I Am In The Becoming ...

... and other poems for Lucille Clifton at Delirious Hem


Being human, I have always
entered a tethered moment
to redeem the dream
at the end of time.
But where is my body now?

It seems my scars still attach,
but in the abstract —
just as my stars beat in eclipse,
whatever their nature
and purpose.

It’s true that I would know
this one you are now seeing in dreams,
being in community,
together being broken.
But now I am the one becoming,
becoming now.

While crossing a great ocean
or ascending a throne
we may see ourselves
as the winged
revealers of reveries,
beseechers with open hands.
Or thus I have heard.
And thus I now know.

And where is my body now?
My body is in the becoming,
becoming now.

I Am All Over The Oblique Ascensions Required for the Process of Achieving Aphesis

Untroubled by history, religion or research, I am passed out in this here alley, halfway between the smell of stale piss and rat droppings, naked and Pepto/Caucasian-titty-pink in the cold dim dawn, and it’s Wednesday.

Wednesday is considered either the third or fourth day of the week, depending on whether you start your week on Sunday or Monday. That’s why the Dutch call it something I can’t pronounce. Here in the U.S. we call it “hump day.” Which is what French people call every day, when they’re not using the term “le weekend.”

There’s lonely weekends and there’s lost weekends. Some weekends you’re the dog, other weekends you’re the hydrant. “The Lost Weekend” won the Academy Award in 1945. But Freddy Fender had a hit with “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” in 1975. In the words of the husband of the woman who wrote Frankenstein: “The barely articulate Jack White never found weekends particularly sad.”

I’ve never met Jack White, but I am passed out in an alley and also not particularly sad, but definitely deciding to abandon this heedless delusory sleep of a unicorn Tom Cruise. Where does my “American Idol” cell phone end and my hangover begin? Answer: between the sharp smell of stale piss and the rat droppings which contain bits of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s beef stroganoff that she made with hundreds of petals from the famous Julia Child Rose during the days when fishes walked and forests flew.

I never once saw a Toronto Maple Leaf hockey game, but I have eaten a beef stroganoff, though maybe not the one made by Sister Rosetta Tharpe from the petals of the famous Julia Child Rose. On the other hand, the reason I’m passed out in this here alley in the first place is because I just experienced a foursome with the fetching Olson Twins and rounded out by Penn Jillette.

Penn Jillette displayed a glorious beauty like that of a fat valley, and we know this from the Bible, the part in Ezechiel about the ritual orgies of the Serbo-Croatian beard-pullers, from whom Penn Jillette is descended: “And the glorious beauty of Penn Jillette, which is as a fat valley, as the hasty fruit before the summer, which is what the beard-pullers seeth, and with their walrus teeth eateth.”

These Serbo-Croation beard-pullers were ithyphallic, concupiscent men, whose modern-day descendants continue to luxuriate lewdly in the dandruffy sacristies of academia, visible from every vista, like Tiny Tim marrying Miss Vicki on “The Tonight Show.”

At some point during his life, Tiny Tim emptied a can of spaghetti into a frying pan, in imitation of a crude turnip parody of the woman whose bulbous and squat na-na is the only thing required for the process of achieving aphesis.

Scientists succeeded in cloning a Giant Tiny Tim Squid when Tiny Tim was stranded on a desert island off the coast of Taiwan and the Olson Twins were spotted rearing chicks on jagged reef nearby and in desperate need of a good puppy name. Therefore, a clone was made as a way of getting a chance to start over again with a more creative interpretation of Tiny Tim: Michael Jackson.

The Olson Twins never once saw a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game, either, but they did cook and eat squid with Julia Child on her long ago cooking show, “Staten Island: Friend or Foe”? And at some point someone will come to in an alley and rediscover the squid / Tiny Tim clone wearing white sweater socks and singing “Red Leather Forever” at the Pythian Temple. But it won’t be me. I came to this here alley straight from the Midwest in a four-door Impala like a cross between a honky-tonk fiddler and a pretty ballerina, and I gotta get home now, and anoint my azaleas. Why I am always saying I’m anointing when what I’m really doing is abluting?

