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Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Two

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. At first they do not discern very clearly whence comes the strange agitation that reigns in this place. A wax bubble moon trembles on the honey blue horizon. The sea is black as a field of violets. How will they ever enjoy being in a land to which they are not accustomed?

A vast similitude interlocks all—all identities that have existed or may exist on this globe or any globe. Advancing rapidly to destinies beyond the reach of mortal eye. They say to each other Let us be like two falling stars in the day sky. And so this night is divine, more than any of the others.

But no time is given them to reflect.

What they believe in waits latent forever throughout all the continents. Latent forever.

To fall asleep here is to wake up there.

Last night a white apple fell from the loneliest tree in the world.

Not so much as a seed of that apple exists any longer.


I still hear them singing the rhymes of goodbye.



DECKED



File download: http://armacost5.opendrive.com/files/54295527_asRbj_76f0/Two%20Individual.mp3

Thursday, November 4, 2010

possum

I'd become a successful omnivore
scrambling fear and grabbing what was offered when available,
destined for a roadside end, no trophy head of mine.

So many idiotic deer,
smug birds, perverted dogs.

At home there's a cat and 10 kids
who don't know shit and can't help you.

Maybe I stink, look nuts, work too hard to live.
Starvation and rivals everywhere--
all that slinking just to thieve an egg
knowing you'll never be wolf-sized

all balanced by the
you are no deermouse, it could be worse
routine routine routine.

Neither good and bad nor in between seems tenable.

99 times out of 200 I do the right thing.

Before long you’re just moving on inertia
and if you stop who would know?

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Five Days

Touchdown
Truffula trees
With the car radio
she left me
holding her flowers
and feeling Thanatos'
first fuzzy sentiments

12:12
Fuck off
On the bench
a trio of smokers sit
like a three headed dragon,
too well dressed
for the skaters and the punks

Success
Coffee cups
You'll sing a song and I'll sing a song
You'll pick me up from school at noon
and we'll cross Main Street
to eat lunch
in the back of the library

I hear trumpets
Stay here
blindfolded
and recite Shakespeare
to the wall

All night
no sleep barricades
the dark and the dawn
as days grow attached
like siamese twins

The Hardy Boys Go Nowhere

XV.

“I’m baffled, Frank. We’ve been here six hours. I think I’m going to be kidnapped. I feel cholera coming on. Let’s call Sam Radley, Dad’s assistant.”

“Nonsense, Joe. The truth often lies. If you don’t see it all. But where there’s one clue, there’s bound to be another. All we have to do is wait…and here it comes.” A giant stork entered the ballroom bearing a scroll that fell from its claw into Frank’s hand. The elder lad unfurled a treasure map and exclaimed, “A-ha! It all makes sense now!” But Joe saw something else. “Frank! The X covers the whole page!”


XVI.

“Don’t look now but we’re being followed,” murmured Frank. The steps were steep, but Joe turned slowly. A shudder ran through him as he noticed the grim specter of a 1955 Corvette following them down the stairs.

Friday, September 3, 2010

Iris


O Mississippi, urethra of the American beast
I remember your low-lying turbid simplicity

like the moments before and after
car accidents that could have been avoided.
There are things we know
that we do not know. For real.

Everything is recorded nothing is found.
Words are spoken silence is heard.
Money is gathered money taken.
Arrests are committed. Death is awarded.
Numbers are given. Questions are questioned.
Silence is heard. Predictions are made.
Nothing has changed.
Dead dogs drift to their masters
dissolving in bayou/industrial/bathwater/chyme
as the sea eclipses the sun
and the night skies throb 
of helicopter landing lights
endless useless
endless useless.
Wake up again.
What a life on the balcony—
gothic trees uprooted in blue light and contraflow.
Not my tragedy but, in the midst of it
no camera, no healer
East Coast guy scared by the pool
I saw the momentum of misery 
and turned away stray Christians 
who’d wander in to pray 
the monster moves on
to people praying
the monster moves on
like women and their cancers
pray together
with southwestern stares
through black steel bridges
on the Argosy riverboat
wondering Who do I know
in Houston
Topeka Chicago
and all anyone can do is pray
for masses moving through the complex
like a giant human hand
shouting Fuck the Quarter! 
I don’t know what I’m gonna do
but I’ve gotta get some ice!
My family has drowned.

