Friday, September 7, 2018

August VOGON Algorism

Friends,

You are good. I am too. We’re glad there’s no hurricane this weekend, like there was last year.

Here are your Vogon poems from August. If they seem a little atonal or apathetic it’s because I think July depleted my creative resources ( I know it did)

As you know I’m reading The Exegesis of Philip K Dick right now. And as you also know, Vogon poetry is unedited stream-of-conscious rambling that sometimes turns out to be truth on a global/local/or microcosmic level. Lately my Vogon poems haven’t hit on (m)any global targets, but I swear I’ve been writing stuff that I end up reading a few days later in The Exegesis. It’s blowing my mind, and also making me feel like a data spewing cyborg (see Vogon poem below)

The big ART BINGE of the summer didn’t amount to much. Not only was I in no frame of mind to concentrate on art, but we were very busy and also a little bit sick (w/ the red tide & all) so…excuses, excuses…this is all the art you get for awhile…sorry …(laughter emoji)…or I guess I could just say LOL…

*******************************



The Future Sound of Carbon

You sit like a fungus
Slumped in your heart-heavy cell
A backless gown confessing your cleave from senses
You’re a garden left untended
Over your fear of combustible engines…

You weren’t born in the wrong body
You were born w/ the wrong constitution
Solitary mushroom, circled by star-powered daisies
Cold feet rooted, arms ablaze
A hug from your brother

Brings memories
Ricocheting from rib to rib
The primal sound of carbon atoms
Crying

0809:0475a

**********

1000 Piece Puzzle

1000 puzzle pieces
All cool grey #4

You’d rather play dominoes
Or even a classic video game

But they offer you only
The grey puzzle

To keep your devil hands busy
To remove you from yourself

A jumpsuit slumped
While its skeleton takes a shower

How many other inmates
Pinned the blooms of their eyes on your nakedness

Using a cactus’ spine
Bury yourself in scraps of your own white meat

Your hands are pork rinds
Curled around the soap

Your mother was no Mrs. Beasley, she was a
Half-baked nova, her hugs from a toy oven

But god you miss her! When they offered you 
the Fisher-Price funeral, 
the Barbie doll prayers

You mounted your Tonka tractor & mowed them down

0809:0500a

********

You were a hex of
Crossed wires

Introversion means wearing
Day-glo marrow
Under hushed neutral bones

After upholding the walls 
Of your towering voice as long

As you could
It was finally sacrificed from a radio

Chanting on an ancient dashboard
You sprung from a jungle warzone’s loins

I can’t say the name of the song
That underscored your carbon cries

Something about beatniks & witches
getting rich

0809:0525a

********

BUN SKULLS


Phobic introverse
Your news breaks w/ its incriminating beak

Your friends all struck
By syringitis

Cops issuing noise warnings to birds

Testosterone intuition re: the grey puzzle

It’s a mercenary heart

Blighted strawberry farm

Bit by oil drillin’ jackdaws

No picture emerging from the
Abstract brushstrokes
Wetting this hypothetical
                   anti-Euclidean
                   blandscape

But here are some words…

0809:0550a

********

You failed to mention minor Major Tom
(Nope. Aviation &
mass shootings are censored
from the tip of my pen…) Is that the son of god

Fighting fires in open-toed shoes?

We’’ll report him to OSHA & it’ll be Halloween night
(Martians landing) all over!

Rapture in open-back gowns
To bible-approved safe spaces

Make room for me on your arc, motherfuckers!
And I’ll make room in the hospice of my heart for you

As the white curtains burn—

There’s widespread silence
On matters
That once set our tongues on fire —

God has always loved me best

0813:0375a

********

SEPTIC FEMININITY

Where purity is expected
We find sticky assemblage
We find rutting werewolves 
in loosened frockage

Where I expect a fluffy mother lamb
You lambaste me 
W/ canine teeth punctuating 
Each curated bark of wise-acreage

Your handsomest philosophers
Chained to speed dial
Arf arf, you say androgynously

Equally
In touch w/ your canine/leonine 
Lineage

Androgyny always brought to mind Max
& his warped ’09 arcage
But lately my mind is on Ivan
outed in the shower by curious Kit
just out of Carthage

His array of prosthetics —
displayed like toy guns —lured her
in a cowboy/Indian
       feral/domestical
       maximum/Ivanov
       kittage/cattage
     wag-the-doggage
black-guy-plays-white-spy &
right-bulb loses wattage way

0813:0400a

*********

Seriously though...

