets in the brain of a philologist with rickets. The effect of thermodynamics on rickets is the world, the world of this and that and rickets and whirling. Whirling is the world of rebuses without end. I need more sleep.

sLAKING*

I have awakened to a pineal-headache; self-consciousness does such things, such awful merciless things; Hegel’s smithy, where metals are pounded into oddities, a retinue of alchemy and hammering, a cooper’s barrelhouse of awls and bungs. Perhaps a tincture of quinine and Quaalude will slake the pining, a panacea for consciousness, alchemy and faulty representations.

cAMPING iN sIBERIA*

fORGETFUL rEMEMBERING*

Forgetting how to remember is a chore, as is remembering how to forget. The immanence of forgetful remembering, remembering forgetfulness. Now that I am a doctoral student forgetting is much easier, as is remembering all that I have forgotten to forget, this binary of forgetful remembrance. The history of philosophy forces one to be forgetful, to forget all that we were taught, the tutoring of past, present and future. To be forgetful in this manner is to remember that forgetting is the principal of the philosophy of history, the historical history of forgetful remembering. Forgetfulness, in this manner, can be likened to a cessation, a suspension of will and knowledge, a deferral of belief and opinion, a remembering how to forget. In context, then, Plato’s forms, his Ideal of ideals, is as new as that first breath of air, the parturition of air, knowledge, belief, opinion and will, a newly opened birthing canal, a way out, a way back in, a forgetful remembering, a remembered forgetting. Trying to force Plato into the twentieth century, into an ideology of non-immanence, a dialectical non-historicism, recentness, is like trying to regain that first breath of air, trying to remember the forgetfulness of that first breath, that first expression of wilfulness.

jAMES jOYLESS jOYCE*

pHILOSOPHICAL cUCKOLDRY*

Good morning, please commode your mucking-boots at the door, remove all partial and full dental-plates, prosthetic stemmers, hairpieces, and wipe that silly smile off your face. While a guest at the theta-not-theta syllogism hotel, you will be required to suspend all belief in commonsense, logic, formal and informal, deductive reasoning, inference, axioms and dialectics, material and immaterial. Here we regale in the Socratic monologue, the soliloquy, the deferral of rational discourse, the blather of blather, yes, philosophical cuckoldry.

aRILOSYLLOGISM*

Table 5.1: Truth tables for AND, OR and NOT AND

A
B
A B
false
false
false
false
true
false
true
false
false
true
true
true

OR
A
B
A B
false
false
false
false
true
true
true
false
true
true
true
true

NOT -
A
false
true
true
false

pENGUIN'S sYLLOGISM*

What is this cuneiform, this Platotectonic? Plato salad with a sprig of fennel and pullet-peas, {an} Aristotelian rue with cumin and allspice, a Lockean bouillabaisse with navy curd and barberry on the side. Evidence to the contrary, I am quite mad, mad indeed. Who thinks such things, such dalliances, such commode-O-thoughts? I rue the day that Aristotle connived me into believing that this is that and that is this, and set me assail on the Barbary host, with Bingaman’s toga, a Penguin’s Syllogism and pyloric glumes.

eTERNAL rECURRENCE*

This is a conniving, this is my head. I awake all too often to a connivance, a despotism in the Cartesian ganglia, next to the pineal gland, abutting the hypothalamus, in the anterior abacus of my head. I have mean dopamine, a despotic mean unruly dopamine; a mealy mouthed mean unruly dopamine; perhaps a psychopharmacological salve, a mustard and bean curd poultice; or a bouillabaisse of Fluvoxamine; a tincture of Maleate and lye to balm the bitterness in the charnel of my head. Obsessive compulsive disorderly conduct, that is all I can expect of the day, an eternal recurrence of the same, same.

rECONSTRUCTING dECONSTRUCTION*

http://www.remue.net/article.php3?id_article=352

tAKING iNTO cONSIDERATION*

This, this time marks the umpteenth time that I have marked the umpteenth time. At this rate, and taking into consideration the 3rd law of thermodynamics, I will reach total entropy within the hour, perhaps sooner. I must confess, however, that I have no idea what the 3rd law of thermodynamics is, nor care to for that matter, how little it matters whether I do or not is moot, pejorative at best, that is, this marks the umpteenth time…

cARTESIAN wAX*

My contrapuntal-machine is whirling in the cones and stirrups of my ear, a cornucopia of whizzing and buzzing. This hardening, this cementing, this calcification is driving me mad, madder perhaps. I hear things, noises, sounds, banging and chipping, a collateral crashing, a dissonant clashing in the incompetence of my ears. My un-deafening machine scallops sound into bite-size monads of re-amplified noise, turning sense into nonsense, nonsense into sense, senate into insensate. I poke Q-tips in the quail of my ears, exhuming curds of paraffin, an autism of sounds buffered by Cartesian wax, a Platonic form of the form of forms, a cuneiform of forms, a formless form of forms. Going deaf is a quietening silence, a stone quickening in the calm of my ears, a soundless sounding, a dissonant clashing, this constant whizzing and buzzing, this whirling whirl of black noise, this hardening.

