Standing by the riverrun
a lone a last a everything
the mass was floating and unfolding
I was the engine she was the chorus.

Twisting about the bend
One fell one fall one everything
the mess was unfolding and holding
I could only touch her if she was nune.

Looking past the looking-glass
Her nerves her curves her everything
the miss was touching and forever
I be gone and be all by the riverrun.

riverrun past eve and adam so
fast it tossed up my chainmail
vest. For a second it shone my
tattered back battle scars.

I’m not one to reminisce
about bad times but the fish
I had wrangled had rattled so fierce
I bell ****-boreward into the fox
of fishing hooks.

Dangling pirate hands shredded
sails salty water waves filled my
whales -- “ARR ME BACK”
The fish cackled and got away.

The boat was in the Abiquiu river, a ways away
a way a lone a last a loved a long
the riverrun

"RIVERRUN..!"

she slaps the water
"Look...I'm making
the river run!"

it's quiet hard to find a welcoming book, i can cite two read in one sitting, thus spoke Zarathusrta (the original intent) and the soft machine by burroughs... all others came with many composed sittings... but none of the repeated encounters can be spoken of so favourably as Bertrand Russell's history of western philosophy, with that book came the kindest summer - in that i find historians the prefects of philosophy, the Republic guardians, leave the poets to do their sing-along, and furthered abstracts of symbols (should they wish, and ought), give presence to historians like Russell and Tatarkiewicz (surname derived as descended from Tartar auxiliary at the battle of Tannenberg with two naked swords dipped into ****** soil awaiting blood by a Lithuanian king married to a Polish gal).

sometimes poems can be more memorable than entire
books, there memorableness technique used in
epics gets lost most of the time,
writers' custard narrative awaiting a memorable
spontaneity is always missing, a memorable quote
needs to be bookmarked, it's hardly remembered,
all that talk of etiquette, esp. 19th century is always
the fog in novel, Mr. Darcy and his twin
Mr. Rochester, both haunted -
the former by social structures (prejudice;
his wife to be by lower caste governed by pride)
while the latter by a madwoman in the attic -
there's nothing memorable about these novels
in mono assertions, unless you have a book-club or
a cinematic script and a movie... poems are more
memorable, naturally, even if you're unable to recite
them because you rather recite the list of ingredients
for a bonkers curry, someone else will recite you a
poem, no problem. i guess that's because memorising
poetry is afforded by rhymes, the crude musicology
if given an instrument, would be to pluck
two same notes, ugly with a guitar, beautiful with
the tongue.
no, novels are not memorable, ask blind Samson about
the pillars he absorbed with his strength and pulled
down... ask him...
or... or i can tell you a little secret, it's a secret concerning
Sylvia Plath's *bell jar... page 119 in my edition (Faber & Faber),
slight digression: a page later she's complaining in
a "fictive" personality about the ineffectiveness of sleeping
pills... she has been apparently given max'      imum
strength pills... dear Sylvia,
                                        against your doctor's orders,
          against all pharmaceutical orthodoxy,
sleeping pills are best effective with alcohol,
even though the tagline is to avoid mixing the two...
i can't specify the quantity of alcohol in milligrams
akin to the dosage of the pills, dear Sylvia, they're only
effective with the liquid sedative, and perhaps a painkiller
like paracetamol...
nonetheless on page 119 she's citing a book you will
probably not read, and neither did she (explanation
a bit later)... she cites the first page of J. Joyce's
Finnegans Wake...
                 riverrun past Eve and Adam's...
and that ONE-HUNDRED LETTERED word:

  ba'ba'ba'dal'gharagh'takamminanarronk'onn'bronntonner'r­onn'tuonn'thunn'trovarr'houna'wnska'wntooh'oohoo'rdenen'thurnuk!­

i tried the syllable scalpel to my best ability for breath,
this grand anti-onomatopoeia, cut for brief pause...
but she didn't read any further like Delmore Schwartz
trying to sell this **** Grææ tongue...
she didn't read on, because there's another century in this
book:

