Λωτtοφfάγοι

Λωτtοφfάγοι
Where broken threads come to rest.

Island of the Lotus Eaters™

Those of my men who ate the honey-sweet lotus fruit had no desire to retrace their steps; their only wish was to linger there with the Lotus-Eaters, to feed upon the fruit and put aside all thought of a voyage home. - Odyssey, Book IX

Friday, March 28, 2008

Riding the Ionospheric Chimney commuter shuttle - Pratical Manual Overview

• New brains are here to help us forget.

• We'll unearth new usernames, new passwords to overwrite, and the new codes will disable the old locks.

• These new codes build their own locks and inseminate the earth with new machines and doors that only destroy you on the way out.

• New machines are here to help us remember.

• Remember your code. Do not write it down.

• Do not give your password out to anyone else.

• The door will lock automatically behind you.

• Each lock stores an unlimited number of codes.

• Each door houses an unlimited number of locks.

• The old machines have not been able to determine how many doors we can expect next year.

• The old machines have not been able to determine the probability that any given code will open any given lock but we know it is higher than zero.

• The old machines will not by operated by the new codes. Remember your code: it is the machine that has created you.

Monday, January 07, 2008

Tag ‘Em & Bag ‘Em

A bag of hammers: “Sure, we crossover.”

Megahertz hexagon Schumann resonant cavity nasal conche.

Sitting in chairs when cups are not cups until the bell is ‘in its cups’ when stricken - massive hemorrhage. Bent, melodic and swollen boys in the ether glide, Trazodone days in hollow domes. Lightbringer – word mortician, degreased in the creosotatorium, branded, “Bar-X the Lazy M.”

Tamperproof DNA patent scission. Bermuda triangulation. Asinine Cro-Magnon trigonometries. Timberwolf – sanguine. Choleric – nine lives. Integral circuit-breaker mastoid prophet sucks excess marathon joints.

Tubal infestation, march of the cyclopedia tourist. Anatomy in Carnation instant circus. Narcoleptic inside source. Ramshackle mummification. Inbred macrobial cultures channel stargate pantheons through heavy metals, noble gasses and control-group neutron-star density in nova implosion.

Canned saccharine ana-sepsis. Marduk levitation branding iron works. Ire works aqueduct Sanskrit mantras intoned at 8Hz, resonating at 32Hz, and inaudible octaves vibrate in storm nimbus. Bitter fumes escape parallelogram dissection on the numb toilet anagram.

Scoliotic cardiac paddles drop on dirges against nail and tissue grafted onto ivory iron tusks, into blood-silver, mercury staves of massive infectious parody. Biological sandpaper in fermented lice. Antioxidant bioflavinoid napalm cement.

Absinthe drinker, proto-elongated Sangiovese vacuum tube override transistor. Cue theramin music. Brian Wilson carefully drawn and quartered and stuffed into a meat piñata, swung from Nazi salutes on cockney schoolyards. Cases of champagne escort General Asplundh-Rudolph Guile-Gut through the high plain of Namibia. Engraved ivory scabbard. Not a white glove this side of Capricorn’s tropic.

And in the Year of the Locust, a bag of wheezing sludge makes a dent in the Earth. 23&1/3 degrees and we are inductors, naïve gravity wizards in elevendimensional spacetime membranes. This “big bang” is only a wafer-thin body-of-Christ slice of the bigger piñata where Karl Rove eats gravy train Brian-Wilson-Kibble in a boxer’s medicine ball.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

Bodyhammer

This is a spoken-word excerpt from "Bodyhammer," a song I wrote for the rock trio Agnes in 1997.

