Morphometries

Morphometries: The Collected Poetical Works of Jack K, A National Poet of Little to Middling Importance

By Kane X. Faucher

Differentia Press Santa Maria, CA

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Morphometries: The Collected Poetical Works of Jack K, A National Poet of Little to Middling Importance

By Kane X. Faucher Copyright © 2009 All Rights Reserved.

Published by Differentia Press Book Design by Felino A. Soriano Except for the sole purpose for use in reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, without the written permission from the publisher.

Differentia Press Santa Maria, CA 93458 submissions@differentiapress.com

Differentia Press

Poetic Collections of the │Experimental Spectrum│ differentiapress.com

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Some of these works have appeared, or will appear, or has intention to appear, or has appeared and then vanished from, or has cameo’d itself by means of reproductive parody in The Argotist Online, Moria, LinQ, The MoosheadX Anthology, Paradoxism, Words on Paper, Words-Myth, The Verse Marauder, Dance to Death, Poetry Midwest, Eratio, LinQ, Nthposition &c.

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Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………12 La guerre d’etoil(ett)es--…………………………………………………………………………13 Tempire…………………………………………………………………………………………..14 Plangere…………………………………………………………………………………………..15 Sheissein…………………………………………………………………………………………16 Katastrasis………………………………………………………………………………………..17 Cerebrum Chaosmos……………………………………………………………………………..18 A Logic of Consumption: Lesson 1……………………………………………………………...19 A Logic of Consumption: Lesson 2……………………………………………………………...20 Deyes and Rabelaisian List………………………………………………………………………21 When the Organs Melt…………………………………………………………………………...23 Credit Christ……………………………………………………………………………………...24 Tell it Again, Sam as Same………………………………………………………………………27 Carnivalues………………………………………………………………………………………28 At my Threadbarest………………………………………………………………………………29 Here Lies…………………………………………………………………………………………30 Urdoxa, the Novel!.........................................................................................................................31 Abbauhaus………………………………………………………………………………………..32 On nO No oN! E (e)……………………………………………………………………………...34 Chronophagica…………………………………………………………………………………...35 An Apology to the Reader……………………………………………………………………….36 Skeuomorph……………………………………………………………………………………...37 Livegas…………………………………………………………………………………………..38 Americabana……………………………………………………………………………………..39 Lynchbox………………………………………………………………………………………...40 1 telepoem 2……………………………………………………………………………………..41 The Anchordata of Krist II (Or, P.K.Dick will Build you)………………………………………42 This book is(ituationism)………………………………………………………………………...43 A Face Nebunii…………………………………………………………………………………..44 A Mass of Black Fat……………………………………………………………………………..45 Atoria…………………………………………………………………………………………….46 Auto-Sodomination………………………………………………………………………………47 Cagamosis………………………………………………………………………………………..48 Codaphone……………………………………………………………………………………….49 Confestication……………………………………………………………………………………50 Contumelia……………………………………………………………………………………….51 Exsurgency: A New Primer for Water Torture…………………………………………………..52 Estimada Cliente…………………………………………………………………………………53 Generation of the Goose-Egg…………………………………………………………………….54 Guraphysics………………………………………………………………………………………57 Heirlock…………………………………………………………………………………………..58 Imbible…………………………………………………………………………………………...59 Ossuary…………………………………………………………………………………………..60 This book is(ituationism)………………………………………………………………………...61 Pollock is Dead…………………………………………………………………………………..62 5|Morphometries

Table of Contents Continued…

Whorizon…………………………………………………………………………………………63 Zoviet pushka in aero…………………………………………………………………………….64 List of poetry books by Jack K:………………………………………………………………..65

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Warmly dedicated to the eternal good humour of Raymond Federman

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The following is all copyright Š 2009 Kane X. Faucher. Guy Debord did not always reject copyrights being placed on his works, but he used to. But what you have to understand is that Guy never left his house, surrounded at all times by his devotees, sycophantic jelly-tart intellectuals, and part-time soft communists. He also hated the workers, himself an aristocratic pontiff. Permission to reproduce this text, in whole or in part (as per Hegelian modo), is strictly forbidden or should be obtained by Guy Debord, who is now dead. Barring this, small sections may be quoted in reviews, articles, pinned on fish tanks, sloganized for neoist purposes, or inserted at random in your local Church bible. Do not read Morphometries while taking acetaminophen or any of its ancient Greek analogues. If you are experiencing difficulties breathing, kidney malfunction, extended dizzy spells, or lame-leggedness, discontinue use and consult a physician immediately. Psychics are on-call for any and all other matters. Results may vary.