(i left a bookmark on the page (no. 23) - a painting by
Diego Velázquez, the toilet of Venus 122.5 by 177 centimetres)

with loss of breath and entry of the centipede as follows

perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhur­thrumathunnaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun!

but i must i don't have the ratio, since i didn't bother counting
either words, but Sylvia did, and if she counted the first word
as a century, this second word must also be a century -
yet on suspicion should i believe she read further, or didn't?
they claimed the book to be a Babylonian Tower
readying for dispersions of the people, yet with historical
events it's a joke, given that there are no diacritical marks
in the book to provide stresses of accents:
e.g. fumatul poate să ucidă (romanian for: do not smoke
cigarettes, yes, there's a black market for cigarettes,
THANK GOD!) - and with saying that, it is not a book
with a Babylonian Tower attached to it, it's a tower for sure,
but a Globalisation Tower, how english became the
Lingua Levant once more, when the Franks had their
puppet king of Jerusalem at the time of Saladin.

I live a breath's away from the oldest river in the world.
While I don't take much of nature in it is awe inspiring,
to be sure.
I live within the crook of the oldest mountains in our history.
Not the tallest,
nor the proudest,
but for now these ranges are growing senile within their misery.

The riverrun through it and exposes rock perhaps a billion years old.
Our oral histories, passed on legends,
scary stories and mountaineer folklore accounts for
such a small passage of time.
We built a bridge once.
It was at one time the longest single-span arch in the world.
Now it's the fourth.
Top five, and that's something for which I am proud.
The oldest river, in the world.
The oldest mountains, in the world.
The highest fatal overdose rate, in the States.

There is a beauty to be had here. Somewhat backwards, but
growing up our water was clear.
It's now choked from coal slurry.
The brain drain of young adults leaving, in much hurry,
hurts us as the ones that remain become grey and blurry.
We are living in a permanent winter and we have high roads,
that wind and curve. Dangerous when icy. veins filled with
heavy loads and nodding verve.
I live a breath's away from the oldest river in the entire world.
I can't touch Roman ruins with my hands, or
sift through the Dead Sea and float on salt above sand.
I can't touch the hill where Jesus may have died,
I don't know what it feels like to hold history as pride.
But our trees even when green have a dusty coal darkened sheen.
Summer is overgrowth from the Springtime rains.
The highest fatal overdose rate in the entire United States.

Where once we built bridges to close in the gap of travel.
We unzip black bags with rigs and object with obvious cavil.
Our industry is old, the world is moving on from coal.
For better, to be sure, but in the meantime we grow cold.
Not from lack of heat, we can boil our spoons just fine.
But we need a replacement from shaft or the mountaintop mine.
Let us worry about beauty again,
let us treat addiction with correction instead of levying it as sin.
Remove the pantomiming politician speak
of addicts or the sick as being weak.

Let's find ourselves again, West Virginia. You're the only home I've known.
Childhood summertimes sat beneath canopies of caterpillar home,
the happy baby butterflies eating leaves so more sun could shone.
Walking sticks used to play with me in my yard,
and at nighttime I'd still be outside mouth agape at the stars.
Evening meant lightning bugs and I'd capture a few in the cup of my hands.
There was a whimsy to how nature responded to us,
how bees would bumble and land,
on the dandelions whose seeds I'd spread as I blew on their white
polyp heads.
Maybe it's nostalgia and my memories are tinted rosy.
The smell of wood stoves burning in winter,
the crispness of autumn breezes felt cozy.
There was a trust held in communities, or maybe I was naïve.
Some of my friends made a choice and moved.
Others among us took a more permanent leave.
My brother, too. He himself got in a lot of trouble.
Over the cotton swab boiled to a bubble.
He died when I was young so maybe everybody is right.
It's all sentimentality and a lot of lonely nights.
But does the past being ****** up make the worsening now fine?