You remind me of Ivan

Such a teeny-weeny arc
But academy award-worthy
For all its brevity,

Like our brevity it gave forever

0813:0400a

********

A drug-fueled fantasy on every channel
Our Alice has russianized (russified?)
Into Alexei

Through a looking glass so travelled
It whacked her long blond hair
At its serrated checkpoints

A smart refugee crop
Helps her blend w/ the genpop
Until, skittish unicorn, she pierces the veil

In a frantic attempt
To remain mysterious
She doffs her tricorn hat

Rabbits appear out of nowhere
Multiplying
The immaculate square

Root of power
From precious to pestilent 
In a triad of moons

Where’s the flying lion
To save us all?
To the back of the closet we go…

0813:0400a

********

Bunheads


So far we’ve gone canine lupine lapine feline
Avoided ovine like a live vaccine

Past a mass grave of crazed humine
A society that pointed needles to protect itself

The patients who once crowed
In big black syllables
Struck by necrotizing fasciitis
Of the corvine syrinx

(in this mess of a nest; your poems have completely forgotten
the Cablekraut Subject-Verb Agreement)

0813:0420a

********

I can’t read you
W/ my dead dolphin eyes
You fell off my sonar & tasted
Like tuna,
Unashamed

I can’t read your body language
As you’re falling off your bike

Throwing your guilt under the chassis
Your wrists break like twigs

You smelled like a baby bird
Sliding off uterine frying pan walls 

onto the asphalt

0814:0300a

********

“CULLERING” 

You were a latchkey miracle
(aka monster)

Coming home w/ your 5 dirty senses
& your 6th separate sense
Hardened, petrified

Would it know all about its classmates...

oh please don’t say it on the 2nd day of school

What would silence you?
Dry erase tongue?
Wine colored walls?
Squirting pistols behind the banyan trees?

Childhood was too loud for you
Cover your ears & scream for the next
Half cent

0814:0325a

********

MERCERISM

We dropped the reins

Not the unbroken mustang on the plain

But a service mule arthritic from

Heavy-kneed atonement

We cry at the sea turtle’s necropsy

But don’t mourn the jellyfish, who looks

Like a plastic bag anyway…

A newspaper

Used to live at the foot of my driveway

Wearing jellyfish fur

I would read it offline, and 

Never end up down the rabbit hole

0814:0325a

********

Ivan & Alexei
Sittin’ in a tree
S-M-O-K-I-N-G

How am I indicted when I’m
Out of my mind
How I am guilty of being
Brainless faberge egg, how go from
Uterine inmate to prison shower selfie?

God Smack America
I don’t want to hear the rest of your confession
I toast the flames
Leaving the charred image of Taylor Swift
on my cup (did I expect
Pink Floyd?)

[august vogon extra gibberishy. But those are the ones that mean something later on]

0814:0350a

********

Our hair’s falling out
Like the pages of this dimestore journal

A graceful fall—
         leaf spasms on final 
                  hits of oxygen, one valiant synapse
in our brain — a strand of cobweb tousling w/
the ghost of a cicada — managing our
         library of thoughts

Pages like skin cells biopsied from their books
                  turn up malignant

Teeth collected by pliers & placed
Under pillows…psycho unfairy trade
             (I have nothing left to give!)

Where are the pages off to?
Are they the privileged offspring
                 of textbooks?

Are they the Dox Sinistra 
                     of masonry
Typed by a freckle-fingered hillbilly
     w/ the deepest voice on register?

They wear the elegant fonts
       of a subpoena,

they enjoy the fancy formatting
                  of reality(news)
that’s stranger than fiction (Earthwind&firegate)

(Please paginate all the -gates and leave them 
on my desk by this date ________)

Pages…words
Page of swords….princess in the streets
A rhino in the sheets

0823:0450a

*********

As of today
Our chakras are outlined in chalk
At this moment
We enter the spiritual morgue

Your love bubble
Dances like blood on your fingertip
A nurse appears
Around the bubble &

Asks you to pee in a cup
(though it’s not a question)
Once, not long ago,
You were capable of hoarding

Miracles in your pelvic carry-on

Now open the bilge

The cup is clear, plastic
Your piss an immaculate alchemy
Of opium & fear

Instead of miracles 
They utter the syllables
krim
annul

0823:0475a

********

Tell me about this rhino horn
Tearing at the veil

Are we sure it’s not a
  Bullhorn,
   a staghorn
    a flugelhorn
      a triceratops
        an omicron
          a bugle
            an optagon
              a pitch pipe
                a singular bird beak
                  or any other machete-like hacking device?