The mayor says Sewage Snakes Sharks
Sharks with Guns Rape in the Streets
40,000 Deadbodies, Dead Dogs, and the Darkness
We’re All Fucked Thank God for the Army
for the helicopters over
Baton Rouge tonight
Baton Rouge tonight
Baton Rouge tonight
pulsing wound on fire with emergency
arming itself at the WalMart
closing down its windows
opening its doors
aiming at the road.
Don’t panic—dogs everywhere—
the sky chrome as the holding tanks
next to the cosmar facility, feral dogs
spilling fu manchus of drool
over intersections of concrete and dead grass.
The president has spoken. He may even help.

A billboard still stands: You Need A Reason to Smile. Louisiana.
The Lottery.

The numbers/of millions
are spoken since I came.
Where am I? Why am I
behaving badly?
Shall I not
speak my own language?
have my own holidays
and isn’t that why
I came here to start?
Was I not a stray Christian
once wandering?
Am I not here in search of glory
and hurt enough to show it?
Man I’m really freaking out today.
And there’s no way to stop one’s train.
Goddamn this gumbo is almost good enough to stay.

I need a reason to smile
beyond biscuits and gravy

ever since I realized
America
is a miscommunication
and the result
is a crying shame
I cannot fix without leaving
the wreckage and illusions
I am lucky enough to call
someone else’s piece
here at the end of the Mississippi—
please don’t think I didn’t love you.

But Jesus Christ come on.

Saturday, August 21, 2010

blizzardays


Right turn • Red lights • Left turn • Red lights • Straight on • Red lights • Red lights
 
More than enough is enough is never enough.
Too little for too many, too much for too few.
The accidents play out in limitless frames
and we go limping through the stoplights home.

Left turn • Red lights • Straight on • Red lights • Side street • Red lights • Red lights

Snow keeps on coming,
hangs out like fleurs de lis and chandeliers
on streets of neon cashmere,
painful to the touch.

Straight on • Red lights • Side street • Red lights • On ramp • Red lights • Red lights

Whatever happens seems an omen of Rome:
the thrill of agony and the victory of defeat,
the feedback loop of the on-and-on.
Laughter a murder laughter again.

Side street • Red lights • On ramp • Red lights • Lane shift • Red lights • Red lights

So I roll on reality, one-lane highways, growing gaps,
executives come downsize time,
how a carefully engineered face waits behind every door.
Functionaries, understanding
settled like a watermark upon the eye
regulated to the brink of disorder
and blameless for their bombshells.

On ramp • Red lights • Lane shift • Red lights • Off ramp • Red lights • Red lights

Solutions are subversive
and our ills as we desire them to be--
big bad unsolvable
infinitely profitable.
What will we take back when we reclaim remains?

Lane shift • Red lights • Off ramp • Red lights • Red light • Red lights • Red lights

Look, a vehicle breaks from the herd, spins into whiteness.
Cop cars, cherry and snowball blueberry, alight,
butterflies en masse around catastrophe.

Off ramp • Red lights • Red light • Red lights • U turn • Red lights • Red lights

Do we control our destiny? Did the dead?
Up to a point that never settles
like snowflakes lost in outer space, 
shifting down around around around?




Red light • Red lights • U turn • Red lights • Wrong street • Red lights • Red lights


Oh, all you Mercedes with no track to run
aiming your afterburners into
Mercedes with no track to run before you,
are you tuned in to catch the latest contradictions,
are your wheels spinning in ways beyond design?

U turn • Red lights • Wrong street • Red lights • U turn • Red lights • Red lights

You can stop it if you really try you see you can't stop it.
Snow keeps on coming
keeps turning to mineral in white lot light
to cauliflower dark from the dirt.