Once upon a machine we bent the rib-cage
To taste the whip, hot sting locked in the chest
The clavicle harness, buckled
Taut saddle ride the spine

Claw to grip smile and eyelid, arthritic
Knuckle, canine and incisor fondle
A Parkinson fist, the tingle of punishment
The whip

Friday, November 16, 2007

Caveat Emptor (The Frozen Dead)

Rags tied around the rips in my clothes - leather and canvas, black and olive-drab (and always dirty) - heave a silent menace into the road. Riding freight cars is a thing of the past; the highway is too slinky and clean for me, the woods are all swamp pits - infested with trash, needles, beer cans and waterlogged couch cushions - and the neighborhoods are all built from recycled plastic milk jugs. Our estuary is dissolving into white chalk and re-bar. The black birds in black armor mark sentry posts against the White Visitation, white surf beating its cold saw-teeth...

Sand dug under my fingernails, shabby red whiskers on my jaws, feet in perpetual ache, nostrils in perpetual flare, stare fixed on the hundred-yard line... knives fixed to bootstraps ...hoarding tinder and kindling, hoarding bricks and pipes, ducking squalls under swoop of cedar boughs, rationing canned beans and apples, bolting up from sleep to stab shadows, stinking of smoke and toe-fungus, bathing in a forever of sweat.

This is this how you’d meet me: wrung out, never living in it. Who wrote on this beach trash? Who broke the sundial and left the hourglass upside-down? Will I show up trailing kelp and crab-shells, dune-grass in my beard, eating cold beans from a can, teeth orange, eyes yellow and sunken and bruised? Who’s been chopping at the straw goddesses, throwing the corpses of dogs on the fire? Who keeps carving messages in the tree-trunks, and if I stuff a note into each bottle, what’s to keep them from washing back up on these same beaches, scratching me in my sleep?

The fog is here.

The dead come at me in those radiant under-eyelid visions before sleep. The dead come at me in dancing skeleton circles, in a funnel that sucks the Earth into dead obliterating space, the frozen dead in brilliant blues and turquoise and the orange glow of campfire embers, asking me if the ocean is cold enough to swallow, the frozen dead in lavender and the mad red reds that rip the ocean sunsets, the frozen dead in hammered gold glide their frozen bone fingers across my palm, ask if it isn’t a lovely day to go drowning in whisky and wheels and metal. The skulls all drain and spiral into orbit, and there they forget the Earth.

The frozen dead are focused now into a thin twisting filament, stretched out over eons of space, vomiting frozen souls to disseminate across the empty galaxy waysides. The frozen bones smear into fine hairs, lightyears in length, wrapping the planet in silken death-twine, choking off the solar wind, de-magnetizing the poles. The frozen dead are an electric tourniquet before the celestial amputation.

Afterlife Express

Vitamins. Caffeine. Vomit. Pills. Whiteout. Calendar. Salad dressing. Acid reflux. Scratch paper. Fish scales. Seaweed. Sticky-hot June rain ...and these organs don’t fit inside me the way they did before I ripped them out. It’s like unpacking a suitcase in your hotel room the night before your redeye flight: everything expands. The pills swell up in your throat if you don’t swallow fast enough; they get stuck - halfway up, halfway down - and now your mouth is driftwood-dry with the bitter piss-yellow powder bleeding out, and if you cough it up you’ll get a side of bile with that big-mac - that’s for star-spangled goddamn sure.

That magic-marker, factory-fresh glue smell ripples invisibly off the boxes in the back room – fiber-tape-tight noxious money-shots ...on credit. That’s a Benjamin well-spent, m’boy. And before you can file the flash off your model rocket parts these elastic acres’ll be humming with the lush luminous blue globes of commerce: where the streets move and the cars stand still, where the high-definition flatscreen monitors are embedded into every vertical surface, where the couches are plush and jumbo and help you stand up to take a leak when the catheter slips, and you never have to worry about losing the remote control because the digital cable responds to inhibitive action-potentials in your frontal and parietal lobes, and the sea has a volume knob ...and the flowers pick themselves.

Notch Six (Non-Zero Sun)

A virus in the planet, an imprint subject to screw... countdown to nova. The sugar-screw circulates and drives. Brain marinates in bland alcohol shivers; this machine shudders, runs on petraglyphs, burns clean eclipsthynol. This is not a reading machine.

