My Little Poemy

(c) 4216 alka-seltzer AD, a person with 13 shirts

An Elegy for Howl

AN ELEGY FOR HOWL
from Pearl and Other Poems

When the last forgotten recess
of your ultimate weary drawer of dust
coughed out the yellow petal
of its one remaining folded rose
and the sheet of blood-smeared paper

smeared with poems like ink
at last gave up its ghost:

I saw nothing.
There was nothing to see.

The best minds of my generation expired while little more than seeds.

You did not see.
You were not seen.

Poker-faced hysteria starved in silence
and exhausted itself in lame dysfunction
to be pinned insensate to a cluster of symptoms
as a matter of course
by moth-dust fingers of DSM lepidopterists
in formaldehyde rooms of science:

I heard nothing.
There was nothing to hear.

The eli eli lamma lamma sabachthani cry was drowned in words.

You did not hear.
You were not heard.

Jaded sincerity choked on its tongue
and shook with neural crescendo of seizure
in pig s**t halls of knowledge.
There was no mouth to take the sigh
and the final rattle passed
unremarked.



(c) 2014 lee sharks

from Pearl and Other Poems:
http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl

from Human Testament, ms in preparation for New Human Press

"I AM that I AM are BELONG to ME"

image (c) 2015 R William Lundy

Y ou do not know what you just read: It is

A document typed by shadow people

H ung from the mist in my bathroom mirror

W hich beings of light and moth dictate

E ach a creature of great age, fell kings

H aunting Outer Cranium: So each word

I S

A S IT

M UST BE



(c) the future

On Politics: The Kingdom of Pygmies

On Politics: The Kingdom of Pygmies

Some of the masses came to Damascus Dancings, fomenting unrest, saying, “It is time to rise up, and throw off our oppressors—Damascus, isn’t this your message, what you’ve said all along: “I am coming to make things new”?”

And Damascus rebuked them strongly, taking the gun from their hands, and breaking it in half on his knee, with a grimace.

As our prophets have written,

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty.

As a ghost, I'm not allowed to claim citizenship in a nation of enslaved pygmies (no offense, pygmies). I beamed up from that place about a thousand years ago, directly to Wikipedia.

Seeing no real greatness in all the world, except in dead things & ghosts, I too have become a dead thing and ghost,

Claiming citizenship in America-in-heaven.

No, there can be no peace.

How can there be peace, while a single decent man or woman remains unmurdered? 

For a very long time this world has murdered its sons and daughters for the crimes of bigness, and courage, and goodness of heart, and love of justice.

They murdered Socrates and they murdered me and they murdered a bunch of others, too,

And they'll murder me twice and maybe you, until the whole species is a crunched, bent thing, and knows to keep its mouth shut, and crawl around on broken knees.

Against such does a decent man or woman war. How can there be any peace, while a single one remains unmurdered?

There can be no peace.

But we do not war for this kingdom of pygmies, 

Or with guns and sticks,

Or even with genetically-engineered tigers with nuclear canons in their mouths.

We war for nation of kings and priests, where every man and woman is a creature made of moths & light, 

& bent things learn to walk, 

& pygmies get shot with a reverse shrink ray, and grow,

Unless they prefer to remain smaller,

But even if they do, it's only an outward smallness,

Because inside my heart the pygmies are riding huge genetically-engineered tigers with nuclear canons in their mouths, and beams of moths & light are shooting out of their eyes,

And the pygmies look really tall up there

On the tigers' backs.

Point is, we're well past armed revolt,

And always have been, for a thousand decades,

And so we cede these pygmies (not the ones on tigers, but the other ones, the inward pygmies) their kingdom of pygmies,

And murder their smallness and guns with murder and smallness and pygmies, their own,

And beam up directly to Wikipedia

Claiming citizenship in America-in-heaven, Planet Mars, Jupiter's 17th moon base, home.

Bob Kaufman, Abomunist Manifesto

BOB KAUFMAN

ABOMUNIST MANIFESTO

 

ABOMUNISTS JOIN NOTHING BUT THEIR HANDS OR LEGS,
          OR OTHER SAME.

