Trot

I will canter out a rhythm

a song

I will sugar and sweeten

a song

I will sylvan and stylistic

a song

I will know my song well

before I start singing.

;'-/

Crying and winking at the same time would be the weirdest thing you could do to someone.

That is all.

Blondell

Bells-A-Song

Trouvere

Traversing

Tumbling verse

Waiting for lambs to be Lion-hearted bleaters
of a war song

procure a sense of smell / manage hatred / and weep little lion man

After Jon Schaff

I'll give up my words too
and wait to see what my vocabulary did to me...

r e c k / l e s s
f e c k / l e s s

and dreaming of San Francisco

Jack and Jack

Where's my drink?

i'll give up my words

i'm sleepy in the city

when it's hot

and i do not care to write.

the train behind the house:

i'm sleepy then, too

when it sounds a sustained wave

a wave a-crashin'.

ac: for people who can't live in season

ha, fuck those people

not me, though: i'll sleep unclothed

under a bed sheet

wake up before morning

i've sweat the bed

then i'm never sleepy.

Pusillanimous Pussyfarts

Thank you, Eli, for that warm and tender introduction. Your words have humped the folds of my heart. Or, did they fump the holds of my fart? In any case, my panties are moist.

I used to live in the sweaty breast-folds of antiquity. Now, after bursting forth from the labia of my subconscious, I can finally taste the nectar of tumidity. I am the meninges. I am the pons. There is a vas deferens between muscle and appetite, a meta-world of tubes, mcconaugheys, and fluttering mandy barftwats. I am the sperm banker that suckles the bailout milk from the tit of the capitalist scrodum. I am your swollen balls to bare (the balls of a bear?), your dangling albatross of aristocracy. But no matter how swiftly they sperm-churn, they will never bling you down.

Introducing: DAVID ROSS PINSOF

Ladies and gentlemen of the goblosphere, I would like to introduce to you a dear friend of mine, a compelling little creature and entirely beyond mythology, sicknasty. If I habitually wore shirts with breast pockets, I would keep him there and nothing else--little Pinsof resting his bearded cheek in the crook of my nipple, his vertebrae bumping against my heartbeat. A pretty girl would ask me to borrow a pen and I would fiddle in my pockets and brush Pinsof's eager body with my finger. My heart would sigh and I would suddenly remember that I needed a pen for this girl and accidentally swallow my gum or something. Thanks, David.

And as the girl recedes back into the mystery zone, I glance down at my breast pocket and say, "Well, I guess it's just you and me, Pinsy." But the pocket is empty. I raise my head in time to see old D.P. dangling from the hem of the girl's skirt, bellowing like an ancient warrior as he hauls himself up to seize his glittering prize.

And so as budding virgins shall we welcome David to the fold. So let it be written, so let it be done.

double-fist this piss popsicle

well, boys, i'm skippin' town 'till june.

gotta getta way, gonna leave these blues with you:

it starts like this, see, some dick dumped me,

and now there's this new broad.

wedding bells and all that. seems kinda sudden.

worse than a piss popsicle labeled "pineapple."

funny thing is, it's not the first time.

popsicles always come in pairs:

inconvenient to hold, impossible to eat.

the first half broke off when i was 18.

a similar ice phallus: bitches gettin' hitched.

took me 2 years of brainfreeze,

of wakin' up to the same hangover,

and there weren't enough booze to melt it gone.

you'd think: if ever global warming had your back...

but a frigid bitch, nature is. and science

can suck my popsicle stick.

i like how, in disney movies, there's an evil cunt

dressed in black and pulling all the cunty strings

offstage. somewhere. her cackle.

open chest, insert cock, thrust until dead.
i've got a salty case of brainfreeze.

Fridge Ballad

Lucy wafts white,

cold and milky.

Her breasts *huddled penguins*

migrate toward the fridge as

warm pockets tightly knit

a scrapped symphony

“Superb…”

her underpants agree

(…wafting breath…)

The fridge reveals its lonely inmates:

A brilliant cast of Chekhovian characters,

bleakly painted.

