From website gregglory.com
Written by Gregg Glory (Gregg G. Brown)
Interregnum Scribbles
By Gregg Glory
Published By
BLAST PRESS
Copyright © 1999
Interregnum Scribbles or Taunting Tantalus
Contents
A perch for the wind
Sensorium Reporting
The Transparent Head
Said the Head
"The queer and the square"
"The practical cactus"
"The more sporting orchid"
"The eyes of Miss Mezmer"
“'Live for the deal !'”
"Through the door’s lighted portal"
"There lies puss Harvest"
"Grendel and Mockon"
"There once was a maid from Missouri"
"spilt milk from runny mouth"
Attempting Sonnet
The Queen of Cakes
Tramping
Void, Voyeur
A Complex Martyr
Homage A La Dbd
St. Louis Mourning
A Vacant Harlot
Consummate Pageant
Dardanelles
St. John's Lament
Kangaroo For Gordon
William Carlos Williams
"i look around at the room full of personalities"
Rabbit
Tad
"I do not cease because I suffer"
"In the pubs out loud I sang it,"
By the Punchbowl at Anakreon's Wake
Purity
[Alternate] St. Louis Mourning
St. John's Lament
The Bells of St Mary's
What Love
SONG: stop lookin' so sorry and sullen
Scrabble for the Soul
Stet: Situations
Dirty Words
Windows
The Dagger Of Art
Version Two: The Dagger of Art
Fixation
Bask
Verdunce
"Stark Eternities crumple when one flower fails."
Urf N Urf: The Poore Houz
St. Louis Mourning
Lost in New York
Banned in DC
A perch for the wind
We value the imagination so much; we need and desire it to the nth degree. Civilization lives on the barest bones of its creations; it drinks its sour sweat and laughs with relief like a man dying of thirst. And yet, we can give no living imagination a home in our material plenitude, no perch for the wind.
Here’s the poem I blabbed on the horn to you yestereve. I think I’ve already achieved some of the condensation and eliding I desired.
A perch for the wind
Whose bones I break bear the ash
Breath first tongued in soot;
Whose back I bare endures the lash
Of days quick as coals.
Whose tongue I suck between two gasps
Of bare babe’s cry and skull’s knobbed crack
Vowels a violent void that snaps
Babe, grave and groin in our kisses’ black.
Whose wormy, wasted soul I own
Filched infinity from moldy bloods;
Animal and man I dug for sup
And killing and kissing gave forth God.
Sensorium Reporting
Dawn creeps out of corners
A luminal aloneness
Until the block stands bare,
Undressed by trailing shadows
Along the canyon, there.
See, the dark sangreal moon
Leaning frailly unaware,
While Monsieur Honduras down the street
Strangles nightmares with a yawn.
A California fragrance
A sequoia something stirs;
The cactus broods on its own sweetness
And not a soul is heard.
The Transparent Head
The transparent head is ready
To tell me what I know--
The jimson stuck inside her
Peers out at molded eyes.
Here cerebellums’ eloped with dews
That slip along her smile
Invisible and sharp and real
As kisses carved of glass.
Said the Head
“Here I am
an empty head;
You are living
And I am dead.
I was made
to let pass
Illuminations
Through my glass.
Your head is solid,
dull and dark.
Now tell me who has
the diviner spark?”
"The queer and the square"
The queer and the square
Make the loveliest pair
With their corners at opposite junctures
Where one makes a bend
The other in twin
Flops over as if suddenly punctured.
"The practical cactus"
The practical cactus
Has prongs out its cractus
To defend its soft core
Form anything more
Than the bare breaths of intrusive intriguers.
"The more sporting orchid"
The more sporting orchid
Dangles openly sordid
Surprised by stray breezes
That easily pleases
The startled red parts of the orchids.
"The eyes of Miss Mezmer"
The eyes of Miss Mezmer
Stop clocks in October;
With her NeuroSync looks
And love of good books
She’ll stop the stock market come December.
“'Live for the deal !'”
“Live for the deal !”
Goes the salesman’s spiel
And the gold perihelion
Of the businessman’s millions
Rises like Christ
When I crack the dice
And Dame Fortuna sits spinning her wheels.
"Through the door’s lighted portal"
Through the door’s lighted portal
Go bravely, don’t dawdle
-- Confront Life’s millions of marvels;
For every burr there’s a pearl
For each hurt there’s a curl
That smiles although we are mortal.
"There lies puss Harvest"
There lies puss Harvest
Alive as a starburst;
Her paws paused from battle
And all matter of twattle
That keeps Mankind upended and cursed.
"Grendel and Mockon"
Grendel and Mockon,
The philosopher’s dragon,
Argued and never quite got on.