Wrong street • Red lights • U turn • Red lights • One way • Red lights • Red lights

Two hours on, red lights have me filled
with so much hope and doubt
waiting for something to catch fire.
Almost home; til then
we must submit to aspire.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Still 2



Still 2

Smoky Polaroid with dingy drapes and antique dolls

Hot flowers with black peach and quetzal

Black string and white foam

X-ray with lemongrass

A plate of tequila, silver, and gloves

Tarantula, tangerines, keyboard; Tahitian sky and matrix

Honeycomb and mandala beneath a vortex

Soil grapes and ingot on plate glass

Vincristine, yarrow, and worms

Prescription pills and perfume mister with windshield shards and bloodstained nylons

Pumice and milk with cobra

Teddy bear and retaining wall

Parvati with opal iceberg and Norwegian sky

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Gentlemen I Remember and the Things They Said to Me in Passing

Do you like classic rock, sir?

You don’t say much. I like that.

Don’t underestimate the power of attorneys.

Stop! That’s licentious material!

Of course I remember you. You were the last person to see my son alive.

No it’s not tainted. I just tested it last night!

I always liked pro wrestlers until I learned they grab the hair under each other’s armpits.

Hey man, your girl ever been DP’ed before?

Are you gonna catch the damn thing?

I really want to masturbate in front of you right now.

What do you think should happen to you?

I would have taken you boys down to the station.

You might turn out to be a cocksucker for all I know.

I like this very much. I don’t have any tolerance for this at all.

Man, you some kinda bookass librarian.

I have serious doubts as to whether you wrote this.

What in the world do you want to read that for?

A Merry Life and a Short One


I had no captain to begin with.
The navigator was a basket case.


All compasses went haywire and the anchor rusted through.
The birds mocked me as they took the sails
This man is the opposite of what he wants to be!


Tired of being a stingray in a world where meaning has no time
to be established as the continents I witnessed move,
I saluted all flags, I accepted
all things.

Very soon I was marooned.

The whales were speaking in kazoo.

Comets and sea turtles
told me secrets and lies.
I took my pages from the proverbs of a given sky
prayed with one hand and an ocean wave—
Give me my pineapple wine!



I thought I was really something.

Then I wondered
why no hunters
blazed in search of me
across horizons bluer than cologne;
 

why I'd left no wake of golden bones
and found my torture,
a Manila fortune,
in nothing but new days now shining
too bright to be healthy or real.


One morning
my head wide as the sky
I could not tell if I was breathing
because I was the air

counting the silver
stars up above
listening into the glistening,

a black magician for good.





Friday, July 2, 2010

Midnight Annapolis


Nothing's sadder than listening
to other people party,

toying with the abacus of ideology
while twenty-year old prodigals
get half-bipolar on the blow--exotic dope:
qualuudes, ayahuasca, cool stuff
they briefcased in from cities
richer than thou,
more-well-adjusted than thou.

As they learned money management
I played the lottery--



roasted marshmallows on coat hangers
over candles on the roof,
slid home on the frozen tears of dirty old lunatics
patrolling in Town Cars for love
and watched the earth turn on its side to sleep with me,
absorbed by elementary questions     
we are asked to answer with assumptions:

What is a point? What is a line?
What do you miss when you have everything and no desire?

Shackles soon appeared
laws would focused
fine print enlarged.
I took chess too seriously.
I learned what’s in the biggest books of all.

Some birds never learn to fly and still survive.

The Hardy Boys Go Nowhere

XIII.

How terrified they were when the elevator doors reopened before Egmont’s Somalian wife, tied up in white lace and sent to announce that men with the initials J.H. would be taken that night in honor of James Hickok.

“Wild Bill!” Frank concluded. “Whose face appeared on only one known gold dollar coin in U.S. history. Didn’t Dad tell you? It’s the gold dollar that belonged to Egmont. The gold dollar stolen from Dad’s office. Joe, don’t you see? Joe, you look drugged!”

XIV.

Joe Hardy shook his head to dust the fleas of sleep and fear and beauty from his face, then made his way around the cataract falling from a chasm in the ceiling through a chasm in the floor. He found his brother kneeling by an overturned hat that had sprayed its hold of caramels, butterscotch, licorice, and mints across the room. “Whoever put these candies here must have switched them with the lobster tails and kidnapped Dad,” Frank postulated.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

The Hardy Boys Go Nowhere

XI.

“Frank, wake up. Remember? We came back here to the old Egmont estate? For forty minutes we sat in the car? There was a dead man on the doorstep? His loose molar opened up the door. Remember, Frank? Remember. Remember.”

XII.

