Journal 67 - Blog Nobody Reads

I write a blog that nobody reads. And in this
blog I write that no-body reads I fill with the
pages of this little journal. So now I pressure my
self to write well and clever for this journal for
this blog that nobody reads. As the images scramble
away like the hoppers left in the pit when the
five-o unearth themselves. I walk around like
Omar the stick-up artist whistling to the dead
dark night dead dark lullabies while the images
of the blue black orange world scatter fearless,
scatter in the alleys and the brick apartment
buildings fearless in their selfish clutch on their own
primacy. Soon the winter will stand like a stripped
Poplar on the street; like a Japanese magnolia bared
in November, not even the remnants of its purple tinted
leaves lying rotten and beautiful on the late winter
ground - the winter standing decked out with downed
electricity lines and sharp icicles drawn like a
nasty comic villain. We stand in the street naked
with red wine in our hands and cigars in our
mouths smiling at winter's icy stereotype. Then we
look at ourselves and the cigar falls from our mouth
like AIDS. The bug is here to match wits with our
goofy brethren. Words can be hard to follow when
games easy games are played with the signifiers
and the signified; puns are the mark of punsters
not geniuses. Genius may be a necessary condition
for a punster; not a sufficient condition. Language and
pronunciation is a tricky localized relative endeavor in
evolutions & rights. It's la-fee-ette in Louisiana
but la-fayette in Oxford (MS). Both are correct.
If the localized region uses a phrase or contraction
illogical and irrational it is a boy in Baltimore who
only knows Baltimore radio stations. Nomenclature
carries the weight of the king. Language is a
drug dealer ready to change-up whenever the five-o
try to incarcerate the girl watching the street.
Language spoken real language is not an inscription
on a tombstone reminiscing of the days of yesteryear.


6.18.09

Journal 66 - God, Meaning and Incompleteness

The world itches for meaning - the world hurtling
the world spinning and hurtling through space
like a big blue streak, a colorful cold comet; the
world in all its wet wonders and glimpses of life
itches for meaning. And like a poisonous itch that
is scratched at until it bleeds, there is no relief
for the itch of meaning. Meaninglessness of Meaning-
lessness; Vanities of Vanities, all is meaningless
vanity. Words the preacher spoke with a fevered tear.
Meaning it's said is lost in structure and context
and meaningfully lies in the grown eye of the beholder.
The eye of Elmo glue pasted letters and cut words
blown apart like a dandelion in the wind with
meaning reaching out in horror to clasp onto another
meme, another lexeme or mytheme to rearrange itself
from that horror that is Dante's 3rd circle of hell.
Meaning vibrates inside the nucleus of the hemoglobin.
Crying out for attention meaning screams with no sound
like an explosion in the dark matter of space. If
there is a listener who can't hear does meaning lose?
Meaning vibrates off the E-string of the acoustic guitar.
Hiding inside the duality of light, spreading its wings
in broad waves and penetrating each dissenter with particular
precision meaning surprises the scientist in the white
blue-stained lab with its unsolicited itch, the scabbed
itch scientists have doused with various itch-relief
formulas of relativity and deconstructed uncertainty.
Gödel and Derrida are unlikely bed mates on the
path to incompleteness. Tapping on our souls like
Chinese water torture these drippings, these continuous
disconnected drippings of splattered meaning resonate
like a tuning fork to our own miserable incompleteness.
Vanities of vanities we try to attach meaning to
our wandering ghoulish lives like prisoners in the
muddy prison yard. We touch ourselves incomplete.
We children of God wander the night like runaways
ignoring the hand of broken experience slapping a
random pastiche of experiences together to form a
broken world of rationalized meaning. Vanity of Vanities!