The quarrel they brewed
Grew thick as goo stew:
“Why, why?” whined the one.
Said the other: “Come, come,
Infinity’s a joke
For the clear-sighted bloke
Who can see the clown on the bottom.”
"There once was a maid from Missouri"
There once was a maid from Missouri
Who wanted to get laid in a hurry.
She’s soft and she’s furry,
Her speech a bit slurry,
Because she would suck
The place she’d been fucked,
That merry young maid from Missouri.
We can do nothing against the force of nature; we can’t win, the best we can do is lose gracefully.
"spilt milk from runny mouth"
spilt milk from runny mouth
poppy popcorn music
bubblegum chums
trading spit with the wicked
tonsil hockey with a walk in
sinful sips from liquid lips
go hang yourself with your sky blue tie
violet whiles have freed my miles
limitless lilies nod at my goddess
stark and dark
everything that rises must converge
in the makeshift moonlight's yellow zone
inkless words increase and cross
spelled backwards by the resurrected trees
white Aprils laughing up her sleeve
the sonatina a trembling mirror makes
before the half discovered image breaks
the sonatina in the tomb
labors through the sounds of gloom
to something paltry, pained and new
while surging echoes of remorse
rip a rose's ribs apart
and there in severed heaven
of louder country called
alone as agony
unattended by any eye
Attempting Sonnet
Okay, how does a sonnet go?
Insomnia’s a good way to begin one.
Add a patch of cyclical periwinkle,
An endrhyme balancing on a follicle…
Boxed by a wooden border,
Any patched and secondhand semblance of good order.
What is it about the endrhyme’s fence?
I like what rough tongues send instead
--internal rhyme and inner sense--
I’ll fight the endrhyme to the end.
Okay, but how does a sonnet go?
I used to care, and I almost know....
The quatrain will not contain one.
With three, you may almost obtain one.
Buckle it with a couplet, and you’ve got one.
--by Carrie Water, Gregg Glory, & Boni Joi
The Queen of Cakes
The Queen of cakes and regal treats
Is the only Queen, for sweet Terra’s sake,
Whose sad, delicious meaning beams
On sleepy cougars and their dreams.
Chittering junebugs rave and writhe
Against the screendoor’s breezes blithe;
Lemon frost and sassafras sticks,
Peppermint blast and licorice whips.
The single Queen of meaning seems
She of cakes and regal sweets.
Unbind the slaves from their blind lathes
And strip the succotash from out each dish;
Upend the jars of jelly spice
And mahogany cabinets lay bare.
The single Queen of meaning seems
She of cakes and regal sweets.
The architrave frays in its leather case,
Rusty chores lean half undone,
Steel sticks of Alcatraz char discarded
In the summer’s minty sun.
The only Queen of meaning seems
She whose sad, delicious beams
Fall on cougars, roses, and their dreams…
--By Gregg Glory and Carrie Water
Tramping
When Spring's chaos comes and small snakes braid
Under the Sun’s bold boots strolling dusts as cozy
As the pelvic bed where our mortared bones are laid
(In mortal mixing snug love mists hazy)
Then every nosy bud that shoves its muzzle
Into the grand good glory old God abandoned
Reigns with sceptered pollens and royal fuzzes
Of cone-shadow gowns the martinet, intrepid,
Thorny casques of courtier insects arrayed in leaves
Winter's withered stick had cracked to ground.
And then when my petitioning stride displays
Along buzzing meadows where the mower first ambled
(With longlegs shortening my travels)
I glide the tidied detritus his staggered blade unravels
And wish for all the walked world's fallows
A cragged return to disordered brambles.
Void, Voyeur
Alone between the stars I went
From light to light my back was bent
To fill the void of lonely feeling
I carried so many a night.
But no matter how far I journeyed,
Peeping from star to star with yearning,
My empty heart still followed me
Unsated by any light.
Then Carrie came, and Carrie kissed
My blood red lips one night;
And deep within my heart's dark mists
Began to glow a little light.
O Carrie came, and Carrie kissed
And I know why the stars are bright;
They shine within as much as they can
To see my Carrie's kiss.
A Complex Martyr
Chastised eyes
Chastised eyes
Glare no more on inward wars:
Accreted dusts that sharply crept
Down the pale defiles at midnight,
Spilling golden dirty light over all.
I made the world when I was wise
When I wandered lost and found
And in a crossed, broken shadow drowned;
And sharp Time frisked
With syphilitic Pantagruel.
(I have lived my life while floating on the rood.)
And still the snow inquires
And still the day expires
In some stale argument's half-misapprehension,
The glazed eyes of weary aspect,
Hollow yet disdainful, and rolled upon a bulb
In the moronic posture of a gesture
Gilding the broken indices of Fate.
