On The Ovarian Trolley, Occupy the Uterus

"But I had no choice about the mother who was to deliver me. Perhaps I was lucky not to have been born an idiot, considering all the circumstances. One thing seems clear, however, and this is a hangover from the 25, that I was born with a crucifixion complex. That is, to be more precise, I was born a fanatic. Fanatic! I remember that word being hurled at me from early childhood on. By my parents especially. What is a fanatic? One who believes so passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes. I was always believing in something and so getting into trouble. The more my hands were slapped the more firmly I believed. I believed, and the rest of the world did not!If it were only a question of enduring punishment one could go on believing till the end; but the way of the world is more insidious than that. Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the ground taken from under your feet...It's a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You are seized with a soft of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love The more you reach out toward the world the more the world retreats. Nobody wants real love, real hatred. Nobody wants you to put your hand in his sacred entrails, that's only for the priest in the hour of sacrifice. While you live, while the blood's still warm, you are to pretend that there is no such thing as blood and no such thing as a skeleton beneath the covering flesh. Keep off the grass! That's the motto by which people live by."

Tropics of Capricorn, Henry Miller

The Empty Boat

Sunset —Coney Island


The sun,
Like the red yolk of a rotten egg,
Falls behind the roller-coaster
And the horizon sticks
With a putrid odor of colors.
Down on the beach 
A little Jewish tailor from the Bronx,
With a bad stomach,
Throws up the hot-dog sandwiches
He ate in the afternoon
While life to him
Is like a sick tomato
In a garbage can.

Who Untangles Bare Wires?

Explode Into Space Like A True Nature's Child
Lessons From Within The Laundromat


He enters,
charges directly
at a bunch of white roses
left on a table
clutches them to his chest
rotting nails against wilting petals
ascends to his nose
he takes a sniff

looks
straight on
at his audience, seemingly non-attentive
two lost or rather old souls
contained for the time being in the room

he speaks

Man, these don't even have a scent!
To the roof, is where these deserve to be left


he exits and then enters a few minutes later

points to the machine
waltzes like a dinosaur
melting steps, clawed fingers, broken wrists
spins

Man, haven't, haven't you guys
ever noticed Earth
is just a washing machine?

He then unzips
throws his blue jeans in

Wait, now look at it!

Lying in a Conundrum

A Room With a View

a whole centre

and a border

make hanging

a way of dressing

but its dressing

for pleasure and erections

and cooking

or stewing

better yet 

for stuffing

cause nothing

suggests difference

better than whiteness to a wall

it is currents!

even if you put two 

in space

together these two

you get rapture

you get dimness

in this room

intentions change

in this room

is where escapism

is a fleeting moment

that is why some jump

from windows

due to constipation

high-up places and spaces

always asked to consider

since it is my space too

we both got to look out of this window

and who ever is out there

has to look at both of us too

look at us both

disputing possessions

 fairness, mold

and rat poop

cause faucets break

screens do too

there is no disgrace in looking in

so here is the show

full of preoccupation

vacant intent 

excavation-al remains

of objects inside rooms

we use to live here

we use to love it here

just because of the view

Text Testimonials

"Actually, I lit the fire and got everything ready. Made sure there was nothing she could pick up and have a bash at me with. It's no good pretending I had my old trust in her. Well, she went up to her bath and it was all like as usual. When she came out I did her hands, no gag, and I followed her downstairs. I noticed she had a lot of her French scent on, she'd done her hair up the way she did it before and she was wearing a purple and white housecoat I bought her."

John Fowles The Collector

Back to Black...Boards

Back to Blackboards


But the blackboards are bare
teachers prefer chalk-less fingertips
and sitting on chairs
or standing behind podiums
we are herded
like old times
in chairs in a room
but this time
they ask us to plug in
to laptops
and take class online
while in class
so meta
so metaphorical
for the times
education
is a dying art
a dying breed
we are headless
dirty old men
flinging bills
at lecturers
who say
click on this page
and give a provocation
because
it is time to grade fair
in fairness
fair for all

PAYBACK

"He realised that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her; but the other grimmer appetite for meat and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by men who made money in industry."

D.H Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover 

"The dark side of the sense of fairness is the sense of unfairness, which results in gloating when you've got away with being unfair, or else guilt; and in rage and vengeance, when the unfairness has been visited upon you."

Margaret Atwood, PAYBACK

It's A Gas

the only sense

you'd like to have

is the two cents

i owe you

i woe you

i woe

for those

cents you have

been adding up

to ease yourself

will eat yourself

one day

at a time

Text Testimonial

"Portrait of a Lady"

The city was a vast emptiness. He stood at the window of Finbar's hotel and looked down at the River Liffey which was mud-brown after days of rain. He closed his eyes and thought about the rooms all around him, empty now in the afternoon, and the long empty corridors of the hotel. He thought of the houses on the long stretches of suburbs going out of the city: Clontarf, Rathmines, Rathgar, the confidence they excluded, the sense of strength and solidity. He thought about the rooms in these houses, empty most of the day and maybe most of the night, and the long back gardens, neat and trimmed, empty too for all of the winter and most of the summer. Defenceless. No one would notice an intruder scaling a wall, flitting across the garden to scale the next wall, a nondescript man checking the house of a sign of life, for alarm systems, and then silently prising a window open, sliding in, carefully crossing the room, opening doors, not making a sound, so alert as to be almost invisible. 