False hope?

It’s just a meat prison.

(…whispers behind her hair…)

“Whose plate is this?”

The Intersection of Appetite and Muscle

Cede your Apple


make supple your suck


afflict your affections


applaud the applicant


subjugate the convert


reduce applications
to your own body


See anything written.

Droid quote of the "week" # 3

"Droid: The buffet for the serious app glutton"

Last week's discussion of the relationship between appetite and muscle bore little fruit. Just some parsley and a tuft of hair in the goblin lobe. But lo-be-hold: from this week's quote a sprig of hope (?!) springs up, hinting at the cornucopia of insight that might lie beyond any bulb of fruit or leafy lobe.

Thus it stands: "Appetite" and "application" yield their common seed in the root "app." "App" itself is a mutation of "ad," or "to." "Ad-petere" roughly means "to seek toward." "Ad-plicare" roughly means "to fold to" or "to attach to." A computer application, then, would be a function that "applies" technology to a new or special purpose.

Inherent in the human/animal is an appetite (desire); inherent in the machine is the application (the tool with which desire is "quenched"*). Last week's "intersection of appetite and muscle" confounded because appetite and muscle both seem to be characteristics of the human/animal--how could a technology stand as an intersection between two organic properties?

This week's quote elucidates, terrifies. The juxtaposition of "app" and "glutton" reveals that Droid is playing on the shared root of "appetite" and "application." Whereas last week's "appetite and muscle" confused by not disclosing the route of intersection, this new connection plants the seed of intersection within the consumer/desiring body.

The fact that appetite and muscle belong to the animal at first led me to believe that Droid was simply portraying itself as animal, an organism with hunger and the muscle to wrangle its prey. This is an old advertising trick especially prominent in car commercials (horsepower, epithets, commercials set in the Serengeti). But the reality is much darker. No longer can the victim parse a one-to-one correspondence between device and analogue, product and symbol. Droid intersects, cuts across the organic and splices itself within it. What we face now is a virus of which "app" is the seed.

The abridged "app,**" as a symbolic unit but also a unit of desire, transfers the viral DNA of the Droid's "application" to the consumers body, manifesting itself as "appetite." Suddenly, we are machinic producers of our own desire. Appetite leads to application, application leads to appetite. Our hunger, our muscle, our intelligence, our affection reduce to applications of our own bodies***. Droid acting like human/animal is something we are equipped to understand; Droid and human subliming into a multiplicity of contingent desires gives me the willies.

One disorienting Droid commercial asks us, "does your phone do searches of the word 'human' on the web?" I say to myself at first: how cute, a machine wants to be human! Or I say to myself: Oh no, the machine is trying to enslave us! How Matrixy! Throw both of those conjectures out the window. I ought to ask myself: Why would a machine search at all unless it is a desiring machine? I should ask myself: are not we the searcher, the desiring machine? Does not this Droid commercial dramatize the growing desire of the human to define himself through search engines, applications, technologies of his own devising? My friends, the cyborg approacheth, and he is a capitalist. I leave you:

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Droid

For Thine is the App

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Droid

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Droid

For Thine is the Internet

Between the appetite

And the muscle

Falls the Droid

For Droid Does

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

* Or propagated, a we shall later see

** The "Apple" Corporation suddenly takes on a new cast--not to mention Johnny Appleseed, though that's neither here nor there

*** See anything written by William Borroughs; See Deleuze/Guattari's "Anti-Oedipus"

jon, tell me a story about the holy land.

After Rabindranath Tagore, poet (1861-1941)

The Necklace of Songs:

Hurts - Wonderful Life

ABC - Poison Arrow

Duran Duran - Wild Boys

Candi Staton - Young Hearts Run Free

Where do you want to go next?

