"Where literature is concerned,
I will not cooperate at all":
A mind resolutely turned
From the social crusades of fall.

Seventy-eight years later
I agree with the "dilettante";
Twenty-five years cater
To reclusion in a shanty,

"Writing frightening verse
To a straight-toothed dude
In New York." Curse
My reckless solitude!

The short-order cook and the dishwasher
argue the relative merits
of Rilke’s Elegies
against Eliot’s Four Quartets,
but the delivery man who brings eggs
suggests they have forgotten Les fleurs
du mal and Baudelaire. The waitress
carrying three plates and a coffee ***
can’t decide whom she loves more—
Rimbaud or Verlaine,
William Blake or William Wordsworth.
She refills the rabbi’s cup
(he’s reading Rumi),
asks what he thinks of Arthur Whaley.
In the booth behind them, a fat woman
feeds a small white poodle in her lap,
with whom she shares her spoon.
"It’s Rexroth’s translations of the Japanese,"
she says, "that one can’t live without:
May those who are born after me
Never travel such roads of love."
The revolving door proffers
a stranger in a long black coat, lost in the madhouse poems of John Clare.
As he waits to be seated,
the woman who owns the place
hands him a menu
in which he finds several handwritten poems
By Hafiz, Gibran, and Rabindranath Tagore.
The lunch hour’s crowded—
the owner wonders
if the stranger might share
my table. As he sits,
I put a finger to my lips,
and with my eyes ask him
to listen with me
to the young boy and the young girl
two tables away
taking turns reading aloud
the love poems of Pablo Neruda.

GIC to HAR**

It is late at night, cold and damp
The air is filled with tobacco smoke.
My brain is worried and tired.
I pick up the encyclopedia,
The volume GIC to HAR,
It seems I have read everything in it,
So many other nights like this.
I sit staring empty-headed at the article Grosbeak,
Listening to the long rattle and pound
Of freight cars and switch engines in the distance.
Suddenly I remember
Coming home from swimming
In Ten Mile Creek,
Over the long moraine in the early summer evening,
My hair wet, smelling of waterweeds and mud.
I remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse,
And instantly and clearly the revelation
Of a song of incredible purity and joy,
My first rose-breasted grosbeak,
Facing the low sun, his body
Suffused with light.
I was motionless and cold in the hot evening
Until he flew away, and I went on knowing
In my twelfth year one of the great things
Of my life had happened.
Thirty factories empty their refuse in the creek.
On the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive.
And I am on the other side of the continent
Ten years in an unfriendly city.

there's no point writing out what poetry is... if you don't actually write it.*

a whiskey prior noon,
too soon, too soon,
too soon?
i'll be cooking a turkey curry later,
a whiskey prior noon,
too soon, too soon,
too soon?!

rhyme or rhythmic, perhaps the latter
in Dante's trinity of rhymes -
poetry of the near-illiterate,
who never read as much as could
have been -
thinking it out as origin and originals -
a man without influence is
not worth reciting -
                                   he'll still have to borrow
the life of a Henry VIII somehow,
whether he has or hasn't read a book
concerning the man -
while the Vatican emerges as the gossip
library of all the European royal families,
and indeed Henry VIII dubbed
Anne Boleyn's cow dangler *******
duckies - i think it's due to the fact
he quacked while he suckled the *******
like a pre-mature **** not producing ***** -
seriously, no milk;
and as honesty goes, ******* literature
does it for me, patron saint kenneth rexroth -
self-education moulds the self into a
pristine sequence of surprises -
there the pop of a balloon,
there the weeping clown...
there the giraffe on stilts!
indeed even at university entry point
where i deposited my self
i came back with debts!
idiotic treachery of teaching the politicised
version of language,
as language per se simply called grammatically
sound, in politics simply versed "correct";
two satans from Syria while Solomon
had his harem,
                          a third from Poland,
they say the holocaust,
6 million if not more citizens of the world
with polish passports - mind you
they took the Diogenes quote
into left and right parallel readied for a march -
Apollo listened then laughed at
the failures counting to 13 - laughing
while the words 'too the moon!' were eased
out from his helium filled lungs.