The worms drill down viral patterns in the uterine echo chamber: the heartbeat, pulmonate rasp, motor’s thunder, asphalt hiss and the paranoid flat nasal buzz of men and women making sense of things – folding a neat universe into handbags and cocktail napkins, a neat conspirator pacing in the background. Toe clicks on the tile... moth bend and clip, silent on foetal radar.

Lips singed by the barking liquor burn smile now. Lipstick-mottled blank goddess ...a mother buzzard. Fat-fry renderings in chalk and piss and granite... This scroll was written in bile, with a hollow bone, with a hum in my ear. Shovel it in A-major, as close to 8 Hz as we can get down here, in the leech ranch, where the agates are all alphabetized, the typewriters only run underwater.

Six notches down, the cool air condenses on the canister – a pressure differential – like tiny wooden match-fire burns oxygen from a glass cup. The cup, positioned, suctions like an empty brilliant leech, blazing with transparency.

Open end, corpses down... six feed down, six notches up. The joint ratchets, the prices hike; the skyjack knife pinions Braille xenophobe threats on the dust-jacket. These pensions prolapse; now were all uninsurable. Miles of coils, miles of eleven-degree chemical knifings and chemical brides... A mass of tissue bolus subdivides, implodes. Latent twin fetus shares a spine, vestigal gills and fins, shares a jacket-less circular book with his broken blood uncle. Bulemic queers piss in the livery. The bootblack fucks the sheriff’s horse. His signature blot drips.

This island is a whale - a dead whale imploded - and supernovae coalesce swollen oceans into microscopic non-possibilities, particles with a negative tendency to occur in a non-domain. Eleven-dimensional six-corpse opening... buried head down, salt-crowned skeletons of the elevens, skeletons of the nines. The vane rests on the eleven. The gears melt. The axis of Pluto falls through galactic center, trips the wire while our sun rests there, saying nothing, never setting, never brushing close enough to zero. Non-Zero Sun ushers you just to the edge but can never drop you over.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Eleventh Plague

-or- Pez/Anti-Pez

originally composed in early 2004 as a review for The Locust Plague Soundscapes (Anti 2003)

...and after persistent showers of cash-register chowder, shoulder to shoulder with walking post-it-notes, chattering houseplants and McHumanoid consume-o-trons siphoning the ankle-deep and non-negotiable overturned-honeybucket-nectar [gentle shopper, I tell you they are all clogged follicles on same hairy-backed beast!], pinned, wriggling on the Styrofoam plate for another unmistakable prelude to more of the same radioTV that plugs the [overseeing equitable cancer distribution][author’s note: thanks Mom!] TVradio that plugs the magazinebillboard plugs the newspapermovie plugs the fry-o-latervideogame plugs the ballplayercellphone plugs the lotteryticketvideopokermachine that convincingly [if you’ve been a good little stick of chalk] impersonates a good milkdrinking flagsaluting man-suit impersonating the new machine that is slated to replace the other newer impersonating machine that replaces him, but almost too slowly -

...and after Lil’ Chatty-Kathy, Johnny-Pulls-Up-His-Tubesocks and Mrs. Mayonnaise have rehearsed for the 956,832nd time their same great new engrossing infomercial, powerwashed their concrete lawns, and broadcast shimmering crystals of monosodium glutamate across the glutamate of monosodium deserts -

...and after marinating in the overflow from some unhungry-golem’s sewage-hose feedbag breathing-tube [doesn’t the new one just totally (and at such well-delineated intervals!) almost remind you of that other new one, but in almost that total way that, like, you don’t know which of the other ones it just totally almost reminds you of, or whether it really reminds you of it at all?] [author’s note: yeah, totally!] hormone supplement cocktail...

...wouldn’t it just perforate your circumstances to discover that for every Pez dispenser, there’s an equal and opposite anti-Pez dispenser?

Monday, November 27, 2006

for Holly

May, 2006


There are too goddamned many of me in this room, grappling over this stale machine, jabbing our fingers into each other’s eyes, swapping-out skin-grafts, tapping me on the shoulder every nineteen seconds, using up all the good oxygen...

"TWENTY FOUR HOURS!"