Shoot the Blue-Jays - jaded and sprigged:-

Blast Them::

Matriculate your mate::

We nearly touched

&&

We earthly topped

&&

Weathered together

&&

Warranted topography

&&

Wasted telegraphy

Someone else, maybe Eli, called through with a Marconigram

All of your languishing women, we

Oh how we awaited Jonathon's return each day with quivering bulbs. How we, your putrid wives, peaked over the azaleas from the white-framed panes of Goblin Fantasy Shack 2*, awaiting your return. How we fondled the floral embroidery of the curtains. How we breast-fed one another to cut the numbness with warmth. How we nearly touched orgasm at the thought of home's turf sucking at your bootknobs--do we recognize those boots? Do our spasms of pleasure color the leather like desert sand and hipster gland?

Now let us, dutiful domestics, legitimate the coming of Jon by bearing up our wombs and laying such a fertile feast of words as this blog has ne'er seen.

* The first, as you know, was peed on by a bandicoot and so nullified.

New York Minutes

I won't post everything I wrote in my trip journal, because that would be annoying, but I hope you all enjoy gobbling up some gobbledygook time-passing. I wrote this waiting for my friend to get off of work and take me, after a long day of wandering, home.

--

Day 1 – 4/30/10

Arrive at JFK

AirTrain to Jamaica Station, Queens

Long Island Railroad to Flatbush Avenue, the end of the line, Brooklyn.

Was directed by food and sunglass vendors, clerks of army surplus stores, pedestrians of varying age, race, gender, possibly creed, to a street, Myrtle Ave., that I have not, as of yet, found. Am writing from a curb in Forest Green Park. Have toted both carryon and suitcase proper since departing airport. Slightly tired from walking – have been at it for an hour at least. Brooklyn is real lovely. Lovely and young, which are two chief components of beauty. Chicago feels different in a way or ways that I will have to think about because they don’t make sense just yet. I need to use a bathroom, and could stand to eat a lemon bar – but where? I am thankful for my fitness and my money.

A man comes by – a jogger – with a shih tzu (orig. written “shitzoo”) on a shimmering leash lagging behind, the dog choking, its little eyes bugged out.

I hear the end of a woman's conversation - she says, resignedly, “...and those are the hopeless days,” to her walking companion. The women are both exquisitely gorgeous, the meeting places of exoticism and domesticity. I long to suffer her hopeless days.

My tinted sunglasses, BluBlockers – will they render Brooklyn yellow in my mind and memory forever? Will someone sometime say, “I’m from Brooklyn” and I’ll reply, too quickly, “Oh, yes, that yellow place!” The lenses make the greens of the park stand out especially. Anything blue is rendered black.

But wait! The jogger is returned, chasing the unleashed dog back in my direction! The shih tzu is liberated! Its name is Milo and it will not stop now.

Correction: The park is actually named Fort Greene Park. And the jogger collected his dog. I spit on some flowers, took a picture, and walked down to Vanderbilt Street.

Sitting now in Tillie’s Café, at the corner of Vandy and DeKalb. Tillie was my great grandmother’s name. Dekalb is a city in Illinois. The world, I will later find out, is small and Jewish. Not so much Dekalb, though. I bought some organic loose leaf tangerine/ginger tea and a chocolate croissant. I will always be an asshole. Still have to use the bathroom, but afraid to abandon the only material items currently in my possession, even for a minute. Can’t trust these sallow-eyed Brooklyn devils. Tillie’s is festooned, yes, festooned, with white holiday lights, and the café’s front door is ajarred by a crate. Open front doors of cafés, bars, gastronomicas, give me a great good feeling, an untimable feeling like summer afternoons wasted under the partially cloudy firmament. Again, asshole. Tillie’s is further festooned with paintings of partially cloudy firmaments. Outside, across the street, a pigeon woman screams at passersby. I can see her and hear some of her through the open door. (There is a diagram in my journal that elucidates how such a sightline is possible. In the diagram she has crazy snake hair and stands on a pile of old newspapers, which are labeled next to a small, pointing arrow).

I’ve waited long enough and taste my tea infusion. I burn my tongue. Bitch!, I whisper.

Last night, in Chicago, Julia and I performed “Love Shack” by The B-52’s at Kareoke night to a thunderous ovation. It was special. I later sang “Let’s Go Crazy” by Prince for the 20 something black patrons there celebrating a birthday. We went, as it were, crazy. I relive this memory now, my tongue still aflame.

