Evo 2

Tis in the silent isthmus-hour of time, where light and darkness have alternate birth.

Everything is receding from everything else and there is no center.

Rock and ice particles swirling around the young sun collide and merge.

Dense iron sinks out of magma oceans to form a metallic core.

One heavy collision flings away the Earth’s crust, part of which ends up in orbit around the planet: the Moon is born.

Amino acids gradually come together into increasingly complex molecules.

A many-chambered shell resembling the ammonite unwinds.

Large trees stretch out their arms across the stream, and the steep, earthy banks are clothed with ferns and zingiberaceous plants.

All is stiff, formal, bright, and green, monotonously green.

Attracted by the pieces of offal and clotted blood which float from a carcass, many large fishes keep darting about, fighting for the dainty morsels.

Laurasia is in two parts, these being separated by the Tethys Ocean, which widens to the east.

The Sea, like the snow-cloud with its flakes, in a calm is always letting fall on its bed showers of microscopic shells, and all pelagic life adds to the showers.

A herd of four-legged Proceratops drifts ponderously in the shadows of the dune fields.

The shining coral reflects shafts of light in every direction.

The glaciers so grandly displayed are of every form, some crawling through gorge and valley like monster glittering serpents.

Now, more than ever, everything new and beautiful seems to arrive already haunted by its own demise.





--for loren eisley and boards of Canada

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Sources

1. Father Tabb, “Sympathy”
2. Martin Rees, ed. Universe, “Expanding Space” DK, London, 2005 (42)
3. Tim Appenzeller, “Earth in the Beginning” http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/solar-system/early-earth.html
4. John Valley, “A Cool Early Earth?”
5. Evolutionary Timeline, http://www.worldhistory-poster.com/en/screenshots/science-evolution/early_evolution.gif/view
6. http://www.fossils-facts-and-finds.com/archaean.html
7. Samuel St. John, Elements of Geology
8. Alfred Russell Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, Ch. 5
9. . Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey, p. 68
10. Eugene Andre, A Naturalist in the Guianas
11. Building Planet Earth, Peter Cattermole
12. Matthew Fontaine Maury
13. Michael Novacek, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs, Anchor, New York, 1996
14. Urashima Taro, Japanese tale
15. John Muir, Travels in Alaska, p. 52
16. Caroline Evans, Fashion at the Edge

Museum

The seated female figure on the right is classic,
unmistakable Rubens, a voluptuous body of very
white flesh and a magnificent face. The total
effect is perfection, an ideal combination of real-
istic details and abstract forms. Her ice-blue eyes
glance at me furtively from the two apertures
in her gold encrusted fire-opal face, united by one
faultless line with a straight nose finely chiseled
as a cameo. Resembling the love-child of a Burmese
princess and a hammerhead shark, she is somehow
astonishingly beautiful. Over and over when she sleeps
the butterfly's imprisoned in her dreams; for there she was
fashioned who turns the key to open the supreme love. It is
unlikely that we ever will know what the artist meant to convey.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Sources

1 and 2. Stefano Zuffi, Baroque Painting. Barron’s: Hauppauge, 1999, p. 316.
3. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged. Signet: New York, 1996.
4. Thomas Bulfinch, “Cupid and Psyche.”
5. Adriana, “Antonella and the Idols,” posted 3/8/07.
http://vh1blog.vh1.com/2007/03/antonella_the_i_1.html
6. Robin. http://www.reelingreviews.com/freedomland.htm
7. Jean de Berg, The Image. Grove Press: New York, 1966, p. 84.
8. Pablo Neruda, "Body of a Woman." W.S. Merwin, tr.
9. Dora Levy Mossanen, Courtesan. Simon & Schuster: New York, 2005, pg. 169.
10. Anna Harriette Leonowens, Romance of the Harem, ch. 9.
11. http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~msred/novel.htm (defunct) and
Veena Reddy, http://www.fast-women.com/athletes/interviews/2005/veenareddy.html
12. Sir Walter Scott, Guy Mannering.
13. Antonin Artaud, Heliogabalus. Creation: Washington, D.C., 2003, p. 38, Alexis Lykiard, tr., and
adaptation of Cornell Woolrich, "Death in the Yoshiwara," Night and Fear. Carroll & Graf: New York, 2004, p. 117.
14. Pete Lyons, The Complete Book of Lamborghini. Beekman House: New York, 1988, pg. 148.
15. Jerry Oltion, The Getaway Special. Tom Doherty Associates: New York, 2001, p. 309.
16. Artaud, Heliogabalus, p. 32.