Through the radiator grates the Hardy brothers saw a thousand test tubes spewing steam. Behind the chemical fumes, a man and a woman sat interrogating none other than Chet Morton! “So tell me,” the woman asked flirtatiously, “how do you feel about what I’ve just fed you?” Convulsing like a half-dead fat bird, Chet answered, “That one made me feel real good.” “And how about this?” asked the man, offering the lad an unwrapped cracker square. Chet Morton began slobbering fat uncontrollably. “This one makes me feel funny.”
“Chet looks fatter than ever,” whispered Joe.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Rinzō


 
It would have earned him Siberian exile had he not already been in Siberia.
--Ronald Hingley


In 1808 a Japanese cartographer named Mamiya Rinzō traveled to Sakhalin Island to map the land and document its inhabitants and natural features. In spirited ethnographic fashion, he became well known for his ability to assimilate into alien environments, often disguising himself as a beggar or journeyman. The ocean was agitated during earthquakes, producing waves of translation, often of great size and power. Every time the sky lit up, a tornado seemed to jump closer.

There was evidence of a thin atmosphere and even ice volcanoes on this strange world —lakes of molten sulphur and vast fields of sulphur dioxide snow. Great sculpture reached out like invisible gravitational folds and changed the space around it, making it alive with its presence.



Rinzō struggled to make out beyond plants the first stumbling steps of the Invisible in the mud. We are informed that fireflies placed inside a glass or transparent tube were used as lamps. He was unafraid and eating a mushroom when he lifted his gaze to the towering fortress that loomed before him.

Bright moon was shining on the Rainbow Skirt Palace.

The castle kept changing colors as it spun around to investigate its new foe. It was smooth, grayish, and partly membranous, with a prominent vascular pattern.* In it were present the torturers, the martyrs and the beasts all together, all at the same time—Terrors enough to have daunted the stoutest Hearts that ever were placed in Cases of Flesh and Blood. Drawn by admiration and wonder, he approached the building.



The gates were open, but he stopped short of entering them and began to sob.

"Open to me the gates of righteousness; I shall enter through them, I shall give thanks to the LORD. Through long years I have not ceased to experiment, neither have I spared any labor of mind. I am the surgeon of old authors and heal the wounds of dust and ignorance. I demand that you open the gates at once!”

The gates were open he did not enter. Picture him raving wildly at the wall as he writes his questions to heaven.

My thought is clinging as to a lost learning slipped down out of the minds of men.

After a while, even the will to distinguish between what is happening and what seems to be happening fades!

Do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose?


Alone, man has less than half himself for company.

In brief, he is told he is like anyone else and that he isn't!

On the other hand, most evidence suggests a very different conclusion!

Lost is the lost, I know'st it, and the past is past.

If you do not open to me, I will kill myself before this door.



The castle kept turning around to look, and look again. Now heat poured out on a terrifying scale. Suddenly, the castle wall became a prison wall, as if its stomach had come out of its body and digested Rinzō before going back in. Rules and meanings became dislodged from those of society’s unconfined counterpart. Pushing and pulling on the rock he yelled, “Help me. Let me out.”


The mythic land contrasted to the inescapable empire within which he remains, his reign or his captivity, which you please. Time after time birds were heard, but before one got within range the calling would cease and no amount of watching would locate them.

Although they have never been printed in any atlas or map collection, his tapestries ought to be considered as maps based on first-hand observation. He saw fantastically sculpted limestone caves and stalactites, a stupendous waterfall, volcanic springs of boiling mud, and sulphurous blowholes. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.


Pirates were about, plundering and killing at sea.

Maimyo Rinzō is still standing at the gate.






--------------------------------------------------------------------
*Two philosophers, one in Italy and one in Germany, maintain that its surface consisted of transparent crystal.