I live a breath's away from the oldest river and mountain range.
I live with the highest fatal overdose rate in the United States.

synagogue bells jar and outside is the
  color of green, mist enshrouds moss
  macadamized in young wall;

beating back to lips, a paler hue of scorched red,
     a moment twists, hurries back to
the shell of a modest hour,

  rearing in its tender arms, tantric ***
of rain and tendril. tenuous wind swiftly
purloins sound
      submerging the world in picker-patter,

the moon fronts and the sun
     behind — this is my world and within
its breast, the riverrun stride in between
   stone packs its smell of mud

clotheslines full with heavy fabric
weighed down to intent and inertia,
  dragged down to sleep and dream
as the hourly siren tolls somewhere that
    does not have a beacon, a name
  even, blaming only the shadow frittering
  back to its console, pinning us
    down to the calm weather we sing
about in the afternoon —  reaping
   in the twilight,
        a cold-mouthed Hefeweizen!

So what is the new next thing?
isick ilich selum lee lay lum
syntax brizoke choke sizome
jabber wizock riverrun,
past Eve and Adam
Raisinets, Kay Jewelers, Round Up ‘s the way
Nirvana sun Gaga Ketchum drum Bellum

Numb undone-or-been done “that’s right son you tell’m”
“Ugh a rhymer?” “a diner.” “no stop it,” “crop top it.”
“No really I’m feeling like this meter is cheating”
“but I can’t stop,” “that didn’t rhyme” “oh yea”

So now what?
What is there?
Can I go any further?

Not not, come **** ****
September November taint
I, you, it—‘s all ****

Dream a dream in leather-bound
Sheets as white as wedding gowns
Trace endless streets as riverrun
On alleys, veins back and down

Cigarette mornings, sun’s crown is passed
Onward! To destinations!
Calmly, into nothing goes on the last
And ever on so fast.

Steam does lift off the shadows cast
Off the blinding sky, perfect, pale-skin white
From my empty room Troy-maiden appeared
Verse tattooed on belly white, limbs so lithe.

Ere long, the throbbing thing, the pen
Passed and rent the soul to send
My crafted love in the sallow morn
The devils therefrom that are born

Knows not best torture  me
With outright attacks and battery
But that time and brooding are
Whips and chains—evoke his dignity
All it took to collapse his frame.

Grievous

I hold you as the chameleon with his spring-trigger bone
Holds his tongue
And I will catch you as a fist
I will lick the stench from your odor sacks
as a skunk

All those creepy little fragments
bugs in the system;glitched codes
they are shackled souls in a microsecond arc-length
of the universal
Prodding the dirt
and the worms
as stars

How about all the spice trees?
The many different species of food glitter
they make the buds sparkle, they are thinking of the taste
of umami, of sour, of patchwork gaze
the cooked vestibules of bone
the marrow, seeping into the stew
The pepper trees are smoked
equinoctial bonfires
You and I are yet to be cooked through


A taxi in the trader joes parking lot
Big repetitive 7's splattered across its paneling
I won't forget when i'm drunk or inebriated somehow
The tree in the center of town is lit up with LEDs
Branches curling like worms

You are Pharos, you are the great celestial beam
you are the crescent moon, thin as a sleeve
and the hot taste of batter on your breath
the way you let my Guinness cool off next to the space-heater
and give me yogurt from the local townsfolk
Everything is creamy, you said.

But i don't like to hear that
It's a steel rod into my brain, that.
I am a simple Vishnu Hare Brahma
I do not have any purpose but to be enlightened
and worshiped for my powerful odors
and a four-chambered bowel
that makes the turn easier for worms.

