My friend Gerard, (who is alive), looks like an Arabian slave-boy, though swarthier and longer of hair than Tony Curtis; an olive –skinned Mowgli, ape boy of Kipling’s  “Jungle Book”, although I have never seen Gerard swinging through any trees, nor eating any insects, nor even kissing a sultan’s foot. But looks can be deceiving, or receiving, with the proper pen, the zen pen of a poet, this proper poet who lives upstairs with his multitude of books piled on the floors, walking on Whitman, sitting on Shakespeare; tripping over Ginsberg, sleeping on Sartre; not a single shelf for this Jung man.
“A place for everything, and for everything it’s place”, he stands and stares out of a window overlooking the jungle of five-foot high weeds that serves as our backyard and wonders aloud “whither Oregon?”; questions our alleged enlightened sense of awareness, his disposition toward liberalness in a world gone madder than usual. Have I convinced him yet, my naïve, trusting neighbor? Yes, he realizes with a sigh that it is so, now that he has finally succumbed and bought a thirteen inch, black & white television of his own, now he can see with his own brown eyes in his own living room, far off wars, instant coffee & instant karma, depersonalized tragedies, faceless fatalities, insidious soap operas and humorless sitcoms, adverse advertisements, Howard Stern; “whither sanity?” we both cry and laugh out loud at this mediocre media, the global sewage, the Marshall McClueless, me and Gerard Rizza, my friend who is alive.

Gerard, (who is healthy), is gay, yet straighter than most men, and has been complaining quite a bit about the ferry service lately; contemplating a move off of Staten Island, and leaving his sporadic substitute teaching gig at a nearby high school, a mere six block walk from our house atop Winter Hill, where he is trying to convince me, a wide-eyed cynic, that a blank, white, unused canvas, surrounded by a wooden picture frame hung upon his wall is indeed a work of art; the job is very convenient, but again the ******* about the ferry, not the boat ride per se, but the incongruities of the ****** schedule, which anybody who has ever just missed a three a.m. boat and had to wait for an hour in the Hierynomous Bosch triptych known as the Whitehall Ferry terminal ,will definitely attest to; and Gerard has this thing about Staten Islanders, like the homophobes at a recent anti-peace rally in New Dorp, supporting the carpet bombing of an oil rich yet still poor third-world country, throwing beer cans at him and his companions while shouting “we know where you live, *******!”. Rizz came home that evening, visibly shaken and pale, (not his usual olive-skinned self), knocked on my door and pleaded “whither ******?”. I went upstairs, sat on his couch and rolled a joint. Gerard puts on the new 10,000 Maniacs tape and tries, once again, to bait me in a conversation about his “work of art”, my work of naught; he speaks of the horrific details of his day. “Isn’t this picture of Doc Gooden on my refrigerator door proof enough of my manhood, my patriotic intent, for those *******? The ******’ Mets, fuh chrissakes!” We sit out on his porch, watching the sun set over our backyard jungle as Natalie sings wireless Verdi cries, and I pass the burning joint to Gerard, my friend who is still healthy.

My friend Gerard, who is *** positive, was quite possibly a cat in a former life, probably a Siamese, thin, dark and aloof; yes, I can see ol’ Rizz now, sprawled out on an old tapestry rug, getting his belly scratched by his owner, perhaps Emily Dickinson or Georgia O’Keefe, Rizz purring like the engine of an old bi-winged barnstormer; abruptly rolls over, gets on all fours, tail waving *****, slinks over to lap water out of a bowl marked “Gerard”. He’d sleep all day on books and original manuscripts, and play all night amongst oil & acrylic, knocking over an occasional blank canvas, which he, in a future incarnation, will try to convince me, in his feline manner, is art. Sitting and staring from his usual spot on the windowsill, his cat eyes blink slowly as he wonders, “whither dinner?”; and begins to clean himself with tongue and paw, this cat who might be Gerard, my friend who is *** positive.

Gerard, who is sick, recently moved to Manhattan, Chelsea, to be precise, in with his best friend; and has stopped ******* about the Staten Island ferry, having far more pressing matters to ***** about, i.e. the ever-rising cost of homeopathic medicine and the lack of coverage for holistic and alternative care; any number of political and social concerns (Gerard was never the silent type); the lateness of his first published book of poems, entitled “Regard for Junction”; his rapidly deteriorating health, etc., etc.; and is now a true city dweller, a zen denizen, a proper poet with high regard for junction. That’s all that remains when it’s all over anyway, this junction, that junction, petticoat junction, petticoat junction – “I always wanted to **** the brunette sister”, I’d once told him; “I prefer uncle Joe!”, he laughingly replied; dejection, rejection, reclamation, defamation, cremation, conjecture, conjunction, all junctions happening at the same time, at now, a single place, a single moment, this forever junction with Gerard, my friend who is dying.