The Hardy Boys Go Nowhere

II.

It was the only night all year that rain fell. It was the same night children went looking for butterscotch, caramel, licorice and mints, but found only a pot full of lobster tails curled up like armadillos under the lace wallpaper next to the picture frames. “What strange treats,” Joe remarked. Frank explained that lobsters are fertile only three hours a year, but Joe, who had always imagined that lace was the product of a great black spider, dreamt himself asleep in a web of eight hungry arms.

Itinerary for Mark Ruffalo

Sometimes it is necessary to jump
the turnstiles and make for the shuttle before the afterburners
reach a safe temperature. Here’s the deal:
You go years and don’t think of love.
The castles and intimate monuments
Of youth moulder, administered by
The sad truth that sometimes
Seeing is the only way to remembering.
What is elastic fissures. The new girl- will she pan out?
People are on your side, Mark Ruffalo.
“Belief is not only for the believers”-
something you learned. Something
you told to a friend, over clay oven bread, in tin foil,
in a cold spring, just before closing time,
in somebody’s hometown.

--Anders Sh. Mandersson

Three Years Around

Busted flat in Baton Rouge and the why keeps slipping through my mind like mercury.

Je ne sais plus parler.

I used to be so ambitious—ambitious to achieve something beyond the normal.
I was living in the mirror as in a sea, secret and senseless and selfish like the shellfish. I hid under the bed when it thundered and fled in terror from the sight of Etna's flames. I shut myself in with my soul and the shapes came eddying forth.

One day the forest blossoming in front of my door became charged with aggressiveness and tried to annihilate me by throwing unusually large numbers of jaguars on my trail.

Je ne sais plus parler.

I saw everything at once and wondered

What is the point of learning that another realm exists beyond ocean?

The Child-King became an anarchist. I was against everything, systematically and on principle. (Once I took a whale and weighed it, and then sent my friends what I reckoned to be its weight in fish.) I became a wild and savage creature who lived among the tombs and wandered naked through the countryside,

sallied forth into the public streets and rushed through all the arcades like a maniac. My wife said, “You must try to be more human with everyone and not fly into a rage so quickly, nor speak so loudly that even the neighbors can hear.”

Je ne sais plus parler.
Ah, the power to speak well is taken as the surest index of a sound understanding,
but for me it is as complicated as trying to drink water with a fork instead of a cup.

Intellectual giants—the ladies of Rutgers and San Francisco—kept saying Speak, then. Speak! But I froze.

I began to breakfast in the library, to which the dingy volumes on the open shelves always gave rather a gloomy air.

(Who can help wondering, concerning the modern multitude of books, where all these companions of his reading hours will be buried when they died?)

Before long, I felt as though my mind, saturated with literature and art, was refusing to absorb anything further from them. The soil on my skin turned into sprinkles of gold dust. The people proclaimed me some kind of god. I saw everything at once, and wondered

Why I should linger long to live in this disease of fantasy?

Poison I had my thoughts much upon, but knew not where to get any.

(Much the most pathetic thought about books is that excellence will not save them.)

I spent the following three days in the basest debauchery.

Je ne sais plus parler.

And now I return home not as a conqueror, but as a discredited prophet, content to lead the life of a marginal man.

Last year is buried in a casket and the casket doesn’t need to be opened up for any DNA tests.

Recently, I hooked up with a mail-order company in an attempt to become a millionaire hair tonic salesman. I thought of traveling the country to deliver motivational speeches, a theater of make-believe.
To some perhaps my name is odious.

I am not what I wanted to be but I guess I am OK. I’m not so bad.

Je ne sais plus parler.



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Sources

1. Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee.”
And
Andrew Thomson, Emergency Sex, Miramax Books, New York, 2004
2. Arthur Rimbaud, Morning p. 53, Bertrand Mathieu tr.