6.8.09

Journal 65 - Witch's Eyeless Squalor

I reach outside my car window and grab the
lightening, grip it like a witch's broomstick and twist
it into a tiny ball of dust, silence in the heavens
on a dark gluttonous day. I have no time for silly
quadropedic misdemeanors heads arched up toward the
sky like bodies sung electric. The rain it is said
conducts the electric bolt the way a crow-bar conducts
pain. I stand in the middle of the storm and the
rain, and laugh at the skies like a starving hyena,
laugh like a ribbed skinny hyena for the rain and
the lightening to slap me and slash me and slice me -
throw me across the back of the earth like a gibbering
holy man, a holy righteous man laughing at the
stormy scowl of the trees and the wet wind in the
dry leaves I stand back arched, laughing at the
lightening bolts erupting around me like distant jagged
spears thrown by that temperamental adulterous Zeus.
You wouldn't know if those were tears or rain that
soaked my cheeks in the mid-day heat. It takes
guts or ignorance to laugh. I laugh often but
ignorance is often capsized in my world. I feel
lost drowning sometimes. And then I find myself
standing on the surface of the water and playing a
short game of soccer with the other man of faith.
The man on the shore with the fish doesn't laugh.
And I sink in the sea like a flooded engine block.
I twist the lightening in my mind to elucidate the
gravitational pull; the gravitational pull is nearly
irresistible next to massive objects. My mind is
twisted by massive questions of mediocre care -
leaves in the gutter and spaghetti monsterians. The
world is against us the World is against us the
old world is with us like the new world is
gasping in its eyeless squalor. Eyes are the visors
of the windows of other souls. Eyes invite the external
into our internal world. My eyes are being tested
by the pileated woodpecker. The tones of home
sound like children on the football field trying to
start a fight for the flighty eyes of another pretty
physicist.


6.7.09

Journal 64 - Free Willie and Ontological Equality

The light shines down in the light of the orchestra
down like a slap in the face in the morning to wake up
for work or school. Life is one or the other. Music
instruments lie silent in their cramped crate clumped
together like forgotten stickers in the back of a child's book.
The stroller sits broken and empty, unable to scramble life
in its tiny plastic seat and wheels. These signs are not
so. They live they breathe they cry out with connected
notes when the new born breath of children breathe the
dormant notes into them like a patient etherized upon
the table. Frankenstein rises from the dead toys each
day ready to destroy with mirth. The earth is old
and damaged creaking like hardwood floors underneath
our feet to those with the hearing aids to hear.
My ears have receded in availability the last few
years, locked on the absence of the ancient music of the
spheres - I toss and turn each night out of tune with
the lady at the service desk in Barnes & Noble. She
has a name tag. She has an identity, like my neighbor's
cat. Rachmaninoff wasn't far from the truth when he
put his warmed cold hands to clefted paper to pen
the 2nd & 3rd piano concertos. He was Russian though.
I hold my head high, I hold my lazy head high
to avoid the quicksand and the rain. If only her
napkin could wipe clean the stain that penetrated my
epithelial tissue. Science doesn't make it all better; nor
do scientific terms. Science is the performer at Sea
World containing the killer whale and forcing him and
her to bow to its every need - controlling it like a
lower pet while claiming ontological equality. I'd
like to free my willie. Yours too but the gravitational
constant keeps me down. I'm stuck wriggling and
writhing to the quadratic equation and Gauss's
summation theory lost as a 3 or 4 dimensional soul
in a multi-dimensional world. Soul? Souls are not
allowed; this is biology not poetry. Therefore poetry
has no meaning in the biology class. Not vice-versa.
And thus God has no meaning in the science class;
except now that means no meaning in any class; Not so...



6.3.09, 2

Christmas Notes

Gods come and gods go

Gods shapeshift and shit shapes

Afraid of yesterday's red sweat

Under a back-city olive tree.

Dreams are not a warm blanket

Or a cozy home on another street,

But an orange flower spurting

Forth on a cold November day.

This day once was Saturn's day

Commandeered by faint subjects

With too much dirt clogged between

Their swollen calloused toes;

And once this day smiled with teeth

Brown and Whole and Musical. People

Dancing hand in hand around bright

Flames eliciting unfeigned smiles

Wrapped round and around bright

Sparks prodding silent brittle feet,

Hopping without cause and without 

Merit. Merit is not a god's homage.

My dehydrated alcoholic brain misfires

In slow spurts of garbled words

And disconnected strains of thoughts

mired in unsympathetic virtual merit.

Upon this distant pantanomic scene

I raise my brown glass and toast

Quietly to the unheard divine voices

Ruminating amongst themselves.