(I have touched the molten blots that blot within.
I have rearranged my clothes upon a hook.)
A look, a moment's Edenic condescension
Gazes back from a haunted mirror
To fall upon the blankness of a wall.
That is all.
(I have stood upon the Arctic zones and poles
Of certain yellow unlit rooms alone.)
Scarred and mastered in the discarded garden,
Near the wisteria, near the moon's porcelain glances,
Roses had maddened us, and we were glad.
Water's memory in the concrete bowl
Rustles cold leaves in the ruined fountain
Scratching over the water's ancient course.
A thousand points of light conflict
In a thousand parted dooryards;
Conflict, flicker, and then resolve,
Focused into a single momentary glow.
Here, balancing the wisteria on a fingerend
Pointing past my agile nose to oblivion.
(My eyes and I contain
A thousand portions of a thousand parted souls.)
Homage A La Dbd
Perhaps these venomed essences seem obscene,
Half-realized dissolutions,
Blank dissuasions of half-solutions
Leaking moonlight leans down to send
Into desperate, intemperate heads.
Desolate beneath a fading moon
That invades
The murky modesty of a rented room
My unmended melancholy still compels
--Or, merely serene, serenely seems
To spell both sky and sea,
Rampant tree and vacant well,
Into the broken order of my soul.
Paralytic flowers of the chilling moon
Dose dead medicines
From silver skins;
They edge the blind compliant mouth
Tumorous June once brought to drought.
No, no, there is no need to ask--
Among such colorless anarchies of the air
Divinity rarely lifts her mask.
St. Louis Mourning
Around the corner and down the street
A dixieland funeral saunters,
Colorful and lingering and usual
Toward the graveyard's nightmare encounters.
The band is blatant, pure and loud,
Hesitant and impudent,
Symptomatic of the crowd.
Punctual despair! Martinis at five.
I cannot afford to stop a clock
Or otherwise improvise
Eternities ad hoc;
Time's unmoored,
And grinds along the street.
I repeat the bony, frozen syncopations
That continue, with the usual
Dividend of derivations.
Time hangs heavily in the ratty eves,
Losing teeth, losing leaves;
Sturdy human habit seeks reprieve.
Spanish moss that darkens the darkest hour
Wets the bold wisteria climbing there
Twisting like the dying
Aria of Guenivere.
I glance below
Lowbrowed eves and stare:
Nothing moves and nothing cares.
A Vacant Harlot
Outrageous and depressed,
Alert on taut animal haunches
And somewhat overdressed
Despite the summer and the butane heat,
The whore expiring across the street
Proceeds to her appointment, cool and cautious,
And carefully repeats:
"Anonymous anodyne of pride: defeat."
Life does not hold together,
A soggy cardboard box, abused and ruined,
Silted with liver pills and moldy feathers,
The last illness of a fatal afternoon.
Life lies purged of hope and gloom,
A crumpled paper romance white fire withers
Beneath the disappointed siftings of the moon.
Life retires in the grass, expires in a room.
And here the harlot, hot and rapid,
Danced thin instants upon a checkered floor.
And all she touched was overripe, or rancid,
A ribbed theater of pain and gore.
Consummate Pageant
Silver prophets, jaked and jaded,
Languish where tornadoes dared;
They lift wet ashes of a disheartened
Ovation littering the stairs.
Unaware, though wry and fitful,
The tall trombonist of noon approaches,
Extruding tones in lazy fistfuls
Contented as a cockaroach.
The afternoon seems turned around,
Notes like icicles litter the pendant eves
Or, moody rapt contemplatives,
Hold themselves alone, intense, profound.
The prophets seek to circumvent:
"Such giddiness is sin!"
But they are powerless to prevent:
"We cannot finish, so why begin?"
The tall trombonist honks a long report,
Gutting out the usual day with sounds
Until a moaning starry eve of sorts
For a 'bourbon nurture' comes around.
The prophets find themselves excluded.
Mooned beyond the windowpane in pairs
They spot the happy hero of their minds denuded;
They look on him and stare.
Dardanelles
With midnight vigils at a busstop
So that our suffering might be destroyed
We sit and drink our coffee, adjust the lamp,
Shaving patient corners from the void.
The hustle of suits dressed in deceit
Prepare a face to meet the faces that they meet
Black tears trysting on an empty cheek,
An aerialist suspenseful above the clouds,
Meet dead center, a past and future,
In the stagnant tension of the crowd.
Individual luminescence has decreased---
A sulfur spotlight pins the penitent's
Restless shifting feet
The body like a flower, mildly drunk,
And flooded with the memory of love,
Drinks and waits 'til the tightrope trips,
A strangled grieving scream above.