Are New Yorkers brusque because they’re New Yorkers, or because they’re all asshole hipsters? Is it fair to refer to a population of several million by a common epithet? Is it somehow unfair not to?

Hipsterism, which I feel ashamed to even be writing about, it’s so played out, but I will, in its most recent incarnation was at first pointed towards feminizing early 2000’s and late 90’s exaggerated American masculinity tropes; opposite steroid injected home run hitters were lady jeans clad, skin tight track jacket wearing nancy boys. Recently, however, the reactionary pendulum has swung again, and now the world is filled with super macho hipster men, no longer boys, running around all of Brooklyn. They have the same goofy calf tattoos but they’re been stretched over burly muscle. Hipters are domineering again, ideally inhabiting 6’1, pot-bellied, large triceps owning bodies, the tight track jackets replaced with lumberjack plaid and spring-coiled beards. It’s funny and a bit intimidating at the same time. Always the same the question arises: but who am I? Their sense of self is so meticulously constructed that there is never any pressing question. They exist to cast my own identity into question. What about me? By attempting to resist the beck and cll of superficial trend cliques, did I again forget to establish myself?

This tea is really gingery.

Six motorcycles race by.

Everybody seems to know each other here. Maybe that’s not surprising, or it shouldn’t be, but I didn’t expect to see people saying “Hi” to each other on the street like 1960’s Northbrook.

See this:

Mustache. Falling water bottle. Pink underwear. A belt the precise shade of green as his pants. Have I been forgotten, or are you delayed? Why Do I continue to put insipid tea to mouth? It will only make me sick. A man with a pram. Three girls in striped skirts. Jon alone at the table. A bicycle rider with a beehive hairdo. She comes into the café. She is about to fall out of her orange dress. Will wonders never cease?

I’ve switched seats: There is nothing left to say but that I wish I was back in the park, and that one day I hope to pee.

Wait, fuck; I’ve remembered the lemon bars.

Gone Tomorrow

I just wrote a long post singing the advantages of not being able to grow a beard. And did I twist myself into a fine rhetorical tizzy. Let this spare post stand as a monument to the failure of words hairs.

I preserve for you, for it is not mine, a single passage from the treatise:

"Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. [He listens.] But habit is a great deadener."

And this:

"We celebrate the ginger germination of our (sometimes ginger) pubic tendrils."

Peace, siblings.

What Is the Opposite of a Miracle?

BOO YEAH.

The Flippers of the Great Walrus Embrace Us

I received a dollar bill today at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater which bore a strange marking: A red stamp that reads: "Track this bill at www.wheresgeorge.com." So I did. I entered the year and serial number of the bill into the site's engine and, lo and behold, another entry. 180 days ago, a man or woman, instrument of fate, received this bill at a Cracker Barrel in Kentucky. Cracker Barrel! Cracker Barrel! Cracker Barrel! The flippers of the great walrus embrace us.

E

Droid quote of the "week" # 2

"Droid: the intersection of appetite and muscle."

So, appetite and muscle, huh? Uh . . . well . . . awkward. The nonsensicality of the above statement is so fundamental, so axiomatically present that one cannot deny the words any more than one could deny a bludgeon to the face or the birth of a flawed and hideous spawn. Deep within the Dome of the Droid labor scientists who trifle each day with the laws of the universe, basic principles of physics and biology. Each day, it seems, a new horror is carted out from the depths: an uncorrectable equation, a smear on the babycheeks of God.

I could have read the above advert and simply mouthed "what?" to myself--or erect the mucusy shields on which the teeth of creeps and goons are turned each day in this sinister city of Chicago. Perhaps I should have. But it is too late. I am too deep in it. I cannot rest until I figure out what the FUCK appetite has to do with muscle, and how a phone could have an "appetite" in even the vaguest metaphorical sense.

