
thing language , jack spicer


(This is the first poem in the sequence Thing Language.)
"Thing Language"
by Jack Spicer

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises
Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.
It
Is bread and butter
Pepper and salt. The death
That young men hope for. Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.

https://is.gd/82ZqMY

Thing Language ,  jack spicer

TRAIN SONG FOR GARY , jack spicer

The trains move quietly upon
The tracks outside like animals
I hear them every night.
And sometimes I can almost see
Their glittering unhurried eyes
Move out of sight.
I think that on the day I leave
This town of quiet houses they
Will sound their horns.
I think that then that burning herd
Will turn and follow me towards you
Like unicorns.


A SECOND TRAIN SONG FOR GARY , jack spicer

When the trains come into strange cities
The citizens come out to meet the strangers.
I love you, Jack, he said
I love you, Jack, he said
At another station.
When passengers come in from strange cities
The citizens come out to help the strangers.
I love you too, I said
I love you too, I said
From another station.
The citizens are kind to passing strangers
And nourish them and kiss their lips in kindness.
I walk the unbelieving streets
I walk the unbelieving streets
In a strange city.
At night in cold new beds the welcomed strangers
Achieve in memory the city’s promise.
I wake in love with you
I wake in love with you
At last year’s station.
Then say goodbye to citizens and city
Admit this much—that they were kind to strangers.
I leave my love with you
I leave my love with you
In this strange city.



excerpt of letter to Gary Bottone , 

Bohemia is a dreadful, wonderful place. It is full of hideous people and beautiful poetry. It is a hell full of windows into heaven. It would be wrong of me to drag a person I love into such a place against his will. Unless you walk into it freely, and with open despairing eyes, you can't even see the windows. And yet I can't leave Bohemia myself to come to you—Bohemia is inside of me, in a sense is me, was the price I paid, the oath I signed to write poetry.   https://is.gd/3QLvyX 


Train Song for Gary & Second Train Song for Gary , Jack Spicer


HOMOSEXUALITY ,  jack spicer

Roses that wear roses
Enjoy mirrors.
Roses that wear roses must enjoy
The flowers they are worn by.
Roses that wear roses are dying
With a mirror behind them.
None of us are younger but the roses
Are dying.
Men and women have weddings and funerals
Are conceived and destroyed in a formal
Procession.
Roses die upon a bed of roses
With mirrors weeping at them.

Homosexuality , jack spicer

“We find the body difficult to speak . . .” , jack spicer

We find the body difficult to speak,
The face too hard to hear through,
We find that eyes in kissing stammer
And that heaving groins
Babble like idiots.
Sex is an ache of mouth. The
Squeak our bodies make
When they rub mouths against each other
Trying to talk.
Like silent little children we embrace,
Aching together.
And love is emptiness of ear. As cure
We put a face against our ear
And listen to it as we would a shell,
Soothed by its roar.
We find the body difficult, and speak
Across its wall like strangers.

We Find The Body Difficult To Speak , jack spicer

Psychotropic Squalls , will alexander


To peer into the obverse 
into smoking cane field erratums 
as if haunted with the steamy colitis of whirling iridium 
cancellations 

as in the saliva of newts 
one sees the intestinal raging of deltas 
of blackened sea giraffes osmotically split into simultaneous alums 
above a judgemental sea glistening with Richters 

like a weakened neutron egg 
its fissioning petrol mirages like spirals of irregular hunting geese 
flying through flames of ulcerated smoke & gargantua 
hissing a blank imperial greenness 
rising above dense jetties of cobras 

the shocking demise of the sea 
the unlivingness of its winds 
scorched by irradiations of shaking brine incisions 
the burning gulfs of sun with a glint of explosive Mandean utopias* 
shocks against Old Testament linear prophetics 
of Jeremiah 
or Ezekiel 
or the bony frozen finger shaking stunted alchemical missives 
from a moon burned Judea 
no more than a mechanically burning moat focused on smoky 
spellbinder's disruptives 
where the motion of the soul is delayed 
reduced to flattened agnostic secular smoke 
to a terrestrial rage which eliminates its sensuous heavenly fires 
its stunning unreplicated angers 
its sudden selenium spirals 
its fire which staggers across the pseudo-faultlines of pre-replicated judgement 
its flirtation with spirits of enriched Draconian plankton 

so that the soul with its amber of flashing microbe drachmas 
with its wounded tourmaline divisibilities 
flaming within a light of smeared tornado weathers 
within a shower of black fish scales & spleen 
is entombed 
within a blank thirstless psycho-motion 
falling from a furnace of stars 
which both flares up and freezes 
which inculcates a flawed microbial botany 
as in hypnotic grammatical emulsions 

within a hollowed elliptical opening where we witness old 
Egyptian surgeries 
where the dead magically rise up from mazes 
& stare in a language of scorching totemic anomaly 
spawned in heretical miniature 
their phantoms 
seeping from quadrilateral sutures 
from brief 
violent 
renunciatory squalls 

uprooted 
armed with the weaponry of ghouls 
& broken birch tree lizards 
seasoned by the light of psychotropic angles 
blazing in the middle of a green Venusian interior God 
singing 
as if 
in the fumaroles of anguish 
with an inclement bleeding 
with a littered corona 
of unstable altimeter reverses

