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…

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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]

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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

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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