Ahab said something very interesting about nylon strings and strange tunings that got him the feel of an oud. I can’t begin to explain it, but it’s very lovely. He’s been posting some great tracks on his blog and I’ve been writing poems to go along with them. Check out these:
poetry
I suppose I feel it is time to put an end to this whole charade. I had intended this blog to be a fictional context for both the Napoleon story and Hindu Zombie Fever. I thought I would extend the meta elements of these pieces into the severnspoon character as author. Not only was this an anxious bit of bullshit, but I feel certain it was unsuccessful. So I have two choices, actually start a blog that’s not bullshit, or just retire this whole thing.
As well though, I feel like a learned a lot about digital identity and the role it might play in my life. I created this persona as a way of buffering myself from any sort of direct engagement with the world. I wanted a filtered reality, one with certain fictive assumptions. What I found is that the fictive is always present online. There is no point in an online forum where the fictive cannot arise. Whether from boredom, malice, marketing, or cons. Here’s my roundtable of what I learned:
Hindu Zombie Fever
Hindu Zombie Fever was written in 5 days at a pace of 40 pages a day over a vacation trip to the woods. I was at Morningstar and had an idea for a book that derived from a poem. Here’s the poem:
Green butterflies coughing coins
In my hindu zombie novel
there is a princess
who gets no rest
on the great palace balustrades
where her father once grew monkeys and tigers
but now only tea
and dread.One day the sky went strange
and green butterflies flew over
coughing coins into everyone’s upturned faces.Her father was blinded
and dashed to the ground
and only rose again
changed
as if his dreams had come true.In my hindu zombie novel
it’s as if the undead were really men
broken by despair–
arriving at all hours
to marvel at the princess.I got distracted
when I set out to write it
and wrote about the sands instead.
And every time I sifted,
the sands fell back clean,
unblemished by meaning.There was only so much to say
about sand after awhile.In my hindu zombie novel
everyone is dead
in part
and also part alive.It’s told from the perspective of a princess
whom everyone adoresand it’s full of zombies
like lumbering power tools
stuck on
to shimmy the floorin search of love
or brains
or brawn.It’s true
that I’m like her father in some ways,
sifting sand from hand to hand
like a tired and broken hour glass
to find some flake,
some frank forbidden fragment
of myself that could save us all.And it’s true
that I am the princess
who may not exist,
who must be hidden
so no one discovers
whether she exists or not.And it’s true
that all my dreams are
scattered patterns of sand
dulling everything to shapes
against a dark sky
and I stumble in shadows
hungry and aloneand the sand is blowing everywhere anyway
and great dunes of sand
are belched from the sea for some reason.In my hindu zombie novel
I keep losing the story.There were butterflies, green butterflies
that flocked the sky once
and their coins were like blows
raining down promiseand everyone was dead
but still hungry
for the dull shapes of things.Everyone held their arms outstretched
like a troupe of desiccated birds
dreaming of flight.And I am trying to dream them
from the sand, but my hands are empty
because everything is too dry to clump
and the forms are too dull to signify.There’s only this mound
wanting that mound
and another mound between them
that’s no different than any other story.So my hindu zombie novel
is nothing more
than an idea I’ve been toying with
and the green butterflies coughing coins
are just some stupid ideas people get sometimes.They fly over me every night
and I dodge their missiles
uncertain of their commerce.Will the princess get to love a living man?
Will the king throw open the palace doors
to a shambling horde of zombies
and stagger among them
drunk on the coins of green butterflies
who are not real,
who may be the stuff of legends
in the clouded minds of the undead.They tangle with each other
as they cross the great hall
like a many-armed god of hope
offering death
and protest
and peace.And I just want to write this book
where a man can love a woman
and they can live
happily together.Instead,
I dream of sand
so things can be simple somewhere
even if that means they’re meaningless.That zombie horde weaves,
more in love with the idea of the princess
than any glimpse of her.She just wants to be left alone.