My friend Gerard, who is dead, officially passed from this life on a Saturday morning in early April, a mere two weeks before his junction with publication, although Gerard my friend passed away much earlier, leaving a sick and emaciated body behind to play host to his bedside guests, to help bear the pain of his family and friends; so doped-up on morphine, no longer able to remember any names, he called me “*****” when I entered the hospital room, where this barely physical manifestation of what had once been Gerard Rizza was being kept alive like the barest glimmer of hope, and displayed like some recently fallen leader, lying in state;  “whither Gerard withers” I thought, saying goodbye to this Rizza impersonator, this imposter, this visitor from a shadow world, an abstraction of a friend, whom the nurses told us, his disbelieving visitors, was our friend Gerard, who though technically still alive, was already dead.

My friend Gerard, who is laughing
My friend Gerard, who is singing
My friend Gerard, who is coughing
My friend Gerard, who is sleeping
My friend Gerard, who is holy
My friend Gerard, who is missed.

I want a girl who drinks whiskey
Not a sophisticated white wine woman.
I don't need more than one fork and I
don't know what to do with more.

I want a girl who drinks whiskey
who will watch the stars from atop a desert bluff,
naked, beside me, as cars scurry like ants far below us.

I want a girl who drinks whiskey
not a woman that sips reds and explains
my nihilistic future intents.
Life is to beautiful to plan on a ****** future.

I want a girl that drinks whiskey
and tells me like it is while laughing at
all the incongruities in that truth.
A girl that recites poetry and literature from
a truck bed surrounded by enraptured steers.

I want a girl that drinks whiskey
who pours her shots neat and drains her glass
Who lets each and every glass be
laden with experiences and laced with frivolity,
knowing that the cup itself
is nothing but a vessel for life.

What I fancy I approve,
No dislike there is in love:
Be my mistress short or tall,
And distorted therewithal:
Be she likewise one of those,
That an acre hath of nose:
Be her forehead and her eyes
Full of incongruities:
Be her cheeks so shallow too,
As to show her tongue wag through;
Be her lips ill hung or set,
And her grinders black as jet:
Hath she thin hair, hath she none,
She’s to me a paragon.

some days I wonder
how I could fall in love with your
passionate words
but empty eyes
I never realized
that it was painful to see
you smile
I've been asked before
about my addictions
but everyone said it is impossible to
be addicted to your lies

Twirling on an oil slicked floor


Faster
Faster

Never stopping to see for sure

Faster
Faster

If what you want is the cure

Faster
Faster

For your pulsing heart
Faster Faster
Growing close
FasterFaster


STOP


as you slip
and your feet
are no longer
beneath you
and in slow motion face the ground
beneath you
and it swallows you up
the darkness intruding
on your vision
closing in
on your dreams
as you slip
past the incongruities
of destiny and fate
of love and lust
of passion and gentleness
and all
Is Still.

maturely premature thoughts preexist inside
waiting to explode and marvel
at the symmetry of our meetings,
asymmetrical
incongruities.
unthought veils bearing everything
mysterious. magic rarely happens
when eyes open slowly for the
first time. life hatefully
spiteful, vengefully
insipid, unknowing
uncaring,
who cares, time
lost,
repent,
recant,
re-imagined revisions,
systems breaking human
conditions, connections. see
past the humanity,
inanity and insanity are deliberate
malfunctions- there is beauty
inside every action, movement, and
word.
torrents of half thought forms cascade
over fickle answers,
responses to help your quest. yet
in the same ******’ breath you say
‘you’ve thought too much;
imagined
enough-
excuses are all
you need’ while
i cry to you in silence,
you’re missing the beat, the
form, the aspect and motivation
of the intellect that you
so silently yearn
for in your verbal
abuses.
this will only get you so far before
you see as i see
or not at all

[A child of indeterminate ***--either a delicate-featured boy or a tomboy-ish girl--, 9 or 10 years old, enters the chamber where the United States Council of Artists is meeting.]

"Is this the United States Council of Artists?"

[The Chairman of the Council responds:] "Yes. Who are you?"

"That doesn't matter. Are all the high arts present? Poetry, Music, the Visual Arts?"

"Yes. . . . There are people from all the various arts here. . . ."

"The Hour of your Doom is upon you."

"What do you mean?"