OK, I give up. Well, muscle makes enough sense. I would have rested easy (i.e. with the usual cynicism) if the ad had simply read, "Droid Is Muscle." But Verizon bought all that ad space and, hey, words are meaningless, so let's just throw a bunch of them on there. OK, so what do people like? Things that DO a lot of things. Indeed. Things that intersect in one bitch-punchin' contraption ("Sony Walkman: the intersection of goblins and inappropriate yodeling"). So what can droid DO besides muscle? It can serf the web. Hmm, "the intersection of Google and muscle." Nah, doesn't make any sense . . . (Hey Gary, I'm going to Chipotle, do you want a burrito bowl or something?) . . . Wait: are you suggesting that Droid is able to DO APPETITE???!!!??! . . . (No, I'm just going to pick up some lunch). . . Brilliant! Nothing says "I'm hungry" like the new smartphone from Verizon!

And the rest, as they say, doesn't matter. We will duel again, dear Droid. Mark my words: for I have marked thine.

E

and speaking of onanism...

i once posted on 'pern-tang's wall: "poetry is masturbation."

he then sent me a Gob-link, a Bl-ink, if you will.

after a month with the Bulb, I have this to say:

poetry is masturbation.

let me count the ways.

(using the Glob as an example)

1) self-serving

2) happens every day

3) sometimes several times a day

4) sometimes someone notices and comments

5) sometimes no one notices

6) sometimes you're struck by inspiration, what i call The Fever

7) sometimes you force it, and it gets tedious, jejune even

8) it's more fun if you have somewhere to be in, like, a half hour

9) it's more fun if you're doing it when someone leaves you alone for a few minutes but could be on their way back RIGHT NOW

10) inconvenient when you're at work

11) better if you put the porn on mute

12) way more fun with booze

13) difficult to execute on acid

14) way more satisfying if there's a sandwich coming after

15) sometimes you wish you hadn't

16) sometimes you reflect on it and think "really?"

17) if you lose control, you can always go back and edit that bit out

18) like a bicycle

19) annoying if you do it too much and make people listen

20)...i like to do it

what did i forget?

i've got israel envy

stalk the Afikoman

with a spliff-spear

through the cutting salt flats

and the stinging buoy-sea.

numb tongue from

impatient coffee sips.

hash in bricks like gold.

babe-monsters toting yardlong guns.

ah, to be in the Holy Land

with a deck of Hoyl cards

and a head scarf and a couple of

shekels for the cigarette crane machine game.

hide your wine from the muslims--

they'll just get uppity--

but pass the hummus and

turn the wheels toward the desert.

i WILL remember...

before your voice tolls, bell toad,

and your teeth have ambled on.

before your hair rots off

and your eyes raisin up.

if thurston moore gets dashing

and his kimmy turns to hag,

i christ swear--cross heart--

that i'll remember...

alarum sound!

shit. forgot.

A Poemb

H o l l o w M e

H a l l o w e d



L a u g h i n g

B r i s t l i n g

L i s t l e s s

B u s t l e r s


B e l l o w s

L u s t r e / s t r u c k /

B u l b o u s

A d v o c a t o r

are you a big smokey lizard?

are you a sparkly lamb?

are you a chubby lettuce piglet?

are you a slippery bumblebee?

are you a crusty vacuumed snake-dog?

are you a tasty dragon?

are you a busy turtle?

are you a miniature porcu-pony?

are you a prancy gerbil?

are you a shaved pigeon?

are you a crunchy toad?

are you a lippy hagfish?

are you a gay walrus?

are you a sniffly cicada?

are you a pointy turkey?

are you a ticklish manta ray?

are you a soggy helicopter goat?

are you a distant llama?

are you a nerf cobra?

are you a cream corn poodle?

are you a tricky sandpiper?

are you a rainy metal dodo?

are you a floppy cricket?

are you a moldy uncle tomcat?

are you a serious chicken?

are you a moist inward mole?

are you a shouty brontosaurus?

are you a sneaky fleshy donkey?

are you a preppy tuna?

are you a clicky pomeranian?

are you a solemn finger monkey?

are you a gassy cactus kitty?