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.