Cosmopoetica

speaks to me in
the language of
rusting wind chimes
and clacking cans
kicked up dusty
in the wake of
speeding trucks
hungry for spit
smooth asphalt
the split stone
choking the dirt
not a trace of
bone beneath
vectored black
Acheron’s scar
a black bandage
barely containing
the earth swollen
to bursting with
wretched afterbirth

[pad 6.1 - 7/18/09]

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You’re sitting long-legged on a stool in front of The Empornioum hawking 20-minute passes to sticky viewing rooms barely bigger than phone booths. Dream interpretation 101, right? But you’re good. You’ve got a patter so obvious—rip and run, look and leap, five’ll get you twenty—it’s disarming. Suddenly slipping a five into your hand isn’t embarrassing, just playing our part in a cosmic production that might be going right for once. Your lips part just enough that I can believe your smile is real. Without thinking I’m digging in my pocket to pay. Exact change only, you say, looking through me with the steady gaze of the profoundly blind or the batshit insane. Inside the stale-sweat room the selection will be easy: barely legal, POV, she-males, twins-twins-twins. Press a button to burn the dark screen. But out here in the bright, a green flower of greasy bills blooming between my fingers, just this fire. I have no choice and somehow still no idea what to do.

[pad 5.3 - 7/16/09]

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Recently it was reported that Nikolas Kontanakas, 27, was severely injured by a large, falling albatross that (doctors surmised) suffered from a heart attack in mid-air. In fact, Nicolas, 17, was issued a citation for speeding in a school zone.

We reported on the breaking news of the indictment of Mayor McKenna on charges of corruption and racketeering, but our facts weren’t in order and we’d like to retract that story and instead send the Mayor our congratulations on the birth of his new baby boy.

Mount Rainier is in Washington state, not Washington D.C.

Transvestites and transsexuals are not the same.

The new river recreation area is being named in honor of Adolf Tauzen, long-time local ophthalmologist and community organizer, not Adolf Hitler, the former German fuehrer who attempted to exterminate the Jews.

Correction of yesterday’s correction: the plural of the word ‘fetus’ is ‘fetuses’ not ‘fetii.’ The new flower beds at the women’s clinic were funded by anonymous donations and are not now, nor have they ever been, fertilized with aborted fetuses.

Our story on alleged illegal payments to scholarship athletes on the University baseball team may have been premature. Further investigation has revealed that we have no baseball team… or university.

While it’s true that the new Ocean View condominiums were designed by a graduate of East Valley High School (go Running Rebels!), there is no evidence that their foundations are insufficient making them likely to fall suddenly into the sea.

Sympathy and empathy are not synonymous.

Odds of a planet-wide extinction triggered by an asteroid– technically a meteoroid– impact are significantly less than the 1 in 12 estimate given in our story "The Myth of a Global Financial Crisis."

Valentine’s Day was not invented– or celebrated– by the Ancient Greeks.

Madonna and The Madonna: very different. We apologize for the misleading illustration.

If a storm forms over water, it’s a hurricane; over land, it’s a tornado. Cyclones and typhoons remain hazy.

The gematria of "Prince Charles of Wales" in both English and Hebrew is 666, but there’s been no definitive demonstration proving him in possession of the powers of the Anti-Christ.

Our research continues.

[pad 5.2 - 7/15/09]

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He who breathes clouds looked out over creation and laughed with contentment, streams of cirrus escaping from his vast nostrils, his laughter a rumble of distant thunder in the ears of the minuscule people below. And for their part the people cavorted and danced and sun-bathed and pursued one another with anger and desire and fucked and fought their little battles with their tiny spitting weapons. It was all the same to cloud man, who delighted in the shapes and configurations of his own creations, rarely wondering what the world had substituted for clouds before he came along. Baked in the sun’s relentless, bullying fire he supposed. The sun with whom he was constantly struggling. The sun that never stopped burning.

Cloud man liked best to create impossible shapes that would shock the occasional human who happened to look up at the right time. He was free to make just about any shape he pleased except words. He’d been forbidden to create even single letters since before he could remember.

In fact, though he had lost all memory of making it, this was cloud man’s own edict. He had no way now of knowing the trouble this had once caused. Clouds that look like mountains or animals or tools were one thing, but the first time a man looked up at just the right time and saw his own feeble scratchings stretched across the sky from horizon to horizon, he began to take himself seriously. His words in the sky! Whose work was this? And so man began to mistake the names of things for things themselves and concocting all kinds of gods that, thanks to being carefully written down, persisted. Soon these gods were crowding the sky, taking credit for everything above and below, cursing cloud man’s colorless creations, scattering them to the wind and laughing as he tried to gather them again.

