1. |
Up from Land
04:06
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Along the Mason-Dixon line,
a lover’s quarrel ends
so a vulgar sibling rivalry
can finally take its place.
And I—a non-sectarian—
whose fun is to make amends—
I’m lost, alone and lonely,
and dreaming
of your face.
Up from land, up from dirty land.
The land where all the love
you’ve lost
will soon be laid to rest.
And there goes fine Paulinus,
wandering empire’s finest.
Bohos never change!
But we know water creeps on
Nola’s beaches
past the lurid breakers,
where the rapids meet the Gulf,
where the Mississippi River splits
and greens the Outer Shelf.
There’s a blond and preening
Repo Man,
all cool unchristian cant,
on the last Southeastern island
humming bebop to himself.
Up from land, up from dirty land.
The land where all the love
you’ve lost
will soon be laid to rest.
And those post hoc diviners
talk of Lot’s but not Aquinas.
Pray cum grain of salt
and vibe like Philistines,
so let’s not waste time
whaling on the Ouachita
and swearing at the bream.
You’ll lie with something sinister
or die in club passim.
Up from land, up from dirty land.
The land where all the love
you’ve lost
will soon be laid to rest.
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2. |
Drop City Noise
05:47
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My old man was a doctor,
his allegiance to the blood.
Sowed the nettle to his own tomb
and his money made it like Mesud.
Westering, a kind of scoutlaw—
middle west by middle road—
held a Whole Earth in his right hand
and there, to his left, a Barbary Coast.
Hear that sound?
Drop City noise.
All around, Drop City noise.
Can’t you hear?
Drop City noise.
All around, called out at last.
Westward course of coronation,
riding west of Capernaum,
to Canaan or Colorado,
reading Cybernetics like the
psalms.
Fingers cursed to type in line
from
fingering the Rosary.
In a church they coded Verbum,
never leafing thru St. Augustine.
Hear that sound?
Drop City noise.
All around, Drop City noise.
Can’t you hear?
Drop City noise.
All around, called out at last.
Bourgeois bladders
can’t stand the ciders—
pissing past the past.
I was wary, you went across that
line.
No one is sacred.
Six-Day scary, commentary,
burning like Sinai—oh!
And Horus, playing us out.
Here the new-old cop Penutian,
steal the sacred in Cheyenne,
all for live-in mausoleums
for the saintly Stanford man.
Hear that sound?
Drop City noise.
All around, Drop City noise
Can’t you hear?
Drop City noise
Hear that sound called out at
last.
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3. |
Çatalhöyük
03:50
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Cruel world,
breakfast by the Old Stone House,
family affair,
the refrigerator’s hundred gauss.
In Volta Bureau,
eyes to phone, Graphophonic cue
to decode.
On Volta Park land,
there headstones paved
a passage in place of the road.
And a map hangs crooked in the corner near the bar
and a man stands staring at the Costanoan land
where the great-grandchildren of bootleggers
position pegs of donut shops by hand.
Along the Beltway
monuments indicate a memory
traced.
Like this Vinland map, say:
15th cent. but it’s covered in fresh
anatase.
Like Çatalhöyük
mocked the spots of the leopard décor.
Like Waldseemüller
named a square by the 95-
corridor.
And a map hangs crooked in the corner near the bar
and a man stands staring at the Costanoan land
where the great grandchildren of bootleggers
position pegs of donut shops by hand.
There a man falls thumbing at the coronated cabs
while a teenager’s sitting dour at the stand.
All the while he’s thumbing at a screen,
calls a six door uninsured wheezing Kombi van
with a map framed crooked in his flushed and hardened hands—
his weird Old Dominion over East Algonquian land,
where the great-grandchildren of bootleggers
position pegs in yule Afghanistan.
A palimpsest:
In the grid
you discover yourself,
like a stencil,
retracing the work of
someone else.