She’d rather be sand
and drift on the wind
and pepper their eyes with sleep.My eyes
most of all.No one wants to read this hindu zombie novel,
they’re all too busy
dreaming of princesses
that are themselves whittled by wind
down to their most beautiful parts
which must exist.Palaces are thrown open
and their treasures are scattered in the street
as if all things were equal but one.Horizontal planes
crash into vertical planes
in geometries too powerful to comprehend.Sand-scarred winds burn
to tease and plummet presumptuous birds,
to baffle the trees,until a man stumbles upon a doorway,
thrown beyond himself by the simple revery
of one foot
and another.In my hindu zombie novel,
all the human burden returns.He’s a man still,
though his heart is a ravaged padlock
scarred by crowbars.The door is locked to him.
His greeting is hoarse and sticks in his throat
and the door is locked to him.
Far from the heaven of a kind word,
the crisp turn of a smile,
or any other remnant of the ancient world,
the door is locked to him.In my hindu zombie novel,
everyone’s always reaching beyond himself
towards a fire
that isn’t strong enough to save him
but saves just another night,
just the next breath of life.And the princess comes alive again
like a fire,
like she always does.He calls to her,
promising tiaras.
He pleads with her to reign.We are always asking for the right things
even at the wrong times
with the wrong people.In my book,
they look at each other,
this man and this woman,despite everything,
despite her undead father
lying slain between them,
despite the green butterflies crossing the sky
dropping their golden coins
in tireless brigades,
despite being written from the sand
against their will.They ask “why?”
until the answers are good enough
to quiet them,then life goes on for some reason.
I had read the poem backed by Blue Nebula at Hugo’s Mexicans without Borders. I was very pleased with how everything went and the feedback I got was that people would love to read my Hindu Zombie Novel, but the truth is there was no novel and there was never any intention to have one, it was just a poem that was playing with a sort of meta quality that I was beginning to enjoy.
So I went to the woods and decided to write this book. I bought some Ben Gay, some ibuprofen, some Ginkgo extract, some green tea, all the things I thought might be required to write a novel in 5 days. I had no idea what to expect. I just sat down and did it. I wrote myself to exhaustion for five days straight.
The results were about 180 pages I think. I added the beginning and ending later based on feedback. I don’t know if it works. It’s all just an experiment to me. I wanted to explore certain narrative possibilities, but then there was the predicament of what to do with it once I was done. The solution seemed to be around the corner:
SXSW
My work is in web development. They were sending me to SXSW interactive in Austin, Texas. I’ve been to conferences before and I know they are swag fests, so I thought I would armor myself with something. I created this page. And thought I was very clever. I printed out a bunch of them intending to distribute them in a clandestine way at the conference. But first I needed to get the book typed in and fast. But I needed it to be more than just a mad dash, so I came up with:
Code Poetry
I decided that for this experiment to really hold, I must do it with intentionality at every level, so I fabricated a number of artificial constraints for myself. What I called code poetry. It was not art if it was not intentional was my guiding constraint. So I refined the HTML and CSS. I polished them to a high sheen of unnecessary aesthetic outpouring. For no good reason other than to distance myself from the unsophisticated puzzle of coding. I wanted a greater constraint so I was forced to choose which characters to type for more sophisticated reasons. So I had to be resourceful with both clever formatting and a tight knowledge of the languages involved.
If I could accomplish this, then the facade was complete and the thing was art.
The Structure
I’ve always wanted to write a book of fragments, like Evan Connell’s Notes found in a bottle on the beach at Carmel or a few others I could rattle off. The truth is, I love decontextualized narration. I love found pieces and sketches of overheard conversation. I love the jolt my imagination gets when it tries to place something. What I wanted was a book that could be read with a sort of voyeurism. A book that could be snuck around. A book you could dive into anywhere. I’m not sure I accomplished this, but I came up with a code as an organizing principle: 1.2.3.2.1, etc. The idea was to provide a wayfinding device within the narrative. A minimalist method of organization. If you knew the code, you could find your place within the whole system. Learning the code would be a matter of discovering who is speaking and their relation to the other characters and their place in time, etc. It was a riddle:
Riddles
I love riddles. I love their dense poetry. Riddles crop up throughout Hindu Zombie Fever, the primary one being: What is it? For a while I thought Hindu Zombie Fever was a symptom of this identity crisis I was feeling online. Who am I if you can’t see me and this is my only interface to you? I’m a fiction. What do I do while you are not thinking about me? What do my personas do when I do not inhabit them? They are like the hour glass cursor, spinning and spinning, awaiting some release. But the real seed was a sort of emotional vacancy that has taken over various people of my acquaintance for various reasons in my life. Some people just stop living and that’s a fact. Hindu Zombie Fever strikes. Asking why and what has been a major guiding pursuit in my life.
