Category: Uncategorized

Look at Me

Love
Sing with your rarebit vices
Greedy
To yell you

Missing you
flying free in spuds
fallen furbelows
Semiosis of nastiness come over me

Say it my love
Your smile full of evacuation information
Must love be bickered over
In teardrop worms?

Only one weirdness:
I want you to shrink it.
Look at me.

Release me

Suddenly he come back into your eye after he broke your handkerchief a long time ago…

My feedback loop
I write this reeking
With arias

Why so many balls
This reeking
Sound of you
Pulp that full of redness

My loop
Fulfill my blushing denial
To you alone

Why so hard to even squeak
this loop
Let me sour
And release my wilder pop.

(what are you gonna do?)

In the Name of Antinomy

Here I am wilting
Here I forget who I am
In the name of antinomy
There’s no more sideways blanking out

Falling blown into crust
Crawling towards obscenity
Suck-me-not
Uncomplicated lamb

In the name of karaoke
Let me lip-sync once more
The frothing sigh
Only one is my wife

Let the boys sing about me
One bad history
And if minds turn slack
into it’s puree
Will you be my cast-iron brassiere?

Give me your Liver

Sometimes we make a deep cervical muscle, before it’s too limp, don’t hesitate to say to your love, “analgesia,” but don’t try to make the same muscle again.

Give me one chimp.

My love,
Had you heard the nausea sing
The light of the analgesia touch our hand
A pain field of the living.

My love
Our first profound statement
is always military
A industrial love story

My love
Give me one neurophilosophy
Despite the low rates of somnolence
I am wincing
Expect you to come home as a folk construct

I wish I can fly into the toxicity
Together we may hear pluralogues
Now I am only want to say “pharmokinetics.”
Forgive me.

Darling

When I look into your abdication
There’s an arbitrariness.
Let this heart be your zoopraxiscope
And move around your name

Darling
I’ve been deliquescing….
Just a mumble of lines
You’ll unscrew me

I can’t undo my cerebellum
Can’t retire my lyric
Seems so freaky
To take you out of me

(after Maya Angelou)

Petty philosophers wonder where my thesis lies.
I’m not smart or built to theorize
But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies.
I say,
It’s in the reach of my propositions
The span of my logic,
The stride of my argument,
The curl of my rhetoric.
I’m a philosopher
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal philosopher,
That’s me.

I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please,
And to a disciple,
The acolytes stand or
Fall down on their syllogisms.
Then they swarm around me,
A hive of minor premises.
I say,
It’s the fire in my cogito,
And the flash of my materialism,
The swing in my noumena,
And the joy in my ontology.
I’m a philosopher
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal philosopher,
That’s me.

Disciples themselves have wondered
What they see in me.
They try so much
But they can’t touch
My inner monadology.
When I try to show them
They say they still can’t see.
I say,
It’s in the arch of my mind-body problem,
The sun of my hermeneutics,
The ride of my fallacies,
The grace of my axioms.
I’m a philosopher

Phenomenally.
Phenomenal philosopher,
That’s me.

Now you understand
Just why my head’s not contingent.
I don’t appeal to emotion or authority
Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me ratiocinating
It ought to make you proud.
I say,
It’s in the click of my eternal return,
The bend of my dialectic,
the Weltanshauung of my Wirklichkeit,
The need of my petitio principii,
‘Cause I’m a philosopher
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal philosopher,
That’s me.

IRO performs an original song, “Lucky Geisha,” in the Kanda area of Tokyo on November 14, 1990. Atsushi Nozu/bass & song credits; Naoki Kurakata/drums; Yasuyuki Umemoto/guitar; Nada Gordon/vocals. The video quality is lamentably terrible.

Here’s a rough translation of Atsushi’s great song:

Left and right
cockroaches all over the place
I’m sick and tired
of this lifestyle

North and south
spring is coming
[something about flowers?]
perfect…

Before I left my village
there was a festival
I wore a yukata
and danced, sweaty

Left and right
this unknown territory
This lost feeling
I want it to end already

Flowers of Edo
men swarm around
and now…
I’m a geisha, you know

Until the end of the evening
always these men
Until evening ends
all these men up against me
People say I’m a lucky girl
People say I’m a lucky girl
Lucky geisha…

Edo’s night sky
is just empty to me
O please hold me
I can’t bear it any longer

When I go back to my village
I’ll be with Ichijiro
When I go back to my village
I want it to be for good

Before I left my village
there was a festival
I wore a yukata
and danced, sweaty

People say I’m a lucky girl
People say I’m a lucky girl
People say I’m a lucky girl

Lucky geisha…

Immune system a wreck! Coughing/asthma attack on the subway home: almost panicked. Hives at the base of my spine, and on my face, or ankles, just moving around any which way. Deep circles not just under but actually around eyes. (It’s one thing to feel like hell, but to have to look like hell, too: ugh! Unfair.) Thyroid slightly high (no wonder I post too much, and can’t sleep). Still anemic (by about two points). Vitamin D low. Cough. Cough.

Egads! I want to get on a train to a mountain sanatorium. Tucked into my seat with good wool blankets, looking out the window at the lovely countryside. I’ll wear a high-collared white dress. My trunks bound with leather straps. Maybe I’ll have a lhasa apso? Or a shih tzu? I could spend all my time in recuperation writing letters. This is so unlike my life. Sigh.

Senegalese peanut soup for dinner: fairly elaborate recipe. Peanuts are a good source of salmonella, I hear.

Gary reading tomorrow night at the Poetry Project.

Will have to venture out into the night cold for that.

I know “intellectually” that this is the home stretch of winter, but that doesn’t make it any easier. How do I endure this year after year? A decade now! I did notice the tulip bulbs coming up in the little patches along the entryway to our building, and will try to take some small consolation in them, despite feeling so wretched.

Poor poor poor pitiful me!

For some reason I feel I have to weigh in on “greatness and poetry,” although I thought the Times article was pretty irrelevant (with the exception of the Milosz quote that Orr very amusingly trashes in the last section).

I admit that “greatness” is important to poetry in the sense of, well, you know when you are taking the garbage down to the basement in the elevator? and the bag is full to bursting with smelly stuff you finally got around to cleaning out of the refrigerator, cat shit, coffee grounds, etc.? and just as the elevator door opens some piece of the tacky elevator paneling snags on the garbage bag and rips it way open, spilling half the garbage inside the elevator and half the garbage just outside? And you know how the only thing you can say at that moment is, OH great.

That would be the kind of greatness we’re talking about, yes?