Here’s “Upside-Down Again (The Sonnets)”, in which you’ll find a few:
1.
In which a fly
flew by and sat on a word – not a letter moved. It took to flight,
spreading its wings.
-Adonis, “An Introduction To The History Of The Petty Kings”, 31 (tr. Toorawa)
*
And light entered the lens
-Marisus Borul, “De/Re/flections”
*
On the island, heads full of the sea
what we took to be metaphor was fact;
to write each name and cross it out
did not change a thing, we were there and it was real.
In the holy period of Spring
the moon rises so fast it tears your heart out,
it does not ask anything
making a white path on the water.
-Kelvin Corcoran, “Picture Eight”
*
(the sheer beauty of such bewilderment)
-Gustaf Sobin, “Transparent Itineraries: 1997”
*
& now I am here to tell you all that I have discovered
That living is one of the best things – there where I ripped it
*
Night sky bright beyond language
Lie lightly upon her dreams
-Oslomon, “The Necklace”
*
Come shadow, come, and take this shadow up
-Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona
*
Scars sing
To those who know the code
There is nothing aimless
About the bees
That dance amid the roses
-Anthologie de la poesie de Katibo
*
I wonder how many stories the almost invisible traces of dust can tell …
-Bohnchang Koo, “Portraits of Time”
2.
As long as a person is constrained to wait for a time when the creative spirit will inspire him, and then he will create, meditate, sing – this is an indication that his soul has not yet been illuminated.
Surely the soul sings always. It is robed in might and joy, it is surrounded by a noble delight, and the person must raise himself to the height of confronting his soul, of recognizing its spiritual imprints, the rushing of its wings that abound in the majesty of the holy of holies, and he will always be ready to listen to the secret of its holy discourse. Then he will know that it is not at one time rather than another, on one occasion rather than another, that the soul engenders ... wisdom and thought, song and holy meditation. At all times, in every hour …
-Abraham Isaac Kook, “The Soul’s Illumination”, Lights of Holiness
*
With plain words for simple thoughts
did I not touch the heart of
Tao? For I saw a poet,
a man with sticks on his back,
a man listening to music,
and I had not searched for them.
-Michael Hartnett, “Sikong Tu Walks in the Forest”, 18
3.
Nobody is important. Nobody is major. We go to our destiny in the end. I am not in the least bitter over all this. In fact I am always in danger of bursting out laughing.
- Patrick Kavanagh, Self Portrait
*
Mirror shadowing light
Whose face? Whose eyes?
What a handsome dead man
Drowned in the flood of time
-Symmachus Bolzachy, “Epistle to Dante (from Rue du Sabot)”
*
Overheard in a café:
“I don’t want to be anybody’s legislator
“Unacknowledged or otherwise
“I just want to look ‘em in the eye and say, ‘Yo’!”
*
I photographed an execution of seven men and one woman. … One was named Wu Bingyuan, and when he heard his sentence, he looked into the sky and murmured, “This world is too dark”; then he closed his eyes and never in this life reopened them. All eight were … shot in the back of the head … I could smell the fishy smell of blood and brains … As I enlarged the photographs of these executed people, in the dim red light of the darkroom, I quietly spoke to them. I told them, “If your souls are haunted, please don’t haunt me, too. I’m only trying to help. I’m making your pictures because I want to record history. I want people to know that you were wronged.” And until this day – even when I printed the images for this book in New York – I always say that.
-Li Zhengsheng, Red-Color News Soldier
*
Interviewer: Would you like to be read in 5,000 years?
Borul: Yes! That would mean there were still people …
*
Tiny cars drive down winding roads
Is how they see each other in Paradise
Saturn & its rings spread out majestically
4.
… a creation
so rich in life that its flowers perish
and it is full of sadness
-Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 2 (tr. Merwin)
*
… where bathers talk and laugh beneath a midnight moon …
-Sarah Naaktgeboren, re: Cezanne’s Les Grandes Baigneuses
*
Dream dream dream
What can you tell me?
In starlight
At midnight
I sail the sacred river Simulacrum
In my papyrus boat
But when I wake …
But when I wake …
Oh, dream …
-Oslomon, untitled poem
*
If Homer and Virgil had awoken one morning from uneasy dreams
and found themselves transformed into a giant insect
on an exceptionally hot evening in early July
out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly
as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge
and rounding the Chateau d’If
To the red country and part of the gray country
*
Overheard in a café:
“This is not the Matrix, asshole. This is not a simulation. Fuck you fuck you fuck you.”
5.
Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future lies hidden …
-David Hilbert, “Mathematical Problems”
*
a doomed man planting tomatoes
backyard of a house he lives in
belongs to somebody else . kneeling
on the earth
his hands move earth
feeling earth .
-Paul Blackburn, “Journal: June, 1971”
*
… the difficult art … of having the courage of one’s feelings.
-Patrick Kavanagh, Self Portrait
*
& where else if not here
do you expect to find enlightenment?
& the beauty of anemones swooshing!
*
Keep me in your heart for awhile
-Warren Zevon and Jorge Calderón, “Keep Me In Your Heart”
6.