These voices shatter our porcelain hearts

Like lyrics from drums and guitars

Screaming for one soul to stare and hear

Their trampled song among the wordless throng.

At what point do you recognize the

broken face in the mirror, and at what

point do you cry instead of laugh,

weighed down with myopic soggy eyes?

This Christmas wine weighs my wet body down.

Matthew died tonight with a smile.

Words convey neither more nor less.

Journal 63 - Hope, Tchaikovsky and Tears

I want to dance outside in the sprinkler, dance in
the sprinkler in July laughing with my neighbors
playing with my children to the distant reggae
tune of Marley over noises in the scentful summer
afternoon. But it's hard to see the bee dance its own
little food tune. The bee is there don't you see it
don't you see the black and yellow pin-striped food
dancing jig fool; don't you see it there on the stem on
the blade on the yellow water laced flower dancing in
its wild honey mood; don't you see it; don't you see
it dance fucking dancing? No I don't see that. I see
my son and the notes of his laughter erupt from
between his teeth like a playful arpeggio of Mozart
or Schubert, to which the yellow black pin striped
bee dances like a ballerina on the night - I see the
bee I see the bee and its concomitant dance with the
yellow-jacket and the 2 year old; I see the sprigs of
light clamor for sight and sound, bounding like love
notes from a gong in the midst of an apathetic symphony -
subtle and desperate in their struggling dance to be
seen for the beautiful buoys of independent hope they
call from. Hope is tortured and Hope is laughter; Hope is
broken and Hope repairs broken smiles in mid-life crises.
Hope is Tchaikovsky in the 6th and the D major. I see
the dragon fly bat light with its phosphorescent wings
in splayed remnants of color like the first time Newton
spied light fractured in his prism; I see the purple and
orange and blue flutter around in animated free-for-alls
crying out to the drab colored rat, the blah hoary rat
scurrying under the house in fear of being out of key
with the fly and the bee. I'm with the whory rat
under the house with skeletons and broken busts staring
with white darting eyes through the poisonous grate
like a prisoner in a foreign land. I do see the bee
dancing I see the yellow honey bee dance fucking
dancing with the arpeggio laughter of the girl and
the boy; I see the mother try to shield herself from
the joy of the sprinkler spraying cool water in July.
I see it. I see the bee and I see the child.
And I cry.


6.3.09

Journal 62 - Illegitimate Words

Yeah words are inadequate illegitimate children
clamoring for meaning in this fostered reductio
world of phonemes and lexemes, strings and quarks.
Why must the smell of flowers beautiful blue
flowers assault my nose and throat like a German army
of molecular Stazi? My head manages to succumb to
the lung-punctured short-breathed coughing mucus
splayed breathing of my evaporated respiratory system.
Writing that sentence elicited one cough from my red
lungs. Small talk eludes me like existentialism and
post-structuralism.  Post-modernism wants to elude thus
is found head to the ground separating the soil
from the toil. Small talk is standing outside the
auditorium during intermission listening to two strangers
pontificate about the pitch quality of the third violinist
during the third measure of the third movement. No
wait a minute - that's pretentious look-at-me bullshit.
Small talk is rambling about things that are of
tangential concern - weather and occupation. Though
a rainy day can mean so much more than the next
report for your boss's boss. Small talk ends where
alcohol begins. Small talk is impersonal; the personal
is the spark that livens intimacy and round-the-table
knowledge. Small talk is the fake laugh at the post
office joking about the long line, or the sports comm-
entator "enlightenment" over Frosted Flakes during another
homeward lunch. the Structuralists marched through
the streets with Dock Martins and shot guns holding the
universe hostage with Her Majesty Science at the throne.
Order and context reign supreme were the signifier lords
the signified. But that bastard post haste meta-structuralism
poured oil and kerosene on the streets and lit fire to
the Queen of Philosophy crowned through a coup of
military success. Damaged the Queen limps on with
her mathematical dogmas and evidential head-banging.
Order lies on the ground smoldering in the balance
of the structured and the free, coughing up bits of coal
with ancient writing reminiscent of the script used
by Daniel in his fight for the supernaturally natural.