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Morphometries: The Collected Poetical Works of Jack K, A National Poet of Little to Middling Importance

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The difference between Dante’s Divine Comedy and a Warsaw phonebook is minimal at best. Doggerel at its worst.

Introduction …he broke from the bloom of his thought to engage his waning enthusiasm for a task better suited a man of more consecutive attention. He began souring at the prospect of resuming the task, feeling more like a spent tourist at the very margins of a culture he couldn’t hope to understand. Perhaps it was lovely to fail, but only for an approving audience. Jack K’s book is a twisted mélange of disjointed segues and barren aporias, a notebook stuffed with the straw of his lackluster musings. Deflated and spent, he issued a flatulent hiss rather than an intended roar.

The pages were stippled with silly whispers, and only the guilt of labour’s time stayed the notebook from the rubbish bin. No robust idea could struggle through the fetid, choked canal of this boustrophedic banality, mildly peppered with slapdash musings.--A triumph of circumspect metaphysics over the cadaver of poetry.

And yet, after only the most minor and unobtrusive editing, Jack K’s book of poems stands as a fresh testament, on the very precipice of a poetics to come.

--Paul Epistolas, publisher of Jack Krist’s book of poems, Acts Tomorrow, Clay Today.

Jack K was nothing more than a paper stock boy in Paul’s printing offices in the basement until he was “discovered”. Paul, whose life was predicated on the slick advertiser and lawyerly pursuits of image-control, transformed that opinionated paper-jockey into the Great Voice of the Working Class. This was Paul’s great inspiration when, in doing a pub crawl with old college cronies on Damascus Street, he fell out of a cab and reported, “at that point, I made a full three-sixty turn in life.” Not only did Paul not understand labour, but basic geometry was out of his reach too.

This book makes as its sole purpose the aggrandizement of Jack K, his poetry, and his tense relationship with his money-grubbing, graph-paper minded publisher of gleaming paperback chunk-ness, Paul Epistolas

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La guerre d’etoil(ett)es-O immolations and, O immaculations, here night, There A sink; a word caught in a windchime.

The earth at the libidinal crotch-level of Cosmos(is).

The sun turning around itself, itself, always The same face to its innards, the innards toward Its face as pure volume without surface, Pure surface without volume.

Please win and capture in this war of war(-p)riors The beneficence of a reader, An astrologer of text, Rather than, say, an astroblogger.

Let Montaigne die over again with stones, Le seigneur n’est pas de soleil La soleil qui je vais nomme a feminin-The flushocracy of the stars is (esch oder nicht-)scatalogic.

Hear the peeling cries of astrozoic age On toast, in subways where skies are blocked By concrete meshworks.

Jack Krist, suddenly a swaggering and intolerable figure of “genius” by the numbers of Paul Epistolas’ shrewd book-boosterism, had become an unwitting centerpiece for Paul’s greying, failing publishing house. Such was the pageantry of Paul--to fatten the coffers on the death of Jack K who was, to be honest, a mediocre poet at best.

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Tempire Please, Stagirus, tell me What is the prime matter to orgasm And what is the derivated species term For that feeling of pain at the end of my member After such jouissance as I hold it out To relieve an organ of its waste.

When capital itself accumulates its orgones And ejaculates itself always prematurely But always, in general and as such, Does it, too, have a name for the Pain-piss afterward, or Do your categories prohibit this?

For you, and Nicomachus, It is an easy formula so laughable in its Exchange particulars: Five beds is equal to one house.

But what is the eudaemonic mean There?

Krist’s poetry had a peculiar stagnancy to it that cultural studies students found adorably interesting. However, despite how denim is the working class tuxedo in the eyes of desperate academicians who want to feel something vaguely resembling the real, one must remember that Jack (named after a song by The Fall) was still as arbeit macht French fries as he had been before becoming a “discovered� poet. Paul has quite a broad net, and he has trawled all of Toronto and New York for such specimens. Jack heralded as a genius? A reproof is required; to wit:

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Plangere How many pieces lost in the involuntary freight Of ejaculation?

Both the plague and the plaintiff Will strike back as complaint, As the root Plangere, The base of the priapic Of Jarry’s Physick-stick; Ubu-toi.

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Sheissein Whose is that rasping hide Performing algebra of the skeleton?

For al-jabr will set and repair the bones Of dried body (skeletos).