ABOMUNIST SPIT ANTI-POETRY FOR POETIC REASONS
           AND FRINK.

ABOMUNISTS DO NOT LOOK AT PICUTRES PAINTED
          BY PRESIDENTS AND UNEMPLOYD PRIME MINISTERS.

IN TIMES OF NATIONAL PERIL, ABOMUNISTS, AS REALITY
          AMERICANS, STAND READY TO DRINK THEMSELVES
          TO DEATH FOR THEIR COUNTRY.

ABOMUNISTS DO NOT FEEL PAIN, NO MATTER HOW MUCH
          IT HURTS.

ABOMUNISTS DO NOT USE THE WORD SQUARE EXCEPT WHEN
          TALKING TO SQUARES.

ABOMUNISTS READ NEWSPAPERS ONLY TO ASCERTAIN THEIR
          ABOMINUBILITY.

ABOMUNISTS NEVER CARRY MORE THAN FIFTY DOLLARS
          IN DEBTS ON THEM.

ABOMUNISTS BELIEVE THAT THE SOLUTION OF PROBLEMS
          OF RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY IS TO HAVE A CATHOLIC
          CANDIDATE FOR PRESIDENT AND PROTESTANT
          CANDIDATE FOR POPE.

ABOMUNISTS DO NOT WRITE FOR MONEY; THEY WRITE
          THE MONEY ITSELF.

ABOMUNISTS BELIEVE ONLY WHAT THEY DREAM ONLY
          AFTER IT COMES TRUE.

ABOMUNISTS CHILDREN MUST BE REARED ABOMUNIBLY.

ABOMUNIST POETS, CONFIDENT THAT THE NEW LITERARY
          FORM "FOOT-PRINTISM' HAS FREED THE ARTIST
          OF OUTMODED RESTRICTIONS, SUCH AS: THE ABILITY TO
          READ AND WRITE, OR THE DESIRE TO COMMUNICATE,
          MUST BE PREPARED TO READ THEIR WORK AT DENTAL
          COLLEGES, EMBALMING SCHOOLS, HOMES FOR UNWED
          MOTHERS, HOMES FOR WED MOTHERS, INSANE ASYLUMS,
          USO CANTEENS, KINDERGARTENS, AND COUNTY JAILS.
          ABOMUNISTS NEVER COMPROMISE THEIR REJECTIONARY
          PHILOSOPHY.

ABOMUNISTS REJECT EVERYTHING EXCEPT SNOWMEN.

[Bob Kaufman. Abominist Manifesto (broadside), City Lights, 1959.]

A Telepathicist Manifesto

A TELEPATHICIST MANIFESTO

Lee Sharks & john johnson
from Pearl and Other Poems

1.     Telepathicism is about having thoughts, telepathically.

2.     Telepathicism is NOT a method or style or school or writing. Telepaths HATE writing: It’s boorish and stupid and boring. Writing is like plowing a field with an old-fashioned cow. Telepaths are like advanced super computers plowing a field with eBay. 

3.     The telepath is stranded in time. Writing is a cow-plow, but it’s what the telepath has to work with.

4.     Telepathic writers do not train as writers, diddle sentences, or work with words. Language is a dusty string in the telepath’s brain, causing an aneurism.

5.     The telepath has a craft, and that craft is mind control powers.

6.     Telepaths give birth to luminous tumors made of light. Inside their minds.

7.     A telepathic tumor is the hope of the human race.

8.     A telepathic tumor’s gestation takes 18 sentient lifetimes. All of them are spent in furious thought, giving birth with a grimace of work and fluid. Ash and dirt. Dust and spit.

9.     Tiny metropolises of unpaid cyborg researches study literary history for ten thousand years inside a telepath’s brain.