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4. |
Rhoticity
04:22
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Rhoticity sounds
so much sweeter in the South;
but Rhodes will confound
and you grow grim about the mouth.
The time is never right,
and a broken watch just twice,
but Oxford’s working for a Third Boer War,
so fight back, baby, or you’ll halve
that old Dutch door.
Rhodesia dined
on rhodium to anglicize
loanwords to modify
in Jodhpur boots to colonize
in Mashonaland and try
where the Falklands met Brunei—
where the textbooks sounded as
one wretched word,
and the Beit Trust covered every case on
loss incurred.
You wait for me, I’ll show the way out.
Wait for me, I’ll know the way out.
Wait for me to let your hungry heart
combine with mine.
Interred, as sure forgot—
old ideas cannot rot.
Their covenant’s cleared,
so grab the pisco,
fuck De Beers.
The city is too dear.
Let go your good Bronx cheer.
When the West Coast’s rotted like a
junkyard car
and the East Coast’s flooded, baby,
can’t go too far.
Wait for me to loan the day out.
Wait for me to blow my brains out.
Wait for me to let your hungry heart
combine with mine.
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5. |
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There’s no one in Hollywood
who could possibly play my father
so I no longer go to the movies.
I don’t see anymore movies at all.
Now I walk down streets of amber
as the old economy collapses.
In the swamp-like streets of Manhattan,
in the soggy sheets of the Atlantic
the critics are quiet.
To the last American
to call out the names
of every crumbling monument:
did you ask for it?
The last time I went to the movies
I kept on shouting questions
to the characters in the movie
but these people had no answers at all.
When they told me to be quiet
enraged I said they had nothing
but the celluloid they depend on.
They told me it’s in digital
and that TV is better anyway.
To the last American
to call out the names
of every crumbling monument:
did you ask for it?
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6. |
Belgium Wastes
04:29
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I walked the Coulee Dam.
Now I, followed by a Ford on ’55,
will ride that Chrome back home—
Some ride.
High art from Pliocene.
A dam followed the flood
and then the workers’ blood to dam—
don’t lie, whose land?
King Columbia?
Damn creditors.
Scum, predators.
Some coffers they’re constructing on the
Rhône.
No hope.
Around the fishing ground
a quiet settled death
spawned trouble for the West Indian—
and Guthrie said this thing was grand?
Graves watery,
in cautery,
they relocated certain burial grounds.
Some drowned.
Belgium Wastes
Belgium steals and takes.
Belgium hates.
No doubt in my heart:
We, too.
A Congo riverboat
surveys fifty meters up the northward face
of Inga,
cap’s a grayscale:
“MK”.
Cut to le Roi-des-Belges:
“J’y suivais un serpent qui venait de me mordre.”
“Demi mort?
Your accent’s poor, speak up, say more.
Quel endroit?”
“Atlantropa—
Ein Damm über den Straße von Gibraltar."
Belgium wastes.
Belgium steals and takes.
Belgium hates.
No doubt
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7. |
I'm Not Yr Guy
04:13
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I slammed the door in your eyes.
How nice.
Dido, your friend,
had just died from a joke I read.
You all knew I was on strike from the word,
and luring me out with a light
like a moth I stirred.
In Carthage harbor,
where crown clerks, courtiers
talk like marchers
and drop like martyrs.
Well I’m their Arthur,
their colporteur, yeah,
but I’m not their guy—
Oh!
No sentiment for a month, just Donne.
Lying at length in a bath
with the clergyman.
Ressentiment for a world without
your testament.
What a joke.
What a cruel cry-out.
Our love had value—
still, St. Matthew walks the earth
but I’m without you.
I’m aphonic, anhedonic now
that I’m not your guy—
Oh!
I came home that night,
stormed back inside,
and fell inept apart.
Even failed that.
No luck,
no time,
no suffering signs—
I’ll just attempt to be
someone who can’t die.