Dear Joy hello, it is 5:15 a.m.
-Pseudo-Ted
*
The search for love continues even in the face of great odds
-graffiti artist, as quoted by bell hooks
*
Do you remember?
The courtyard was filled with music
And everyone brought food …
-letter from Page Merline-Lou
*
in Nahuatl, one of the names of God is “nearness and togetherness” ( … del cerca y del junto)
-Cecilia Vicuña, “Five Notebooks for Exit Art”
*
And the wind
On top of that mountain
The boulders the trees the lichen
In my language
The word for summer is summer
The word for snow is snow
-Oslomon, “The Word for Snow”
*
I look in the mirror and see
(No, not my self)
I look in the mirror and see
(No, hear) (no, see) your song
-Symmachus Bolzachy “To – (Last Poem)”
*
Playing with L’aura which equals breeze & l’oro gold
7.
What I really wanted was I wanted my life
-The Assassin
*
To live! So natural and so hard
-James Schuyler, “Hymn to Life”
*
[indecipherable]
-Michael Palmer, “Sun”
*
[indecipherable]
-Michael Palmer, “Sun”
*
like formica
*
Overheard in a café:
“That’s funny, coming from you, the Statue of Limitations”
8.
There’s only one body
And it’s made of light
-Grenadine Szorora
*
The light
Which is presentaneous
-Symmachus Bolzachy, “Three Hundred Years from Now”
*
With that light I sense my soul once again becoming drunk!
-Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue
*
The corn is as high as an elephant’s eye
-Rodgers and Hammerstein, “Oh What a Beautiful Morning”
*
O poets!
What are we going to do with you?
-from an anonymous Sung-Ting wanka
*
& the only Empress is the Empress of Ice-Cream.
So we fall deeper and deeper, glass-clear, as if in justice to clarity But nothing is clear Intuitions come hovering, scarcely distinguishable forms in nothing, like ice-profiles in water, the dragonfly's vanishing pairs of wings The small mountain ashes' new leaf bouquets emerge, into nothing Becoming in annihilation A slightly varied formulation of Hölderlin’s thought Disappearing far out on one of the tangents of glass While the hypersphere grows and grows I hear impersonal music, no human's music Again I’m very scared What do I dare? What don’t I? What kinds of becoming The existing annihilations rampage all around us In which do we take part Breaking out into total answerability Or whenever “now” is. Enough to look at here For the rest of a lifetime. Even the simplest things, Their provenance — a shoe, a prosthetic post-war leg reminding you of silent doubles unfinished, imperfect, imperfect, shadowy. Slowly the particulars get scattered to the wind and one is left with what is under the surface trying to come to light what has not yet been found nor been found out. 6. Civitas uncanny, darkened, stippled, riven with confusion and contradiction. The dark being both obscurity and incipience, it’s light that becomes perfectly unnerving. The problem is to articulate any promise of the civic, without this glint of the apocalyptic. 7. Bewildering what happened. The profligate rip of earth, of persons, of the sharers — plants & mites & languages — down to the very bit of fleck along the crack. Is it “your dead” or “you’re dead”? One in the news, or not, one in some myth, or not — who no longer finds credible the humane part of human nature. Yet knows in the gut that something large was thereby lost: and wants to find it, choose it again, affirm it as possible. Open the door says a weeper to a stone room. This unprecedented spatial and moral secession of the wealthy from the rest of humanity also expresses itself in current fads for high-end monasticism (Sara Lipton), floating city-states (China Miéville), space tourism, private islands, restored monarchies, and techo-murder at a distance (Dan Monk). The super-rich can also retreat, self-deified but not yet dead, into their marble mausoleums (see Joe Day on personal museums), or buy up to 2 million acres of ranchland and singlehandedly “save Nature” (see Jon Wiener on Ted Turner’s bison). Where the rich lack requisite power and numbers to create new luxury cities (as at Arg-e Jadid in Iran) or gentrify wholesale old capitals (like London or Paris), they can nonetheless “disembed” themselves from the matrix of popular urban life through the creation of separate transportation and security systems (as in Managua, discussed by Dennis Rodgers) or by the radical disfranchisement of poor people’s right to unconditional use of public streets (as in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Hicks, described by Don Mitchell). In post-Taliban Kabul (described by Anthony Fontenot and Ajmal Maiwandi), they simply evict the poor to build their palaces: an exhibitionist narco-warlord architecture that quotes both Walt Disney and Genghis Khan. The superrich live in capitalotopic conclaves of corporatism that leave the rest of us wandering the hells of the forgotten and excluded; or, even disposable and untouchables outside the gates to these safe havens of sin and death-pleasures. The neo-liberal pursuit of riches is nothing less than a utopian frenzy, and the early twenty-first century, with its global vogue for evil paradises (of which Dubai may be both the most remarkable and sinister) recapitulates many of the same mythic, impossible longings that Walter Benjamin discovered in his famous excavation of Baudelaire’s Paris. With Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism as his Rosetta stone, Benjamin unraveled the