A streaked resemblance in the rain
Recalls the pallid ghost again
Beyond the abstract silver circle
Where our impatient senses sit
A splinter of a finished soul
In perished light persists.
St. John's Lament
Homeless and entombed, intense,
The listless martyr in his cave
Lives unlighted, yet repeats always:
"I burn the night and burn myself away."
"When soul unshakes her shackles
From misconceptions of the populace
My self above herself flies trackless,
Pure God whistled in an ear.
When World at tenement dawn unshutters
And stray dogs bark with utmost grace
In terrifying clarity I eye
My batlike soul unfurled, yet loitering,
A tombless wanderer in the swarm.
"Damned and dark I die each night.
Shut out of mortal life's mistake
All my agony is all my light,
Heaven a clearness where I quake.
Then love on her fluxing wings descends
A parachutist-suicide
Who slides down along my tower soul:
Central spotlight of a peripheral fool
Full of declamation and crescendo.
"Love is difficult, her wonders great,
That in the martyred heart
Lie curled and pent;
Much that's dark, much that's blessed
By love's confusion only
Pours gasoline upon a changing soul, 'til she
Consumeless stands in the fire's folds.
Shadrach, Meshack, and Abendago,
By love's confusion only
In vampire night under napalm tombs may I
Burn my bitter self away."
Kangaroo For Gordon
The piano's full of broken notes
the ceiling's caving in
Western Civ. just barely floats
in my lonesome mandolin
Kuala bears and kangaroos
Big Bird's got Bill Cosby down tonight
Santa's dropping presents from the roof
and all the girls are bulletproof tonight
I'm full of drinks as a smash-faced bat
bleeding night's coming in from the rain
the piano's notes fall full and fat
in my lonesome mandolin
William Carlos Williams
Ignore excelsior! The finished man hasn't happened yet.
All's the slide and trying-out of jazz, daddies,
not the finished litany of the visionary's crypt.
My Holy is Wholesome, seed of the American Grain,
wee weedlings gone green in their starchy stalks,
stiffnecking existential winds; Ezra and I
through the long Penn State corridors of rosewood
stamped passions into bones as if they'd hold:
"Contemporainity must yeast itself in bread!"
He, eagle-headed, cackling, wiseass, says:
"I'll egg caviars, and knive thy wheats, Willie!"
But he's wrong, ol' Ez is wrong, we're all
just human mush, not ribald gold; what shines
shines through us, not in us, not ever,
a flush flare we may mirror or magnify:
We were never gems. Admit it, Ez. All that flame
is but the catching fire of what we've made.
Chuck out greatness, procure the bolus, and burn.
...
"i look around at the room full of personalities"
i look around at the room full of personalities:
(Time is ultra-full!)
creation jostles
abuts: a subwayride
downtown
full of expressiveness!
Is a gem a cornerstone of lights
or is it merely
the most open to what
passes shining through?
Look at the foxgloves!
rising in teeming tiers
to the sky, unroofed
for their blueness.
Humanity trampolines
the quiet height a median
between topmost and voidmost
a concession to restlessness
the active waiting
of a furious birth
a slap in the stirrups
::does god have tonsils
as strong as these!?
as strong
as human softness
born
crushed to here.
Rabbit
It's dead.
Nothing left
Except for a sort of
Remorseless tapioca.
The skin, starched,
Is turned
Strange as a linen.
It's dead.
Was thundered down by the cat.
---I watched. The cat's paw,
Light as a cork
In my hand,
Set off the soft detonations
That purple the spine,
Back of the small head.
the window kept me safe.
This window, now
Set white
With morning blaze.
It is the precise color of dying,
When all the fleshy parts
Shimmer out in glimmer of
Decay. Lead white---
And heavy as hospital walls.
Time's gravity
Knots the lips to a ridiculous snicker.
A grass toothpick sags between the teeth,
Half eaten.
All night
A cold breath has been clambering,
Nail by nail, up my pantleg
Unannounced. But look now--- It's
Disgusting!
These maggots!
White as the chalk
On a little girl's hand.
Quotes
And so at the age of forty-seven I became a soldier for the first time in my life, outfitted in scraps of cast-off armor, wearing a coat of mail with half the scales missing and a much-dented helmet shaped like a hewn-off pumpkin, wielding a blunted sword for a hopeless cause under a doomed commander. I felt I must be approaching the very heart of the labyrinth; I could almost smell the Minotaur's hot breath upon my face.
---- Gordianus the Finder
UNDER THE EYE OF THE CLOCK
Vests of vanquished heaven bucked his boy's god-given loneliness but at the same time hell guffawed in loud mocking laughs.