I need to brew another pot, or at least wrest out these last two molars before they ratchet back up into my skull, because the house is filling with flies. They pour, screeching at me, out of the furnace, dumping down in crisp, black static-electric mats on our faces, and by the time I discover just which one of us is writing this, we’ll all have run out of air in here.

"SPLIT THREE WAYS!"

But whoever is writing this has left me a trail of typographical errors and idiosyncratic punctuation habits...

"SINCE YOU BOUGHT ONE THIRD!"

...from which I can surmise the following: he is leaving me this trail intentionally, to throw suspicion not on himself but upon the man whom he is so abysmally and humorlessly impersonating, but behind this intention is a deeper motive, a need to be discovered for the poor imposteur that he his, and this need is, in itself, a message, though not necessarily to me, but you, his gentle reader. As I comb through his scribble, erasing, cutting and pasting, marking his misspellings in red, I realize that I have taken him out of his own writing and gently, insidiously, interpolated myself like compacted sour lozenges between his words; in being almost laughably unsuccessful at impersonating me, his would-be-scapegoat, he has impersonated himself impeccably, thus, proving to us once again just how precisely unreal a man he is.

"YOU OWN EVERYTHING!"

There are too goddamned many of me in this room, grappling over this stale machine. Between the armless one with the blunt scissor-segment prosthesis, the one-legged, three-dog-headed man, barking, belching, shitting out the words, "That’s it, I’m done!" like a suspect being interrogated under purple high-beams, the blue corpses keep piling, their faces matted in dry, dead flies. There are less of us now. The air is sweet; it is not a good sweet. Bones of each other’s that we’d broken in these last skirmishes are now healing into bricks and pipes, limbs sawed off above the joint with bitten leather strips and 90-proof-backyard-still-applejack are now growing into floor lamps, table legs and window frames. A rattling sounds in the attic, the man in starched shirt and black suspenders is lumbering down the stairs. I hear him just outside our door, now, black phlegm rattling in his black lungs, wheezing, barking, shitting out the words, "I’ll take it with me to my grave!"

-

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Mannequinsex

If asked to choose, albeit reluctantly, a favorite from my "chunks" of writing, it would have to be this. Back in September 2003, this just... well, scribbled itself out of me, as a cramped block of prose... in green chalk or colored pencil (I remember, now) on a sketchpad. I still have the "manuscript," or "hard copy," as it were, in my files; looking over it, I can see how minimally edited this is. It reads at the pace in which I wrote it.


Mannequinsex


in this closely trailing after-image a leash of carbon paper touch-tones a percentage affixes itself to creeping battalion of security envelopes proofs of purchase do not detect a dial tone automatic call return service unavailable revert to original command sequence code displays item not found -

in this breathing tube feedbag hormone supplement hazard-simulation body-suit protocols echo in real-time document transfer secured deposit at fixed percentage sealant conscripts growth figures projected for windproof man-hole cover sutures in silk needle-worked rows of surface-to-air missiles -

in this echo-chamber four-pound waste disposal units open incinerator chutes for unmanned parades of lifeless packaging deliver automated transfer of interdepartmental factory-sealed fingerprint-proof parcels quarantined by tear-duct bronchial psychomotor chromatic scale involuntary time-lapse -

in this assisted living facility unedited pages slip beneath radar into bottomless landfill splices a chromosome’s bitter end beyond retina-offending chemical sunsets offshore drilling in mouthwash ziplock subdivisions ascend with main thrusters operational through troposphere ionosphere freeway pileups in textile mill zoning permits border patrol undeveloped marshlands where overheated silicon chips vibrate seventh-chord arpeggios in the telephoto lens -

in these buddy-system hazmat suits econo-lodge electric pencil sharpener harmony lays the pavement you can count on to maintain operant hair-clog formation for a guided tour of chainlink fences parking lots and the backs of people’s heads like a generic neighbor these wheel-of-fortune gelcaps keep a good dummy company in the safe oblivion of a slow-marching people-plug -

the airbag you save just may be your own -