Oh Lifelong Song That Is Purely and Most Surely Love

for Toni


Were you the stone collecting dew
and I the flower needing water?
Then to you I owe the debt of tears.

I spent time wondering
more time wandering
through moonlight reflecting on water.

I felt empty when I was done.

But through Time wondering
through moonlight wandering
reflected in the love

of the flower for the water
from the stone collecting dew,
I repay my debt to you.


(inspired by The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin)

Oh Girl of the Bright World

for Toni Renee Long, October 30, 1962 — November 17, 2009


It’s night and the ceiling light
swings and everything
moves closer.
A bare lightbulb
all shadows and angles
reconfigures
this difficult and beautiful
world into
a place of bright permissions —
to come all this way,
and then as music?
Oh wild holy memory.
It was a long way to go.

The sky was dull,
the clouds rolled by
there appeared
a solitary bell-figure
wheeling
in a gate: it was Love
and it was distance:
first and long-forgotten
world of light
where pure forces shielded us
from distress
and the night
and we woke from that sleep
to verdancy’s harbor.

To know what makes
a moment, to know what moves
the calm abiding, to know
that only death releases
who you were and will be:
oh girl of the bright world
I have opened this door
to make a gateway
for joy:
as long as kindness remains
as long as dreams come true.


(the phrase “girl of the [wild] bright world”
from Cecilia Woloch’s poem “Bareback Pantoum”)

I Am A Lonely Oneironaut, In Need Of Salutary Grounding

for Harvey Zuckerman


I am a lonely mushroom cowboy
lonesome as the winter ocean
lonely cyclonic rag tag tranny
waking from a battlestar
walking lost & lonely
galaxy-tipping lonely
lonely and in love with
this poor city & the whole world
singing "lonely boy lonely girl
suddenly soul searching”
Miss Demure
lucidly dreaming
lonely drifter Karen —
lonely schnozz, longest walk —
lord of the living room lonely
John Lennon-taking-a-stand-against-
evolution-lonely
professional adult orphan
taking crap on two continents
and always getting rained on
by amateur clouds
lonely

Oh, solitary psychedelic alchemist
Oh, twisted oneironaut:
tell me GPS gets lonely
tell me déjà vu is lonely
tell me the antipodean dream
at the end of time
is lonely

tell me

I Am Registering The Timbre Of A Plastic Bottle Hitting A Wood Floor Midway On My Trajectory Toward Death

for Steve Evans


I've been doing some interesting work with kitty slippers which,
when sewn out of newspapers headlining Iraqi death tolls,
create a cheap parody of our planet
that constitutes a kind of science.
Or, failing that, art.
I’ve also been taking sick-hot Tommy Hilfiger teddy bears,
made in Ameribama of spindly bones,
and shelving them up high, so that they appear to be
staring down like a cat.
I have also put Arcade Fire in a room with Vincent Price's corpse,
threw in the Berlin Zoo’s flash mob climax
and the three keys to God’s secret uterine temperament.
What I got was an alternative universe buddy movie
where Anthony Hopkins smirks at Chris Tucker
while both of them get fat,
and a single note from the throat of Michael McDonald
echoes across the planet
over the course of a Kali Yuga.

Sometimes I get so caught up in these ornate recipes
that I forget the humble loaf of bread prototype
for the Mount Rushmore / Holly Hobbie
“prairie dildo” trope.

Edward Kennedy Ellington, 1899-1974,
once said something similar to,
“Doesn’t ‘Destination: Redneck’
feature a crude parody of Yoda
getting his groove on with Pink?
Too bad he failed malaria training.”
Yeah, too bad.
I could’ve made some awesome kitty slippers
out of that damn creamy bee.

Why Am I Still Angry With William Blake?

Anyone can be angry.
But it takes balls to be angry with William Blake.
It also takes termites.
and echidnas and ants.

Being angry with William Blake
can be "deep" and also magnificently real
and critical.
It's not like being a fan of everything,
because THAT'S easy: like being a fan
of a peanut in the peanut gun
of Elton John, straight-shot into the mouth
of the luminous high priest elephant bot
who navigates the stringiest runway
in the history of the battle of rabbit sexing.