Rambling through glistening orchids, gentians, meadowsweet and wild rock roses cloned from breezeblown, bird-couriered seed, the familystepped on scattered floral carpets strewn here and there among the rocks. Joseph festered hymns of wonder at beauty born from limestone. Cripplelegged, he rode his human beast of burden and gazed down into wells of verdant flower-cushioned greenery.
ceremonies of inconsequent innocence
disaster dabbled in the statesman's pen
inked with rich death and then
dabbed dry once again
Tad
Our revels now are ended,
Every beaker emptied;
Flown are our good wishes
Alcohol had furnished;
Now's time to wash the dishes.
"I do not cease because I suffer"
Ges pel maltraich q'ieu soferi
De ben amar no.m destoli,
Si tot me ten en desert,
C'assi.n fatz los motz en rima:
Pieitz trac aman c'om que laura,
C'anc plus non amet un ou
Cel de Moncli N'Audierna.
I do not at all cease to love nobly
because of the pain I suffer,
although it keeps me in the wilderness,
and so out of it I make these words in rhyme:
as a lover I suffer worse than the man who labors,
and never did that man of Monclin
love more his Lady Audierna.
I do not cease because I suffer
to love most nobly-- not at all,
though all of me's dropped in the desert,
cursing to cough out these words in rhyme:
"More crucified than Christ hangs the lover,
and never with more passionate lips than mine
did Christ kiss his Mother."
"In the pubs out loud I sang it,"
In the pubs out loud I sang it,
From my tumbledown grave I shout:
Drink, drink,--- hops and liquors, wits,
You too must tie on this bib of dust!
---Julianus, Prefect of Egypt, 600 AD
By the Punchbowl at Anakreon's Wake
FRIEND:
Anakreon, you died from puffing your paunch
with indigestible wines, day and night.
ANAKREON:
It's true; but I enjoyed myself,
and you, who never indulge,
will wake up with me in Hell just the same
but perfectly sober.
---Julianus, again.
Purity
Beautiful girl, let us cast off these garments.
Let our naked limbs be knotted
so that
not even light can pass between us.
To me your weak shift
is as daunting
as Babylon's great gate.
Let us press chest against chest-- at once!
Let us pour our mouths together
mouth into mouth
and plunge the rest into silence.
I cannot abide trivial chatter.
---Paulus Silentiaris, adapted from Willis Barnstone
the charming petty larceny of a stolen self
[Alternate] St. Louis Mourning
Time is hanging heavily in the eves,
Spanish moss that darkens the darkest hour
Wets the bold wisteria climbing there
Like the dying aria of Guenivere.
I glance below
Lowbrowed eves and stare:
Nothing moves and nothing cares.
Around the corner and down the street
A dixieland funeral saunters,
Colorful and lingering and usual
Toward the graveyard's nightmare encounters.
Naughty time's knowing syncopations
Continue, with the usual
Dividend of derivations.
Punctual despair! Martinis at five.
I cannot afford to stop a clock
Or otherwise improvise
Eternities ad hoc;
The band is blatant, pure and loud,
Hesitant and impudent,
Symptomatic of the crowd.
St. John's Lament
Without a home and with a tomb
I listless languish in this cave. No ray
Of penetrant light, and yet always
I burn the night and burn myself away.
My soul unshakes her shackles--- I am free
From all the bound-down faces of the earth;
Thrown, my soul above herself flies hurled
Into life and into ecstasy, pure God
Whistling in my singing ears. This World
Unshutters with terrifying clarity to see at last
What I eye in utmost grace:
My Soul unfurled, yet still languishing,
Without a tomb and with a home.
And though I die damned and dark each night
In crabbed mortal life, I know
My agony is air, air, mere air,
A dullard ink ignorant of light---
The heavens' clarity where my soul goes;
Dynamo love still fluxes stiff my life
However numb, denied, black and blind my day.
Love from my tower soul falls free of strife
Til I lie in my soft cave sans rays.
Hard, the wonders love can work---
I know as few can know
That all that's damned or blessed in me
By love alone can shaft heart's core,
Charging my changing soul alight til she
Consumeless stands in the fire's hurt.
I feel love's lightning light as a ray
And kill the dark days until entombed I lie
And burn my bitter self away.
[extra]
The king is absent, on vacation
Beyond the icy scope of globes,
He persists unmangled past rank mutation,
A dead ideal or remembered rose.
The Bells of St Mary's
Sweetly beat the bells of St Mary's
Over all the pasturage;
Ignorant souls and weary
Come gather at the meeting-edge.
