Cyborg never heard a real record neither

“I went to a Spice Girls concert,
when I was 14,
I think I turned out
okay.
I wore my tuxedo. . .”
a
fucking weirdo
they all cheer waving
chickens in the air.
you can’t be a cop as well as
a cagefighter - -
always choose
cages and chickens.
corazon diablo
every one of two trying to cure a make believe
illness.
for daily use;
take with food;
on an empty stomach-
morning chaos, eternity chaos

facing each other
eating pickled lettuce
and chicken from a shared solitary plate
trading dex for dinner
chicken for speed
merry
on our
fucking
way.

Seabright

A little short story I had to write for Poetics...

The aged-grey curtains hung lank on the little window of the door standing ajar, letting in the pungent algae smell of the receding tide now tepid in the mid-day sun. She moved about the cluttered space slow and deliberate while pulling plastic half-broken teeth through lank hair, also grey, and humming a tune with lyrics long forgotten. It almost sounded like a hymn. From the ceiling methodically hung by pieces of twine were shells, driftwood, dried lavender, beer bottle caps, the spines of small animals, torn bats wings and anything else that delighted her time addled mind. If you looked closely, their shadows could be seen from the road waving imperceptibly amidst dust and the wings of houseflies.

Behind the house sit rotten shambles of neglected wood and blocks, another project her son had never felt compelled to resume, beside which stood a barrel for rainwater. A relic and a ruin. That same son muttering through brown teeth about civility and the way things were done had laboriously and conscientiously (or so he assured her) installed a septic system for the shack but it made no difference to her. What was plumbing when next to the roar of the grey Atlantic, she wondered while he castigated, sat passive and silent with an eye out the window.

Stare through the same frame for too long and nothing remains where it was meant to be. Who put that pebble there? How does the grass presume its place between gravel tracks for tires? She knew one thing. She knew that Rupert was where he ought to be. Green eyes shining and fixed on the horizon. Tail pointing towards the sun, or moon, or ceiling- fixed and loyal- better than any child. Quieter too. At times it grew burdensome the way he refused to bend; she always stooped to him. At times she worried that their life together was growing dull.

Morning after morning on days when the weather was good, which she believed (and who shall refute her) were fewer with each passing year, the two went about their daily ritual. After dragging the comb through her own hair she would brush Rupert until they were dapper and ready to face the sea. She’d leave him for a moment and cross over the rubble to the barrel to fill the copper kettle. By the time it shrieked on the stovetop she would have assembled their spot in the sun, a wicker rocking chair draped with a frayed patchwork quilt, and a yellow paperback. The bowls of kibble and water were set out for Rupert. While the tea was steeping, she would gingerly lift Rupert from beside the single bed - always mindful of his delicate tail, and carry him by his wooden base into the sun. The rays of light refracted in his glass eyes animating them like the flash of a squirrel might have in days gone by.

And so they sat. Hour after hour. The children passed with dirty knees and brine in their hair, transfixed always by the incandescent copper coat of the frozen beast. They stole glances over shoulders and through tangled hair. Their parents had taught them it was rude to stare. The tide came in, the tide went out. The neighborhood kids grew up and moved away, into the city or to the trailer park, and still they wondered about the dog that never barked and the apparition of a woman by its side.

Maybe the wind was different that day. Maybe it hadn’t changed. She passed through the door and through the yard but no kettle accompanied her. Clutching an old metal measuring cup she plunged her parchment skin arm into the baptismally cool water. The water from last night’s storm spilled over the edges as she drank deep from the metal cup, her hair still wild from sleep. Not sleep. What goes on when all is dark behind those grey curtains... endless footsteps shuffling across the floor...ghoulish incantations or dehydrated snores...padding paws....