I always wanted to be a doctor as a child. That I ended up a writer doesn’t dissolve my desire to cure certain pathologies. I want the larch cure for those I love.
SXSW again
I thought I would fabricate this elaborate deception. I thought it would somehow matter that it was a sort of art prank. The truth is, one valuable lesson I’ve learned is that the deception is seamless with reality as most people find it. There is a conscious filtering of information for the level of deception it contains. We suppose that whatever we find online is a lie to some extent. Even Wikipedia tolerates a degree of false information. It’s the only choice we have. People seem to have flocked to deception as soon as they were empowered with information.
So the world is inundated with bullshit and my little flyer was a lonely victim of the fray:
Jeff Boughner
The other thing that happened during all this is that Jeff Boughner died. Jeff who held me so gently in the sling of his guitar while I read of my Hindu Zombie Novel. He passed away unexpectedly. So this whole charade became tainted with the most serious of tragedies. It had to be about something more than an art prank. But I’d locked into this whole structure. Obsessions were everywhere around me. I was buried in it all and have only now dug myself free. I wrote Ghosts of Arco for Jeff and Blue Nebula, as an attempt to recreate for myself the experience of reading with them. What joy they have given me in my life. How grateful I am for their care.
Balloons as a base
I decided to start a blog to go along with the persona I’d come up with, severnspoon. I called it Balloons as a base because I was flipping through an old craft book of my wife’s and there was a project called that. I thought it was intriguing in a number of ways. I’d just begun reading about Napoleon and he brought a famous balloonist with him to Egypt. Balloons as a base worked in all sorts of ways. Implying an empty or airy foundation, impermanence, but also ingenuity, everything I thought I was doing.
My intention was to provide avenues into the story, just as I supposed it should be discovered by search engines and spammers and whoever else might stumble upon it. I wanted to be found by strangers. I wanted people I didn’t know to fall into my web. All my layers of intricate knots. I wanted them to feel a sensation very much like how I describe Hindu Zombie Fever. I wanted to blog as another person. Someone who was not Scott Krieger, but was a part of him at the same time:
Severnspoon
Severnspoon is a strange name. It is a unique name though. I am the only one in history to have ever thought of it. As a result, I don’t need to have any weird number string in my username when I join a social networking site or whatever. I can always use severnspoon. Severnspoon is composed of a number of ingredients: the spoon:
and the word Severn which recalls for me the song Venus in Furs by The Velvet Underground: “Severn, your servant, speak so slightly, Severn, down on his bended knees.” Despite the masochistic overtones, this delights me because of the coupled irony of the spoon. The spoon, gentlest utensil in the tray:
Spoon
The spoon is always surrendering
to the soup. In the school of cutlery
it’s beaten in the yard by the fork,
by the butter knife, pinned down
with tongs and teased by the spatulas.Yet it has the oldest soul, patiently
holding its brothers in the tray like
a healer, a savior, one who gives his
warmth on a cold night to the lips,lends a hand to his parents—the cup
and the bowl. A dutiful child, the spoon
never wanted to split its form and be
the spork, never cared to tear the melon.He flips our faces and holds them to us,
letting us taste at our leisure whatever
is carefully freed from the can; whatever
is brewed, cherished, demanding a form.The fork is rude, as if it could give to the world
an answer. The spoon knows what the world needs
to calm its fever, to warm its bones.
The spoon has always appealed to me. Severnspoon is what has become of the spoon online.