mystery of the bewitched capitalist city where human collectivity, overwhelmed by its own colossal productive powers, hallucinates its social being as a swirling “dream-life of objects.” I mean, A room of one’s own is a good idea, but a workroom filled with giant kites in various stages of construction strikes me as infinitely preferable. One approach to this hallucination problem is to consider the possibility of a demonic world. In our region, demons are believed to be intelligent and unseen creatures that occupy a parallel world to that of mankind. In many aspects of their world, they are very similar to us. They marry, have children, and die. The life span, however, is far greater than ours (Ashour 1989). Through their powers of flying and invisibility, they are the chief component in occult activities. The ability to possess and take over the minds and bodies of humans is also a power which the demons have utilized greatly over the centuries (Littlewood 2004; Gadit and Callanan 2006; Ally and Laher 2008). Most scholars accept that demons can possess people and can take up physical space within a human’s body (Asch 1985). They possess people for many reasons. Sometimes it is because they have been hurt accidentally, but possession may also occur because of love (Ashour 1989; Philips 1997). When the demon enters the human body, they settle in the control center of the body–brain. It’s then i want to dance with a vacuum cleaner / walk backwards then towards your feet / inhale your shoelaces / make you trip / my organs are like external hard drives / and I hold a water balloon I bite / and spills on my face my backpack becomes an air tank and air tank becomes you / Why waste your time on finished things? My love for you is marsupial too. Lookie here. I like to take photos of needier landscapes. Oh look! And here is a baseball like Miss Havisham’s baseball if she played whose boy is now a man. She was running down the hallway crying. I asked her if she needed a “self-help” book. Oh Gawd, yes. It grows wild around here. And elephant’s ears are hugely listening beyond that fence. Probably we should all try to agree not to hate anyone who doesn’t even chart on Google trends. It should be a moral law of the internet. If “Not enough search volume to show graphs” comes up, let your hatred go. It had a certain vintage charm. Maybe that’s what drew the photographers. The old man couldn’t stand this. “The play is about a dwarf pretending to be a baby to cure the mother of her dependency on spiritualism.”* (*Comment left on this blog a few days ago that I only noticed tonight. Struck me as a found poem. Thanks for the explanation, commenter. Photo now makes much more “sense.”) Oh, the dreams that dried blood has! It was a summer, I was at summer camp. I had weird taste in music, listened to Lisa Nilsson and Simple Minds. Screamed like a pig, wanted home. It was most kickers there, I ended up in the kicker room, had stinky feet, a kickers hid in my bed. Arts and actress students who worked there named me Nico. After she died. Others got hot type cheese and biscuit. I had so much arm that went through clothes and furniture. I lowered a set dinghy. Eventually they put me on a bus from there, I was listening to Lisa Nilsson on freestyle, mom met up with me and we ate ice cream in some sort of ceramic vessel. Which means I’m like nothing! Nothing. I want a stuffed crow in my ugly house. No balloons. Balloons cause cancer. Hmmm but seriously, one day at a time. Take a day and do something fun of it, and then the next and then the next. Oprah: Pink glitter around the eyes? Not vegan. It can be killed by some people’s charisma. Everything would be easier then?
[Note: Sources: JBR, “Upside-Down Again (The Sonnets)”, fromTravels to Capitals: Sun (unpublished; the note to this bit reads “Symmachus Bolzachy: b. 1765, Deuxfois, Sabot; disappeared 1793, Paris, presumed victim of the terror. Poet, self-proclaimed revolutionary, self-proclaimed exile (“Byron avant la lettre”); I thought I stole this idea for this thing from Walter Benjamin; alighting on James Schuyler’s “Fauré Ballads” on my way to his great great “Hymn to Life”, I see I stole it from him, too.”), interspersed with [italicized] bits from Petrarch Collected Tim Atkins, which arrived in the mail today; JBR; Göran Sonnevi, “Mozart's Third Brain” (tr. Rika Lesser), at wood s lot, 23 Jun 014 (formatted per my RSS feed); Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Draft 85: Hard Copy”, at wood s lot, 23 Jun 014 (formatted per my RSS feed); Craig Hickman, “Positing Futurity: The Possibilities of Utopology”, at wood s lot, 23 Jun 014; JBR; John Taggart, “It occurs to me …”, at A Fiery Flying Roule, 23 Jun 014; M. Kemal Irmak, “Schizophrenia or Possession?”, quoted in Matt Staggs, “Published Paper Blames Schizophrenia on Demons”, at Disinformation, 23 Jun 014; JBR; Ana Carrete, “women dance with cleaning products in commercials”, “tío, me encantan las metáforas” (tr. Google), at Illuminati Girl Gang, 23 Jun 014; William Keckler, “Marsupial Love”, “Lonely Landscape Club”, “She Was Running Down the Hallway”, “Growing Up”, “Sensible Hatred and a New Moral Law”, “The Blue Chair*”, “Comment”, “{oh, the dreams}”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 22 & 23 Jun 014; Stina Kajaso, “Oprah” (tr. Google), at SONOFDAD, 24 Jun 014]
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