Grotesque and Ridiculous -- ??

There are people in this world who cut such a grotesque figure that even death renders them ridiculous. And the more horrible the death the more ridiculous they seem. It's no use trying to invest the end with a little dignity-- you have to be a liar and a hypocrite to discover anything tragic in their going.

I'm wonder what Henry Miller would say about Michael Jackson's life and "going."

The above section (in bold) is an excerpt from Tropic of Cancer where Miller's talking about Peckover, a copy editor who fell to his death in an elevator shaft.

Despite the fact that his legs were broken and his ribs busted, he had managed to rise to all fours and grope about for his false teeth.

Is Russell Edson Great or Just Popular??

Johannes Goransson ponders Russell Edson, pale in the light of Michaux (and more interesting places the prose poem can go. Black Ocean, etc,--- thanks, Johannes).

To read what Johannes (that's my dad's name too) has to say go here


So what's right about Russell Edson?
Well, I do think he wrote many great poems. Especially when he combined the strange with the lyrical. Some of the poems are tender and "deep." Not just bizarre ape story poems.

What's wrong about Russell Edson?
Distinctive poets often have a very bad influence on their followers. Most Edson disciples write lesser and paler versions of Edson's best poems (and perhaps we can count later career Edson among those disciples.) And you can spot these Edson-derivative poems a mile away. If you've read one you've read them all.


I think the best think re Edson is to buy his Collected. Read some of the middle third and then put the book away for a long time. Perhaps even then, for better or for worse, the ape will find its way into your thoughts and poems.

New Ocho (including 6 Ron Silliman Visions) - Edited by Blake Butler

Open publication - Free publishing - More mipoesias

New Ocho (25) is available now. Click here.

(Edited by Blake Butler, who has great and clever taste.)

The issue includes poems and pieces by Rauan Klassnik, Adam Robinson, Claire Donato, Jamie Iredell, Janey Smith, Matthew Simmons, Sam Pink and others.

My contribution's "Six Ron Silliman Visions."

Here's Vision 3

Ron Silliman’s making love. To his wife. His beautiful and dark wife. And Silliman’s so white they look, entwined, like a zebra. A zebra leaning down to drink from a sunset lake. Flamingos—— billions and billions of pinkness flashing——drag up over a monkey’s teeth. Silliman’s biting his wife. And they’re fucking, not making love. Sheets stained with blood. Bones and teeth. Ron Silliman and his wife are smoking.

The Apple Pie Frogs

This morning I nearly stepped on a frog as big as an apple pie. It was crippled. On its back. An extremely unusual and mystical shimmering white stomach. It was beautiful, angelic and it sickens me. Like the insides of a monastery where the monks are practicing Kung Fu as their old master dreams of cockatoos flying away in the dawn. Girls go out to fetch the water. From far away. And love comes to them on these wide and yawning early fields. And they lie down and take it. In a fire of swords and birds made of bamboo suddenly inspired and glittering with falling shards. In the rain. And the streets turning into a reservoir of dying frogs. Thousands of them stacked high and wide. I have to walk over them-- fire and gas spewing up as I go. In the rain. Gas and fire. And the night stink. A dark spring. Blossoms rotted in tree crotches. Discarded hatchlings rotting. Like the bones of rats. You turn away and spit. Beauty's just a way to read this dying evil.

The Sky and River Blanket (and Michael Jackson's Son)

The sky spreads its blankets in the river and after a while the river washes it all away. And itself away. This just happens. In spite of its best intentions. I've always held the sky in awe. A blue and white house of God. A fiction that rubs itself against my fear. Fondles my fear and jerks it off.

But the sky too is afraid, searching. And wants to fall in love and stay in love-- sipping champagne and nibbling cherries for eternity. The sky. The river. Fate. The blue and white condo-block in which the phantom angels sleep. It's all the same. Like a grape squeezed in your fist. A juiceless color-bled fist heavy with the love of dead skies and rivers. And crying out to God and Nothing (God-Nothing) as it dies.

(note: "Blanket" is the nickname of Michael Jackson's youngest son, Prince Michael II. According to his father "blanket" was a word he used with "his employees and family." As in, we should "blanket" him.)

The Gym-God - Albino Medusa

This morning the Gym-God's doing pull ups, a towel hanging from her ass (she looks like a horse clambering up on to an ice berg) and the Gym-God's face is contorted with botox and 4000 pesos worth of creams that "just aren't working."

The whole collection of God-Freaks are here like a retinue of angels fluttering about this filthy emaciated and rippling Gym-God. The horse-face. The monkey-face. And all the other little squawking minions.

On the way over here I saw so many beautiful little orange swallows. They nest in the Gym-God's hair. Poor little beauties. Like brain cells. In her armpits. Her mouth. Her ass and her cunt. In the spaces between her teeth--she speaks and they howl in the disfigured wind.......And still they sing from the wires and bathe in puddles. God bless them.

The worlds revolve around the Gym-God---this anorexic albino Medusa who slumps on the machines and cavorts and drizzles. You can judge the world by studying this sickly sun. Those who approach her are sick, depraved, corrupt and they too will disfigure and implode and leave, like she will, a charred black hole in which nothing and everything rests. Those who flee her are doomed-- lights in their wings flecked in anguish (like swans in harness.) They are doomed.