6.2.09

Journal 61 - Flibbertigibbets and Moonlit Slugs

The night sky was faintly white with the white of

the moon shining dimly down like a dying flashlight -

one small opossum stuttered with albino eyes and giant

rat tail before sauntering off to his dirty hole behind

the air-conditioner. Birds rustle the leaves and awaken

the silence of the night - the eerie silence in the city

one can catch at certain undisclosed times awakened like

a meadow at noon by the quiet songs of birds with

undisclosed names. The wind is artificial in this

brief flash of night time mercy stirred by the fans

on the porch, artificial but still comforting on the hot

night air. It's past the time of crickets and their

string section accompaniment of the percussion of frogs

and the winds of chimes and cardinals. The squeeze-box

sound of cicadas eludes me too this soft August night -

how many sounds do I not hear because I'm not listening

closely enough? What is the sound of the beetle tapping

its hard feet on the wet brick? Does the belly of the 

snail rub itself against the concrete like a washboard?

No? We can imagine. He may create a layer of silver

film between himself and the ground he slides over like a

wet banana slide in the wet yard. The sound of the cars

passing over the bridge on the interstate annoys most moments

with its loud noise-machine white roar, but tonight the

distant waterfall sound is nostalgic in its own ancient way.

The renaissance is around the corner but scoffed at by the

stoned local intellectuals; the flibbertigibbets of our

bored apathetic been-there done that it has no meaning or

influence in my life X generation. The label is not a

misnomer though maybe due to the predestination problem.

Did the label cause itself to not be a misnomer, or was

it actually originally accurate? Yeah, who cares. Jack Bauer

doesn't concern himself with the past only how to move

forward. I'm stuck in a ditch outside staring at the

white light of the moon watching slugs wriggle down my

nose wondering how I got here - so I can get back -

oblivious to the exit sign on my right of my daughter's

ocean eyes and my son's gaping grin and my wife's sober

hand held out reaching through the muck like through a

dirty lake...

5.25.09

Saturday Night Discourse

This discourse rattling about my broken head

bruises brittle bones and 

plays my busy mind with ideas still dead

but borne with the stale breath of

Pegasus imprinted upon the malformed words.

Fanciful flights of neglected faeries

lift my mind to more delectable tastes -

Why must I wither in this hollowed state?

The death of a bird means so much.

The death of a little hoppy bird, so much

beloved with its red and green and blue

singing to clouds the pure love of pure art.

The muses were killed long ago, along with

God and the Divine. Divinity living within us

is a divinity so ubiquitous as to be

full of bloody darts and borked ideas,

ejaculated for the zeitgeist-infused sense

of our Holy-blackened-Ghost-unhaunted

world - drowned by the scientific voices of

philosophy-decrying scientismic philosophers.

Knowledge is limited by our estranged experience -

effects yield limits to conjured colored paintings

from perceived causes, but our causes are not

limited by our still-born perception.

Hume's Epicurus may not appreciate the full

effect of inferred causes, but our divinity

stares out of hollow eyes, with torpid

smoke rings circumambulating her plastic

face and concrete hair. Each tap of her chipped

fingernails on the false marble is a quiet

beat of defeat, unresisted and uninterested.

A soul means more than the death of a bird,

even a painted bird with iridescent wings.

A soul means more than the modern defecations

of the university trained mind, so certain of

its uncertainties and its known unknowableness.

The soul has survived the pontific perturbations

of its putative patriarchal pornographic assaults.

The soul means more than the life of intravenous

bourbon, imputed to our empty souls like the

revived wings of a broken dove, entertaining

the crowds while trapped in its mellifluous

cage.

I live inside an uninvited text of mal-extant

sufferers. I part from the world of dragons

and werewolves only for the sake of my child's

sanity. My children are so unforgiving when

they say a brightly forlorn Hey after dancing

in silence with Monkey Joe. They bounce their

buttoned butt on the cush floor, trying to ignore

the meritorious laughter of their hyena friend

as this laughing bore circles in his frayed

pajamas, afraid of the flat smiles of the group.