"You've failed to create with feeling.
Nuclear angst no longer excuses you.
Moral uncertainty, the dissolution of society,
no longer excuses you.
The 'Death of God' no longer excuses you.
Human beings have not changed.
We are not the hollow men.
Great art
comes from the heart;
your superfluities will now depart.

"Painter! Isn't it true that the same day you started work on this [holding up a reproduction of the painting "Incongruities: White Lines, Pink Lines"] you visited a hardware store with a middle-aged clerk whose face was wonderfully sad and quizzical? That as you walked home the pattern of the sun shining through the trees onto the sidewalk was marvelously variegated?


"Composer! Tell me honestly [playing a cassette recording of "Duet in F-Minor for Flute and Woodblock"] that these rhythmless sounds move you. . . . It's made with the head, completely with the head.

"Poet! Isn't it true that you've never written any poems expressing your deepest feelings: your love of your older sister; the painful growing-apart of you and your wife leading up to your divorce; your hatred of the stuffy academics who denied you tenure; the passion you felt for that Australian ******* Corfu last summer. . . . Instead you've written these [holding up a book entitled Root Crops, No Metaphors and reading from it:]

     translucent, magenta-veined root-tips
     push, cell by cell, into humid grit;
     dark green, dark-red-veined crowns
     expand profligately sunward. . . .

"Great art
speaks to the heart;
your superfluities will now depart."

[Another Council member:] "Mr. Chairman, with all due respect to this --surprisingly eloquent-- young person, I suggest that we return to the business at hand which is" [consulting his agenda] "the allocation this fiscal year for haiku in South Dakota."

Arise from autumn meadow
The days last thought
Of you who chose a path
Not measured or guided but sign less
And yet, you walk with purpose
Resting in unfamiliar territories
Aware of the incongruities of your route
And still, you had the vision
Earlier years were fraught with ambiguities
And muddy trails made for slippery ramblings
And then, you wrote a poem
Your heart found its medium; and soul, its pen
You write with depth in a shallow sea
How magnificent life is, when our path is clear
And the autumn meadow allows for one more thought

Waltzing on the fine line
Between love and pain
Yet burning with happiness
Leaving the blurry shadows  
Incongruities behind

Tight rope
Watching our bodies sway
Every fault made perfect
Yours and mine
In the bright eyes

You see this bird has wings
And she needs to fly
Needs to free fall out of the sky
He, the wind, will catch her
Before she hits the ground.

I don’t like how the skin below my eyes gets cold after I’ve cried and my tears have dried.

I don’t like how, when I listen to a sad song, my eyebrows scrunch together and touch the frame of my glasses, and I can feel the hairs bristling against it.

I don’t like how my mascara comes off in clumps and takes my eyelashes with it, and I see the white tips where they were rooted in that precious skin that rims our eyes.

I don’t like how the heart-shaped, helium balloons that my parents got me for Valentine’s day float at the top of my ceiling and look like demons crawling across the ceiling when the light’s off.

I don’t like how I can’t be all one color, so I buy skin-colored nail polish and skin-colored lipstick, so that if I can’t blend into anything, I can at least blend in with myself instead of being a walking commodity of incongruities.

I don’t like how I can’t just pull bones out of my body and give them to people.

I don’t like how I can’t walk into rooms and fill up every nook and cranny with myself. I don’t like how I can’t expand and crowd into all the air around me everywhere I go, so that I never have to walk into a space and feel emptiness or smallness, because that chair refuses to wrap itself around me and the floor doesn’t soak up between my toes and the ceiling fall down and cover me like a blanket.

Antiphon Benedictus II / Sybilla Herophile

The wide influence of history was automated in rituals; it would indicate a bibliographical time rather than secular. The antiphons will take us through the hallelujah of eternal times and along the path of the Spring of Castalia. In singularity will be Delphic Herófila, primordial of Delphi prophesying Trojan conflicts. By reinterpreting her priesthood, she leads us to the Templar Adyton, which can be reinterpreted in a Christian way in the classical antiquity of this antiphon. Being able to be captive, she looked serious and wise, visionary and with customary strange gestures, for an abnormal state of Young Sybilla woman who was later supplanted by older fortune tellers.

The Antiphon Benedictus says: “Herophila you were plagiarized and ridiculed by a heterodoxy that knows rituals and sacred cares, the Pneuma that emerged from the cracks upset your incongruities, which settled on the millennial pedestal in Macedonian territorial geographies, uniting with Alexander the Great, recirculating in Sibylline centers and dividing the doors of Sober Hell, towards epiphanies of the cult of light, and of the sacred pairs of wisdom.

