Cusp, Part 2. Poems & Prose Fragments on Poetics, 2022 "mahler, a mushroom canopy...when you seek to enhance embrace withdraw... error is boundless"

 

dream it or not

 

mahler plays a victrola

under a mushroom canopy

gloom, cool light, fireflies

padding of the lichen moss

destiny's blossom, 

 fragment

of the chernobyl radio -- crackle --

pollinators, whatever it would mean to echo

in the outhouse in Romania

luminous moulds on the walls

ahead of them came the ac to dc

bc became bce concept of ancestrals

reversals these very stubborn beacons

lucipherase in the sky

but were they always performing that

lightshow in the shit-house

for themselves as aphrodisicacs?

then came modernism

erasing many ideas and species

even itself soon enough

bitten off the chew

marconism, the good year,

theremin blimp, weyl, oum khalthoum

maxwell equations,

the first signs emerge that

binding feet of girls (wu han? --

signs of being abandoned

I'm the cartographer of winds

misunderstandings forget me

just as competently

as them who eye

 

 

---

 

 

when you seek to enhance embrace just slightly withdraw

 

 

--

 

 there is very rarely any new life that doesn't contain significant portions of the old life. when did life begin for you and where? what part of life is always here? (left behind, scattered) what part in some distant there uncertain? are there any parts at all.. and on which sides do they fall? in all the years of traveling wasn't I always going to wind up in the same place? do I know the limits of who or what I am? and if I ask you will your reply only refer to you alone? it didn't matter in the end if we worship dionysius or vishnu, crash or the pineal gland or the flow of gold in ingots of speculation in the slave-ships of cryptocurrencies. there is no silicon native to silicon valley. i can never rest this case your honor we best be getting on...

 

---

  

 

Error is boundless.
Nor hope nor doubt,
Though both be groundless,

Will average out.

As if prompted by the reminder

Bales of cotton candy

dissolve into sensational browns, greens,

discesa indiretta

-- volume di acqua sporgente,

 seek to spread themselves out

spargersi, spandersi

Il sbaglio non si fa, non e'

niente affatto

ma sempre torna

Mentre quello che non e'

tende al gioco viaggio

d'essere e diventare

qualcosa vera, altro,

inattendibile

 

**

 

 

Dear Alice,

I was thinking about you

through myself, as usual

bending, almost naturally

like in the Brenda Lee song

except for pesky Novalis

and that Wunderkind crew...

I wanted to know

about Alice,

hoping she's feeling

Ten feet tall

---that's how it came out in writing --

moments ago

(like I wanted to fit this

on a postcard to Pete Spence

like he posts on FB

even now -- like Tarot --

 

He's likes a portobello, non?

 

which I mean to extend into the spirit

and ask

how do you do,

amid yet the things of France

& as are we all

there and not there at all

or undecided

ca va?

 

 

 

 **

 the earth is also part of your body

 knowing what eyes want, I want art (meaning whatever I do) -- knowing what ears know-- to remind me that I should be honest, faithful, rebellious, traditional, drunken (oh, but why?) and yet sober (but what for?). That's all. I want art to remind me of what I really want and that which gets me up to do. This and that. Anything. To revert, pervert, return, advance, get sucked backwards into forwards, to be free to be freedom's arrival point, free from view, in the underground rail-roads of water, sluices, followers of elderly root networks, sending via mycofilial tendrils and slime moulds the woodpecker's cry to send water up to the bud's of next year's the new leaves. the new year's sunbeams, buried in the acorn's ruin

 **

 no one will see you or listen to you
until you are not there
obstructing their view

**

 music is freedom itself as dance living dying into mycomass always flowing

great hydras of terraforming cryptobiotic soil on the birthday of Arthur Rimbaud

mingling undulations siphoning idiosyncracy crapshoots

mon ultra somnolent itinerant cactus

my music never over

here but lion's mane mycelial

sporadic mutant blossom

ready now to dusk

as visions come to jacob boehme

far too early bohemian

fathoms of mothers gather their moss

build the braintree's leaves

prepared pinnacle

pineal acorn

nut squat

stored by squirrels

doffs its cap --

it's almost Spring

inside the Ice

 

date unknown

(on the birthday of Arthur Rimbaud)

***

RENDERSI
CONTO

 Make photo or drawing or music live improv with moon energy but do not look at moon. Art smart: Go make an old growth forest and ask me to come to the opening. Gaia is a bitch, wrote Lyn Margolis. From no point outside the eye is anything seen. I cannot see but feel the sun like a blastospore, ballistosphere dawning amanit cap on the Black Sea (yes, it is difficult to dance in the quicksand)

  And it's not that I think there will be a political solution without political problems but that human consciousness has to develop a perspective that includes itself amid the actual biodiversity manifold from which it emerged and genuinely appreciate how the planet incorporates and destroys even those who think they control it.