tABULA rASA*

Kurt Gödel

cOUNTING tO sIX*

Can I have six; no I can’t, of course not, not six, that would be absurd. Five, yes five is okay, fine is in line with the numeric alchemy of my nominalise, but six, never, never six. What are you crazy; mad in the tete, a mad hatter in the head mad, a crazy mad in the tete madman? Six is out of the question, were there a question to begin with, a question at all. Never question innumeracy; it’s beyond questioning, questionless, without question, plain and simple. If you ask a question, don’t expect an answer, because there won’t be one, no answer, no question, fini. Can I have four, or three or two or three four five seven, yes, why not, of course, have them if you want, all of them if you so desire. But not six, no not six, never six, stay clear of six, keep away, far away from six, far, far away. Can I have six? No you can’t, you won’t; never ever will you have six, never. Fuck it then, I’ll have five, four three two, four five three two, maybe one, no not one, that’s a one with a five that makes six, and six, well you know, six I can’t have, never ever six, mad hatter six, mad as a hat in the head six, an alchemy, a nominalise of numeric sixes, a covey of sixes wearing little hats, mad as a hatter, madder than one plus five equals six mad, that fucking mad, mad, perhaps madder still, that mad, perhaps.

eYETEETH*

He’s missing his front teeth, the middle ones and eyeteeth. I’m having them all removed, he said, before an infection sets in and ruins my gums. I stopped brushing them after he put his cock in my mouth, he said, I was twelve. My psychiatrist said that I stopped brushing my teeth because my mouth was dirty and would never ever be clean again, no matter how hard I brushed. I said, no, it’s because I won’t allow anyone to dirty my mouth again, never ever. I Googled him, he said, and discovered that he had become a pillar of our community, a social activist for children’s rights, a rich pederast who dirties little boy’s mouths.

mADNESS aND wIND*

There is enough wind today to blow a super kite to Uranus and back; blusters of windy wind; bluffs of wind, a gale-force wind that blusters and bluffs. The wind is separating the leaves from the marrow, the twigs from the branches, the stemming from the stipule. This is a Uranus wind, so strong and efficient that it will surely blow us all to Uranus and back, like super kites bluffing and blustering in the bluestone blue sky. If Beckett were still drawing breath, he would approve of this windy wind day, flying his own super kite, tugging gently on the string, pulling the bobbin close into his chest, heaving with delight and faro. I recall flying a box-kite, a Chinese cube with a fiery red tail, reeling the string into the bobbin of my chest, my friends jumping for joy, faces red with madness and wind.

aBSOLUTE aBSOLUTE*

The absolute is impossible? What does this mean? Is the concept, the very idea of the absolute impossible to apprehend, to grasp and conceptualize in our mind, or is the very concept, the notion of the absolute impossible, without meaning, a meaningless hermeneutic. As an Ideal, in the Platonic sense, perhaps so, as a pragmatic, a prescriptive tool, it is meaningless, a paucity of both thought and concept. The absolute is absolute absolutely, what does this mean; nothing, it is foreign to our language, our concept and use of language. How would I use the term absolute in a sentence, other than as an authoritative edict, a diktat, a conjugative term used to subjugate and instil fear, a despotism. If the absolute is impossible, then it follows that absolution is impossible, the very notion of free will shifts away from an authority, an authoritative voice, a despotism, to a self-reflective authority, an inner voice that is, in itself, absolute, and therefore capable of absolution. Without the capacity for self-reflection, an inner voice, what some call an inner conscience, the very notion of absolution would be meaningless, a paucity of thought and edict, a referent without a reference, a hermeneutical impossibility, an absolute impossibility. The only way to encourage and instil meaning in the term, the word, the concept absolute, is through a transcendence, a faith in a transcendent authority, a voice, an inner voice, the voice of a god, a god come to through reason based in faith, an absolute faith in reason and god. If there is an absolute this is where it is to be found, apprehended, conceptualized and used as a pragmatic tool, a way of life, a meaningful meaningfulness.

tHE sICKNESS uNTO lIFE*

I saw him again to day, shunting through traffic looking for a way out, or was it a way back in. There is an unmasked urgency about him, the urgency of a crack addict sick for medicine, the very panacea that caused the need, the urgency for the cure, which is the poison that causes the panacea that causes the sickness that necessitates the cure. His face is drawn and sallow, a face without a face, a face within the absence of a face, the faceless face, the face of urgency, the absence of calm and rest, the need for entropy, an entropy that only the cure can cure, the sickness unto death, the death unto sickness, the half-life of the addict in motion, a shunting urgency with neither an effect or a cause, but a ineffectual causation of effects. Imagine, if you will, when the urgency to urinate overwhelms your every movement, you’re every thought, the absence of auxiliary movement and thought, a casualty affected by the causation of neither, but neither one nor the other. An addict’s life is such, an urgency within an urgency, an urgency without a cause or effect, a shunting, an unmasking, a sickness unto life, the panacea that necessitates the poison that necessitates the cure that is the sickness unto death.

rUPERT'S sISTER*

Rupert Thompson had a clubfoot and coal black hair. I was not invited to his tenth birthday party, as no such party was to occur, his father having spent his pay on horses and Tankary Gin. Rupert’s sister had wide spaced eyes and a pug nose and chewed elastic bands, her eyes squinty and vacant. Rupert’s father, slough in his newspaper chair drinking gin gimlets from a coffee cup, paid little notice of his daughter, preferring that she didn’t exist, was a figment of his wife’s imagination, an aberration. The first time I saw Rupert’s sister she was standing at the end of they’re hallway framed in a dark halo, her jaw working an elastic band furiously, a thread of spittle cupping her chin. I invited Rupert to my tenth birthday party and let him have the second piece of my cake; I gave the first to his sister.

bONE aND bRAILLE*

pODIATRY*

A blue steel rainy day, a marrow bone simmering in the pot of the sky. Mister Thompson’s wife had podiatry problems, corns and peapods, a Braille of flora growing in the nooks and crannies between her toes. She used pumice stone, scrubbing the hard nubs with vinegar and Epsom, but to no avail, as the corns and peapods persisted and continued to flourish in defiance of her lavations.

tHE mECANO-sET*