Your dossier-flowers’
Most sensitive tissues depicted
Ekphrastic diagram,
     including wasp corpse
       Where there’s still
           no electricity

A sunbeam
     and the mouth of a cave

Kiss and turn 
To gold

0823:0500a

**********

Summer has pounded my brain into 
   shapeless clay & said Start Over

Original sculpt
By famous robot & 
predator drone

Hands in many gardens
Pulling petals gently
(then not so gently)
Anxious

to get to the
Antherium — the glorious 
     stripper pole of the bees!

0823:0525a

********

The Edge Lords (aka Singlewoody)


The policy was open door
So there were no knuckles or 
Knobs before the ballistic entry

Born of office gossip
Born of mimeograph
Born of colorless carbon copies

This is a wasteland teeming
With babys
(sic)
What can’t be said will be
Repeated
What can’t be repeated will be
Xeroxed by feline assistants

Sexetaries. (Ah, yes Norm, life’s
a hell of a lot better w/ sexetaries. Too bad
they can hear & type & remember)

I’m talking bullet points (yeah, Jimmy,
and we just embalmed one beautiful kid
whose friend shot him in the head
on New Year’s Eve)

I’m talking breakfast food stuck
To my tiptoe-ing wingtips

Copycat Killah (Seminole Heights?)
Repeater, but not here in Whitfield Estates

One neighborhood over, Bayshore Gardens

Hey get that gun off my page!
Go be a bird somewhere else

Quit making a feline beeline
for my every whereabout

0824:0300a

********

Dolphin skull
Nose cone eaten like ice cream by time
(which is fat, not linear)

I used to have an audience in my skull
But it’s extroverted (egressed)
through the vomitorium
(orally)

To swim w/ the sea turtles (illegally)
& let the salmon* enchant again

*pronounce that ‘L’

L Dopa fix me arright… what is it with L?

It’s like V doesn’t e’en exist…

0824:0325a

********

Movies need watchers

I don’t mean the audience

I mean the voyeur w/in the story

The ugly duck. The nice guy who’s
Way creepier than we first suspected

The surround sound didn’t get enough love from its mother

Doctors can’t turn images into sound
Though they’ve been snipping sound into vision for eons
(since before doctors e’en existed) Pre-hDs if I may jest
In the midst of my own Vogon flow

Doctors were born of the horror genre
Grave diggers, mummifiers
Insurance corpses’ artisan decomp 
quenched curiosity that became cure

Scrubbing human touches out of bedside manner

Nighttime soap opera bubbles
Drift detergently toward China

Movies need stuntmen like you
Leeching poisonous dust as you
Plummet the ninety stories
Superlung!…annnnnnd CUT

0824:0800p

********

1th Upon a Time

Ambushed by ambience,
     hugged by ghosts imitating unmarked cars
(when they see you first!)
         
Their thoughts come waddling out
     Of their mouths like penguins across the tundra

Everything in my head now is remembered and/or pre-conceived data —

“jellyfish fur…”  didn’t Gregory Corso write something like that?

“unborn teenage tongues…”  did I read that in Kim Addonizio’s last book?

“I want big news all over my tombstone”  surely I plagiarized Bukowski Himself (how embarrassing) or worse,
                                                                  one of my friend’s chapbooks
“an adjective existence…” surely John Lennon

“the rain is made of lead…” surely Rayon Lennon

“non-dairy nipples…” surely David F Wallace

“a girl named Autumn O’Beale…” surely David Letterman

“Reagan girls w/ hipbones & hair to the moon…” surely Ginsberg (switch Reagan for Nixon)

“to bear boredom w/ majestic plumage…” surely Blake

“Earth is a big skull full of feathers & ash…” surely Alexie

“we can’t have big washed & manicured hands protecting our fairy rings…” surely Oliver

“make a pot of black tea and tell yourself a ghost story…” surely Sexton

“onion-sized tears; whole organs excised by this sadness…” surely Plath

“I got mad all over at people I thought I’d forgiven…” surely Natasha Tretheway

“hamburgers w/ eyes I couldn’t eat…” definitely Philip K Dick*

— which makes me wonder if I’ve hardened into a diamond?