This went on until finally cloud man literally lit up with the idea of lightning and decided to tell his own story to the accompaniment of endless rain. He told his story of bright light and fire and every man had to listen, the blinded and the burned and the lucky few who lived, wearing a web of white scars, unable to find the words…

[pad 5.1 - 7/14/09]

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After the bloody spittle and the piss stinking steam and the bloody-beaked birds that float like sties in the glaring eye of the sun

After the flies and the hoarse breath of sandstorms and the last words of the supreme leader faded from the loudspeakers

After the rusted gurneys have been fashioned into sleds to drag the remaining scrap over the borders lost and found and lost again

After the last sinking stones have subsided into the sand

A traveler stoops and then straightens, lifting an old x-ray film to the light

The pristine bones bear no trace of gut or gristle or the lost laminate skin

The film casts a skeletal white shadow flower on the dead earth and the man’s weary face

High above a confused carrion bird begins its as yet unseen descent

[pad 4.20 - 7/12/09]

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And I think this must be the moment a desperate, shaking junky tastes the baking soda he’s been cooking and can’t even cry, the taste he went on his knees for, the taste of the last time he saw his kids with their runny noses pressed against the dirty rear window, receding, the taste he begged to forget as often as he begged for it.

There’s dead rubber stinking air where my heart should be. The kiss of life would be your kiss of death. There’s no drama left, just what’s easy and hard. Meta is a luxury that can’t afford me.

People stand it in camps with wild dogs snuffling for surgical scraps. People kick in rooms with no door knobs and high windows, where every shaft of light is choked with dust. And me, with my pathetic ennui. Me, repeating the eternal question of emotional metaphysics: why do I feel nothing rather than something?

My name on the bottles that might cause dizziness, the bottles filled with sugar pills and chunks of ash and bone fragments that scar the roof of my mouth. The pills  that are as much a myth as dying from shooting air into a vein, as the eternal trip, as the infinite jest.

I can’t stop laughing. I’m my own placebo. My own words choking sideways in my throat. I’ve swallowed the treble-hook of me, myself and I, dragging out things that can’t survive in the light.

[pad 4.19 - 7/11/09]

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In the end Medea appears, descending in the Sun God’s chariot, drawn by dragons, the same chariot in which Phaethon scorched and cracked the very earth where mortal Jason stands left with nothing, suffering on the hot sand of Medea’s own scorched earth.

A literary scholar describes the Ancient Greek customs of marriage and mistress and argues that Medea misunderstood these foreign ways. A feminist scours the text for clues, invokes the etymology of hysteria, and elaborates on how Medea was broken by the wretched unfairness unable to understand what she was doing. A philosopher wonders aloud about the inevitability of hubris in the face of our imagined and unimaginable gods.

But Medea knows the simple truth of it: she’d pretended as long as she could to love those whose life is rendered from the first in the language of dying. While her father’s father drove the very sun across the sky she suckled her nameless children as they grew to fit their graves.

Those who possess something of the Gods are not of Earth or Olympus either. They live their lives bewildered, knowing little more of their days than their chimeric ends. We as well blame Medea as we blame the mirror that in turning reflects the light that blinds us and then as quickly becomes nothing, a sliver we couldn’t see even if hadn’t been lit up by the lightning and left alone in the absolute dark.

[pad 4.18 - 7/10/09]

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I don’t answer the phone

I don’t check the mail

I dread the knock of a drop-in at the door

I sleep in a nest of dirty clothes and a collapsed pile of half-read books

I go out and feel every eye on me

I close the door

I lean further forward on the river’s bank

I look for roof access in the tallest buildings in town

I make lists

I consider the empty space, the tunnel where my body’s been

I whisper to myself and strain to hear what was said

I breathe and inflate my blood taut skin to bursting

I repeat three words over and over until they dissolve bitter in my mouth: deliquescent, malignant, interminable

I’m transparent, a trick of light, a ripple of fleeing heat

I become the master of mimicry, aping smiles for pills

I press the lever, slide down the rope, wander the maze with a knotted ball of string

I remember the want and being wanted

I invoke my right to refuse

I wonder how I can be nowhere and still hate where I am

I rehearse what I could’ve said, discarded lines

I smell smoke

I invite cancer in

I know I can’t do it again but

I want and

I wait and

I want some more

[pad 4.17 - 7/9/09]

