.

Under the grand patronage of
Alcohol flowing to her brain,
The glutton,
The harlot we all love
Employing the fluorescent lights
So they have something to shine on
When the Crazy Horses are stabled,
The gluttony imbibes,
With every ceramic tile dissonance,
The crassness of being lost,
The hopelessness of deliberately,
The deliberate heaping of pleasure —
.
She is the reality of life in 2016,
A living, embodied rhapsody
Whereupon shall fall
The ticking of the clock,
The ticking of the eve.

I now lie
As a lone wolf in an empty field,
The wind dead,
The chirping guppies respiting
In a nearby stream —
.
I tend to my duties,
But as the sun scorches my fur
I feel this life ending,
I feel the meat making
Recourse
.
Of all those corpses
I rendered, needing
Food, I will descend
Into worlds more prismatic,
Worlds of purple glasses
Which cannot be touched,
Only stared at
For 1,000 years.

The rain came down, and we were washed into a situation of uncertainty, in mid-March. It was one of those days when your chest feels sore, when the steely cars race by more incognito than ever, like so many alien constructions strewn effervescently across what is soon to be your past, and never anything more. She stood there in a yellow raincoat, wondering before my tyrannical face, wondering what had propelled her out into the rain on this night. Maybe it was that her life was rain, itself, and she were a petal, put on this earth to soak all of this up, to soak of the frenzy, the torrent of earthly need, the jet stream of manly rage, anger and hurt, like an animal which grows apart by its colored trueness, knowing only horror, knowing only pain and this next moment, all its coerced washing.

Ulysses, voted the premiere novel of the 20th century, has been called “one of the most beautiful pieces of writing of all time.” Multifarious and composed of sovereign sections, one of which is a play within the novel, another of which is an extended session of structureless stream-of-conscious narrative, it boasts sentences which zoom along like Honda CRX racers, wielding a sense of urgency and at the same time a street vernacular, or what qualified in early last century as such. This is the case in favor of James Joyce.

The case against him? Well, he’s dorky. He’s a big dorkus-forkus after third period chemistry class. He’d never make it with Zach Morris and Kelly Kapowski. I mean, have you seen what he wears? That bow-tie? Huh-huh. And the hills are alive with the sound of laughter.
The case in favor of James Joyce? Well, he’s got multiple other fictional publications which are taught in high schools, prep schools and universities the world over, like the short stories in Dubliners and the similarly prolix and vanguard novel Finnegan’s Wake. He’s got a potent knack for conveying affective images of unique characters, such as the shy, introverted kid in school in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man who prefers Lord Byron to all the more conventional poets, also named “Lord.”
The case against him? Well, the owner of the Keltic bookstore in downtown South Bend, Indiana, which is home of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, has never heard of him, and he’s got a hot ass daughter he puts out there in short shorts, so he must do something right. That’s right, do not adjust your computer screen: it’s not that he didn’t carry James Joyce, it’s not that he wasn’t sure if he carried your title off the top of his head… he actually did not know who James Joyce was. And yes, this is the KELTIC bookstore, mind you. That should just show, pretty definitely, that said author is now irrelevant.
As for Christianity? Well, we got the Mexicans hooked, for sure, and they hate the gays. To all… a lot of luck.

In enacting its duty,

The net in form unveils what is the hidden mystery,
A life processional too rapacious of the senses
To stand a battle of reason,
A snail to the turgid nebula
Wedged in the waxing figure
Of a crying ghost.

I stroll down to the park, getting ready to roll a cigarette. There’s a girl on a run, stretching by the river. She senses me coming up, senses some people around her, and then goes full force into her lunge, knowing balance only in the moment’s extremes.

With a slight smile, I glide past a dad and a son fishing. Neither one looks at me and I don’t look at them — I just hear… their voices are the same as the crickets chirping, not indicating age, status, or how soon they will die. [1]
As usual, the actual thing I was doing was the worst part of what I was doing.
.
[1] A Japanese poem cited in “Teddy” from J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories: “Nothing in the voice of the cicada indicates how soon it will die.”

By the time you see another

Brothel poster,
By the time you hear
Another joke of hopeless nothing,
You will realize
.
By the time they just
Stare, and stare,
That the logic was really a dead end
Like
.
At the day’s decline
You are just cattle too,
Given “freedom”
In exchange for
.
How the only “path”
Is that one up your neck to your price tag
Or bar code.

Like the color

And like the light
And like the intent that you first saw,
Before you formed your bitternesses,
Your hard self,
Her ears and eyelashes presage action,
Mimic the future’s fancies
And echo and nurture
What the rest of the world rightly
Sees as a hare brained masquerade.

Life —

This is the life thing..
And life is what happened before life,
And life is what will happen
.
After life is over.

Insanity

Is like a refraction
Of the will
Where
Instead of dissipating,
It actually grows stronger to where
Wild horses couldn’t drag the person away
From themselves.