 

Nov 10

 

 

 

Light Exercise

Morning permits me coffee and juice

as proof I've outlived consumerism

of melatonin where night lives,

dwells eternally in the back of the brain

while news of solar magma blast

Earth's magnetic field entangled

the previous 48 hours generates

pink auroral plasma seen near Tomso

in Norway which, while invisible to me,

feels actual here in my follicles, tingling

eyebrows & slightly metallic swallow

to my palate plus that double rainbow halo

seen around full moon magically with Karolina

two nights ago at 5th floor eastern exposure

window, dazzling, sliced by two jet airliner exhaust trails,

entrails carbonic, refracted light

in the otherwise cloudless Above

Nov 11, morning 

**

 

 

 

 "woven of the earth wherein..."

 

woven of the earth wherein

weeping as of sap

slaps the wasp back

into the black-

hole merely 1556 light years away

---when fossil fuels go

another layer of dinosaurs deep --

it reveals the old order

of ferns and variegated flora

and microfauna, fungus, molds

silts the swampy nervous

wrecks of earth rebuilding itself --

this is supply side Rockerfeller renames--

-- you can rest now, do your part...

Lorca was a service-officer of sorts

landless landrich wandering raven of duende

that angel feather-flock flame engorged

slashed riftage into the heart of the matter

Fuente Grande, these are things of Europe

debated like the value of Pound

but when young black lives matter

how fair thee any-coloured of the many

who ever will evolve the reticular

reformation of the outer-ear

familiar of the moth blown lilly

cutting a diamond stylus into a Gypsum Soul

loaning volumes from the library of Silence

gathering round the Migrant Trees

Nov 11, evening

 

 

Riff from Rifft

 

"if you say hi energy hi energy hi energy a thousand times it's starts to sound like hi energy 

-- Damo Suzuki

 

 anything sentient
beyond dishevelling
bent appeals off the grand idea
abnormal suns aber norm all soons

life seems the neurons light sees the nervon the lumi adddia drum durn

 eddy from a frown... ulm a what freddy eddy langsam watcham, inya iwanna voi

 (he then, being an elder Damo Suzuki, gray frayed locks bedraggled--

 no less a surfer of tsunami, drops the mongolian tibetan throat chant mammoth 

elephant vagina throat vibe cavern apple

effort to continue the cause shamanic 

shatters

 to scat that light mental tinder

whap

(unfinished) 

(finished)

nov 11 -12, late night early morning

 

 

Ghost me, ghost you, ghost us

What "desperuptions" of economy

Beckons gold from opium, Bitcoin pirates,

an illbient blab of perpetual track marks

With leaky gut tankers

Spilling crude blossom darkly

Tazing the indigenous

While vapes away every oblivious Canaveral.

Is the war really over?

Is the pandemic back on?

What blockduster netflick tik tok

Will distract us from God

Slipping us the mickey

Over the horizonal cackle

Of the ant-castle mottled

With yew and poplar

News of the heaving wetness of leaves

Writing letters to friends in the sod

Who'd rather never've heard from us again?

Have we stalked the last burnt bridge

Into perfect felony of solitary disaster?

Or shall we not tap on the illegible keypad

With Stefan Ellis that one extra poem

To that one person who reads everything

One last first time? Cogito ergo sumus.

Nov 13, 2022

 

 

 

 

 not a poem but part of the scene

 

 In the the begining, I have to admit, there was rock, rock and roll, that was derivative almost entirely from soul, gospel, blues and funk was what any good guitarist had to pull off. Hendrix therefore is the first God, uniting all of the above with psychedelic visions, electricity, feedback, howling, diving and screeching, great master of noises, conjuror & poet. But within all of that (back of that, as Jack used to say) was an intelligence related to a music I had to learn slowly. That was what they called jazz and it (jazz) was one thing for one year of listening and studying and by the next year another thing until eventually it was clear that the borders between musical genres was entirely fictional, mostly bogus marketing schemes and bigotry. Once I heard Ornette Coleman, music both coalesced, all flowing into one great Amazon river delta or it dissolved. In any case, that was the mind opener music. Ornette was not liked by the average bourgeois elitist into jazz. Similarly, I came to Ayler and other musicians (Ra, Cecil, Don Cherry) doing the so-called free jazz thing and within this music were other musics from other lands and other worlds. In this music you heard the voices of animals, wind, oceans, streams, leaky pipes, motors, jungles. This music included everything whereas musique concrete isolated and objectified a few sounds, strecthing and dissecting. Which is not to say the genius of Pierre Henry for example was not poetic and capable of being visionary and expressive of all things in the cosmos but that being a composed rational scientific music, it disallowed more than it permitted, in my opinion, and isolated what it wanted to celebrate and paradoxically turned the musician into a technician with all the dangers implied in Heidegger's critique, that we in turn become machines or remain operated by machines. On another level, electroacoustic music is an extension of jazz and classical music's means and enriched and enhanced and even dissolved it's grammar, it's own limitations, limitations placed on it only by cultural establishments and people who are too frightened to face the infinite and pure possibility of creative freedom.