2

Pitiful

You are the hopeless pod
the many wildebeest, crossing their annuals
through twirling water-crocs,
Lion Prides
Leopards shifting within the brush
Bacterial infections from ***** tusks
Strange metal boxes
No 7's on this side

I want to blow the ******* skulls off of anything
that aims for you, sweet mare
45-70
Will literally send chunks of it into orbit
Lion or Turtle or window or Children
The most godly thing is a bullet
And the streams of blood that will seed a new ravine
and seep the next feed of riverrun

Will you be mine, then?

I knew it all along,,
The passions fire song,
Has long since been sung.
A turn, another riverrun.
Currents up to speed, A hegemony's
Life force bleeds.
Entropic blades of iron
Coated in gold lions
Of Zion.
And prophets lost yet found.
Reality abounds,
Prophetic or not,
Subjective thoughts
Achieved, not sought.
As time trickles on.
A dream?
Perhaps....
Perhaps not.

riverrun, past Eve and Adams*

in the end there is a beginning
that must never end.
It is hardly difficult to argue
that this is no time for the fatuous
and that nothing is more fatuous
than scribbling poetry at dawn.
But compulsion and desire will out.
We must sing of this world
not some better unknown star.
The given is the wool we weave.
All times are equally terrible
and equally sublime.
The eternal politics of horror
must never stifle the human heart.
Which serves to make clear that

death arrives to feelingfulness,
    all who wish to forget.
sometimes the way seeking the cold
   from which the sun lifts in its hands
    the heat pressed against
   the mad and the strife-torn heart
   affords nothingness still.

pain is etched in stone— all for no one
    to hear, but he who is frozen beside
    the petrified willow like a brook
   unthawed from the ice of its call.
  at the brink of it watch all birds,
    strings, petals of days and the leap
      without any sign of swelter from
    a day's stridence.

  how do they fit through the seam
    of this river— altogether in riverrun
     and aching, wind is full and stringent,
      with its figure white in moon,
       even whiter with hand-woven quiet.

this is when
we keep on keeping on

our fingers laced and kinked
to some incited cold

gives us no unction – i leave
you with irreparable harm

trudges across flame, guesses
the assailant of aches.

when these crosses straighten
within the whelm of your mouth

i will curl them again in sweet,
successive manners of graceless joust

and then when you come before i,
or is it i before you — whichever,

this music is never a notice of
ease — only rescue without warning

or attendance, seeping underneath
pallid floor work, lips puckered

pursed to attenuated form of bow
and mine eyes arrow through

your triple deeds arraying
and i can never ignore how immense

the moon is in the river of the same vein
riverrun, away, wayward—

lisps of white and red
and soon obliterated when both our

avenues close and we walk
home, hands separately yearning.

there is something
                        that needs to be done,
revere in the plot
                 or a merciless yelp of rebellion;
the night consolidates
          into something no hand could grasp
no eyes could pare
          with stabbing vision, paring the skin
of it, leaving it flayed
              hurtling in the corridor like a child
razed by high-rise of sun
          the bucolic ornaments of downtown
seething with hammered words,
       it starts to rain, diving into the gutter.

there is something that needs to be done.
tonight i look past the haze of the window
and see a vision gyrating, like a hand of
hours full and whirling, preyed on
an iron-wrought webbed without relent
from a tarantula's sepulcher,
a seraph denied of flight.

this is what needs to be done;
all-kissing twilight of paradisiacal twining
a name extolled in all that is quiet,
dismembering parts of you
as i try to once more assemble the night
and give it your flair, your tonal voice,
your riverrun hair, your leap of faith,
again and again the vaudeville of stars
  propagate in the starless morning
necessitating unsung surrender
heeding patterns, fluid lithographs
    drawing a new caricature of pain.

WHAT THIS ENTIRE WORLDSPIDERWEB IS ABOUT...

The day of the funeral
an intense cold.

The lions roaring
in the zoo beyond

Fluntern Cemetery.

The confluence of
the rivers he loved

obscured from view
as if forever.

The sun too
a milky misty light.