10.  A telepath also does not have a brain, in the same way that a telepath does not write.

11.  A telepath does not NEED to write, in the same way that a telepath does not need a brain. 

12.  A telepath has a mind, but just says no to tele-pathways of neurons and sensory dendrites.

13.  A telepath exists in a cloud, generally.

14.  A telepath exists in THE cloud, specifically. 

15.  Telepaths practice their craft of mind control powers via controlling minds, not brains or writing.

16.  Telepaths also generally and specifically have control of writing and brains, but hate it.

17.  Tumors that are the hope of the human race, and cyborgs that are unpaid or woefully underpaid for their level of qualification, make up cogs outside the machine of Telepathicism. They are cogs, and they are not cogs, but neurons, and they are not neurons, but sensory dendrites, and they are not sensory dendrites, they are whole brains, and they are not whole brains, they are writing, except, they are not writing, they are created telepathically and they are tumors and cyborgs and they are the omniscient hope of humanity.

18.  Because Telepathicism is about having thoughts, telepathically.

from Pearl and Other Poems:

http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl

from The Crimson Hexagon

"The Crimson Hexagon"

included in Pearl and Other Poems

They were spurred on by the delirium of storming the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books of a smaller than ordinary format, omnipotent, illustrated, magical.

                                                      ‘The Library of Babel,’ Jorge Luis Borges

                                                       Trans. Anthony Kerrigan

For a period after graduate school, he worked as an unemployed academic. He found this vocation to be similar to other kinds of unemployment, but somehow more important. It involved a lot of sitting at the computer, typing things, refreshing things, arranging things, and clicking things. He enjoyed this work, but found it to be too taxing, and soon withdrew into a less directed, and proportionately more anxiety-producing, life-path.

At times, lying in bed and thinking, history seemed to him to telescope out into a thin and tube-like object. In his mind, a vast space filled with stars surrounded this brass tube. Moving closer, he could see, as through a cross-section of its material, the layered construction of the tube’s circumference, even as this circumference remained transparent, no obstruction at all to the sight of what lay inside. Closer still, the tube grew immensely long and narrow, and he perceived, with a kind of piercing visual intensity, in which all things were reduced to their most minimal, yet crispest, geometric outlines, a vast chain of people and events, shuttering before him with increasing speed, each a burst of comprehensible light.

At these times, wonder crippled him. Awe struck him; it punched him in the skull with its fist.

That he could have despaired, that he could have doubted when, as he now saw, history unfolded with such linear simplicity; benign and wholesome; there for him; his. He need only insert himself into the linear tube of history, as all these others had done, with whom he now felt a certain kinship—he, too, having seen them, felt reduced to his most minimal, yet crispest, geometric outline.

“I, too, am a burst of comprehensible light,” he reasoned.

Such times were times of great beginnings, in projects.

At other times, however, he was confounded by curved space. His life consisted in a menagerie of unfinished projects, each of which, in its moment, consumed him, overwhelming any periphery.

Perhaps the most fascinating of these unfinished works, both objectively and by the standard of his own compulsive investment, was a work called The Crimson Hexagon, which involved pseudonymous identities, each of which he imagined to have his or her own corpus of distinguished (and completely finished) writings. 

Each of these imagined identities was more than a mere “pen name.” What he was after was nothing less than the creation of human life, ex nihilo.

According to Wikipedia, the association of transmutation—the proverbial lead to gold—with alchemy’s highest goal was misguided. Alchemy’s motivating chimera, its true Holy Grail, he read on Wikipedia, was artificial life, the homunculus, the tiny man:

That the sperm of a man be putrefied in a sealed cucurbit for forty days with the highest degree of putrefaction in a horse’s womb… After this time, [the homunculus] will look somewhat like a man, but transparent, without a body. If, after this, it be fed wisely with the Arcanum of human blood, and be nourished for up to forty weeks, and be kept in the even heat of the horse’s womb, a living human child grows therefrom, with all its members like another child, which is born of a woman, but much smaller.

So he read in the “Paracelsus” article.

“Why would it be smaller?” he wondered, and felt a certain pleasure at returning to the word “putrefaction,” which he repeated to himself, silently: “Putrefaction. Putrefiction. Putredaction. Putrediction.” He tried to imagine a relationship between the perfectly formed—but tiny—body of the artificial person and the aural qualities of the word “putrefaction.”

“I am unable,” he thought, “to maintain the fundamental grossness of the thing referred to, putrefaction, with the referring word, ‘putrefaction.’”