Your mind is like a haunted house. He did not know where the phrase came from, if someone had said it to him, if he had read it somewhere, or if it was a line from a song. No, he thought, it could not be a line from a song. He had stolen these paintings from a house that looked haunted. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it no longer seemed to. He had stolen the Rembrandt whose reproduction he was looking at now, plus a Gainsborough and two Guardis and a painting by a Dutchman whose name he could not pronounce. The robbery made headlines for days in the papers. He remembered laughing out loud when he read about a gang of international art robbers who had come to Ireland. The robbery had been linked with others which has taken place in recent years on the European mainland. 






excerpt from Finbar's Hotel

Is This What You Wanted

Why Does She Weep

Hush then
why do you cry?
It's you and me
the same as before.

If you hear a rustle
it's only a rabbit
gone back to his hole
in a bustle.

If something stirs in the branches
overhead, it will be a squirrel moving
uneasily, disturbed by the stress
of our loving.

Why should you cry then?
Are you afraid of God
in the dark?

I'm not afraid of God.
Let him come forth.
If he is hiding in the cover
let him come forth.

Now in the cool of the day
it is we who walk in the trees
and call to God "Where art thou?"
And it is he who hides.

Why do you cry?
My heart is bitter.
Let God come forth to justify
himself now.

Why do you cry?
Is it Wehmut, ist dir weh?
Weep then, yea
for the abomination of our old righteousness,

We have done wrong
many times;
but this time we begin to do right.

Weep then, weep
for the abomination of our past righteousness.
God will keep
hidden, he won't come forth.

D.H. Lawrence

Mischief And Repose

The Story of Ferdinand, Fictional and Far Away

If only I could be Ferdinand,
and sit here
quietly
smelling the flowers
there would be a single
cork tree in an empty pasture
and I would sit there
not feeling
lonesome in the breeze
or anguish in the sweat of droplets
no fuze
no short circuits
not a machine of a human
but the patience of a Spanish fictional bull.

James Jacques Joseph Tissot

Dance Me Through The Panic Till I'm Gathered Safely In

The collection is here!
 If you get a chance stop by The Fine Art of Design and visit Stacked Bookshop, located inside the shop if you wish for your copy. There is only five, yikes!

 The Un-Included Introduction, If You Will


There always is this yearning, almost dirty desire to be read and to be enjoyed. A sort of exploited desperation that exists within a writer when commissioned to create a collection. It seems almost necessary to title it i seem to have gone blind as well as cover it with headless naked women. Each poem dedicates itself to the idea that "the image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite." Nothing here can be claimed as fact, but nothing can be claimed as fiction.


I was told that this experience is something I will look back on and feel relief. And it really is a beautiful thing, in the way that beauty can be sick and intrusive. As for the recent pieces of poetry, a million thanks, dear Ireland. Finishing this collection brings me the release, the only path of escape. In the process during which I wrote the recent poems, I felt I did not create enough. But now I can remove myself and peer at what I did create, and although it is not much, I created something internally worthy for myself. For what has been created is exactly how I want to remember it.

Grrrrrr.

These Hills Exist

A Cacophony of Silent Redwood Trees




 I woke in Yosemite 
Jamie curled up next to me 
cupping my left breast, platonically
 her body morphs a furnace 
I find myself again 
inside of the tent this time 
with a single sheet tightly wrapped 
like a coroner's bag around my body 
the sun finally stretches its arms 
piercing the microscopic stitching 
and there is warmth 
stuffy warmth 
and the desire to desert the wilderness 




JMI

What Drains Me Most

Piano

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.


In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.


So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.




D.H. Lawrence

I Wish To Be Murdered By A Woman

Skin Debris as Microscopic Human Trace

The Suit


I am locked in a very expensive suit
old elegant and enduring
Only my hair has been able to get free
but someone has been leaving
their dandruff in it
Now I will tell you
all there is to know about optimism
Each day in hubcap mirror
in soup reflection
in other people's spectacles
I check my hair
for an army of Alpinists
for Indian rope trick masters
for tangled aviators
for dove and albatross
for insect suicides
for abominable snowmen
I check my hair
for aerialists of every kind
Dedicated as an automatic elevator
I comb my hair possibilities
I stick my neck out
I lean illegally from locomotive windows
and only for the barber
do I wear a hat



Leonard Cohen Selected Poems 1956-1968

Just to See Her