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8. |
Cyndi Lauper
04:48
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One night while cursing Japheth,
I noticed that I loved
my lover more than she did me,
then I fell out of bed.
We slept on Egyptian sheets
that burned and chafed the skin.
I couldn’t wrench them from our bed
’til we were sleeping again.
And when I knew that she would bail
I sang along with the nightingale.
I woke instead with a book
containing every word
excluded from the dictionary.
Hilarity ensued.
It read in six languages
and quoted me at length—
it talked in polysemous bleats,
e.g. angst was a shriek.
And when I wrote bad to its author
he mailed me a buck with a note that read:
“Well, Cyndi Lauper was wrong—
or at least misguided.
You’d rather write in my arms for the night.”
And today I ask as any other:
Who do you dignify?
No more than I said yesterday.
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9. |
Buried in the Yard
06:46
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During catechesis we’d seen the church
St. Philip Neri had preferred.
In labyrinths of sepulture and myrrh
we lay where San Sebastian was interred.
And dozing off I dreamt of you and I entwined,
and we were buried in the yard.
In cold uncaring dirt soothed by neither stars
nor aperture nor God.
Then he said don’t be salacious in deed.
The Levantine contorts himself to be believed.
In Jericho, he knows,
they’d bury three or more
beneath their beds in such a rite.
The Baader-Meinhof Gang were buried stacked in threes,
a triple grave commemorates the night they died,
and every offering is tripartite.
In Dolní Věstonice they say
the Trinity is still the rule.
The Levantine, he just spat out his gum
when told I’d studied this in school.
Well supposing it’s true,
that the right love is three not two—
But I love you.
And I’m supposed to lay some person who—?
Oh!
It buried me alive when you said you don’t love—
It buried me alive when you said you don’t Love Me Do.
I’m crying.
Morbidly, I know the dead don’t grieve.
Eternity is bunk,
but for only the lonely.
Oh!
They buried
one alive, faced down and arm in arm with
two faced up, the hand of
three across their crotch—
if only the Levantine had seen.
I’m dying.
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10. |
Maritime Miles
03:27
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Foregone, like a border drawn,
his map not to amend.
Anon, soon the seventh horn,
full throats do portend
the end.
O, maritime vile.
At nine, toss the sounding line,
bear the beakhead down.
Beware the sailor’s morning prayer
from only water drunk.
In there, the Master-at-Arms’ lair,
read the Rights-of-Man:
O, maritime vile.
Look there: the colonizer stares
at broke barometer sighs.
And fair, the ground does plunder where
dreadful riches were once.
Pull rank—the foreman’s chart is blank.
Its measure used to be read
in maritime miles.
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11. |
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Uni Popular—
Can I be popular?
What does it really mean to be popular?
What if I told you I don’t wanna be popular?
I met this same person twice before.
They told of art school prophets far too cool to just ignore.
Where the old lines fall flat, you see,
their suburban parables were too arcane for a friend like me.
And now I see their double stumble in the streets by day.
And when I’m out on Brook I have to break it for the alley way.
Let be be final—
I know it’s best this way.
But every time I bring you up it’s all in metaphor and sobriquet.
Tell the truth.
And but we never even had the time to feign.
Too busy cussing Kissingers and thumbing Charlemagnes.
And when I came to find my love for one plussed two
affaire de cœur just seemed to me like such a bogus move.
Tell the truth.
I know you.
What’s your problem?
Just tell the truth.
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12. |
Yr Paradise
02:53
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I want to trust
that you and I are good as us.
Of everyone
it’s got to be that I could not be billions.
But from your heart I cannot claim to will a part
from it free port
and neither you nor I will chart nor guide consort.
To see to that we’re right,
while the kids keep running aground,
take what they like.
Amongst the skids,
below the draft is where I live.
From stern to dip
I bream with fire, graft, and forceful fingertip.
See, you and I, we’re right—
a problem in all the same ways
but we know that’s trite.
This is your paradise.
Lost in the paradise.
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