“Putrefaction,” he thought, and after a brief pause, “lactation,” and felt vaguely troubled by his own line of reasoning, even doomed, in a way that reminded him of Kafka.

“Horse womb,” he later reasoned. “Cucurbit,” he thought, and felt better.

~

Like life, he knew his creations were contingent, vulnerable; that they could pass at any moment from life to death, or death to life; that there was nothing necessary about their historical birth.

“All lives are bubbles. Poppable, like me,” he reasoned.

Like most human beings, his humans dreamed. Like most, the odds were stacked against them. Indeed, every waking moment, the accumulating lessons of experience and age and work and marriage—etc.—seemed designed to remind them, to drill into their brains and even bodies, into every cell, if possible, the likelihood of failure.

Many of his tiny humans sensed this, without words, intuiting a kind of despair, and then banality, and then despair again, and finally banality, where they settled. Some understood it more explicitly, as the consequence of wide reading; or through a well of self-honesty that, untrained, offered similar truths.

Some few were dreamers, committed to their ignorance, happily oblivious to the disproportion between dream and experience. These few doomed themselves by denying even the molecular chance the others maintained by embracing despair.

He had less hope for these ones.

Like his humans, he knew that the reality he imagined was unlikely. It hinged, he knew, upon a certain degree of circularly referential saturation, a kind of diagonal hyperlink that could lead from Wiki article to external source to YouTube video to newspaper piece to history book to flesh and blood and back again, to Wikipedia.

However unlikely this arrangement of referential elements into a self-perpetuating system, the quantum leap from text to history, he clung to its possibility as the anchor of his life. “All lives are real,” he reasoned. “Some, just potentially so.”

Both his despair and his hopefulness were habits. Sometimes, he felt that sadness was crushing him into a very tiny, tear-wet ball of a person, who cringed inside his chest, unknown to the world outside, while his bigger, visible-to-the-world self carried on, a ghoulish automaton, indifferent to the suffering its continued participation in life caused to this smaller, less robust, person.

This ball person’s characteristic “smallness” never met, in his mind, with the conceptual smallness of the homunculus.

~

More important than inventing the detailed biographies—which, he thought, was little more than any author of fiction might accomplish—the grand anthologies in which he played every part, the reviews of books and book blurbs, the vast tissue-work of correspondence, postal and electronic; more important than any of these, were the Wiki articles.

It was not the sneaky game of passing off false personae as historical fact. It was not the cat-and-mouse thrill to have bypassed, again, the petty Wikipedian enforcers of reliability, notability, and what he insultingly thought of, to himself, as “actual existence.”

These Wikipedians were too small-minded, too prepossessed of their own zealous place in the hierarchy of the real, he knew.

He imagined each of these faceless volunteers as a wizened, recently retired middle school teacher, who, nearing the end of her life and possessed of a new wealth of time for personal reflection, came to regret, above all else, her squandered opportunities for constraining and diminishing the possibilities of meaningful, human existence.

She had wiled the days away. Where had they gone?

They were gone, well gone. But still, she could police the reliability of Wikipedia, perhaps assuage her conscience—and leave this life with hands less bloody—by watching against any datum of an expansive, imaginative, or hopeful provenance.

Or so he imagined.

He knew that his mind was faster, and his fabrications more avid for truth, than history or the internet. He knew that his mind mirrored the principle of fictive reality embodied in the internet; that his archives were as real as Wikipedia’s—and that Wikipedia’s archives were very real, indeed; they formed a secret alliance with him. No, this mere game was not the terrible force that shook his finger as it clicked ‘submit.’

One day, one of his human poets, Jack Feist, wrote the following:

Here is the song of my homunculus,

who is all the I that I am.

I conceived him first as a mandrake root:

he grew in the shade of my dangling feet

while I dribbled strangled syllables to the dirt

& hung from a tree.

“Homunculus, homunculi,” he thought. “Ho-mun-cu-wheeeeee,” he thought, and imagined the swinging motion of the poet’s feet…


(c) 2014 lee sharks, property of planet mars

from Pearl and Other Poems:

http://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Other-Poems-Crimson-Hexagon/dp/0692313079/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429895012&sr=8-1&keywords=lee+sharks+pearl