MySpace
I needed to have a presence on MySpace, so I evaluated the capabilities of the platform and decided on a policy for myself. I would be a praise poet. In the ancient groit tradition. If MySpace was about the currency of friendship, then I must make it a real commerce. I thought I would be undiscriminating in who my friends were. I would take all comers. I would carry my Code Poetry aesthetic with me into that whirlwind of society. I would inject my Courier New into peoples lives like a balm. It would be beautiful.
But the deception of identity was all too prevalent. How many poems can one write in praise of get rich quick schemes. I decided I would only write poems for real people. In the end, I wrote poems for my real friends and left it at that. The whole thing was tiresome.
Napoleon
Through all this, a new presence was looming. Napoleon and his Egyptian campaign. Something was going on here that was about all of this. The Napoleonic identity. Severnspoon was easily brutalized by the presence of such egos. Severnspoon became the mummy head to Napoleon’s braggart. The whole story played itself out in deepening layers of meta-ness that I’d painted myself too deeply into the picture to explain. Truthfully, the presence of Napoleon has become an unbearable thing. I want free of him because I feel like I must either give my life over to him or break it off. I’ve heard Joyce scholars complain about the unfortunate career choices they’d made. I understand this. I do not want to be a Napoleonic scholar, although I think a person could learn a lot about humanity from studying him. I need other personas in my life. I have some brewing now and I want to move on.
Crazytalk
I had begun to feel seepage. I had become unclear of just what I was doing. The deceptions were too elaborate and the dream of discovery was too fleeting. No one was going to get it. No one expected anything of the sort. The whole project was doomed. I just needed to get the Napoleon story finished and I could move on. Leave it behind.
My office
So I cleaned my office. I got everything in order and I stayed up late into the night last week and I finished the damn thing, for what its worth. I hope I haven’t ruined it in the process. It’s all behind me now and with the writing of this post, I close the book on this experiment.
Some time on google, hunting the elusive Bone, bears some old fruit. Where are you Mark?
My voice
1
Humble ham-fisted marionettes,
to squelch the mystery tones
ripping the air
and speak
a few terse challenges,
to tear the seams of silence
into certainty.
Words spill a black hard stream,
this flowering up of spikes,
nails and bridges to cure the light,
tight belt secure beneath a curse
taken verbatim
from charred wet curls of sand
tossed with weather
into my lips
to shadow play inside my ribs,
my craw–
for the pearl.
Whatever gift the harrowing invents
to scabbard the doubt,
I will intone.
2
My voice is opalescent
as moth wings
fluttered and folded
on the moon’s face,
the belly laugh of a cloud over corn rows,
the long string of droplets
that cruise the duck’s back,
the hard stare of the lady bug
lifting its carapace
to settle secret wings,
determined
for the shock of grapes
gripped by tongue and palette,
bursting like florescent bulbs
into whip cracks
and sweet ash
and nothing.
3
I am the lady bug in the ash tray.
My voice is the sound of the dashes
in a long string of numbers dialed
to hear the sigh of a fold creasing,
that knock like a spine through the skin,
that skewer,
a code with green sprouts
that suggests an eye,
a hip
mid-cupped in a lover’s grip,
a hand
played like a many-piped brass knot,
an ear
as kind to the jackdaw
as the knife drawer,
that cherishes a dozen overripe tomatoes
rolling down the attic stairs,
that twists
into the scrape of a knee on a curb,
that rush of dandelions
knocking among the lilies.
4
My tongue
that is still learning
the delicate breath of rotten things
at the hands of olive oil
and ginger snaps,
crawfish and cheese
and what they become
flaked in a pastry
or three days in the fridge.
The thrum of a butchered turtle,
its headless quiver,
legs stuck in instructions
that cannot be revoked.
5
I believe in the hot piss and shit
come unsheathed.
I believe in the strength
of quiet regard.
I believe in hard scales
and rough seas
and oceans of brine-encrusted fluid dynamics.
I’ve sunk a dreamscape
like a well through the bedrock–
what the tree knows.
I’ve made myself possible in this way.
I believe in the quivering bird
humiliating himself for a taste
of some other promise than survival.