.wasn't it Wittgenstein who said: you can write a work, considered to be philosophy, purely by an insinuation of comedy, i.e. peppered by jokes? so... what's "reason" "logic" have to do with anything? then again, for all of Wittgenstein's "wisdom", i always thought he was a constipated thinker... perhaps he could have written more if he was blind and wrote Braille, or deaf, and appeared as a mime... i don't deal with reason, reason is already apparent in the unfathomable will, some term freedom, while logic is, it just boils down to sticking to 1 + 1 = 2.

i don't know exactly how they've done,
but they sure as **** have...
i'm having my Marquis de Sade
Bastille moment,
you know, when he was cheering on
the mob from one of the few
existing windows of the Bastille...
funny moment:
my parents visited Bastille,
went to the Bastille Sq. and said:
'where's the Bastille?'
    ha ha...
            never gets old, like Family Guy...
humor, but only pulverizing humor...
like... getting ****** by a ***** machine
after dropping some MDMA...
(which i've never taken,
so... no wink wink implication...
just the gateway ****...
  English gateway ****...
skunk...
               which, if you know...
could turn you into a psychotic rogue,
cut your testicles off and ****
your mother...
    come to think of it...
i was diagnosed as psychotic...
still am...
          and look me...
          your happy sailor!)...
England is the new Bastille,
last night i watched Channel 4 news
make a comeback and cover
the Rotherham "incident"...
god, the ditto-heads looked so uncomfortable,
that i started feeling doubly uncomfortable
for them...
       when the words dropped like
shouts into a cave, the echo did
a vladimir klitschko punch-back...
asian... **** gangs... of pakistani origin...
better than watching a boxing match...
a shout into the cave...
   and then the echo back...
          faces worse than the faces
associated with ******* a lemon,
eating raw garlic, or eating a heap of cinnamon...
and yes, drinking is the way,
a responsible drinker, makes food,
cleans the house,
writes ******* against a "punching bag"
of pristine white...
             point being...
what was some weird downturn in the media...
but to think that we would have
to come to this,
to make news, of the actual news...
feels like the mainstream has
come full circle...
   who was is, Kenneth Rexroth?
maybe... he lamented...
           these days we only write about reading...
besides the point,
if the genre of philosophy is not
your happy go-to genre of literature,
and you prefer self-help books...
sure...
          but do me a favor...
if you're interested in philosophy,
are ready to think in between reading
said genre, for a period of three years,
with interludes whereby reading
some other genre...
              but philosophy is not your
"thing"... just start off with
        thomas mann's novel
           doctor faustus...
            believe me,
                  that book is on par with anything,
by any other, German.
oh no... it's not that people do "stupid"
things, like my parents and the Bastille
incident...
                 it's that they do unpredictable
things that is the funny part.

pyramid, is that short of pencil-sharpener, an unmovable object, a Nevada experiment... (prolonged pause, also intended for a humidity of the questioning affect). quiet frankly you're making us look quiet silly give the mammalian status of sapiens; ****'s sake, Pythagoras spent a whole eternity contemplating a hypotenuse looking at the chiselled mountains of Giza - reputation wise you give monkeys a bad slogan - i.e. we evolved, evolved to build a temple of perpetual death: each slab housed the body of a labourer, and inside we just found a lot of poisonous powder ruminating to find the only basis for encrypting the whole affair, metaphysical borders, metaphysical by which i mean, due to Egyptology we have the museum-state that's Egypt, and the real life assertions without mint-condition comic book cults of mausoleum-states, known as Libya, Sudan and Israel; on that basis, a chicken and egg question, within etymological parameters, what came first, museum or mausoleum? see, history can be a Tchaikovsky affair, given etymology a dense shortening - a solid, rather than a **** when it comes to nationhood and patriotism and adherence to.*

a U.F.O. could have landed and we'd still
be printing dollars bills and admiring
that **** montem, seriously, bring out
a pencil sharpener, we need to revise Mont Blanc,
more like Mont Bonkers - a white kite hey hey **!
**** retardo and a *** and
a singalong that Napoleon never spotted:
the Ramones with pet cemetary - that's how it's
in Englanf (no speel or spelling mistake,
impromptu arcadia, banishing the surds stemming
from Hay, or a needle in the stack),
a tombstone for each house what would have been,
the riddle of life with the priority of death
having seconds - the nørden of Newcastle will know,
that the soofern fairies are all Arab or Tsar pawnbrokers
or transvestites (as they respected Kenneth Rexroth,
but Proust incubated in only two volumes
just ain't for me).

A reading at Kenneth Rexroth's bookstore,
Union Street in San Francisco, 1971.

He was incoherently drunk, slurred his poems,
insulted the host, insulted the audience,
hit on the awestricken hippie girls,
delivered every kind of obnoxious possible.

Fortunately, I had read his poems
and arrived prepared to witness his act.

I'd thought his poems were overrated,
I found his persona to be spot on.

At the reception, I drank a beer beside him.
He glanced up, called me a *****
and said he ought to kick my ***.

Three weeks back for Vietnam,
I laughed directly into his face.
He turned onto another potential victim.