When ever was body and its wreck
Home enough for what the spirit seeks?
The great clock has run down
and fair and foul are mixed;
Come where the bower's sweetly blown,
Come wind the clock-hands round again.
Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
Sweet are the bells that beat St Mary
To bright sky and mournful cow;
Sweet are the hands that row the ferry,
The backs that pull the plow.
The great clock has run down
___
___
___
Come wind the clock-hands round again;
At midnight soul work begins.
Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
Sweet is knowledge for the weak
Who cannot tell what they are,
Mind and misery sunk in tar.
Work of the back can bring liberation
From too-great ache and half-starved
Candlelit concentration.
Come sweet ladies of St Mary's
For the hands are running back,
Come wind the clock-hands round again
That beat the swollen face and rend skin.
Come wind the bell of the old clock tower.
What Love
What love can know its underpinning,
Cause and causeless are so whirled?
What horse that canters at the gate
Stamp assured of the final winning?
Often what is best starts late---
The midnight pilgrim has her prayers heard
Before the dawning bird's.
SONG: stop lookin' so sorry and sullen
stop lookin' so sorry and sullen
I'm gonna pop pop you in the eye like gg allen
I'm gonna do just like he did--
I'm gonna pop you pop you like my friend Sid!
Scrabble for the Soul
"Such as," she says--
quaintly painted on a generous bed;
mix the smell of wood and coffee brewing;
she contrives her own undoing.
Tidies up the room with a targeted glance
absent sight's chaotic
char and chance.
I open up shaggily
to smoke eloping;--
a remote wind outside
confines my silly honor
paid her prating pride.
"Such as, much as,"
she airily concludes
"we endure this life,
enduring death,
and all of love's etudes."
by GLORY and the MOLE-man
Stet: Situations
a man
· murmurs a summary
from a hurried ambulance
· the lance-tip announcement
of your pregnancy
· last-minute veer
awoken by the rumble strips
· the bottom of the stomach
humbly dips at the
wealth in her heart
Jeffery Moller
the thrill of blugrass is a-passin thru me ears and ways today. lastnite had a fine time in the o' drinkin' corral in d.c. a fiddler on the roof took us to a black cat that disgorged a poet, who magccarpet rodedrove us over to the homey home of jazz. after it all (which included a saffire Bombay martini served in fine high sippin' style) we arrived wrecked to jeeves' apartment and saw a bit of a docudrama about jedco-- the man who is elvis, a mountain dancer who hooves it like satan, grew a beard like lincoln, and who, according to local legend and his wife, is, well, is... uh... let me let her tell you her self...betsy bits, take it away...
"My Jedco? Why... he's the worldwide!"
Thank you, and goodnight.
02/03/99.
'In reading a man's character, who is the better judge, an immortal artist like Walt Whitman or an obscure and banal banker-polititian named McCulloch?'--Geoffrey Perret, US Grant, Soldier & President
Dirty Words
When speech degenerates to apathy
And apathy's to the hurricane thrown
And all lie down with the lie unbound
We've folded up our Constitution
Into a tiny crown.
All are mastless, set adrift
By a dirty word.
The president has oiled the moorings
That belayed us to the earth:
Words wrung 'round tight Appomattox
Where blooded victory was wound
Or tapped at that drumhead on the Hudson
Where our first voice was found--
All are mastless, set adrift
By a dirty word.
Gone is Grant, who saw "all that"
And never said a word;
The virtue of a quiet room,
Hourless as silence--
Where cool truth had held its breath
In a vortex of vices.
All are mastless, set adrift
By a dirty word.
http://come.to/gregglory
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Drowned, drowned; all are drowned
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Last Saturday, hopped over to the Pristines/Mad Lee/Target 7 show at the Brighton. Damn fine bands, and a damn fine show. Jeff "Mole" and "Swivel Hips" Debra were also there, grinding their way around a barstool in time to the killer tunes. I was reading a Mallarme biography in the light of the MTV broadcast and squirming and smiling to myself. Couple of lanky lads dropped by and began confessing to me their adoration of Mallarme's poem "Windows," so here it is:
Windows
Taxed to the max by the hospital, by the fetid incense
that mounts the banal whiteness of the curtains,
up ennuied blank walls, veering to the grand crucifix ...
a moribund old bastard cracks his back and straightens;
drags his sorry ass windoward, less to warm-up his sack of decay
than to watch the sunlight on the flagstones; flattens
his white hair and the meager bones of his face of clay
against the windows, where a beautiful clear sunray tans.
His mouth pants hot and hungry for the blue skies
he raced, when young, to breathe in like treasures!
His skin, virginal at 20, now defiles
with a long salty kiss the solid gold windows.