The discussion took place in front of those who surrounded the perimeter of the Antiphon; there was Vernarth and Saint John the Theologian. For decades the twilights have not made the red blood cells of the Cassotis iridescent, which defied a hydrographic competition, for the purpose of desembalming the bodies of the Falangists that emerged from the Temenos of Patmos; secular space for the auditoriums of the antiphon. With ornamental fictitious oracles envisioning the inadvisable opening of opposing eyes towards a Mysta or Mystírio Eleusino, so that finally, given the toxicity of Mercury's sulfide, they would emancipate themselves by making objections to the hypothesis of ruddy post-mortem symbols, which the braves of Tel Gomel, when appearing outside the extinct topic, so that the Benedictus songs would button their navels, which was the only thing that united them to the Sybillas who came from the expropriated ethics, and from the Cinnabar outpatient clinics for long periods providing life in the quantum of Mercurial Ambrosia. Being this preferably housed in the skulls of the V (Fifth courtyard of Helleniká, but this time with eschatology of the Koumeterium of Messolonghi). Eurydice is associated with an exhumation in front of the alerted and emitted effluvia of the Herophile after the Zygastron, which shone from a canvas and that Borker preserved from the Laurel Woods, in a sycalyptic horizon of the equinoctial Aftó of the Kaitelka Cetacean, which nitrated oxides from the eastern vertical, on its back, spauto shredding with purple carbonates towards the Rubicunda del Tinctorium, and from the rhizome that hydrated the enervated and dispersed drops that remained from the convulsion of the Metelmi wind, and shaking the fin that came from this Balaenidae specimen Mysticete, in casuistry of a whale with Down syndrome, but with prodigious psychic powers.

The Cinnabar wandered through the clothes of Tel Gomel's disembalmed ones, who colored themselves with sulfur mercury and revived from the oracles of Herófila, who woke up early with Eurydice validated by her Orphic impetus like no one else. The specific parts were tints of vital signs and epidermis shoots that trembled through the epiphyses of the tibiae that decanted arthritic through the femurs, and that rose with timid muscular masses, until they reached the instep where the celestial holes of Vernarth appeared, that he struck each one of his faithful with his Xifos sword, to bleed a bronze chalice for their reduced movements, stacked on crossed legs with dejected cheekbones that fell on their feet.

Reddish spots on his jaws and on his forearm they were transposed with red salvific footprints of Eurydice that he brought from Charon, but that expressly limited them in the posterior scapula that came arriving from the fifth courtyard of Messolonghi completely stiff in black. The muscular insertion was made of pale ocher, and the Cinnabar was elemented to verticalize the involuntary bodies of the earthquake, before the controversy of the makeup of their resurrection, after an outfit that they had never used before, pigmented by an antiseptic oracle of Herófila, which already insisted to compensate with war shrouds the size of the Benedictus that self-shod the iron suns, and that buried fangs of light and life in their facials, moving in the nervous of the trigeminal towards the ethmoid, causing rales of stimuli feminoids, for the enthronement of the women present in the only atrium of the Mandragoron. Thus they remained in multi-partial stages of the psalm that revived them, to go to meet the Hegemon Alexander the Great, who emerged synchronously from Larnax, from an eruption that uttered the greatest insults of political clarity, in the fierce agonies of his perforated lung. Parasites were sprinkled like empathic germs of Hellenism, conferring Masken resurrection, beyond the curtain or canopy that separated them in Persepolis..., returning from the Indus, for the funeral that would pass through the departure of Hephaestus. Rigor-mortis buried a soul overheating in pulmonary contusion, after a feverish respite, and re sulphating in the rhetorics of Plato and Aristotle.

The Sybillas no longer menstruated on the tripod, the Pythoness in their prehistoric eagerness was conceived twice cyclical, which were reconverted into prehistoric female raptures that confirmed the exo-red blood cells of the menstrual torment, to become reconverted Christian goddesses who were doubly buried in one past joined to the other, and that they were about to precede the next past-present, on an oak that supported them, clinging to them to bear the pain that never existed.

In each moment, each pursuit
Improvise.
It’s nothing more than living Now.
Of course you’ll f---k it up at times:
Mistakes belonging to a human
As does dust upon a mirror.

In each moment, work or pastime
Improvise, extemporize.
You have encyclopedic knowledge
In your little life-so-far;
Gifts and talents, skills, capacities;
Experiential knowledge
You absorbed the moment you took breath.

If you do what I advise
You see patterns that transmogrify,
Patterns that will make you wise;
Patterns when you make each minute your device.

Despite anomalies,
Quirks, and incongruities,
This the key to bring to light
The star you are,
Becoming brighter with each gesture.