Your space has no value, Says the battle of Heidegger Ridge, And the Marginot Line is a choked canal of blood Dysentery, syphilis, broken national pride, shit And excess.

Tell me again, Mr. 1927, how Being in Time, and not The conjunction or the copula Is an analytic of that unemployed negativity On the breadline after History and Reason have shuttered themselves Because such things are so silly, empty After Auschwitz.

In an interview with Books-Monthly, Jack was heard to exclaim that he was CanLit. He also confessed, quite happily in fact, to enjoying running over dogs like Jack Kerouac did.

When asked if he thought the claim of CanLit was a bit arrogant, he retorted angrily that “any place called Books-Monthly only times its reading with being on the rag.� This angered just about everyone who read the interview, who were few.

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Katastrasis And you, the necroticist, a Nerotic, a Caesar among caesars: May your years be drenched in blood (and may you live in interesting times, for--) We who are about to die Must do so in the most salutary of ways.

What it means to suffer castration And catastrophe = Katastrasis. Which means: To cut as one turns, A knife-edged trope, A deadly metaphor, A Nietzschean variant of active critique, A long Sunday strangled at night’s arrival By the allowable excess of a wallet, a will, a bar.

Katastrasis is forgetting; A forgotten yet latent talent.

See there the Ur-Caesar aggregating around him The pieces of a rising, an argumentum ad montem, Up the hill (with the ledge of his hand, as axe and hammer, as tauborium).

When he was a child, Paul used to take a skim from the top of the neighbourhood lemonade stands as insurance against natural disasters. Skimming from mediocre poets a higher-than-usual cut is only a matter of characteristic trajectory. Paul’s mother can quite easily draw this line unassisted. She blames herself for teaching Paul how to play canasta and poker at too young an age. Paul was destined at a young age to be a slick and cooing ten-percenter.

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Cerebrum Chaosmos I am wondering on a point, If the formation of a brain in the womb is associated with extreme agony.

When there are moments of Voluptuous lucidity, And the person feels in flight, The racing of ideas, Is it the pain that prods Or the anticipated pleasure of arrival?

Does the brain only manufacture In weak times Clumsy metaphors (the brain as jungle, as mysterious, as overcrowded, as arterial traffic network, as global communication schema, as etc…).

May I stick my brain Upon a branch Of these same metaphor trees And invite the fulguration Of metonymous dissolution?

Or does this brain merely skid Upon a grease trail, Itself an ultimate signified Without realizing it?

Paul urged Jack K to make a pilgrimage to Minville, Ontario to gain the poetic blessings of the clan McLanahan, without which Jack’s poetic gains would be minimal and eternally unrecognized. Although making this pilgrimage, Grand Mufti McLanahan was currently touring Azerbaijan promoting his most recent book of poetic musings, By George Bowering’s Bones! (Veggie Ground-Round Press).

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A Logic of Consumption: Lesson 1 When cock, tumescent pink Is liminal fracture‌ The structural reassignation of cultural code--yum.

Uploading the fluid response-trigger signifier, The motif of consumption as unquestioning Illusory discernment (choice exists, therefore I am and you ain’t).

The con-sumptuosness of an emaciated voluptuary and The benign tyranny of layered images (the image you see with eyes the image you make into cultural code the image you purchase with magnetic money).

Safe invasions = encoded practices.

A devolution toward a hierarchization of the internet (a deed accomplished).

Retribalization II, after McLuhan, is the hanging digitalia, Returning to the world of tactility as utility or Consumption with gloves (avant des gants).

That is Touch only what is to be used and, at that Only from the sterile distance of the infinitesimally small (a thin prick slips into thinner condom to make a cut, The stoic logic of the knife and body mutually tracing the other).

With the absorption of finance, a grocery store opens a bank on its premises, The trend of macro and micro-sizing--the marketing on the antipodes.

Gigantism v. Micronization, a slugfest where one thinks of What Walmart is and what it does.

This is the distillation of sign values: Fiat signs of signs, Linguistic counterfeit coin.

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A Logic of Consumption: Lesson 2 Absorption schema, a revisited Nazidealism (little old ladies in parlours, in lace, fork and knife tongues).

A turnstile ideological product, buffered by false courtesy Operating at the absolute minimum of communicative content exchange And the absolute maximum of simulation-comnmunication.

Dehumanizing rational systems of exchange: Descartes is your boss, and the punchclock universe Of Newtonian corporatism.