Stooping once more she gathered Rupert in her arms and carried him beyond the porch, setting him instead on the passenger seat of the Oldsmobile. The tide was high that morning and laughing against the rocks with breathless foam. They drove off down the gravel path and away from the little white house, the rapturous shore. They came to a field where the lupins grew in a wild congregation of purples and pinks, greeting card hues. She continued to drive over the shoulder and into the flowers. An onlooker might have gasped- had the driver fallen asleep? Who could be drunk so near to dawn?

Slowing to a standstill, lost in the blooms, the car door swung wide open. Wrapping those arms once more around Rupert she carried him to the peak of the hill. Copper and grey, they swam among the gaudy stalks. The sky grew dark with the beating wings of a swarm of sparrows, common little farm birds so numerous they cast a shadow like a storm cloud. Lost in the commotion, the flurry, the morning stood still. Out of the stillness came the soft slow notes of a hymn punctuated once, twice, again by the bark of a dog. Among the waving lupins a copper tail wagged too.

Peach Farm

PEACH FARM

I washed my brain and hung it to dry

In a steady breeze on a black clothes line.

I put a blanket down where it looked as if

The sun would be for a few hours more.

I stood by a long way off, on a tower,

On a rock, on a rooftop made of glass.

I remembered half of bible history in reverse,

I watched myself go back to being a romance

Between two hellbent cells.

I followed an earthworm as far into its veriform

Home as it would let me go.

I followed ants carrying nearly invisible separate

Parts of something they wanted to carry back.

I no longer had a face, if I ever did.

The angle of the sun showed me shadows of things

I'd never seen.

I looked at my hands through a magnifying lens

Long enough for smoke to emerge.

I wouldn't need that brain again, I left it

For birds, in lieu of words, and seeds.

- Dara Weir

(From Jubilat, Issue 4)

give me some everest

stars ain't lied yet

back to school, playing the fool

i am that fish.

BEAR HAND BOXING

They almost got it.

MORE MAUS

Who is phone?

crazy dream machine week, embarked on a 2ci trip with b. and had mystic visions midst the outremont hasids. intentional surrender to insanity producing interesting and hysterical results set to the soothing (?) sounds of the one flew over the cuckoo's nest soundtrack.

see above blake-ian vision for an approximation.

i have decided that a large problem with summer is that it leaves me with far too much time to ponder the end of days, and that just doesn't do anybody any good.

back to the homeland tomorrow for a maritimey august.

summer reading list of a lazy student who will not be able to read for fun in less than a month:

-finish dr. zhivago by boris pasternak

-finish the master and the margarita by mikhail bulgakov

-under the volcano by malcolm lowry

-mythology by edith hamilton

-tropic of capricorn by henry miller

Nobody wants to get stuck stoned next to thaaaat guy.

Maus is Missing

I'm spending my sunday morning with a summer sinus infection reading some dense but delightful pop theory by the professor cum pop artist John Maus, he is an admirer of R. Stevie Moore and contemporary of Ariel Pink. He has a PHd and is a lecturer at a university in Hawaii and has some pretty immense observations about pop music and it's evolution. I would do a horrible job trying to summarize so here is a link instead:

http://www.moorestevie.com/press/maus.html

And a snippet from thoughts on R. Stevie:

"In the pop song 'Hobbies Galore,' R. Stevie uses the particulars of his musical situational state to exceed that state, to concentrate neither surplus value nor social meaning, but an excess of all particularity as regards the way of listening called music. The similarity of R. Stevie and Ariel, is above all, that they exceed the standardization of pop through excessive affirmation of this particular in all of its own particulars: standardization of form, standardized emotional intention, standardization of genre, and so on."