Sources

Pt.1
1. Brett Walker, “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: cartography and empire” Journal of Historical Geography, V. 33 # 2, p. 283
2. Daniel Brower, Russia’s Orient
3. Hitchcock, Elementary Geology, p. 184
4. www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0506/feature6/assignment1.html

Pt.2
1. http://www.spaceprime.com/early-earth.htm
2. Charley Parker, “Gian Lorenzo Bernini,” http://www.linesandcolors.com/2007/07/

Pt.3
1. Kazantakis, Saviours of God, p.51
2. Adapted from James Rennie, A Natural History of Insects
3. http://djeugene.blogspot.com/2007/07/todays-musical-choice-that-blogger-wont.html
and
Sheila Paulson, Against a Wall of Stone

Pt.4
1. , Wen Tingyun in The Poetics of Decadence, Fusheng Wu. SUNY Press, Albany, 1998


Pt.5
1. Scotland, http://www.jcamberlyn.com/SCLDphotos.htm
And
Abode of the Spider,” http://www.soldak.com/Depths-of-Peril/Stories/Abode-of-the-Spider.html
2. “Malignant mesenchymoma of the uterus, arising in a leiomyoma” www.intjgynpathology.com/pt/re/intgynpath/selectreference.htm;jsessionid=LKshQN1cJT1hXTGG1w3gc9sGQXhGTRYk
3. Archpriest V. Potapov, “Crucified Kosovo,” http://www.kosovo.net/erpkiminfo_feb04/erpkiminfo15feb04b.html
And
Daniel Dafoe, Captain Singleton, p. 48
4. Bulfinch’s Mythology, Cupid and Psyche
5. Generic
and
www.hauntedbritain.net/index.php?categoryid=8&p2_articleid=26

Pt.6
1. Psalm 118:19
2. John Yarker, Aureus: The Golden Tractate of Hermes Trismegistus
3. John Earle’s Microcosmography, Cambridge Univ Press, 1897, Ch. 45
4. www.myths.com/pub/rpg/stories/navero/nav06.html
5. Original
6. ?

Pt. 7
1. Black Marigolds
2. Ralph Nader
3. Mary Shelly, Frankenstein
4. Joseph Kesselring, “Alone.”
5. Erving Goffman, Stigma, p. 124
6. ?
7. Catullus
8. Moliere, The Jealousy of Le Barbouille


Pt.8
1. www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=95001254
2. Nova Nik, Terrafroming Nova, http://www.posetteforever.com/discussion3150.html
3. Foucault
4. ?
5. Paul Yoder, Marquis de Sade, Building Walls
6. www.millicentandme.com/mywritingsamples.

Pt.9
1. The Literature of Satire, Charles A. Knight
And
Robinson Crusoe
2. Wilfred Osgood & Boardman Conover, Field Museum of Natural History, v. 12 # 3, “Game Birds from Northwestern Venezuela,” Natural History Museum, Chicago, 1922, p. 34.
Pt.10
1. Brett Walker, “Mamiya Rinzō and the Japanese exploration of Sakhalin Island: cartography and empire” Journal of Historical Geography, V. 33 # 2
2. Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita, Archipelago, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999, p 80
3. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulations

Pt.11
1. Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita, Archipelago, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999 p 135
2. Original

Footnote
Stillman Drake, Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science. Ch. 3


STRIPPED




DECKED

File Download: http://armacost5.opendrive.com/files/42487043_P5vMR_fd07/rinzo_1.mp3


Turnstile

I am the same shit as yesterday, the recidivist’s door,
the same shit as two days ago and the day before,
timeless as a baseball game where nobody cares
because nobody scores. Outside the hospital
the addicts glare.  At the graveyard,
the hospital, and the big gull of the sky.
I pushed the hospital’s revolving door,

came out again, saw them hunched over and walking too fast,
asleep beside convenience stores,
scrunched up like wrinkles in a glare-blasted face
under Beauty Island’s sign for HUMAN HAIR!—
transvestite ladies flashing the corner,
ex-boxers in wheelchairs, newcomers. Berserkers, the flare
just glowing as they try to stay composed, explain
Excuse me, sir, I don’t mean to impose…”,
one foot in the revolving door

and one foot twittering on asphalt
waiting to run, forced to obey commands from on high—
doomsday wasp helicopters, the ghetto bird
some called it, rounding the mass
to the high summer grass, to downtown intersections,
and asphalt homes stocked full of pharmaceuticals
and dead black men patrolled by helicopters
waiting to be wheeled in through revolving doors.
Outside it’s twilight, packs of kids on motorbikes
popping wheelies through the Mac trucks,
busting windows, slinging dope, out of adoptions.

Less and less is Baltimore
a city of options.