I believe in the apple.
6
Unsure
of what intents
are there
to be satisfied,
a dragon
in a coffee cup
suspended by thinning hair,
rapid breath on glass
singling the finger print
tracing a word
that can never be seen entire,
huffing
as if I might read it
off my own tongue.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
There’s some confusion in the pipes.
Two men set to digging at the property line.
The brontosaurus back hoe arrives
so they dig down eight feet
by the side of the curb.
More men gather, bureaucrats from the state,
The inspector paints lines for water,
lines for the drain, like hieroglyphs
that will stand ten years
or less.
The pipes come clean of the clay and the sand
like ancient bones or ruins. Like digging up a nest of ants
to see all the workings of their lives.
The men scurry. The pressure is fine at the street.
That means digging a trench from the street to the house,
cutting diagonally across the lawn.
These men are used to standing together outside.
They gossip and smoke and tell jokes, waiting for something.
They wait a long while for it to appear.
They do nothing in the meantime, nap a bit,
talk about their wives, share some intimacies.
The gas guy arrives in his orange fire-proof suit,
helmet and gas mask. He climbs in the hole
to learn what he can from the T junction.
He calls his gas mask his headphones.
He calls to the top of the hole: hand me my headphones.
Men who coil air hoses with one smooth lariat motion.
Hose men. Men who swing heavy joints of metal into bags.
Men who drape rags on poles to hold up the line.
Men who hammer couplings against their thighs.
Experts at reading gauges, surrounded by compression.
They talk in big letters: Y, T, PSI.
Their ears are full of hisses,
low hums cut with shrill screeches.
Their truck is full of little doors,
little drawers full of grommits and joints.
Men reach in without looking.
The hose guy turns off the air compressor
and a whole world of tension collapses.
He scores and snaps new hose and starts to pick up tools.
L’s, Y’s, their snakes recoil.
The joint guy dismantles an old mechanism,
salvaging certain complicated assemblages of couplings
like words whose intents have proved untrue
though the letters still prove useful.
He pries and punches on his knee
as if overcome by the anxious arrival of grief.
The gas guy’s head appears above ground.
Orpheus returning for his lyre. He dons
surgical gloves over dirty fingers and crouches
with some delicate tool that finishes its job
in an instant.
He is a wizard now at his spells,
a necromancer down among the dead
touching the magic wand to erase all memory,
to restart time.
The brontosaurus awakes
and drags the mound of dirt over top
with little spasms and long tonguings
and a series of bashes and stomps.
The men look around themselves at last
for lost tools and some final details.
Perhaps they notice the street for the first time and,
without joining in its mysteries,
close drawers and doors and move on.
Hawk hooked herald
of first light forms
the river beneath broad wings
watches me walk
Dangerous dawn dragoon
first shadows the bridge
to flush a fat blunder
wild of its dreams
Wings wung white beneath
clouds beneath
bones to crack in claws beneath
the heart that beats too hard
Locked lids lead
against trajectories turning back
straight away against
the grain of time
Our perfect pregnant pause
perhaps worth circling
(the swift on a beeline interrupts
intent to nag the hawk along)
That thin thankless gift of flight
he might have spoke
while I spilled out
the grave-bound space of surfaces
I walked on beneath
earthbound at least
content with bricks in sour stride
upset (at least) I could not fly
Sieves clatter clogged
not yet with rust
but bits of food,
fragments of ideas
that will not wash
away. Not yet with rust
the day dawns dinghy
with a million more flecks
of dust, a myriad
of tiny memes hung up on each other
like real thoughts
to bring back into the earth
what was born there.
Sieves clatter clogged,
again before the rust
of generations breaks down
all things to base shapes
excited by chemicals,
dull matters for the stars.
The day dawns dinghy
with words, endless thoughts
dissecting each other,
sand rolling down an incline
towards stabler ground.
One day all things fall enough to one
side or the other through
intricate associations.
Metadata, the truth of things
writ large on a long scroll,
beauty encoded from reach,
everything parsed factual.
Whims hang tagged behind a password:
we people
with our brief histories
who think ourselves
worth remembering.
