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.