Psychotropic Squalls , will alexander

above the human nerve domain , will alexander

Above The Human Nerve Domain ,   will alexander

thought as philosophical torment  , will alexander

Thought As Philosophical Torment

Letters From Ausland  , louis armand


LETTERS FROM AUSLAND
1. The reasons were never clear – only that we 
acted as we did, setting out as though by accident
across the open stage-space. It represented
the only distance we knew – one more new
botched beginning like a half-born calf
protruding from its mother, given up to the
lottery of the commonplace. The operations of
reason alone aren’t enough, first you must be
made to suffer and go on suffering, for good
and all. A cracked interior-being aided by cunning
and violence – leading you on to the promised 
elucidation: I did X, I thought Y, and everything 
could’ve been made up and you wouldn’t 
know – plotting the defection to the other side.


2. To reckon the point from which departure begins
or relinquish the path back through an austerity of
judgement, or its poverty – the trees in Central Park,
boots full of rainwater and middle-of-the-night
conversion to unheard-of beliefs. To say: all things 
are purchasable and truth is the purchase made upon 
all things? A serene inhuman truth – forever
expanding outwards from the smallest integer – 
the time of experience, of our actions in the new
dance and of the twitching of those strings. Thus
my days are passed in contradiction – the lost power
of remembrance and the visionary dreariness in which
nothing is too trivial to harbour consequences.
For the time being, at least. Subject to further notice.

Letters From Ausland 1 & 2 ,  louis armand

LETTERS FROM AUSLAND ,  Louis Armand , 2011


3. What’s the true substance of our present? Pursued
by obligation across a calm thematic sea – a strait
within the neutrality of a still-life and its aura
of attenuation. To attain the eye that sees that it 
does not see or the mirror image submerged and lost.
Prudence, circumspection, infinite delay – 
a mathematics of division and subdivision playing out
its small liturgical operas on the one theme of
all that’s precious and vanishing (to the self or to
others?) A scratched record, pricked under the needle 
of conscience – each instant seen and heard for the
first and last time, as if it were a punishment
infinitely revisited and equally unremembered – 
no matter how scrupulously the sentence is carried out.


4. A tenth year of reckoning through marginal weather.
The storm edges out, wears thin – a cracked bootsole
sucking mud in through its teeth. Another lame
wandering fable – the source of a bland determination 
to go on regardless, but regardless of what? The 
various convictions upon which to act or else declaim 
all truth as optional. An ice cream vendor outside
a cemetery / sun gilding the carafes of vin rosé. 
A world of circumstances joined to the universe 
by a tattered thread: each is no more provisional
than the one that follows – a comedic reverie, arriving 
as though at the point from which you started off;
a point of understanding? As the circus wheel revolves 
on its still axis, secretly arbitrating a timeless dispute.


5. The forms of this landscape are repeated; forms 
that become volatile through too much seeing – 
placed as we are on this isthmus of our middle state
between denunciation and indifference. What 
is a poet for in a destitute time? If only to fail 
in all but the attempt, the fact of the attempt
with its crudities, doubts, confusions; to mitigate 
the darkness in the weather of the eye – self-
abjured, as though some desperate illusionary
Sisyphus of whom no one can say if he died or
escaped or still survives? Gaston’s exit with the little
Madensale boy or the postman who brings the
long-awaited letter – telling of the sprit of our times:
the one that guards and the one that always denies.


6. An elected symbol – to keep alive a useless and 
necessary hope? The place evoked nothing, it was 
as it was, all dark commandments stripped from it,
roots and fibres naked as chalkstone. Jurassic birds
screech in the concrete foliage of towerblocks
smashed from their foundations – the skyline
blacked-out under a hulked massif, thick
bituminous smoke: it’s always places you think of
not people. Of course this can’t last. Between
a wrecking ball and empty nature, some form of
consoling ethic rebounds in the bicameral mind:
the age-old vaudeville in which existence struggles
with annihilation, headlights lighting up the ruins – 
the great metal bridges that once spanned that divide.


7. The rules of the game have become infinitely clear.
To be alive, to change – constantly preparing yourself,
constantly waiting. The act preserves no record
of the thought that made it – even the body, locked
into its privacy with the aggregate mind. 
To withstand the world the weak must understand it.
Learnt at second hand and by halves, from those 
who’ve always managed to save their own skins;
to tell the difference between the profit margin 
and the hunger margin, the stylised victimage where
no aesthetic image is without fatality? Years have
transformed the blood you fed upon, blackened
by old hatreds that rave in the night like an 
ugly reminder of what you once considered beautiful.