Mechanizing the processes of communicative exchange Like an opinion stock market, Like how Plato picks the prize mule of opinions (Urdoxa) Calls it truth with a blue ribbon, a Form, a share-value of signs.

Consumption rates will increase the more communication speaks, the more Its mechanization shits itself to death, Otherwise known as frenzied,manic overproduction.

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Deyes and Rabelaisian List Or, the lowest class of servants in husbandry Employed to the dairy or to tend swine while The lowest class of heraldry (Alfred Jarry) Will represent them. Will carry a gun in the pocket For occasional nocturnal encounters on the streets of Paris.

Regiam Majestatum: (?)

Knave Child.

Wool-staple Colloquies Wattles De Gestis Pontifium Anglorum (1171) Metrical Life St. Guthlac In Germany, the fox denoted an aspirant who smokes and drinks to excess.

It was not until the invention of Solderarm’s wrought-iron goatfish (so-called by its adherents, the Capricorn) that a true plutoscopy began.

Miles Christi and the Evulgo Arkhe - principium (law / legislation) Arche (commandment / commencement) Flacius, Michaels Anagogical reading (becoming text) 1547, Trent. (isn’t this becoming what one is?).

Perpetuum mobile of this bibliography, a Borges-machine.

The book is the river of its people.

Time in the bible, stepped, falling into Increased decrepitude of the human species (it starts high in the Garden, slopes down into the valley of the now, and rises up again at the gates of the Golden Kingdom The biblical account places us in the visceral vat of cloaca).

In that Garden, murder issues from that quince (it was not an apple). [sign determination--self consciousness--proof of existence as recognition] The quince is a repeater.

A luminescent and incandescent apocatastasis.

De/re-materialization of the origin as TRACING. Incorporeal double.--ideational convergence.

De/re-stratification, or forgetting.

Rememoration is burial popped open Makeshift graves of lime and blood 21 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

The tricoteuses of the Revolution. “I have seen it all with a laying on of the hands, and I have breathed life into a clay bird.

I liken to Homer and Socrates, to say nothing with Chisel, quill, pen, typewriter.

Which is why I must warn you as I did Wycliff, Caveat evulgor.�

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When the Organs Melt The chorus of This bland zeitgeist Is the omnipresent Refrigerator hum.

It keeps cold and sterile The mesostrata of Culture that resists Nostalgifying (imagine!)‌ Slapdash retro and knockoffery.

When the organ melts Turn off the light, Unplug the stovetop cerebrum otiosis A bite of today, a shit for tomorrow, A clapping of hands The parade has passed, An empty street A litter-bound corridor The wearing of feet, And the organ melts.

Artaud knitted me A body without organs, But he stenciled their patterns upon it As if to say that they can be inserted later, An incomplete garment This body That body.

Only a false Marxist Can save us now, Will issue the edict That we ought to pool our remaining organs And share their functions.

Paul Epistolas maintains that Jack K was initially inspired by the legendary and still unfound books that Ivan the Terrible hid under the Kremlin.

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Credit Christ Gabriel’s annunciation to Mary was A direct command from god that he was To be born in that womb at some given time.

She was not asked.

God’s private pimp dealt with it.

It was all arranged: “You will carry God, in painful birth.”

The Virgin was not asked, she was Told.

One would expect such tactics later In the late Medici empire, but not In some Being whose essence is Allegedly the embodiment of Good.

Zeus turns into a bull and rapes Whomever he pleases.

Zeus does not send messengers To warn in advance, nor Does he pop the seed into place As if by secret ballot and bypassing penetration.

Mary, you are carrying God in your belly, You quiet Jonah whale.

Eat right, you better, and you better Get your rest and not smoke or Drink. The little foetus-lord In your belly is kicking, “L’etat c’est moi” “Je suis le soleil”.

What maternity gear is appropriate To clothe the mere vessel of God? A God who insinuated himself Into your womb like a nocturnal bandit?

Joseph, quit standing around So uselessly and Help your virgin wife to the chair.

God is heavy.

Mary, God wants out now, he is Ready.

He plops from the groin to the cradle Slicked in afterbirth, now stuck with straw.

Give a slap to his ass And make him cry.

You do realize that 24 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

You are spanking God? Isaiah never foresaw your hand either now Or when little God misbehaved, Disciplining him with a firm maternal hand Applied--thwack, thwack!--upon his Divine little bottom!

Mary, the laws are not here to protect you.

The angels have only annunciated what is to be.

You have no choice.