"The conclusion of this brief and unthinking text is that music's new master - commercial capitalism - though the cruelest master music has ever known (think how unlike other musical truths the musical truth of this situational state is), is unable to prescribe entirely what we listen to in this way called music. Both discrete subjects of the singular truth examined show thinking what remains in excess of this prescription. Moreover, they show thinking that this excess is subjectively wrested through concentrating the contingent particulars of standardization, materialization, and multiplication. Finally, they show thinking that these particulars, though often dismissed, offer a way of bringing-forth the immediacy of this way of listening called music universally."

mod wolves can save any day

irony in ma inbox

today's word of the day is not encouraging

July 25

Poetaster

(\POH-uh-tass-ter\)

Meaning: an inferior poet

...wompwomp.

tent-tative

i'm sad i missed evolve this weekend, any opportunity to bathe in a waterfall and camp with the gang is a grand chance missed.

here is a little poem that i've been tinkering with on my typewriter. once i get a scanner i hope to upload it because it is much nicer in ink the whole format falls apart on here for some reason. oh wellz.

I

an infant cries, the yard below

spinning

shamanic reveries

held up between a moment and

a distant port.

idly i wait

cooly considering

the wind of happenstance

for i am fickle as fate

and no less blind

wine spills as easily as time

and who am i to

for that is that

it rained today.

ca va ca va ca va ca va they say

-i was not invited

to the barbecue

below.

it's a shame

for we could have chatted about the weather

or caudillos

or soup.

i smoke upstairs instead.

II

solitude and summer rain

tidal thunder has a hold of the night

i walked down empty streets as the sky crumbled

carried softly in doughy reverie

stoned, lucid

lovely solitude

found in empty alleys and flooded nights

i do not feel woe or want

perhaps un chat at the

base of my bed

count thy blessings sip thy tea

i feel something in this brew

the devil says he

feels

it,

too.

walk do not rest watch do not listen there is no time for punctuation

the apocalypse is here so grab the cat i'm ready for my just reward

the pleasures of the flesh were too great i saw i wept i reaped sweet

fate but still the devil is behind his schedule

the pot has gone cold, flip the switch, another brew

oh never mind, i've had

it

we're through

twiddle these thumbs until doomsday comes

they say i have a

morbid

streak

hah.

III

on return from camping in mile end

moon imitates the street lights

cafe olimpico waverly and st. viateur

streetlights

mock the moon

their iced coffees are perfection, ya know?

i've been off the radar

couch camping

crouching kodak hidden gardens

running away from

home is

just as

novel at the

ripened age of twenty

seasonal imperfections and the sensation of

eternal childhood

summer

walking smoking talking bliss

as the humid air

keeps close by, the

whole

lonesome

way.

i want to force all of my friends onto a painted bus and drag us to a natural habitat-centric rehab that is dominated by a waterfall and the soothing sounds of bill murray speaking and boosting our self esteem. probably over-seen by an anarchist voodooist but i may be getting a little specific.

bjork talking tv

i wish this were all that science ever had to be.

what makes me think i'm so cool?

THANK YOU NYWANI (and jack's lady friend with a baby)

Poor Martha, She has no clue...

....that I was writing a scathing review of her for half of the last class.



Martha, O and what a Martha this one is. She just oozes Martha.
Sitting there with her little girl wire frames, squinting though she's in the front row.
Poorly powdered nose titled down bookwards
O mousy hair, mousy voice, mousy Martha.
It looks like she's decided to spice things up, the flirt that she is. Perhaps she had grand visions of imitating a starlet from eras gone by for she has tied a foolish scarf around her pale neck, drooping, it complements her perfectly.
It is washed out, like her.
Her shorts are khaki, of course. O and Dear me, what shoes peep toe bronze flat-notes. Dressed for success this one.
Crossing her arms, nose titled towards the professorial horizon...when she furrows her brow and tilts to type a nascent double chin forms.
Dios mios dolly, what is your heritage?
I can imagine you as easily with your gawky limbs in a cow pasture dreaming wild horses, or on the volleyball court with your massive paws smacking a ball to and fro. Maybe in some Albertan highway town, scanning items under fluorescent lights your milky skin a bitter blue. Price check!
Oh I saw that Martha, saw that hawk like scowl as you train your beady eyes (smothered beneath those adolescent frames) at another girl with the audacity to ask a question. You nod your head obediently as the Professor drones, laugh on cue, throw your gaze. Whoa girl, settle.
But here we are. You and I. You are probably a sweet and naive girl who loves her family, team sports, and doing her best. I can already see you full grown in your smart suit (panty lines showing and thick soled shoes perhaps?) spinning the cog as I spin out into oblivion, the wild night, the falling stars or just into some tangential ramble...
But here we are.
Adrift on this ocean, the scholastic tide that drags us, gratingly, as pebbles on the shore.
And now we sit, dreaming of Order and Progress, Brazil
And we sit and we write our notes
Martha in her khaki shorts
I in a vivid floral cotton shift
Contentedly idle and passive, perhaps peaceful or maybe just stoned
And so we sit and talk genocides and freedom at once
Me, Martha, and Latin American History 360.