Instead of some street smart poet,
I saw him as just the flip side
of the New York pretentiousness
he professed to despise.

But everybody loved the clown.
Entire younger generations still do.

Still, I'm sticking to my first impressions.
Only toddlers beg to be worshiped.

Sometimes it feels good to be the odd man out.

  ~mce

The other night when it was foggy on the coast, we went indoors.
Mendocino has not changed since we first camped here in the 60s.
The Point Arena lighthouse strobes through the density of that darkness.
I sat at the wooden kitchen table with my volume of Rexroth.
The new twisty bulb over me gave off a pale light.
I had something in mind to tell you about, but I forgot to say it.
That full moon rose over the rain-fattened Garcia River.
Don't the different testaments on our shelf back home need a new addition?
A Now Testament, with new chapters always coming along.
The experience of our full evenings becoming subheadings.
Our early days held a war to worry about.
We are far removed from the sorrowful explosions.
The new ways of dying don't excite me much.
Torn holes of hatred in the earth expand,
while older ones smolder in our memory.
Life could be filled with goodness.
Maybe goodness is life and it is all that simple.
What is not good is not life.
Yesterday we went around the outer edge
of that poor farm town.
We sat in that small church with all the vaqueros,
while the baby behind us cried and cried.
I knew what she might be crying about.
The place we were staying, out in the country, so far from it all.
And lonely.
Your voice hushed when I thought about writing these lines.
I didn't say anything that might make you wish to be silent.
The moon, soon buried in that mist blowing in off the sea.
Everything here so slow and dark.
It happened this way before.
Even though it is a different form of darkness and loneliness,
it is still here now.
A few more years might make it go away.
but that would no longer be now.

keep me in this prison: to recount the spinning
labyrinth of thought before falling
to sleep only 14 hours ago...
                      and having done so:
dreaming up the most uncomfortably real dreams -
not that detailing them would be worth
anything...

   begging myself: remember the words
prior to sleep: write them down: you fool!
the "other" man is speaking - rising from the depths:
the child "abadoned": to curate this tongue
has risen from the depths by chance
of you favouring to enter them in turn...

a protest concerning kenneth rexroth:
but sir... what's there to boast about?
    aren't you reading Proust as a translation?

keep me in this prison... as of today...
a few chapters from the pickwick papers:
yes... i do kind Dickens much easier on the eye:
and most certainly much more peacock-strutting
than Shakespeare...
            perhaps with the exception of Macbeth:
as ever... exceptions can and sometimes
must be made...
                      however: minor...

and in between chapters... well...
                         a swedish ***** and some tonic
and lime...
            and then the windowsill...
perched on a folded leg...
       smoking a cigarette... continuing
to sip the thrill zapping... crisp and cutting...
      warm snow...
                       and the song...
             qui nous demaine:

                  trois fleurs d’amour i trouvai
                  en la bonne estraine
                  voici le mai, le joli mois de mai
                  qui nous demaine...

in the rendition of corvus corax...

yet another moon-less night...
         such nights: where it almost feeds to be inclined
to conjure up some nearby nomad with
a robe attired with stars...
         a silver globus of glistening
romance and death...

                  such nights when the moon
doesn't appear...
            and frankly... the clouds have settled
for keeping the man in the ***** of earth:
never to aspire toward galileo and copernicus ltd.
in protest! for astronomy!

yes... between reading the pickwick papers...
and listening to some music:
never the two at the same time...
a parting of the seas...
the art of reading: in the sea of silence...
where you can fiddle with...
    a whisper from the buzzing aeon bound
to minutes: the sound of an electric demon
in a lightbulb...

and of course beyond this sea of silence:
a sea of sighs and yawns...
a flipping of a page: like a crease in time -
or a passing whale-shaped-tsunami
of sound...          to then the music...

as death would have it: beside the music...
perhaps once upon a time...
but i do not believe it:
a pen on paper - a hunched crow left scratching
with its claws...
while a fire **** between such
imaginary creatures took place in a candleflame...
but no music...
perhaps in the 20th century:
the radio... and the type-writer: machine-gun...
the radio static would have aided
the mechanisation of the type-type-typo!
scratch-rip! again!