Being angry with William Blake is to gravitas
what the Beatles were to Darren Stevens:
Samantha's elephant-bot friend-with-benefits
OR: Hitler's wife in a Prius.
Did you ever see that Twilight Zone
where the guy signed a contract
and they cut out his tongue and it wouldn't die,
it just grew and pulsated and gave birth
to baby tongues?
Well, one of those baby tongues
was William Blake's mother.

How can that be so simple? you ask.
Well, I know for a fact that William Blake said,
“Mother Blake, you are too simple.
You have ten children, and all of them are doing drugs together,
tied up by their eyes by zombies.
And that is just totally didactic and unworkble."
And then Mother Blake said, "William Blake,
you have an extensive collection of hairnets
in your hamlet, and that's enough
to hate you."

Exactly.
If William Blake were ice cream,
he'd be peanut butter and dick.

I Am Sensitive Energy For the People

Do you perceive fantastic, exotic things that other people can't —
like non-corporeal tongue fungus in Hindus?

Do you sense things that you couldn't — or shouldn’t — logically sense?
Like intangible clouds of Irritable Bowel Syndrome in malls?

Do you feel the pain of the world within your own heart,
manifesting as cat flatulence?

As a highly sensitive person you may know you are different.
After a while, you may be aware that others think you are stupid,
or have stupid ideas: an envied “normal person” just sees
a three-bean salad, but you — a creative, highly sensitive person —
probably see Sam Peckinpah judging the
“Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas Pageant”
in front of a bullfight for vacuum cleaners,
and maybe much, much more.
Like perhaps three white people who are not LL Cool J —
one of them being Bob Dylan and the other two being
a pole-dancing Madame Blavatsky on top of Edgar Cayce —
receiving a brain transplant from a vending machine
for ten cents worth of “Radar Love.”
Or Jamaican children specially rendered into a pickled herring paste
and served on crackers in Jamaica.
Whatever.

It’s not peaceful or calming when we air out the unconscious mind.
For example, in making titanium jewelry we may initiate
a cascade of tortoises.

Uh-Oh … I Think I Just Screwed With the Luminosity of Spontaneous Presence

There was this vacancy in the corporate air.
Collisions with spontaneous emissions were occurring
even before the initial collisions occurred.
The aerodynamics were way screwed up!
I was totally screwed up.
You, on the other hand, were souped.
And I realized, suddenly,
that if we were The Love Boat, you'd be Julie.
That if you were to poop the rosy promise of techno junk,
minding its own business, drinking a cappuccino,
then I would have to hold my arms against my sides
and name myself Flipper.
I suddenly felt very ancient
and very very Buddhist.

Assuming the position of Christ on the cross,
you whispered, “Fag screwed up.”
The irony of the moment
did not escape me.

Like a Yakuza who will only ever use a plastic spoon,
you got me fucked up, jacked up, screwed up,
and warped in the Dollar Store.
The Eagles were rocking in the distance
with enough conceptual linearity to blow up the Earth.
This wouldn't have been so bad if a flaming liberal whack-job lightworker
hadn’t screwed up the economy with a luminous karate-chop
to the butthole of coffee ice cream.
The reason our world is so screwed up in the first place
is because coffee ice cream isn’t as dreamy as we had hoped.
Hell, I don't even like coffee ice cream.
But what if they screwed up Hot Chocolate?

Do you remember Julie Andrews and the von Trapp children
singing "Do, Re, Me .....” until the city was covered with
gamma ray crop circles?
In the meantime, the sleep architecture of rats
got messed up by the Times Online Spelling Bee.
Wow. How that sucked.
But it was because of all that that I learned
how a life filled with misery, hardship and ill-fortune,
can fulfill its potential by becoming a cappuccino, a latte,
or a macchiato,
birthed from the spirit world.
With the exception of the coffee version of Prince,
the brilliant luminosity that churns behind Penelope Cruise
is really the only thing that screws up my routine these days.
I’d punch her in the eye by accident
then shed tears for her barista.