He lives drunk and oblivious to the horror and stench
of herbal cures and thick 'saints oils,'
the pissy tisanes, the clock and the hospital bed.
A solid cough, and evening, sick, bleeds
along transfigured tiles:
his eye peers along a horizon gouged red
but sees only silver ships, svelte as swans,
riding a river of purples and perfumes fast asleep.
They yaw; and the tawny, rich, and clear lightning of their lines
rocks in a grand nonchalance charged with youth's
deep keepsakes!
---So! gripped in the gut by a disgust for Man
and his plasticine soul---
baby-wallowing in shit-happiness where all is appetite:
a feast of persistent searching for 'more, more!' foul
feasting, to bring shit home on a plate
to his excited wife wet-nursing maggots,
I start running, crouched in the crosses
of windows, my shoulder turned to life, blessed
in the clear glass laved with eternal roses
drenched golden by chaste dawn's Infinity. The best!
I see myself-- an angel! I die! I love!
--does this glass possess Art or Mysticism?--
I am reborn, wearing my dream like a diadem,
into the original Eden where Beauty hung in a foxglove.
But, damn! the base world is my master:
its obsessions invade my only certain shelter--
and the crappy vomiting of that beast Stupidity
shoves my nose in my bad breath, and not into the sky.
Is there any way? Self, pals with bitter thoughts
and bitter things,
any way to force the crystal that monster, my body, insults?
Any way to be free
and escape? With just my two stripped, unfeathered wings?
Even at the risk of falling forever!? Through Eternity!
(P.S. we all drew the pictures for this issue at the bar, using the donated pen you see photocopied on the cover; the pen was given to us by the "Where's reality?" artist, one of the members of Mad Lee and the Rough Mix, I forget his name).
Version One: The Dagger Of Art
1.
Yes, all things in magnificence increase
When hammered with travail
And patience---
Verse, marble, onyx, enamel.
2.
Snap all false constraints!
But, that you may walk erect,
Your corset,
Muse, pull tight.
3.
Sculptor, renounce
Clay and stone, chisel and bit
When doubts
Unnerve the finger and the spirit.
4.
Hold to hard Carrara,
With Paros cool endure,
So rare,
Guarding the pure contour.
5.
Imprint the Syracuse
Bronze that, firm and proud,
Never releases
Those traces fierce and charmed.
6.
And with a dread most delicate
Pursue the filiament of soul
In agate,
Profiling perfect Apollo.
7.
Painter, despise pale aquarelle
And pin your palette,
So faint, so frail,
In fixed fires enameled.
8.
Take and twist blue mermaids
Trenchantly a hundred ways
By their fishy ends
---Those monsters of old heraldry!
9.
Show in a nimbus triple-lobed
The Virgin, Jesus
And the globe
Blazing beneath the Cross.
10.
All is dust.--- But Art, robust,
Alone is Eternal;
The portrait
Survives the charnel.
11.
And the austere medallion
Plowed up by a laborer
From dirt and loam
Reveals an Emperor.
12.
Gods die and are interred;
But sacred, sovereign verse
Endures---
More mightily made than Death.
13.
Sculpt, carve, chisel;
Until the floating dream alone
Smiles
Within the resisting stone.
THEOPHILE GAUTIER
Version Two: The Dagger of Art
1.
Yes, all things increase in magnificence
When hammered with travail
And patience---
Verse, marble, onyx, enamel.
2.
Damn each false constraint!
Yet, that you may walk erect,
Your corset,
Muse, pull tight.
3.
Sculptor, renounce
Clay and stone, chisel and bit
When doubts
Unnerve the finger and the spirit.
4.
Hold to hard Carrara,
With Paros cool endure,
So rare,
Guarding the pure contour.
5.
Imprint bronze of Syracuse
That, firm and proud,
Never releases
Each trace fierce and charmed.
6.
And with a dread most delicate
Pursue the filament of soul
In agate,
Profiling perfect Apollo.
7.
Painter, despise pale aquarelle
And pin your palette,
So faint, so frail,
In unchanging flames enameled.
8.
Bunch and twist blue mermaids
Trenchantly a hundred ways
By their fishy ends
---Monsters of antique heraldry!
9.
Show in a nimbus triple-lobed
The Virgin, Jesus
And the globe
Blazing beneath one Cross.
10.
---Dust to dust.
The pastor intones
Talced white
Above white pews of skeletons.
11.
Art alone, robust,
Savors of Eternity; the ephemeral
Portrait bust
Survives the charnel.
12.
And the austere medallion
Plowed up by a laborer
From dirt and loam
Reveals an Emperor.
13.
Gods die and are interred;
But sacred, sovereign verse
Endures---
More mightily made than Death.