The Gym-God walks in the cold mist and it surrounds her in fire and the Gym-God bites her nails. And scratches. And scratches. Her skin falls like papyrus porn. Pharaohs and donkeys. She pulls up and up and walks into spinning class. Her eyes are blackening pulled-in blacker and blacker. Filth sticks to her. Light runs. Soon she will be it all though. A disappearing pulsing tombstone.

The Gym-God pedals and pedals and the worlds doomed and frantic ease beneath her. Swallows and dragons and bats mixed like oil in their throats and wings. No time for good and evil. Time like a river. A huge penis stick. No good or evil. It all eases beneath her.

The Gym-God looks in the mirror. And looks in the mirror. And the Gym-God's completely bewitched. Bows down to herself. Hunched and heavy and pale with self-adoring cum.

Parrots Seething - Nose Bleeding

The parrots are seething in the trees across the river. Seething in me and shattering my bones and my blood. I am the moon and all its lying (its zero) shattered on the swirling shattering water.

The bugs I pick from the water just fall apart. Bugs and gecko shit. My nose is bleeding. My wife's red blouse she never lets loose reflected in the swirling waters.

An egret's angelic white-calm on a rock. I want to tear it to bits. Devour it and shit. Turn it black you know.

The water's are swirling. Parrots seething. Bones shattering. My nose bleeding. And the egret's white wholesomeness is an insult. An affront to all this flux. Fuck this flux. And bring me up to God or the the void (the void-god) in calm shining whiteness. (This is why God's the King of Pop)

And please don't ever subject me to Hugh Jackman's ass in x-men wolverine.

But, of course, the milk's sweet and sour.

Flying ants rise up to the light in see-through golds and reds. They are annihilated believing. Believing completely. My nose is bleeding.

All the Messiahs - Mud Luscious (5 new poems)

A handful of my "All the Messiahs" poems are now up at J.A. Tyler's "Mud Luscious"

I've just read through the issue and there are lots of really interesting pieces (poems and short fiction).

Here are some bits and pieces that spiked my brain

from "Brother" by Mike Meginnis


I am not like the moon, I am like a beach. The tide is out. There are shelled creatures and baby turtle corpses and dead jellyfish scattered around him in the gray sand of me. My organs I guess. He is dead on the beach, or sleeping. He is waiting for the tide. There is nothing more lonely than to have a person inside you.



from Killer Time by Pecho Kanev

I have problems with my head
I have problems with the world
I have problems with all these empty bottles
of Beck’s all around me
I have problems with my lonely nights
with my lonely erections-
useless and trivial



from The Final Feast by Ethel Rohan

At the end of the beginning of love lies the origin of man’s inferior spirit, his shriveled heart, violent longing. I know it. I know it and don’t think I can contain the conviction of it inside my skin. No, the truth of the end of the beginning of love must get outside me in the same way that babies must get outside their mothers.



from We Grew Pianos by Russell Thorburn


Instead of gardening
we played the piano side by side,

following as the sun hung there
on our bare heads



and, last, but not least :)


from Intersect by Tia Prouhet

So we leave each other now,
jerk ing and snap ing
our way to other beds
full of flesh and hands
that will teach us
how to curl.



to check it all out go here

I Can't Stop Eating!

In December 1998, he had a gastric bypass. By June of the following year, he had lost a hundred pounds.

Then, as he put it, "I started eating again." Pizzas. Boxes of sugar cookies. Packages of donuts. He found it hard to say how, exactly. His stomach was still tiny and admitted only a small amount of food at a time, and he experienced the severe nausea and pain that gastric-bypass patients get whenever they eat sweet or rich things. Yet his drive was stronger than ever. "I'd eat right through the pain-- even to the point of throwing up," he told me. "If I threw up, it was just room for more. I would eat straight through the day." He did not pass a waking hour without eating something. "I'd just shut the bedroom door. The kids would be screaming. The babes would be crying. My wife would be at work. And I would be eating." His weight returned to four hundred and fifty pounds, and then more. The surgery had failed and his life had been shrunk t the needs of pure appetite.

The above's an excerpt from Atul Gawande's book of essays, "Complications: A Surgeon's Note on an Imperfect Science."

Gawande's a decent writer but this book can be very boring. And the writing's often just Cheesy and clunky (especially in his ready-to-wear descriptions of people, towns and houses). But passages like the above made it well worth reading.

In Memoriam In Memoriam In Memoriam Ad Nauseam Fcking In Memoriam

Am I the only one who's fcking sick and tired of the phrase "In Memoriam" ??

I mean come on it's like trying to build a greek (or roman, i guess) temple around your heart. Like wearing a lion's oracle-wig and placing a bunch of feathers in your ass. (maybe?) Mercury, Mercury, Mercury

Why can't our grief or respect be in english? Simple, plain, here-and-now english.

I'm tired of death. O, God, I'm tired. But I'm also tired of billions of chickens blowing there tears through a cheap and cheesy iron-latin whistle.

From generation to generation to generation.

Like cathedrals.

Or baseball.

A kind of garlic. Or praying for rain.

A rotten old hag. Garlic dried-up and rotting between her legs. She pokes her head over the railing. Her tits are sour, tongue a big fat ball of bloody need. Her brain a thorn of blood. A dead swollen thorn all disfigured nondescript and boring and opening its mouth (scarred and impotent) in grief's hard piss. Like a fcking dog. But without the honesty.

I need a drink. O, Christ, I quit drinking. Christ!!!!!!!!!!