I Am Having A Huge Asexual Torque Catharsis Over Miley Cyrus’ Hardcore Christian Death Metal Nipples

(My onging project is to write a flarf poem every day. And I've been pretty good -- I've actually done a poem a day for about a month. I'll post them in backwards chron order until I'm up to date, but here's today's poem ... )


E=mc2 means very, very little to me.
On the other hand, Miley Cyrus’ nipples
lay down some nasty good beats for “The Man,”
and sound like the Eagles playing Christian death metal
while filling prescriptions and feeding livestock.
I used to not be able to dance in tight pants,
but the bong-rattling bottom crunch of Miley Cyrus' nipples
filling prescriptions and feeding livestock
made former Christian middle child Jim Morrison
“look at me.”

It could be argued that Miley Cyrus —
small-time criminal and fan of plastic surgery —
purposely picked up a chainsaw and wrought destruction on
Jim Morrison in an attempt to pay homage to ice cream distributors.
But did losing her virginity have to hurt my whole
pubic shaving template download party?
Miley’s nipples' wicked famous “Funeral Poems
for Death of an Uncle During the Spring Break PA Drivers License
Writing Awards” delivered the death blow to a bull
at the end of a stadium fight.
Hopefully this will prove once and for all that Scientology causes
torque arc fatigue in Spongebob.

On the quality of life scale for dogs.
where do Miley Cyrus’ hardcore Christian death metal nipples fall?
Answer: in the cloudy urine of a preschool’s pet boar
that leads people to dig through sewage sludge
for Baby Vogue knitting patterns.
How much does Miley Cyrus weigh?
As much as four simian brother organs
in full body alchemist mode.
Or a young dick through skimpy material
during teenage virgin birthday sex, and hiking afterward in a skirt,
while a rogue gust of violent wind tears Miley away
from Sandra Bullock in a bikini.
Next question.

Question: what happens when,
on the hunt for Miley Cyrus underwear,
you fall right onto gay guys fucking to old granny porn?
Answer: if you answered “glorious Hitler death for
heavy metal enthusiasts” you would also be partially correct.
Miley Cyrus’s apple-y lostness appears creekside in Palo Alto
on the “Zelda Fitzgerald Hunt for Best Guru in a Subaru Map.”
I've been told masochism can be cathartic, especially when
making myself pregnant with my own very hot glove
while speeding toward or away from some asexual cosmic vortex
where Miley Cyrus's own special version of “Fuck Off”
(as an homage to the comedy version of the Tet Offensive)
is played on Princess Diana’s trance radio station.

Like a hawk, Miley Cyrus’ nipples are not hatched but “disclosed.”
They are “reclaimed” not tamed, and they are not trained
but “made” or “manned.”
And, of course, they are never actually ill — rather they
“suffer from ungladness.”
One thing is for certain, though:
I could never be Miley Cyrus’ ER nurse,
filling prescriptions and feeding livestock.
A man's gotta know his limitations.
Plus I never read “My Body, My Self,” so I don’t know anything
about my body or myself.
But I do know that a guy refrained from shaving his face until a new
Metallica album was released in 2003.
The painful recovery?
I can't even go there.

Two Polish Girls Standin' Around Readin' Poetry ...

Cecilia Woloch and Sharon Mesmer
Saturday March 20 at 2 p.m.
Bowery Poetry Club
308 Bowery
(Between Houston and Bleecker)
F train to 2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker
$7

Cecilia Woloch is the author of four award-winning collections of poems, most recently Narcissus, winner of the Tupelo Press 2006 Snowbound Series Chapbook Award. Carpathia, newly available from BOA Editions Ltd., is her fifth book. She is currently a lecturer in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California, as well as the founding director of The Paris Poetry Workshop. She spends a part of each year traveling, and in recent years has divided her time between Los Angeles, California; Atlanta, Georgia; Shepherdsville, Kentucky; Paris, France; and a small village in the Carpathian mountains of southeastern Poland.

Sharon Mesmer is ... me!

This is Cecilia ...

Me, Louise Brooks and "Pandora" on OnandOnScreen . . .

... Tom Devaney's new poetry + video site:

"Pandora"