Dolphin jaws clicking ’no’
    w/ each roll of red tide
Bruxist slumber
    leaving clues about these
      microscopic acts of God

Indeed the very palmistry
Of humanity resembles the red
Tide molecule

Cats::gods   as   dogs::humans (best friends! duh
                                                 amigos
                                                 semper fidelis off leash
                                                 w/ liberty & entitlement
                                                 to bite any bullet
                                                 that whizzes by
                                                 on its bike)
Corpses draw malarial buzzing
A blowfly’s paradise
Sandcastling the shore of my incipience(Siesta Key, duh)

Ohhhh, shut up
One for the soup
One for the science
One for a new Way-ism to be Way-ist (and yes,
                                                     you will have to pay taxes)

I’m inside your dream, squeezing
      the nectar from your endangered horn
You tear through the sheets
Muskoxen drown by the dozen in your throat

Rosary beads, ropes
Flying into the hellmouth
Held shut by the holiest hands on the planet

0825:0825p

********

Old Singlewood art 2012


A ZOOLOGICAL THEME

Mother Goose was a dirty old bird
Scouring the ghettos for easily 
Groomed urchins…after scoping out their candied innards...
          racking up points w/ the mafia…
by trafficking in joy…she died of doohicular homicide…
                a thoroughly modern mishap involving a 
                   plastic gun & an overcharged vape pen...
Her orphans are orange-tabbied, obituaried stepkids
                  Inopportune tone-deaf oopsists
Intoning kudos. Falsette. Oh, who’s your spirit amino?

The kudu. The hornet. The hippopotamus. The proboscis monkey. The pharmacist.
Anything but the fox, the wolf, the snow leopard, the eagle…the flatworm…
Preposterous! 
        Once Upon America’s Next Top Model:
A werefox of antarctic proportions, a rabbit nose, tarantula eyelash, elephant ride, jaguar cub…

                                                          …but nothing with donkeys?

What up w/ you hoes & your non-human racism?

Go bathe in a lake of kale

0825:0850p

[bring in the Tarot nazi. we’re using all these /s/words on the internet to get close to a god we once envisioned a sweet ponytailed babysitter of a deity, but no, he’s the father whose homecoming snaps like a belt]

********

Red Meat Rhetoric

Shall I contact the old man on his birthday?
He was a sex hero because he was captive,
    a war hero when he was let go
He won’t come to the door
The TV is his belly button

Big disaster in a clear blue sky—“severe clear”—
        a sun too yellow to obey
would steal a man’s turquoise heart(earned on
 the embalming table) 
                      Masonic emblem on the urn

Does the Pope smoke dope?

Not only that
but he sips the sweat of treefrogs
             off the tip of a dart

Surely Old Man knows every Pope by now,
     every rockstar including Aretha Franklin
He’s surely met his gepettoized maker?

Concentrate
Camp in Dakota
Mein hills, ihren hosen
Blast breaks ground like a flat earth crouton
On an already nutty salad

Spins endless tractor axels
     Connected not to wheels but blades
       Make it seem like an axxident!
He falls pretty hard from the saddle

0829:0225a

********

Asleep under the wheels
(which exist on airplanes, but neither boats nor horses)

It’s not all thrusting & prayer
It’s also slow stroking science til it
  squirts on God’s divine apparatus (we won’t assume they are
Man and woman, nor two gay men, but a lesbian couple, okay?)

Toggle on to upgrade wetware
I can hear you taxi, motorboat
Closer & closer; no wheels, no feet

Mud flaps crusty w/ what once was the ocean
            Slap of fins on tarmac
The bubbly stuff, the dinosaur blood!

Come stomp your hooves 
On the doorstep of your pet’s door [??]

0829:0225a

********

NIXONIC

Once you were a friend
Now you’re an old expression
Falling off the face of a mountain

A brown Colorado mountain

Climbing is boring,
  though boring is defined as digging inward,
      soaring toward the center

Heal the stick figure 
Struck by a boulder
The inner child 
Sparkles on paper


0829:0250a