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In fact, many species kill without need, not for protection, but for some kind of primitive pleasure and to satisfy a mindless, formless desire. It’s not just we the flat-toothed and clawless with our cumbersome clothing and disturbing knack for efficiency where it’s needed least. Making the sound of a wet drum, an elephant tramples a strange smelling calf. A black widow eats her knobby, poisonless mate. Dingos eat their own babies. As do those hungry hungry hippos. Even pigs are happy to eat bacon, though that’s unfair… the pig with a mouth full of pork jowl didn’t slaughter his pink, squealing doppelganger, just ate what remained without tasting anything funny. It’s we who anticipate. It’s we who hear the satisfying click of the belt buckle when we strap the car seat in for a ride into the river. It’s we who drive slowly down the wrong streets with a gat and a gleam. It’s me who lies back in the garbage-bag lined bath– having thought every angle through so often there’s no thinking left, just a groove worn of mental pacing– carefully drawing the new curtain completely closed.

[pad 4.16 - 7/8/09]

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Not, as it turns out, the same lightning, but if your life’s gone so wrong that you manage to get smited once, don’t give in to the temptation of hubris:

Don’t cavort in the rain in a ring of electric fence and wet taut tarp

Don’t grind against the flagpole shouting “drunk hump! drunk hump!” at the angry clouds

Don’t pretend that isn’t your hair crackling on the muddy soccer field and stay out there alone showing off your little footy tricks

Don’t guide the stunt kite through the storm with your flipped middle fingers

Don’t hunt for the tallest tree or the shiniest scaffolding or the most conveniently abandoned metal ladder and climb

Don’t tread water at the point in the pond farthest from every shore making loon sounds

Don’t think for a moment that whoever or whatever laid down the law that lightning must wander lonely doesn’t have a few adages of his own:

the exception makes the rule, never say never, nobody likes a know it all.

[pad 4.15 - 7/7/09]

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We’re in an obscenely tall black 4×4 pickup with no doors or lights. I’m driving with both hands knuckle-white on the wheel. We’re going up one side and down the other of each in an endless series of snow-covered, ice-burdened hills. The brakes hardly work even when I stomp the brake pedal nearly to the floor again and again, trying to build up pressure. The only light is the dying white of a full moon I know somehow is just at the invisible moment when it’s beginning to wane. The ice crystals glitter around us and look more like stars than the real stars, which are steadily moving away from us in every direction. In patches bared of snow by the wind I see that the hills are piles of discard. Household stuff: futons, dishes, books, electronics, rugs, chairs… By definition trash, but not things we throw away often and never en masse. It’s as if there were houses here that vanished with the comic book logic of the Invisible Man, leaving everything behind but themselves, their clothing of drywall, bones of wood and steel, and their veiny pipes. Here and there I see notebooks that belong to me sticking out of the snow. I can’t lean far enough out to grab them and continue to keep control of the truck. You refuse to take the wheel. I know if we leave the indistinct path we’re following we’ll freeze. There’s no hope of fire. But my notebooks! I keep trying to lean left out the door-shaped void and grab them but you hold my right arm by the crook of my elbow and pull me back as we skid in long scarring curves. You pull me hard until I lean into you and shout to let the notebooks go: no one reads anymore, and the pages are silent anyway. I’m pressed against you so hard I can hear your sea sound, your individual static. When I try to talk I taste the hot salt on your neck. My shouts die in the heat of your skin. I can’t explain myself.

[pad 4.14 - 7/6/09]

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Stones wander lost in the sound of water’s voice

Flowers are the earth’s interjections

Humans are the only animals that may choose not to speak

There’s no natural sound some bird somewhere can’t mimic

I’ve asked myself what happened with and without words

The universe crackles with the staticy sound of its birth even as it dies

Starlight can take millennia to alight on the nighttime water

I can’t hear you over the sound of the surf but I wasn’t listening anyway

[pad 4.13.2 - 7/5/09]

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A quick sketch of an imagined angel’s wing that looks like the taut outstretched arm of a bat

The etymology of “compose” (com, together – ponere, to put)

A list of ancient Greek plays and poems I’ve been meaning to read including, to my shame, *The Frogs* and *The Birds*

Three paragraphs of Celan (from “Crusoe”), a complete poem by Rilke (“Death”) and a single “Tender Button” by Gertrude Stein (“a little monkey goes like a donkey”)