21st century antics?
   pristine quality, earphones...
all the better to not hear the clicking sound
of a lineage of ten little hammers on a keyboard...
perhaps plucking oysters from the depths...
or for that matter pearls...
or perhaps searching for delicate mushrooms
and pulling them by the stump...
still the umbrella royalty still: that sucker's bribe
of pride...

of note: the old tongue wanted an audience...
concerning? drinking... and other... habits...
*****: most certainly... with the lime and tonic...
in "rationed" doses... and a good sleeping
hygiene... i must call it a sleeping hygiene...
at most 12am to bed... and at least 8am the rise...
the drinking:
one day upon a sleeping lake...
another day upon a raving lunatic of a sea!
a time for drinking: a time for thrist...
a time for living and a time for dying...

i tried to imagine myself in one of those a.a.
meetings... self-lacerating myself:
in that secular ugliness: without a monk's tunic
or: tools for: penitence...
after ten weeks or so: clap clap all round applause!
i bet...
       the dry stretch: applause applause:
lady gaga go-go! to live for applause...
b'ah! to ******* with that sort of attitude...
and this is where the old tongue spoke(:)

o piciu?! wersja: jak, pić?!
chcem tego psa na smyczy niż tą smycz: samą!
bez tego psa! ten "niby"
wzamian z tym marno-nerwowym
   człowiekiem! tą śpiącą pijawką!
suma sumarum?
   wole tego psa na smyczy - niż tą smycz
bez psa!
lepiej ja z tym psem na smyczy:
   niz ten czlowiek ze swą śpiącą pijawką!

tr.
     on drinking?! version: how to, drink?!
i want this dog on a leash than this leash:
on its own! without this dog!
                  that "so-called" alternative
with this feebly-nervous human!
                                    that sleeping leech!
<>
i rather this dog on a leash - than this
leash without a dog!
better i with this dog on a leash:
than this human with his sleeping leech!

it's not some eternal wisdom...
but...                                 it's a good enough start...
and yes... please... this prison...
every... single... day, and, night....
forever...
i can become the observant spy mushroom:
the hitchhiker in 1960s psychadelia
mingling with darwinism...
the mushroom that hijacked the ape...
etc.

                  it's a pretty simple list...
a dickens... a ***** and tonic and lime...
a windowsill... a cigarette...
   some... folkish song... i'd much prefer
the lyrics to the sung in anything but english...
french, latin... german... norwegian...
but please... not italian... i'll settle for greek...

if asked: why didn't you marry...
good question...
                why didn't i marry?
                        perhaps this... or perhaps...
i much prefered the 1 hour periods
of entertaining the company of prostitutes
in a brothel?
               honest transactions: stealing kisses...
the mainstream already laid the generic
framework: jack the ripper sort...

                      well: from judas to jesus
to me to the... "lowest denominator"...
                                            or so "they" say...
since if there was anything to be celebrated
at easter... outside of a homogenous catholic
nationhood... in england...
the lair of the huguenots...
         well... i teased reading kabbalah...
i teased reading the gnostic texts and i really did go
mad about the nag hammadi library...
after a while though:
can i change the direction of the Vistula
by putting a stick in the middle of it?
i certainly: ha ha! river... not the sea:
what can you do? turn the time and the flow?

anyway... catholicism...
                the usual suspect rubric check-list...
baptised? had i any say in it?
first communion? did i have any say in it
or would you rather ask whether
i lied when taking my first confession?
a first confession is a precursor to a first communion...
or... i don't remember...
i played the xylophone at the st. augustine's
primary school nativity play:
yeah... and drinking under-age...
crux of the matter: if we're all about peacocking
and comparing all the little richards
via the 3rd's **** or whatever...
confirmation?                      yeah...
          ­           so much for a church wedding...

all that... and i have to come back...
sensibly... catholic intellectualism or sorts...
bribe me and i might take it seriously...
love me and i might even throw in some fiasco
of apologetics... but then i'd be like
a monkey at a sushi bar: eat it? fling it?!
the only sensible consolidation of
a celebration of easter...

    the winter has been crucified...
                 and today was the first day i could
pick up a scent of spring...
in the rain... it trickled with...
earth... from far away... dry sand... mingling
with the water... the wind must have
picked up the sand from sahara and a dollop
of the evaporating mediterranean...
flung it to these isles...

                       yes: origins in catholicism...
which always more fun to break away from...
"apostate": notably watching apostate intellectual
jews and their spezial brand of atheism...
since: i mean... trust a catholic convert to
judaism? trust a *** reading into gnosticism?
or trust a muslim at all?
                         basic questions of: a priest,
a rabbi...                        a druid walk into a bar...
sort of jokes...
           there a litany of them...
a whole 'ymn book o' 'em!
                       sam's the weller! see the son?
moi noi'ver!

         but back and forth back and forth
within and without catholicism...
                                it's not as fun... black-clad
sober, serious, surplus of secularism...
                         all that: agitation from... what the persians
rebelled against... when finally the islamic
schism came so early...
and the ****'ites and... the persians like
the good choir boys of catholicism...
     one eye is said to be reserved for reading...
one eye is said to be reserved for admiring...
           it's hard to admire a text...
                          when it's even harder to read
into a sculpture!

oh yes... i like this prison... very much...
                                             where, is, my, mind?!