© 2011, Louis Armand
From: Letters from Ausland
Publisher: Vagabond Press, Sydney, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9805113-8-3

https://is.gd/vbhQJ3

image: also by Louis Armand, Taxi ii , 2002 , https://is.gd/svq94J

Letters From Ausland 3 To 10 ,  Louis Armand

The Conditions of a Solitary Bird 

The conditions of a solitary bird are five: 
The first, that it flies to the highest point; 
The second, that it does not suffer for company, 
not even of its own kind; 
The third, that it aims its beak to the skies; 
The fourth, that it does not have a definite color; 
The fifth, that it sings very softly. 

these are the words of San Juan de la Cruz in his "Sayings of Light and Love" and quoted in "Tales of Power" by Carlos Castaneda
https://is.gd/iP3YZ3



Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird Related Poem Content Details
BY WALLACE STEVENS
I 
Among twenty snowy mountains,   
The only moving thing   
Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II 
I was of three minds,   
Like a tree   
In which there are three blackbirds.   

III 
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   
It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV 
A man and a woman   
Are one.   
A man and a woman and a blackbird   
Are one.   

V 
I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendoes,   
The blackbird whistling   
Or just after.   

VI 
Icicles filled the long window   
With barbaric glass.   
The shadow of the blackbird   
Crossed it, to and fro.   
The mood   
Traced in the shadow   
An indecipherable cause.   

VII 
O thin men of Haddam,   
Why do you imagine golden birds?   
Do you not see how the blackbird   
Walks around the feet   
Of the women about you?   

VIII 
I know noble accents   
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   
But I know, too,   
That the blackbird is involved   
In what I know.   

IX 
When the blackbird flew out of sight,   
It marked the edge   
Of one of many circles.   

X 
At the sight of blackbirds   
Flying in a green light,   
Even the bawds of euphony   
Would cry out sharply.   

XI 
He rode over Connecticut   
In a glass coach.   
Once, a fear pierced him,   
In that he mistook   
The shadow of his equipage   
For blackbirds.   

XII 
The river is moving.   
The blackbird must be flying.   

XIII 
It was evening all afternoon.   
It was snowing   
And it was going to snow.   
The blackbird sat   
In the cedar-limbs.

https://is.gd/0AOF5M

thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird , wallace stevens

The woman with sex in her eyes


"I feel power. I feel a sacrifice. 
I am dead to right or wrong."

"& every lie that you pursue eventually turns true"


runner than dusk  a morning undoing not quite
all of itself  leaving always the beginning or abandoned 
outline of a map roughly copied not traced  the players 
falling both on , within & outside of the lines  

				it s time to play hopscotch  
it s time to outdrink all the men at the table  you don t need 
the place at to sit that you were not offered   it s time to dance 
tango with the woman with sex in her eyes   she invited you 
under misunderstanding that she was addressing 

in challenge   two men
  the neck of the bottle marks an arc to your lips   
you drink from the bottle for as long as a glass lasts   
you have started to tango the woman with sex in her eyes   
before you have started to rest back on the surface 
of table the bottle of green glass with amber hue liquor inside

in the barely traceable tumbleweed of the virtual flurry 
of movement   your dress with her dress your eyebrow
with here ginger curled hair  ever entangled in timeless
emergence   the eyes in the room try to focus to see
an event that the bodies can sense  not perceive

before anyone was aware of demeanour or tear 
the many new moods traced a multiple number 
of mystifying geometrical causes in the sweat 
running down from the windows & foreheads

the violence was welcomed , the violence was shrugged 
out of sight   the woman with sex in her eyes had not ever 
been answered by a stare of black eyes   looking not at 
her   or into  but through  
	
		the blacks of these eyes are a murder of raptors 
as crows  a panther with venomous claws  circling many more 
times its own circles before it jumps into her eyes & is gone
these eyes are a black bear who has lived 15 years of scolds
& the scalds of the extremes of all seasons & could not care 
less   

it is immersed in a bliss that runs deeper than it   yet is 
not even registered significant enough to shrug absentmindedly off   

the terror is gentle  the smile is sharp as a razor  the glance
sweeps horizons a scalpel of undefined scope  the velocity 
is unnoticably slow  the same time of speed pure as footprints
out of nowhere  near the middle of a measureless desert of snow

the woman with sex in her eyes ,  jeroen nieuwland

fragments from The Trouble With Being Born , Emile Cioran , De l'inconvénient d'être né , 1973 , Gallimard

fragments from The Trouble With Being Born , Emile Cioran

the trouble with being born , cioran , 1973

fragments from LO-FI FRAGS IN-PROGRESS , frances kruk , Veer Press 065 , 2015.

fragments from LO-FI FRAGS IN-PROGRESS , frances kruk

& grace to you, & love, & solidarity

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