Sometimes I walk about the foggy town, wistful

that this fog was the 20th Century smoke of

ignorant cigarettes, the smoke of a young Eliot

or flouting Joyce: the broken sounds of a street

piano, garrulous in its off center singings.

I smile at the purple-haired girl sitting vacant

at the piano. I smile with her silver tooth

and her gold eyes: unstealable with their

bright glow.

Journal 60 - Plato, Goethe and Frogs

What if my IQ were 195 rather than [what it is]?
Would I behave any differently, do anything differently
with my life? Would I too be a bouncer for 20 years
while working out some new theory of the mind/body
problem? Or would I just sit and read Virgil in Latin
and Plato in Greek, Goethe in German and Baudelaire
in French? What about the Russians? Are they worth
an absence from the calculus of the mind? Fortunately
(perhaps) these thoughts are about as relevant as my
own licking of my balls like some strangely contorted
dog. Desire is asleep under the house with the leaks
and the fungus and the skeletons of trapped cats sinking
in the soil with bone white softeners. My draperies are
stuck in Idaho with the corn and the potatoes, stuck
in a farmer's converted truck looking for the next big money
maker since our crops are out-sourced like our location.
I am lost in the den of my house on the other side
of the river where the trees fell in ancient burials of
the neighborhood. Replaced by melodramatic hysterical
giggling wall-eyed women and red-eyed man strafing
like a burnt ass on a desert walk with no underwear.
Each time I glance past my glass door shielding me from
the wind and the rain and the sun and critters I
see the shadow and outline of a man in the night
smiling with bleach white teeth holding a sword in
his covered hand, then disappearing with the flash
of lightening and explosion of thunder. He'll return
next to the rain-happy snails, homeless in their own
crashing economy, and the glass-adhesive frogs clinging
to the door and the light like the last stand of a
jilted bride meandering into a Bat-mitzpah. The throat
of the frog flutters like a eukaryotic heart pumping
everything throughout the thin near transparent skin
of his squishy body. How many squishy deaths of
frogs and snails occur each night after a rain? There
is no record or names of the dead. The day we count
the names of the dead of the distant frogs and slugs
is the day I recline on the beach and piss at the sun -
dispensed with taxonomic equality, drowning in lesser fun.


5.23.09

Burning Ennui

I

they can trap me in the chemical dungeons

of my mind, yell at me with shrills

like Mephisto on a walpurgisnacht

extravaganza, der hölle rache

in meinem herzen brennt. flames

are not limited by the infinity

of hell, hölle, gehenna - ready

to melt soul and fate and limb,

teeth gnawing in dumb worn-down ecstasy

toothless grins of grandpa or baby

oblivious to the black vultures descending

like death eaters at a red dawn;

but there on the edge of hell’s burnt ledge

a common yellowthroat sings to the warden

of my misplaced spring a common warbler

song, prayerful call to earthy arms

where rain drips down in long-suffering

gifts, חָ֫סֶד portents on a sun-dried field,

dire with its inside-out flabbergasted

yield of willful seeds and unintentional

disguises. the mountain lion passes by

with silent footprints on charcoal grass -

dark and violent with her playful death

paws. why, why must I short-change every day

in burning anticipation of a dead angel's

cry of Impostor Impostor Impostor -

you boring hypocrite lecteur, infamous

brother wanting credulity and fame?

II

I cry out to the cold of the snowy night

with two hands cupped around my mouth

screaming into the steamy cold night

No! No! this cannot be the end, the final

End to the sleepy authorless comedy of

life, burning hot and dark in trailed

songs of warblers and buntings, bright

notes of heaven's choirs hidden behind

the colors of songbirds, yellow green

blue red - this is not the ironic finale

of 21st century artists, folding their arms

and turning their heads in disgust.

I have seen the street artiste begging

behind the notes of a defeated violin,

fiddling among rock dove and tourists -

I have felt her song in meinem herzen,

my broken worm-eaten burning heart

worn out by the pew at 2300 hours -

I turn my head toward the stained window

where the hidden choirs congregate,

stare at the empty colors around me,

whisper forsaken words of love and merlot,

laugh at the reflection in the ancient window,

hoping more is there than this Ennui.