El Acordeón del Diablo and Franciso "Pacho" Rada

Long story short kick ass 93 year old Colombian accordion player. Invented his own style and was generally rad. I had a big ol blurb written up but just deleted it. So here is someone else's thoughts: "Notorious throughout the Columbian countryside for traveling from village to village and party to party, playing his accordion for food, liquor, or just a few cents. For decades he wrote and played hundreds of songs in practical obscurity, much like many of the great blues men of the early 1900’s in America.
In Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic “One hundred years of solitude” (1967) he was fictionalized as Francisco el Hombre, a troubadour who comes face to face with the devil one night on a lonely road and gets the better of him in an accordion duel to save his own soul."
I can genuinely say he could be described as a mystical high stepper and sassy ol' man. Fun fact he is the patriarch of over 422 descendants including great grandchildren. Like I said, high stepper.

Immortal Drunkenness by Thomas Wolfe

Immortal drunkenness!
What tribute can we ever pay,
What song can we ever sing,
What swelling praise can ever be sufficient
To express the joy, the gratefulness, and the love
Which we, who have known youth and hunger in
America,
Have owed to alcohol?

We are so lost, so lonely, so forsaken, in America:
Immense and savage skies bend over us,
And we have no door.

But you, immortal drunkenness,
Came to us in our youth
When all our hearts were sick with hopelessness,
Our spirits maddened with unknown terrors,
And our heads bowed down with nameless shame.
You came to us victoriously,
To possess us, and to fill our lives with your wild music,
To make the goat-cry burst from our exultant throats,
To make us know that here upon the wilderness, the
savage land,
That here beneath the immense, inhuman skies of time,
In all the desolation of the cities,
The gray unceasing flood-tides of the manswarm,
Our youth would soar to fortune, fame and love,
Our spirits quicken with the power of mighty poetry,
Our work go on triumphantly to fulfillment
Until our lives prevailed.

What does it matter, then,
If since that time of your first coming,
Magic drunkenness,
Our head has grown bald, our young limbs heavy,
And if our flesh has lain
Battered, bleeding in the stews?

You came to us with music, poetry, and wild joy,
When we were twenty,
When we reeled home at night
Through the old moon-whitened streets of Boston
And heard our friend, comrade, and our dead companion,
Shout through the silence of the moonwhite square:
"You are a poet and the world is yours."
And victory, joy,
Wild hope, and swelling certitude
And tenderness
Surged through the conduits of our blood
As we heard that drunken cry,
And triumph, glory, proud belief
Was resting like a chrysm around us
As we heard that cry,
And turned our eyes then
To the moon-drunk skies of Boston,
Knowing only that we were young,
And drunk,
And twenty,
And that the power of mighty poetry
Was within us,
And the glory of the great earth
Lay before us-
Because we were young and drunk and twenty,
And could never die!


Magic
And who shall say-
Whatever disenchantment follows-
That we ever forget magic,
Or than we can ever betray,
On this leaden earth,
The apple-tree, the singing,
And the gold?


New Orleans -- River

And he looked upon
The huge yellow snake of the river,
Dreaming of its distant shores,
The myriad estuaries
Lush with tropical growth that fed it,
All the romantic life
Of plantation and canefields that fringed it,
Of moonlight,
Of dancing darkies on the levee,
Of slow lights on the gilded river-boat,
And the perfumed flesh of black-haired women,
Musical wraiths
Below the phantom drooping trees.

