"They're selling postcards of the hanging" Bob Dylan


Frolicking in the Hague festooned
as if some monarch's golden jubilee
not a room left empty in all the land
queues for miles to get a ringside seat
at what is billed as The Trial of Man
as W, ****, and Rummy sit chained
to the bionic calves of barstools while
Condo Lisa bears witness atop a piano
ferreted throughout the conurbation
breadlines and circuitous routes
recalling the Nicaraguan case
low on the radar of short-term
the disunited states of disarray
vetoes its own trial's outcome
and it is business as usual

Poem Number Three from Edna's alter ego, Count ORLOK

O how the lust for virgins' blood rages through my veins,
My thirst for the wondrous elixir of human gore is all-engulfing!
I rise at dusk from my noisome grave, drooling with anticipation
And I soar upwards into the night sky like a bat out of Hell
(which is what I am, so it's no ******* exaggeration is it?).
I go to search out new victims in a new place as my old haunts
Are rather depleted following my ravages on their inhabitants,
But the foul miasma emanating from Wolverhampton's suburbs
Is enough to make me throw up last night's supper on my tuxedo,
And it totally kills my ******* appetite stone ******* dead.
With a shrieked *"The West Midlands Conurbation ***** big time!"
I fly off in disgust, a steam of diarrheoa trailing after me,
Like brown stardust.

I woke up at angles with you
---a parallelogram, opposite but equal,
my thoughts in constant rotating view
---a diagram, showing us where
our homes are laid to rest,
where streets became dead spiders
caught in their own webs.

If we are in transit via tunnel,
aqueduct, or escalator,
it might be cinema.

If we lose atlas in the worship of light,
it might be cinema.

But I can't find you here;
here, where they used to build ships
from sand and steam
and science fiction;
where they used to design
buildings so as to create
a dissonant and mournful
whistling sound when wind
blew through them
---ostentatious things;
dead people’s things.

Through walls and underneath concrete, dug so deeply
into the wide plains
and withered, gnarled tree roots
of an agonizer's conurbation,
is a space halfway to the zenith,
charting the prescribed power
of in-betweenness.

Never again will we draw meaning from
our proximity to one another.

bathtub overflowing, the kitchen sink a-running,
water water everywhere, everybody, getting a wordy
Saturday po-em, ahem, so only, lonely, love poetry,
high pitches, whimpering, like a three year old chillun,
why not me babe? why not me babe?

words uttered somewhere, everywhere, hourly,
maybe even screamed, sung, shouted outed,
with total justification, incredulous incomprehension,
my ticket unpunched, this fate, an indeterminate sentence,
if only I had a penny for every utterance, be a multi-billionaire
and still dissatisfied

the isolation au courant makes it a thousand times worse,
sometimes, I hold my own hand, remembering what is touch,
just not to forget, like a lazy eye, a missing limb needy for
scratching, a sensating, sustaining pleasure that sorely
disappoints, for the brilliance of it, is in its eclectic electric,
and a solitary spark fizzles, swallowed up, into disappointing reveries

my eyes wet themselves when I see letters airbone, floating, reforming,
why not me babe?
if mine eyes cannot catch another’s, no across-the-room thermometer saturating stare of farenheightened heat, what good this vision?
left with a single despicable desperate cri du to my conurbation,
why not me babe?

my banana bread aroma flies out the open window to meet
and be greeted across the street, with applause and affection,
but our nostrils cannot taste, our lips forbidden, in this hell,
why not me babe?

the quietude so great, I hear the rhythmic breathing of one who
could be my chosen, my one and only, my love poem, exhaling too,
why not me babe?

but the see-through curtain prohibits strangers exchanging ****** fluids, glances of possibility, and enraged, unengaged, smash all my mirrors, cause they don’t answer my question,
why not me babe?
it’s a reverberated echoing, a slap across my face, married to my cryout, a singular sensation of exasperated silence

pick up my brass decorative magnifying glass, with twisted ivory handle, examine my hands, my lips, my nose, my credit scores, my personal spaces, my declining weight and bank balance, each excuse, belief,
the white spots decorating my sticking out tongue, thinking there’s another sense I’m forgetting, but all I recall is,
why not me babe? why not me babe?

and that is why only love poetry did not get a love poem today...

Ever have they dwelled in that sickly city,
That even the flowing ice avoided
As it crept down from the heights,
Devourving all in its path.

Among evil shadows,
Did they practice their craft.
In the primordial conurbation
Of forsaken Yir.

Since time immemorial
They have met in silence.
Beneath Yir's dark obelisks
And the backdrop of jagged mountains.

Many believe them necromancers.
It is even said in myth ,
That they were the ones to create man
In order to spite the gods .

But such memories ,
If ever there were any,
Have long since passed
From the revelries of thought.

None have seen these sorcerers
Or that sable city of Yir
Since the ice had receeded
In more recent ages.

In fact, not even the location
Of that monsterous place
Can be agreed upon anymore,
Which many count as a blessing.

For though the city is lost,
And unseen by the eye,
The meer mention of it
Disturbs and unsettles the mind.

As if it's raven spell,
Was never truely lifted.

Nine-tenths of a population
housed in a
sprawling conurbation
extending ever outward

looking inward as if we could
would do no good

and even then we do because
we have no place to go,
neither in nor out,
I know.

and freedom is the price we pay
for fair rent property
from which we see sod all
but the building bricks that brick us in
and another ******* wall to bang
our heads against.

An affinity to complicity -
A stain and soil beget -
Silence upon inflictions -
Sullies spirit -
Complacency's conurbation -
Silence considered virtue - asset
But care ought to be given with no ration -
Or else hearts would not meet -

An affinity to complicity -
A stain and soil beget -
Silence upon inflictions -
Sullies spirit -
Complacency's conurbation -
Silence considered virtue - asset
But care ought to be given with no ration -
Or else hearts would not meet -