The silence of the necropolis
broken only by an old deaf man

asking all the time:
"Who...is to be...buried here?"

And when he hears, repeats:
"But who is James Joyce?"

Grave No. 1449 is
meant to be temporary

but even in death
he is Ireland's outcast.

His daughter's madness flickers:
"Cet imbécile...what is he.."

Again a roar of lions.

""...doing under the ground
when will he decide to leave!"

Again the deaf man's question.

"He's watching us
all the time."

As indeed he is.
Life but a Work in Progress.

The author leaves
his death

walks abroad
in all his words.

"bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnth­­unntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk"



The last word is the first "thunder-word" of Finnegans Wake as the babble of launguage falls like the Tower of Babel to...begin again.

From page 3…paragraph 3….third word…of Joyce's WAKE.  The first of the ten. . . one-hundred-word “THUNDER-WORDS.”

It is merely a composite word of different languages proclaiming THUNDER!



The last word is the first "thunder-word" of Finnegans Wake as the babble of language falls like the Tower of Babel to...begin again.

*

When he told me about wanting to read The Wake we were passing as it happens the church mentioned at the beginning of the  Wake...or rather...not passing as we were caught in a traffic jam and so were standing still and the church laughing at us in the Dublin sunshine and delighted to be recognised for its prime position in the book.
So I chanted it like a magic spell( the only bit of the book I knew)and joked that the traffic hated Joyce and would do anything it could to escape both church and words.

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

And like a charm it worked and the traffic flowed fluently onward to my homecoming. It was like cutting the Gordian knot with a sword of words.

The next time he picked me up from the airport we were once again stuck in a knot of traffic at the exact same spot and nothing moving...not even the air.

So he smiles at me and says in a great declaiming voice( he of the so soft voice)and the words hung in the air for a moment,,,

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

And sure enough the traffic snarled and flowed under the magic words and let us continue on to home and our hugs and kisses.

What calling beckons long gone memories,
Those scattered prodigals, sad mother's son
And father's daughter, sailing troubled seas,
To fight upstream a washed out riverrun,
Convinced that something  not yet understood
Will recommend this fallen universe
Of wood and nails to shelter brotherhood,
Through mothers' tears and winter's harsh reverse,
Inspire another backwood symphony
Of blue and green?  Come over now and see.

More than one life only
New York, the other side
Curious coincidence
Susan. Trappist 1.

Knoa in conversation
Navy. Air Force. Thomas More.
The need to battle back
SJ. Thy will be done.

After death discovered
Workin' on a mystery
Ambiguity
Maybe business for my son

Guadalupe green
The Buddha olive, brown
When Love Comes To Town
River Eden riverrun

              Sheep. Deer. Nun.

America, these unconventional
Blues got bags and stretchers
For the blue light special,
Chalk for the teachers
Of the wrong kind of freedom
My old co-worker from
The sawmill days
Steers a riverrun now,
Tugs barges through
The stations of the
Mississippi bridges,
Writes on FB
These protesters should
Get a job
So we don't pay
For their cell phones and health care,
Bullet wounds and bad decisions
Like the color of
Their parents
And the shape
Of their skulls
Phrenologically
Speaking.
He's got no ear for the music,
America's Blues,
Just get off the street
Son, it's yr own
Fault if yr head
Gets Kracked
Or yr shot in the back
By the Blues.
He'll vote for law,
Pardon vigilantes
And fire those *******
Millionaires that dare
To take a knee
Or fail to play the game.

It's good that I'm not important
Live my boring life
Take my son to Wild Wings
Wisdom in the strife

Tired. Exoplanets.
Red Pine on the Way
I fall, I fall, I fall
Nothing gold can stay

Stay Gold, Pony Boy
Robinson middle school
Cordelia is truly noble
Harold Bloom a Fool

I begin again today
Small steps. One at a time.
Call my son, riverrun
Cranberry juice with lime

        Seattle is Sublime