—
All that is vast
remains on the shore.
Hands spread as far,
a body pressed to the wind
will not hold enough of it
to measure anything.
There was pleasure in leaving
the sands crisp with dew:
to crush the strict character
of dusk
into the poignant crust:
undercut by companions
to hang in its own grip:
that brief sense of identity
before a brush of brisk wind
bursts all bravado back
to first principles:
I am
collapsing
into I
The sky seems darker today.
Perhaps it is some cosmic collusion.
No clouds and the stars are crisp.
Is it the moon that has changed?
Some fragment the day usually offered?
I’m singing to myself all the problems of light.
I want secrets for keepsakes, carvings memorializing tantrums, delirious moments of splendor.
But for now, the first form fails to wind the spring
go then
to your curses
forgotten brooms
sweep starts from my spleen
The living acorn:
The meat of the spiral down curls that are not in motion.
acorn, belly, Code Poetry, poetry, spiralacorn, belly, Code Poetry, poetry, spiralIt’s the eye that is active, not the acorn. It does nothing but sit, a dull stamp in a hard nut, a thing to saw open, a belly of promise.
I have set out to say it at least
and that is something.
I am training myself to take note of things.
I am using all the devices
I can imagine
to excuse myself for what
I [feel I] am
compelled to do.
That is something at least.
What connects it to this moment:
my friend's letter in my hand:
the strange anxiety of opening it:
feeling sure of nothing:
having no opinion
to brace the blow:
These nerves.
What for?
Am I afraid I will have
to make excuses
all my life?
for dreaming this?
same as you?
poetrypoetry1
I have begun
2
The mind machine is celebrating
the anniversary of a bee sting.
The mind machine is calculating
all its hiccups, every tingle.
3
The thinnest tuft of down
in the downy pillow of a crib,
the mind machine recalls.
Every relic of the present
is made memorial of now
in matters dumb and tired.
Every fickle intention in the world,
all the moistness of the mundane
it will remember for all time.
4
Bound by wicker bends
with gracious wands
to wear the ground
in its grip:
The road is dusty and long
but something signifies:
there is another beyond
this other beyond:
Inside of everything is its opposite
reflecting back
a just certainty
with little tact, but pure:
We are woven in silk to our tips.
Every thread finds form
in the next till we stand, made
of something no longer certain:
Thanks to chaps and killhambone
Succumb
to such decision trees
as
if s in a
while
recursively spin
in the depths
in search;
The muscular need
for this intelligence
to brute force
the world to represent
a pattern of thought;
The few instants
we transact among
that pass without fail;
//(The very heat
// of all those queries
// create errors
// in the physics)
GARBAGE COLLECTED
before the nuance
is lost
tiny switch
inthe
belly
that is me
tags the melon
of
function(){}
// that could be leaner
// more essential
// more perfect to its cause
/* and still more cryptic
** like a force of nature
*/
class Poem{
var concerns, aThreadOfReason,
thoseAreReallyYourHands;
function Poem( concerns ){
this.concerns = concerns;
this.aThreadOfReason = new Array();
this.thoseAreReallyYourHands = new Hands();
for(var me = 0; me < this.concerns.length; me++){
this.aThreadOfReason[] = this.thinkAbout( concerns[ me ] );
}
}
function thinkAbout( which ){
var expressingEverything=this.thoseAreReallyYourHands.movingInSuchFlawedGestures();
return expressingEverything.withImpishGlee( which );
}
function write( inspiration ){
var youToYourself = new Array();
foreach( inspiration.keepsTouching(this.aThreadOfReason) as eachTouch){
youToYourself[] = eachTouch.impressingTheMoment();
}
//because the method is called for
//because we are always chasing
return youToYourself;
upon reflection
}
}
var concerns=[
"King of Dancers",
"things that stand",
"arms",
"reaching",
"vision"];
var thisPoem=new Poem( concerns );
alert( thisPoem.write( 
) );
Swim hard enough
against the current of images, deep
into the infinite mirror,
into the space where light
still signifies
falling against the darkness
in a river
of focal points
echoing
deeper
from the place where everything
is transforming:
metamorphic:
reasoned,
however complex:
(
The salmon
batter their fins
over tree-wrack,
beyond all urgent retreats.