1. Friend of Lee Harvey Oswald, quoted on Peter Jennings Reporting: The Kennedy Assassination—Beyond Conspiracy.
2. Breyten Breytenbach, from On the Noble Art of Walking in No Man's Land, 3. Will Durant, Caesar and Christ
4. ?
5. Section 26 - Raag Tukhaari - Part 002
and
Pierre Clastres, Chronicle of the Guyaki Indians, Zone Books, New York, 2000, Paul Auster, tr.6. Rimbaud, ibid

1.Original
and
Marcus Manilius, qu. by Jean Heidmann, Cosmic Odyssey, Cambridge U. Press, Cambridge, 1986, Simon Mitten, tr.
2. Salvador Dali, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, p. 116
3. . Aelius Lampridius, Augustan History, The Dedalus Book of Roman Decadence: Emperors of Debauchery, Dedalus, 1994, pgs. 201, Brian and Adrian Murdoch trs.
4. Rimbaud, ibid

1. Isocrates, Nicocles or the Cyprians
2 and 3. Original
4. Alexander Dyce, The Reminiscences of Alexander Dyce, Ohio State University Press, 1972, p. 46.
5. Woodrow Wilson, “How Books Become Immortal,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1891.
6. Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p. 62
7 and 8. Function Options,” http://www.brown.edu/Courses/FR0133/Fairytale_Generator/func.html
9. Original
and
Hyder Edward Rollins ed., The Paradise of Dainty Devices, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1927, p. 46.
10. Woodrow Wilson, “How Books Become Immortal,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1891.
11. Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pg 9.12. Octave Mirbeau, The Torture Garden, Re/Search Publications, San Francisco, 1989, Alvah Bessie tr., p 29.13. Rimbaud, ibid

1. Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, New Directions, 1961
And
Howard Gardner, Creating Minds, Basic Books, 1993, p. 2342. Brian Dawkins, qu. by Michael Silver, Sports Illustrated, 9/4/06, p. 162.
3. Barry Williams, Growing Up Brady, Harper, New York, 1991.p. 270

4. Blumenthal, Will the Real Colin Powell Please Stand Up?
http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2007/08/09/iraq_powell/
5. Marlowe—The Jew of Malta

6. Sammy Sosa
7. Rimbaud, ibid

The Hardy Boys Go Nowhere

I.

At the end of a hallway The Devastation of the Serengeti was performed. Through the doorway fluttered winds of meat and dust. The brothers hid behind a mound of skulls as broken zebras stumbled in their exits and Mr. Egmont’s Indian wife shouted encores from beneath the umbrella tree. “So then it is true. We can’t stay teens forever, can we, Frank?” asked Joe. “Well, let’s not be too hasty,” Frank replied. “If someone wanted us to age, Dad would have warned us, don’t you think?”

Two vinyl toys on the verge of nuclear war. Pt. 1

I. Captain Kim, Elixir of Truth


Check adrenals: Pain low. Adrenaline high. Full egg retinue. Captain Kim is available.

Her father was Radical Communist. Her heart is atomic clock. No beauty no anxiety.

She was overwarm fetus in malfunctioning womb. She recovered. She angry now.

Paces like zoobound polar bear approaching enlightenment through monotony.

Comes with purple dolphin and crystal baseball.

Her brain is handcrafted exotic plastic! (Fish knife and revolver not included.)

Her vinyl was recalled by major Chinese manufacturer but she ok with it really.

She is sunrise from gumball at sea, enemy of Big Tobacco. Foreign object to domestic disaster.

She is warmth of tsunami. She is mother of thirty. Icons don’t last neither do iconoclasts.

She kicks her legs like Roger Craig on famous touchdown run!

Favorite artist: Exxon/Mobil.

OMG she smells like new Barbies.

Exactamudos, deadly cocktails, scent of glass cleaner, Turn-ons include

biocandy, bonejarring infrared debate rooms, fully adjustable omnivores,

10-car pileup with extra cheese.

She was deposed from power from 1986-1991.

Has world’s largest collection of crystal butter knives, priceless tanzanite specimens.

Traces lineage back to Megatherium.

She will walk all over your constitutional rights and tell you Take Care Out There after the interrogation.

Designed with amphibious functionality in mind. The Elixir of Truth.

Don’t let yourself admit impediments to the pursuit of her whatever, man.
She has pictures of you watching her.

She crushes you easy.