14.
Sculpt, carve, chisel;
Until the floating dream alone
Smiles
Within the resisting stone.
Fixation
Epigram: I rise and try the strength of every lock and put to proof each guard's fidelity.
- Schiller, "Mary Stuart"
Painting her nails
a ruined Venus yawns
armless and pale; --
a body of spilled wine
stirred by the fabulous dawn.
With chains fixed deep
within caves of sleep
and watching through a troubled gauze,
I saw the flight of foreign thought
brought uneasily to the light.
Sleepwalking on callused heels
she turns repentant back to bed,
her eyes of absent Venus
impervious to halogens;
while I crave a hollow shell,
insensitive and numb.
But as I bring forth
these nervous words
and frozen, half-circled looks,
the horizon of her gaze unheard
unfurls windows where our Heaven's fled
into countries of new crime.
- Lewd and damned,
she slowly bleeds
No longer one of us.
Gregg Glory and Mole
9/10/98
Bask
The sunburst thrill of the peak
of accomplishment
Knowing the child-in-the-wagon ride down the hill
is just ahead.
Bask away
because no one can bask for you!
Gregg Glory & Mole
Verdunce
In all this fading dun,
This reducible winter,
This essence of Verdun
Eerily echoing laughter
After such autumnal littling,
You come,
You come,
In a hugeness of tune transfiguring.
Obliterating, in our bleak extreme,
What we had become.
You come,
You come,
Among such dark shades and dark days
The flaring crucible,
The true, the one,
Finicky vermilion.
Gregg Glory
"Stark Eternities crumple when one flower fails."
Stark Eternities crumple when one flower fails.
Generations fester into the lily TIME
That, like a backward hatchet, watches growth,
Notes the Spring unwind, an harmonic clock,
Hums with unbounded Summers' golden triumphs
But knows it has an eye and ear lodged hereafter.
Eats the days of languish, consumes them all,
And digs with its witch divot under Autumn's harvest,
Draping divinest fruit with harshest shadow
Until a Winter whiteness wipes the slates
And Spring again puts out its decimated bud;
O who will cruelly note that none of this occurs,
That TIME has no magic ax to hurt, no skill to shave
All of the moment's purple glory to the grave?
To live in seconds is to exist forever,
Or else in Life there is no living to discover.
GREGG GLORY
Urf N Urf: The Poore Houz
[A Conversation Poem; overheard at a 30th Anniversary.]
You know these people
Did you hear of the trauma of Buck
Thought the fishin' lure looked pretty good
Gregg do you want some bread
They rushed him to the clinic wailing
Last time they just brushed his teeth
Is this signed poetry
My pants leg doesn't look like that
Yes it does its a photo
That's the sunlight distorting it
I think not
Oh, I messed up
Gregg do you want some bread
Easiest salad to make
And I screwed up
Oh beautiful thank you honey-- honies
I'm the brains
Lauren watches Charlie Rose too....
How did I miss knowing her all these years
Of course Fran treated
It was a really great movie, really great
Gregg do you want some bread
It didn't have that Indian movie thing
That attitude, you know, More Oppressed Than Thou
Its like a routine
Making salads
Oh....now I know what I was going to tell you
St. Louis Mourning
Around and down the corner and the street
A dixieland funeral saunters,
Colorful and lingering and usual
Toward the graveyard's nightmare encounters.
The band is blatant, pure and loud,
Hesitant and impudent,
Symptomatic of the crowd.
Punctual despair! Martinis at five.
I cannot afford to stop a clock
Or otherwise improvise
Eternities ad hoc;
Time's unmoored,
And grinds along the street.
I repeat the bony, frozen syncopations
That continue, with the usual
Dividend of derevations.
Time hangs heavily in the ratty eves,
Losing teeth, losing leaves;
Sturdy human habit seeks reprieve.
Spanish moss that darkens the darkest hour
Wets the bold wisteria climbing there
Twisting like the dying
Aria of Guenivere.
I glance below
Lowbrowed eves and stare:
Nothing moves and nothing cares.
Lost in New York
Horsesteps trammel faintless lights
pooled luminescence of a cab gone by
the breath passes thru my coat with purpose, on purpose;
choices are each a different Moses
which each decide as the wind disposes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Banned in DC
all generations of men were lost and wrong-- t carlyle
The wail of youth for generators, initiators, and fresh cloth
the nipped wish to live never inhibits who it inhabits
this is the wail of the tale.
What has been processed,
has become depleted of its own
essence;
digested paperwork --
malnutritious from the start.
"There’s something about a butthole."
There’s something about a butthole.
Everyone’s got one, but is it a soul?