Strengthened by falls,
everything abandoned
but rewind
(and the bursting
at the end,
the exhaustion)
deep in the woods
in the tiniest stream,
ragged with frost,
trotting the last mile
to lay down
in the body
of the birthplace.
)
Leaf rot
scratching at the belly.
At some point, everything changed.
(I was hungry.)
My father held a knife
and his brother took a broom.
(I was hungry and crying.)
My father stood ready, a line
dividing us from the rest.
(I had lost my shoe.)
He had decided
something had changed
among the other people.
(Everything stank.)
They could not be trusted
at all anymore.
(We were better off alone.)
(I was crying just to do something.)
We were waiting in line:
to the bathroom, for some food,
to shuffle past tables,
to yell and grab and take.
My mom gripped
an old yellow banana purse.
Our food was there.
Our blankets hung through the strap.
She would not stop carrying it.
She fought off strangers to hold it.
(I wanted her to carry me.)
(I had a kazoo once, a new GI Joe.)
(I wanted to sleep on the banana.)
(Dad was gone a long time.)
(He didn’t come back.)
Some men fought my uncle.
He fell down real good
and lay there a long time.
They took the purse from my mom.
(I just kept crying.)
(I fell asleep. I woke up.)
The rain slowed.
(I didn’t know where my dad was.)
(I didn’t know where my kazoo was.)
There was nothing to do.
(I just kept crying
until I was tired again
and slept in my mother’s arms.)
There is a bone in my heart
for all the sour-faced losers,
all the dumb degenerates,
the sickos, the assholes,
fanatics, the cops, the priests,
the politicians,
all the repeated shocks,
all the bombs,
the crashes, debacles,
from the messages against my senses,
the falsetto blows,
the kidney punches, all
the wind knocked out of me,
all the losses to peril,
those left lonely,
those left dreaming,
my bone is quivering in my chest,
humming their songs to me.
In
in
out
out
away
away
safe
safe
cold
cold
fire
fire
light
light
shadow
shadow
hand
hand
self
self
one
one
1
1
caveman, Code Poetry, digital identity, learn, math, poetrycaveman, Code Poetry, digital identity, learn, math, poetry
in
out
out
away
away
safe
safe
cold
cold
fire
fire
light
light
shadow
shadow
hand
hand
self
self
one
one
1
1
1.
A woman
will love you
like a birch tree
2.
The rocks
are just laughing
and joking
all day
3.
When she comes
down the beach
it will quiver
as if a great eagle
had flown over
4.
At the point
there are spiders
and more
small boulders
5.
When she turned to me
all my bones were showing
My wound was a great river
that bled into the sky
6.
She offered me rocks
just rocks
so I rolled my tongue across them
gently
7.
We were all alone
in the sky
while the distant hills
scorched the earth
8.
There were jaspers in her hair
chert and epodite
but I searched on
for her agate eyes
9.
Now dawn
be good to me
John Henry is under the ground
beating the heart of the hills
with his hammer.
The old beech tree
sings the wind’s name.
A word on the tongue
of the distant hills
drives home no vigor or sauce.
John Henry with his own bones
greater than hammer and granite,
John Henry, beats the iron rails
into the cliff face, singing.
The echoes,
John Henry, John Henry,
the pulse of the hills.
John Henry,
you are double sixes
shaking in a cup.
You, a great bell ringer
in the moonlit slope,
chime the mountain.
The sting is inside me.
Your hammer, John Henry, your name
drives me on.
Suck breath
with horse lungs,
John Henry.
Your grunts scar the air.
All the souls at rest
rise up.
Am I to believe
John Henry beats inside them too?
Because of you, John Henry,
I am singing into the darkness.
Symbols, symptoms nettle my skin.
The wind is blowing through the firs,
jostling the boughs awake.
John Henry, swing that
sledge at the spike.
Jump from sleep,
fix the sun.
This heap of chance wants motives.