An insertion is always personal. The developing spherical galls are green at first, brown later, and mature bacteria multiply in intercellular spaces stimulating rapid increase in structures. Striated snake-spirals in the desert. There is no way / To build it flat like a section of wall: / It must join the segment of a circle, / Roving back to the body of which it seems / So unlikely a part, to fence in and shore up the face / On which the effort of this condition reads / Like a pinpoint of a smile, a spark / Or star one is not sure of having seen / As darkness resumes. But our 173-year-old heroine would mostly be kicking herself. On seeing the weaponry our police states now have directed at the people she would plead for a swift return to 1839, when the Chartists having lost their fight by peaceable means have armed themselves with pikes, knives and caltrops (to bring down the cavalry), the iron workers even producing cannon and grenades in their factories. Ten years after Babyfucker I wrote an ode titled “Censure.” It opens with the verse “The black bar in front of the sex organ.” And the first verse of the second strophe reads: “The axe that – chop now! – that shatters beautifully in your hand.” You crack any door into any bureaucracy. It’s the gym. Better than the real magic. There are bound to be casualties, like on slick surfaces the storm hasn’t yet rained on. Isn’t it funny in a way that we carry of all things our faces all thru all the world right on the fronts of our heads?
There you are, home from
your trombone lesson
carrying a violin case
Aren’t you.
Where did you get it.
Take it right straight
back
And what does butter taste like? In the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern she is putting together a piece that locates one in “a London of 2058, where it has been raining cruelly, without let-up, for years.” From below the hedge, the sky looks like shit in bits. I can’t move my fucking legs and my jaw gags, I will never look like Edie Sedgwick — We halted on our path, and to our left a great drop o’erlooked a single plain that stretched to the horizon. No tree or plant could be seen thereon, no trace of animal or growth. Yet in the middle distance could be discerned what seemed a vast crater full to overflow, a mound of teeming specks heaving and twisting in the gloom. That is the great crater of those studying and teaching “The Waste Land” said my ancient Guide. His finger swept along the horizon, and faintly could be seen yet other craters, yet more mounds distant, separate and afar. Fail again. Fail louder. I almost have the infomercial memorized. My favorite part is where Valerie Bertinelli says “Cyndi! I want what you have … WAIT, I already do have what you have … melon magic!” As he speaks, he carefully dons a diadem of awful awls, spikes and knives, twining his golden curls artfully around them. He pulls a Victorian child’s sailor suit over his t-shirt and panties: a Harjuku cum Cracker Jack look. He cakes his face white. He ties a brown leather strap around his eyes and inserts an awl into the right. In liquid eyeliner, he paints big black teardrops, swoops and lacerations down each cheek like a kiddie Oedipus. He finishes this off in black platform boots, stolen off a passed-out teenaged hustler. Soon he gets into a mini-lover’s spat with Narcissus (who at play’s end morphs into Wikileaks hero Bradley [Breanna] Manning) about the means of the making, whom he instructs: “Okay, cry … But look alive. We have to set it up before we can serve it,” and, later: “It’s time to self-destruct. We’re going to rule this place because we got fucked, we got fucked and fucked and now we’ll be the King of all the Fuck-ups. Curtain up!”
[Note: Sources: Samantha Giles, hurdis addo, (on same pages w/ #56-8); Johan Jönson, collobert orbital (tr. Johannes Göransson); John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”; Sharon Borthwick, “Sharon Borthwick: The Chartist Insurrection. A review of Dave Black & Chris Ford, 1839: The Chartist Insurrection”, at Association of Musical Marxists, 26 Jun 012; Urs Allemann, as quoted in Elizabeth Hall, “Urs Allemann Interviewed by Elizabeth Hall”, at Tarpaulin Sky, 30 Apr 010; Jared White, “Painting”, at Sink Review 9; l’amour fou, 26 Jun 012; Philip Whalen, “Mama”, in Mark Other Place, at Big Bridge (PW died 10 yrs ago the day of this writing, 26 Jun 012); Jeffery Steingarten, as quoted in Sean Lovelace, “jeffrey steingarten on writing”, at HTMLGIANT, 26 Jun 012; John Latta, and Enrique Villa-Matas, Dublinesque, as quoted in Latta’s “Enrique Villa-Matas’s Dublinesque (Reading Notes)”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 26 Jun 012; Timothy Thornton, “Playing Boreads”, at Sarah Crangle / Timothy Thornton Cambridge Reading Series Friday 22 October 2010; Posie Rider, “An excerpt from A Year Off The Ward : a psychosis memoir (2010) by me, Posie Rider”, at Posie Rider / Joe Walton: Cambridge Reading Series Friday 21st May 2010; Tom Leonard, “Moving On”, at TOM LEONARD / KESTON SUTHERLAND •CRS IX•26.11.10•; William Keckler, “REVISION OF A CELEBRATED QUOTE BY SAMUEL BECKETT”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 25 Jun 012; William Keckler, “Cyndi Crawford’s ‘Meaningful Beauty’”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 25 Jun 012; Joyelle McSweeney, “The Contagious Knives: A Necropastoral Farce”, in Percussion Grenade, and Kyle Minor, as quoted in Minor’s “A Few Notes about Joyelle McSweeney’s Percussion Grenade”, at HTMLGIANT, 24 Jun 012; JBR (Breanna is apparently Manning’s preferred given name]
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