The titles, in chronological order, of four mystery series I’ll probably read when I should be reading those plays and poems: Nero Wolfe, Detective Erlendur, Inspector Dalgliesh, Peter Diamond

Words I need to learn more about: apthpthata, irruption, xyloid, beshissen

An attempt to scan the first words of Theseus in *A Midsummer Night’s Dream* (“Now fair Hyppolyta, our nuptial hour / Draws on apace; four happy days bring are…”)

A list of lasts– the last poem I’ll memorize, the last time I drank a chocolate shake, the last time I saw the sea

Thoughts on sentences being forms of speech and prison terms

Lyrics to the song “Afternoons & Coffeespoons”

The optometrist’s phone number

My mother’s mailing address

Sites I should see if I go to Barcelona as told to me by the Motorcycling Spaniard resting on his way to Prudhoe Bay

Notes on memory

The minimum I must do every day: get up, make my bed, wash my face, steel myself

Obsessions: failing memory, her, erasure, my dead father, my failure, her

[pad 4.13 - 7/5/09]

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she says he’s different when he plays

she says she’s not sure she likes the way he plucks a captured piece from the board like he’s pulling something rotten from the ground

she says he keeps smiling to himself, smug with some private joke

she says to tell her what’s so funny

she says he shouldn’t like winning so much

she says she can see the board’s reflection on his glasses

she says just move already

she says everyone says the queen’s the most powerful piece, but it’s the king that’s never captured

she says the king inevitably gives up

she says there are still more possible moves than there are stars in the universe, this galaxy for sure

she says hurry up it’s time

she says look goddamit see

she says a million million possible moves

she says she knows it’s the end

she says do the math

[pad 4.12 - 7/4/09]

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iambic heartbeat
too quick to count
flame cupped in the hand
this airy knot
this knuckled eye

there’s a song
a settling
a silence
still or
disappeared
the same

at the
sound of steps
a green rising
or a falling
away

[pad 4.11 - 7/3/09]

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In the grocery’s ozone fluorescence
you palm a melon whose underside
is scarred by a rusting zipper.
You take it home, furtive and unsure,
but finally draw down the slide,
unstitch the wound.
What flesh there is inside has rotted,
but something newly bald
pushes through the pulpy muck
emerges shinier and somehow
a little larger than the first,
on it a zipper too
that you just have to tear open
and you do,
faster than the one before.

[pad 4.10 - 7/2/09]

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I dug into myself with your dirty needle
found nothing of the disease that
flames in you, fizzles in me.
Your dry mouth strops your steel tongue sharp
ice chips steaming to nothing in your mouth
you taste nothing but salt,
not the bitter new wine unbottled,
not the dripping crust of bread,
not the juice you barely draw through the straw,
not the cold, hard plums, still green,
ripening and rotting at the seed.

[pad 4.9 - 7/1/09]

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I have strange dry-mouth dreams.
I remember the dying and being dead
but nothing of before.
Why not how
I was burned by this,
I tongued that,
I found something under there?
In the dreams where my tongue
retreats into its dank hole
I’ve forgotten these things
and in waking forget again.
To ask how I know now
what I knew in the night
and forgot
is to ask
how I know
this precise place
without ever having
been here before.

[pad 4.8 - 6/30/09]

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Outside the window
pollen floats on
a conflicting breeze,
fuzzing fireflies
lit from without.
As much rises as falls,
some caught up in tiny
temporary whirlwinds,
others fertilizing
the cracked concrete vulva
and stinking oil slicks.
A fat bee taps twice
on the window and retreats
from the flurry of
pale pink flowers that
have opened and press on
my side of the glass.
A few petals cringe and fall
to the disturbed dirt,
somehow sighing
without making a sound.

[pad 4.7 - 6/29/09]

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There’s a whale shark that’s mostly shadow and moves like a storm, threatening and retreating, and eels doodling like a dirty finger drawing on the other side of the acrylic glass, and gaudy fish dollops of cast-off colors too bright to be part of anything larger we’d believe is real, and dolphins that come and go as they please, deigning occasionally to hover close and eye with contempt we baggy, clumsy mouth breathers, and seals not wholly of either world of air or water, somehow sleek and fat at the same time… but look at the lowly schooling sardines, flashing wet coins now a sheet of lightning, now a storm of oily silver, now what from some angle is a face, and once even a perfect churning sphere, each embodying their simple logic: if it’s small feed; if it’s large flee; look to the you next to you and do what they do.

[pad 4.5 - 6/27/09]

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