The Last Fan in Town Pt. I

Always a tad on the sardonic side, I tend to view my life as a pitiful cosmic farce played out to a humorous but melancholy tune. I mean nothing major, but the devils in the detail then isn't it. Just the regular mundane maritimer "Allison is coasting"- que sera...melodramatic childhood that whole grab-bag of sordid adult affairs, even an evil step-mother to call my own: that rare harpie the kitty bitch.
Day like another in the haze of summer, stumble silly stoned for an extraneous course in Latin American History (really only there for Magical Realism's sake) mediocre mumbling too many tablets, vice like pills that bring repose to the anxious mind. Blurry lens of ink smudged page and candle light that flickers, less fickle still than inspiration.
A sip of vodka more.
Penance, bare-foot rain drenched through barren humidor streets, empty city in deluge as I trudge home empty handed.
For the naked sole grass spooks filled with specters of hep c, needles, beer bottles. This is inner city foot crime- the latest among worries. Another day, Another Night without that Sacred and Elusive Fan.
The hunt for cool air continued from fluorescent store to fluorescent store carried by tunnels, by foot, by mania and by heat stoke. Ah those funny little failures.
Let me put it this way, I'm the type of gal who gets tonsillitis during a heat wave. The kind to hide from her shrink for 2 months, and when she sucks up the courage to go ends up almost missing the appointment due to a flooded metro stop. My stop, no less.
I guess you could say I just returned from Spain more blonde, more boozed, more brown and more adrift than before
Between schools, between vices. Praying to Santa Sangria while worrying for my bloated temple of flesh and yet seeking dope daily. Weaving through a forrest of foreign cigarettes and falling into valleys of sweet summer grass. Impersonate the cottage life, keep the phone off the hook and play Board games to pass the time. Yahtzee, is this the summer speeding before my eyes?
The rain falls like any other sultry storm, penitent for the sin of heat. Absolving and yet degraded. Drenched through like some hopeful Magdalene--
Soon the heat returns and the air is a thick shroud.
The city rests content in sin again, just as the cigarette above my chin.
Chased too many waterfalls and too many benzos with vodka.
Big author's little stories; poems...this is a non-commital thing, as all things seem to be. Roots are puzzling, do they keep you resting where you were, can you grow them a-new, what is it to transplant (resist urge to make rancid pun here)
But the vultures circle overhead. How did they find me here in the wilds of Quebec, floating in balconied limbo above a motorway like the others, named for Saint Urbain. Urbane, oh how it all becomes. But we all have our Saints don't we?
Arrow ridden San Sebastian, or a sacred Voodoo Bull, the Catholics, the Atheist, addicts all the same. Santa Vino, now that just rrrrrolls off the tongue. Twenty and nothing better to do than to lay below the vultures and try to shield my eyes, a pity it would be to wake up blind.

Mikail Vrubel

Is a very dreamy russian painter.

Lying in bed feeling languidly relieved from the oppression of the recent heatwave. Thunderstormed out on the balcony with my feline companions as I wait for something unspeakable or misplaced or redundant. Deciding to convert the summertime apartment into a make-believe cottage, we have the board games to prove it-yahtzee, uno, monopoly you want it we got it kid. Hell I'm so bored I'm gonna audit another class, well that and the fact that a little latin american history never hurt anyone (and neither did magical realism...except for that one time: http://m.assetbar.com/uua9TgBw2.gif )
I assured myself I would figure out how to get the creative juices flowing again after spain, but so far not even sangria does the trick.