Make a pact with you yourself
Put old habits on the shelf of things gone by.

You improvise,
You start to fly.
By and by
You are the sharpest, deepest, most profound and visionary
You alive.

Improvising Your Way Through Life 8.5.2017
Definitely Didactic; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II;
Arlene Corwin

Before it occurred to me to break things—

Before, when purity was paramount to *** and
Words and duty and the drink—

Before, when academics wagged from ivory
Thrones to never mime the masters—

To be content with being only me—

To sit in wood and ruminate upon the thoughts of
White men, drunk and dead—

To raise revision for our mankind
In merely muted measures—

To be right-handed rogue, forever plying “please”—

Why then—then—

I was Halfman in a wholeman’s body,
A fish without its gills—

A flapping Fop of scaling incongruities
With gurgled protestations seldom bubbled up—

A wily Portraiter, blinded since his birth—

An agnostic Abbott soaking up a season’s sins
Outside of habit and the church—

A boisterous Beat, a bouncing drum, and gongs
With two left feet—

A Farmer without a *** or seed or farm
Or Nature much in mind.

But, my curious greenhorns on the other
Side of life, don’t heed that—no! no!

You’re free; the world is completely broken now.

True hacks and phonies all around, speaking through their ivory horns of pure disgust and wallowing in incompetence, ******* and kissing and mishandling their newborn children which they name in propriety and for the pearls of God that allow them to **** and **** well. I will blast them all to the deepest of hell for there they belong with me and they will be outrightly ****** by the sojourning sheiks that give their sufferers a razor-tipped ******* that they know they deserve. Where is your relatable, so enjoyable, three or four piece family TV meal that you so deeply craved after a long day at work? It is gone gone gone and now you are subject to your deepest incongruities with yourself, how dare you be such a bother and how dare you believe in your ability to inspire. If you are not feeling this frustration of never ceaselessly being able to grasp at the story that lies within the easel of the juices of your soul, then you are not- and never will be- worth anything more than some broken throbbing piece of genitalia that seethes and suckles at the broken fallacies of pure love and distraught youth. You do not know and you will never know, and if you dare you will never truly make progress for you are a vacuous, insufferable, erratic dame that is not a good piece of skin so much as you are the perfect tool for everyone: a loudspeaker stripped naked and bare for all the world to ****; a true contributor, unlike your deepest and most esteemed of peers. Aww, how does that feel? How does it feel to finally implode from your own vicarious and hollow attempts at wisdom and knowledge? What’s left to be learned has been learned, don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? Don’t you think it’s time to stop digging your ***** ***** nails into that rusted cloud of old hope and forgiveness? Everyone has left, and that is what we must deal with. You must be some mongrel to sit down like an unrepentant dog. Cross-legged and all.

Its an estranged place of beauty
Magnanimous cruelty marks its face
the land of such awe screams mutiny
pleading for a safer place

desert oaks tenaciously grasp the ground
lightning struck gums an effigy to protest
the cataclysmic weather reigning down
the incongruities perpetually contest

spurious clouds pass over head
mocking the parched plants, they ****
despite the drought amongst the dead
orange melts a sunset onto every hill

the beguiling desert offers many wonders
surely it will draw many in
but it only takes one that ponders
to see it represents our brokenness within

Tell it to me plainly, simply,
Without incongruities.
I have NO more patience for
Vagueness and ambiguities.

Whatever you have to say, say it
Clearly, matter-of-factly.
"An unaffected, straightforward style?"
You ask. Yes, exactly.

Of course, flowery language has
A special time and place.
But please leave all pretensions behind
And just cut to the chase.

I want the message in such a way
That makes it easy to grasp.
But convoluted rigmarole
Makes me want to gasp!

If you wear your heart on your sleeve,
That is quite all right.
However, for puzzling plays on words
I have no appetite.

When I was much much younger, I found
A challenge to be amusing.
Nowadays, I have no time
For what’s unclear or confusing.

Complexity might be your thing.
If so, that is fine.
It might be your ultimate goal.
It’s definitely not mine.

Simplicity: that is key.
I don’t mess around
With splashy words or thoughts that make
My writing sound profound.

I want my ride to be comfy and smooth,
Without potholes and dips.
Bombastic words and overblown language
Make for bumpy trips.

Direct, precise, and to the point--
Without a lot of fluff.
That appeals to me right now.
With that, I’ve said enough.

-by Bob B (6-1-21)

tainted bird nests

in shred-house ciphers.

sallow backlit terraces

of skied lines, wind up

wind.

jack n the box buildings--

melee incongruities.

abandoned workzones on

every other corner.