One corner is enough. There isn’t one / as the field bulbs go out. / Right nearby is a river. / Moon exhaustedness slow (BIG) / slides lawns of earth under. / Moves paws, feet, nearby. When a spirit comes to me / and frightens / and the weight on my chest / turns butterflies into desert lands / and rivers flow through / arms to heart / shepherds … / No one sees me. I am just here, / my foot a decoy for compassion … : and that’s when cowboy hulk showed up. Riding the werewolf. Trailed by an undersized gmo spidervader hybrid. All of them armed with lightsabers. But what commodity / have you to show for / it? A breathless ease / that moans into a / gasp. Could it have / been a decade ago? / You study the receipt. OK? Yah, we will do that. I found a great recipe for borscht-nog with vodka and just learned a new Russian folk song about drowning Stalin in the Volga. That’ll take yer mind off yer maladies. The Performa Institute and NYU Steinhardt are pleased to present Get Ready for the Marvelous: Black Surrealism in Dakar, Fort-de-France, Havana, Johannesburg, New York City, Paris, Port-au-Prince, 1932-2013. An eight pointed star in the color of Orula, the Cuban Orisha who says fate is not enough, not even close, we have the right to change our fate because really. I should have taken that magenta / Sky when they showed it to me, / But inexplicably, I spent the money / And for others, too, it would appear that / “Last year some three million passengers / On the nation’s domestic airlines / Were left up in the air / After their planes landed. / Perhaps the most amazing fact / About that statistic is that / It represents progress / What no figures can reflect, however, is the cloud / Of anxiety.” Messy paint on a bottle of cactus. Or, to quote Ted Berrigan, Queen Victoria dove headfirst into the swimming pool, which was filled with blue milk. I used to be baboons, but now I am person … I wish mountains could be more appealing to the eye. I wash sometimes. I wish to exchange this chemistry set for a goldfish please … Now I am President of The United States. I can’t say much now on account of this corroded connection, tonight, expect to find in the center of one of your bedsprings the cataractous eye of a clairvoyant snake. It was like trying to vomit one’s own shadow or on the soft surface of that baby’s belly, another, duplicate face. Look at its little, spectral lips trembling and contorting — it’s still so young — it’s trying to learn how to say boo. But Epicurus calls this philosopher a mollusc, that one a strumpet, he didn’t want to save the souls of only the “good people;” he wasn’t a man who ran with the right crowd, and that is why I salute him here. I mean, Ms. Tabios attempts to collapse time into a point of universal empathy as the reader is asked: “Who decides what kind of life and why? // What kind of / life and / Why?” It’s covered in decomp juice. Thus, if the Firmament gave forth the sound of f, the Sun gave f an octave higher up and the Moon gave f an octave higher still. Saturn, Venus and the Earth gave g in these three octaves, and Jupiter, Mercury and the Antichthon gave c in these three octaves also, while Mars gave d in the lowest octave by itself.
[Note: Sources: Joseph Ceravolo, “Lost Words”, “March 1988”, “March 1988”, in Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo; Lee Ann Roripaugh, FB post, 23 Jan 013; Del Ray Cross, “mdcccviii”, at Anachronizms, 23 Jan 013; Steve Cotton, FB comment, 23 Jan 013; “Get Ready for the Marvelous: Black Surrealism @ NYU 2/8-9”, at The New Inquiry, 23 Jan 013; Bett, “Found this pillow …”, at bett’s blog, 23 Jan 013; Steve Hamilton, “APHTHOUS – STOMATITUS”, at ROOF 1; Donna Kuhn, “heliosphere cactus”, at experiential-experimental-literature, 23 Jan 013; JBR; Ted Berrigan, “L. G. T. T. H.”, at ROOF 1; Michael Leong, “Ghost Poems”, at ink node; Paul Nizan, “On Humanism” (tr. Mitchell Abidor), at Marxists.org, via Anne Boyer, “~everything it contains which puts the world on trial~”, at *, 23 Jan 013; JBR; Theenk Books blurb for Eileen R Tabios, The Awakening; the ME in “The Box” episode of CSI: NY; Cecil Torr, Small Talk at Wreyland, as quoted in James Schuyler, “The Fauré Ballad”, as quoted in John Latta, “Notebook (James Schuyler, John Ashbery, &c.)”, at Isola di Rifiuti, 23 Jan 013]
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