drivel from espana

-----
heart beats burnt red umber,
pumped by a dusty recollection.
In swathes of butter yellow
the grain sings a hymn
that windswept
becomes an ecstatic fiesta shout:
and oh how the poppies dance and sway.
soul now resting on the tip of a windmill,
undulating in the zephyr
weaving fantasies of authors and ingenioso
while lines of cypress mark
my mourning--
unwilling departure.
In this land my blood flows red wine,
voices hushed in dust driven wind
as my spirit floats over mountains to brief petal rest.
To be smothered here in this field of hay, wildflowers
-leave me to lay awhile
I will crouch and cry
supplicate to sweet Apollo
until I breathe as the knotted arms
of the olive tree.
rooted -- restful


illness in the morning

Giant of a baby
swaddled in white
hallucinating crosses, the faces of men, female ecstasy-
incorrect buttons
feed acidic breath
Dehydration.
twists and turns
of a profaned digestive trail
Do not eat the egg.
bright beaked black bird
seen through a crack in the door
i’m tired of this base bodily burn
lull an empty core stranded without flight
hot tea please,
i do not desire foul solids now.
a day to waste and ache and whine
birdsong mocks my stomach
Do not eat the egg.

groucho gauchos

gaucho girls, gaucho girls
what do you scowl for?
unsexed grime
oh no not another with a guitar
dreadnought hair,
and rats on your necks
i suppose you are right to keep scowling

afternoon in lorca park

closing our hands in the sweet dusk of grass
verdure and waste and the sigh
of the sparrow-
feathered wine spills from my lips.
ever the journey, never the rest
respite gives way to spite
and that to indifference-
a birdsong of dewdrops caught
in fading light.
oh melancholy petal life,
delicate and transient
to rest a wing for a while
to lay tangled in branches.
departures like nicotine left on the tongue
chased down with juices mostly toxic
and dull.
exhale like my lungs full of smoke
longing, lulled..

TuneTime

Right Road to Dubland- The Jahlightsl



Stay Away from Me- Bloodshot Bill

pretty ruskie poetry

How can you bear to look at the Neva?

How can you bear to look at the Neva?
How can you bear to cross the bridges?.
Not in vain am I known as the grieving one
Since the time you appeared to me.
The black angels' wings are sharp,
Judgment Day is coming soon,
And raspberry-colored bonfires bloom,
Like roses, in the snow.

Anna Akhmatova


(Photo by Tim Barber)



Along the hard crust of deep snows

Along the hard crust of deep snows,
To the secret, white house of yours,
So gentle and quiet – we both
Are walking, in silence half-lost.
And sweeter than all songs, sung ever,
Are this dream, becoming the truth,
Entwined twigs’ a-nodding with favor,
The light ring of your silver spurs...

Anna Akhmatova
(photo by L.Burnett)

Summer Jamz

Joe Meek produced John Leyton- Johnny Remember Me

Joe Meek- I Hear a New World

THE THIRD MIND

Back from a week away in Long Island, bopping around Brooklyn and being generally overheated in NYC. Went to see an exhibit about a Burroughs and Gyson's book The Third Mind that was never published in it's entirity, pretty dreamy but I was a little bit too space cadety due to antibiotics, painkillers, dehydration and downers at the time to explain any of it here now.

Fun other finds: under the sea tapestry purse, book of coloured Bosch plates, Dorothy Parker and Tolstoy short stories, REAL ARIZONA DENIM overhalls with a horse logo, Marc Jacobs 70's style running shorts (so cheap!!) and much more.

Bleary eyed memories of blunts over that aweful concrete skyline coruscating like the hoor it is.

half in love with easeful death

monuments in miniature

My Supreme Teen Dreams

Thought I'd compile a few of my current teen idols to celebrate my last days as a TEENage.

(Also am emptying disc drive)

P.s Hem's cat look likes Taffy.

Meditations in the Mists of Mania

Quietly-

I wait for the change to occur.

I want to drain the poisons from my pores

effortless-

it wont be.

turn down blinds to sleep it off-

or mimic slumber.

oh please would you

take these knots from my back

please do not take the cat

lie down in the sun

to resume nothing.

sweet repose and underclothes.