 

 

part of the scene of my thoughts

 

 

 if you tell people you are in coversation with the spirits of the other worlds, the dead, and listen to the voices of other species, you can remove a lot of the bullshit talk from your life. it's very liberating. we never made art only for people presently alive. I know very well after a decade or so of university education (and life among educated technician artists) how the idea won currency that art is about the here and now, your community, your human life, this materialistic paradigm, your techniques: it's is very easy to trace. and yet, all indigenous peoples had their universities of forests and mountains and seas and oceans. we all were once something like indigenous people, even nomadics. we owe our work more to the future and past works of the earth than we do to those whose sense of career inside capitalistic market paradigms prevent them from undestanding the scope the poetics we are bound to... because our happiness depends on expressing the truth

 

 part of the scene metaphysics of words part 3

 

....Words do or don’t do the work of the poem—they are, as Jack Spicer said in his second letter to Lorca, “what we hold on with, nothing else.” The work of the poem, McNaughton writes, “is not in any sense a job for rhetoric, in order to gain efficacy of persuasion, to gain social affect i.e. power. . . . Language and discourse, specifically generated by the advent of writing itself, are in the agency of power. It is like Alice Notley said, words aren’t language—they never were...

 

 Robert replies:  Maybe I'm missing context here. What do you mean by "What we hold on with?" Sort of a passionate drive i.e. Lebenstrieb? And what are words then, if not sign symbols to communicate through "language"? And the last point: "Discourse or language can't be creative expression(s), as they are tools in domains of power as per your sources" or "single words don't make a language"? Will check these authors – sounds very interesting albeit cryptic due to the lack of framing.

 Jeff writes back: 

 Well, first thing comes to mind is poets and how simply we know that we could never write (or even think) anything if it depended on grammar, just woids, theories of the sign, social approval, rhetoric -- all the linear framings of englightenment and post-enlightenment modes of reason and discourse. there is a passage from primo levi that comes to mind to me next where he describes one of his fellow inmates in auschwitz, known only by his number, null achtzehn, as the empty involocru of a insect blown by the wind but connected still to a rock by a single frail thread spun from it's own former body. that's where poetry allows for an almost superhuman power against the most inhumane forces imaginable. it remains cryptic because no one can explain it; and those who try to do so suffer the loss of a resource that perishes when exposed to certain forces of modernity -- like those freschi in the fellini movie -- poetry is not the image, the art, but the medium, the glue, the gluon in physics, that allows the pigments to cohere invisibly -- I wouldn't call it Lebenstrieb because it's not personal, it's not related to egoity nor corporal identity, not even to life so simply framed by one body or body of bodies -- I think a lot of people think it's like Chomsky's generative grammar or something but when I read his ideas about language, they don't seem to be covering the same field of energies. Well, that's the best I can come up with for the moment. Thanks for the question and for your curiosity

 

 Context perhaps helps to some degree (to provide my sense for it). For example, if you know that the poet Jack Spicer wrote his letters to Lorca in the 60's long after Lorca was dead and that Spicer lectured on magic and poetry used metaphors of mediumistic messaging services, like the radio in Cocteau's Orpheus film, maybe something of a pre-post-modern materialistic rhetoric based poetry can start to be seem in some depth of perspective. Poets often do not speak to nor need to speak to the living, alhough our use of material audible and visible to the living allows them to overhear our (often hit or miss) transmissions to one another. Some guiding principle in this.

 

 

 

 

long live the queen of the earth

 

 

pact between the bone & skin

quill, burin, gut string, steel-string

the language avverbial

dew on the white feather fallen

disembodied of the dove

& above the clock

of the full buck moon

venereal not martian

tinged clouds

copaline burning on flat stone

to cleanse the mental wounds of war

we prepare our pilgrimages

rich are the ones never caught complaining

may you who have homes yet return there,

& the flower in the path smile upon you

freedom is never needing to explain

the poet, cryptozoic, starthistle,

creator of shrouds revealing

but I beckon the fall of light

what could be more pointless?

it falls without me in shreds

abandoned to destiny

I submit my conscience

to the morning star's scrutiny

whatever that means

to the morning star's stumbling

fructose dexterity

gambled on the leaf-cutter's trembling

flag of detritus

all of it abiding, hung

like those sleeping stars

there for you, like it or not,

whose slumber cycles

barely flicker over eyelashes

both false and true

many yet the unknowables to meet

great and strange madness visions

& there being yet a certain stink about

those blue velvet trousers...

what matter art if not leading

hearts back to earth? what value science

if we cannot prove the ignorant human

colossus is falling like a dumb, lifeless

golem over our planet.

the earth is our queen?

she goes down to give advice now

let it rise into heeding

unplug the years

(written over several days the last 2 weeks)

july 2022

**

In Belovo, July 2022

O Gypsy on the hill,

muted still

strangled by pandemics, hate,

or sending abroad

lost children

into cement, high rise,

corporate stocks:

songs, strains,

lipless tales,

forlorn horses;

how I yearn

to hear you

take them up again

and rattle this

flattened biodiversity.

O Gypsy in my heart,

know thou art

prepared for prayer,

ready to clatter

bones and bells,

stoke the fires of legend,

memory, untether

thy outer matters

& drive our caravan

amid the stars.