When deprived of
Rational thought
For long enough
The brain begins
To gather knowledge
From the smallest
Crevices of humanity
And in the cracks and
Crags of Know and Is
Runs tributaries of
Emotion and Touch
And the whole thing
Is a metaphor
And the whole Ship
Is a crazy illusion
In the mind of an infant
Vibrating nonsensical
Everything throughout the
Walls of human record and
Memory,
This is my doctorate and thesis
This is my final showdown and hoorah
This is staring down eternity
This is laughing with god
This is feeling it and running it down with bare hands
This is the how within the why
This is you me all the faces all the ads and fables
Every leaf and grain of sand in
Every toenail and cornea
This is poverty hunger sickness anger frustration confusion bliss
This is life love and the pursuit
This is the final frontier, the jumping off point
That comes every so often
Like an old friend
To remind you to
Get it all together
Into a single image
Of worship and Holy
And see it and eat it
And spit it back up
In bulimic flowering
Yeah, this is war
This is the last supper
This is Rexroth and Bukowski
In love with Hate
Saying, "Give me something better or get out of my way."

drinking fatigue...

            and something
                                     else in between...

               a skull...

             with two tongues
lodged in its
respective sockets...

and an eye...
            in its mouth that
replaces the tongue...

hardly a respectable
conjuring,
     not exactly a pink elephant
in the room moment...

evidently not even
a dream...

              two tongues for a pair
of eyes,
                  and a single eye
                                  for a tongue...
i am fatigued with
incorporating german into
this island folk, narrative...
       my minding
an unavailable explanation
for the many definite
article distinctions...

                                   right about this
time joining the circus would
appear the only avaliable idea
worth upkeeping sanity...
         since...
               what i was prescribed?
enlisting in
                                          a university?

can't think of anything useful,
or creative mind you,
over than a regurgitation
         of a march of hammers...
without a base-purpose
          of "inquisitive" nails
                         on the ready...

church-and-state...
                the state...
        "church", i.e. technocracy,
                        and "state"...
a faceless individual:
attacked by a stripping-effect
to allow the bare minimum:
of grammar coherency...
  then the attack on grammar!
hmm...

      i'm not genius...
  but...
                     well... whatever
it is...
                            if it's ******,
  it ought to be ******...
                        and if it's good?
        well... then i'm not reimagining
having written this onto toilet
paper...

                    given that:
drinking is the only form of metabolism
that can give you insight
into metabolic fatigue...

                            can't exactly say
i eat much: much of that's puffy is due
to the drinking...
            which is...
                 what's that word...
   marie antoinette's cake confession
for the people...
                   (lard-brain)
                                ah!
                ­                            cake!      

baltic sushi for me:
               creamy, raw, herrings...      
or raw herrings in piquant white vinegar
and oil and accompanied by
onions and garlic, and a bay leaf,
perhaps the english herb...
   or raw beef...
            made to a tartare standard...
roughly chopped...
      and a raw: egg yolk...    

just saying               prishtine
        through clenched teeth?
         encourages salivation for such things...

what was i saying?

ah...
                               drinking fatigue...
it's not that i've had "enough",
or that i've had "too little"...
            but drinking can do that to you...
been there done that...

            the lesser of "me" are at least
entertaining,
    dancing a very public tango
with their shadows...
                    hazy-eyed, quasi-blind,
          but my god...

                 obviously the ones that
learned how to write end up being
successful...
               but the ones like me:
who took the kenneth rexroth approach
and did it, with a self-         impetus?

skull: two tongues in its sockets that replace
the eyes,
               and one eye:
          guarded by 32 tailors...

ah! good old form of english!
                                            letters, like teeth!

yogh (ȝ)

                     ethel (œ)

              ash (æ)

                               thorn (þ)

                                           wynn (ƿ)

  and eth (ð)...

      sounds good spuds to me...
even biblical...

    so that's how mother england
               lost its: ****...
           gender "neutrality" and nouns...

                                yogh was a son, yes?
             ethel was a daughter, yes?
ash was transgender so we don't
know how to apply ashley to either
man or woman, yes?
  thorn: yes, and cain and thor: so male.
wynn: the p'ooh - so a cuddly toy?
       eth: definitely a woman.

i'm drunk: you're sober -
                let's not get into an argument
about why english grammar
doesn't extract a masculinity / femininity
perception
                             of words
         akin to the frowning 'enchmen...
                                               k'wee?