In the House of the Hangman 1099

There’s a noise that saturates Oakland. I’m confident it saturates the helium deposits pilloried in the nitrate-rich boneyard of the bay. I know! That sound stirred me too from the orgiastic perfume of a delightful dream in which I munched the profundity of not one, not two … but like five children. Profundity tastes sorta like an old 5 1/4” floppy, sorta like coffee beans covered in chocolate. Modus ponens, your breath is indeed a constellation of fireflies axeing their way through Yom Kippur like little undocumented lumberjacks. There is indeed a drone filled with indignados in your chest every time she looks at you bleeding sugar, I mean crack. I do care that it’s Tuesday, tho it’s Friday, too, and / or instead. Who gives a shit what some idiot editor in Indiana thinks? Dear Yekaterina Samutsevich, new research from Gutenberg University Mainz shows that enslaved ants conduct their own form of civil disobedience. Heard from Fukushima lately?

Any place in the desert is the heart of the desert:
plant a sword & sand
pumps blindly in every direction.

The body of the desert is the desert’s army.
It rises & changes
& rises again.

See: we will never finish. So I asked mom what she hates. “Umbrellas.”

If only I had been born
A fish
Instead of a monster

somewhere between Patchen’s “O shattering gentleness!” and Bataille’s “Everything real fractures and cracks” in my local Winn Dixie staring at this head of lettuce.

The love in this place
could make a person
squirm.

It begins: when I was afraid
I took all my animals to bed with me.
When I was afraid I spoke to my brother about my skill with knives
and we sat up all night back to back, singing.

The head of lettuce was just lying there. On the floor. What a story. Is it normal to have this much blood in your ears?

[Note: Sources: Brandon Brown, “Correspondences”, at Joyland Poetry, 28 Sept 012 (a Baudelaire translation); JBR; JBR, but see “Wondering Why Your Poems Keep Getting Rejected? Indiana Review Offer a List of Possible Reasons”, at Harriet, 28 Sept 012; Yoko Ono, “Pussy Riot Poems: A Punk Prayer For Freedom”, at Huffington Post, 26 Sept 012; George Dvorsky, “Enslaved worker ants fight back through acts of sabotage”, at io9, 27 Sept 012; JBR; Lisa Ciccarello, “from Sorcery”, as quoted in Julia Cohen, “When I Crawl Toward the Sea I Crawl Toward the Land Press”, at $650 Apartment for $650, 28 Sept 012; Joann Hershberger Henderson, FB comment, 28 Sept 012; Dorothea Lasky, as quoted in SPD blurb for her Thunderbird; Nick Sturm, “We Who Are About to Weekend: Volume 5; We Who Are About To Die, 28 Sept 012; Matt Hart, “Mountain Man”, at Leveler; Bianca Stone, “Les Misérables”, as quoted in Elizabeth Harball, “Drawing Verse: Bianca Stone, Ruth Stone’s granddaughter, charts her own poetic territory”, at Poetry Foundation, 28 Sept 012; JBR; Jenny Lawson, “Is it normal to have this much blood in your ears?”, at The Bloggess, 28 Sept 012]

Comments

[Judemartin]

Anyone who quotes Vira Hershberger is worth a read!!! So glad I found you, John

[john]

Thank you. If she keeps saying such quotable things, well, they ought to be quoted!