Could you have aborted God? Some sort of abortion clinic where You could affirm your right to choose?

Why did no one ever ask you?

No pardon me, no fare thee well, no by your leave.

Nothing.

Christ is now a young man.

Peter finds a fish with a coin in its mouth.

The tax collector comes.

Christ orders Peter to pay his Roman taxes.

Peter pays his Roman taxes.

Masacio paints it well, all three scenes: From “easy come” to “easy go”.

Who will pay Mary for being The surrogate of God’s will?

And what is the debt owed to this son who is Her father? Did not a rape Take place?

Pay your Roman taxes.

Just the other day, a knock on the door.

Opened, I saw there a man on a stick who Asked me if I would be interested in a credit card.

He said that his father that he is Has already pre-approved me to receive it.

He told me that he had already once died For all my credit problems.

I’ve been pre-approved for the divine credit card, And I can buy my sins and pay at the confession booth.

I pressed him on the issue and asked If there was a possibility that I could be rejected, And thereby negatively redound upon my bad credit rating.

He clarified that I was Pre-approved to apply.

I replied that I already had a credit card with a suitable limit 25 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

And that I had enough problems managing credit, That I could not put myself in a situation beholden to another.

He pressed me on the issue and stated, “This credit will be good in case of emergency, in case you sin and have no means to pay for it, and we have a floating and fair interest rate.”

He told me that he was no longer Jewish, And adhered to the Council of Latran, 1215, Where usury was defined at 33.3% or higher.

The interest he was offering was much lower, he said.

Always the interest.

Tacitus reports that the Romans abolished all compound debt entirely, And could not charge more than 10%.

Would he die a second time for all my debts?

The catch: I was not allowed to carry a balance at death Lest I bankrupt my soul.

I already have a credit card with better interest rate, So no thank you.

Jack K was digitally penetrated by the security force of a faddist rite of passage.--and other things that make ridiculous. There were some poems Jack attempted at being topical and popular with the burgeoning vegan elite. This was a PR catastrophe when he accepted a literary prize from the fast-food chain “The Beef Bucket”.

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Tell it Again, Sam as Same Tell me again that story about the man who would be lumberjack, Who in his urban despair and particulate articulations Bought a chainsaw and wandered the street.

Tell me again how he felled hydro poles.

Tell me again that story about the priest who in a priestly rage Tried to baptize an entire town by rigging dynamite On the walls of the town’s great dam.

Tell me again how he washed the lamb clean.

Tell me again that story about the ex-sailor who had predilection for music, Enticing neighbourhood cats and prostitutes to his hovel, Strangling them and making a piano entirely out of their bones.

Tell me again how he played knick-knack on someone else’s knees.

Tell me again that story about the suicide patient Who had that recurring hallucination of screwing a woman And the entire landscape turned into the arctic, and he thrusted into the cold water.

Tell me again how his vision of hell compares with others.

Tell me again that story about the senile inventor Who was convinced he could build a ladder to the moon.

His body broken egg shells on the ground.

Tell me again how he caressed the moon’s face thinking of Calvino.

Tell me again about little Johnny Acres who set fires to barns With old kerosene lamps and spilt his seed into the inferno.

When the police took him away, his face a sweet serene cherub’s.

Tell me again how the firestarter was firestopped.

Tell me again about the village Gulliver who Only had in his possession a solar calculator, And would only discourse with others by inverted numbers.

Tell me again how he pointed at his most common word, “hELL”.

Tell me again about the amateur opera singer who Tried to swallow a fireplace bellows whole.

The doctors needed to lacerate her throat to remove it.

Tell me again how she sat there in the ER next to the man with the tennis ball in his colon.

The downflow ethics of Paul Epistolas: insouciant books, their pedigree debatable, suitable for patrons of groggeries and low barrelhouses.

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Carnivalues The man with the bulletproof ego staggered toward me, the sound of circus all around him like some mean and dirty nimbus, the fairy-freak dancing the sugarplum alone in the empty trailer cabin of his wreckage heart. He popped a tired flask and pointed at me like so many polite cigarettes offered at a party. Newspapers and candy wrappers alit across the crepuscularlydrenched dirt tracks with the deep tractor furrows. So many skeletons and dry jellyfish husks scraping against stone and spit. He told me he was moving on, who knows where, to work wherever that would be tomorrow or the next day. He took a long pull from that flask, that worn bridge between now and tomorrow. The circus tent flapped, letting loose another brief flood of dim yellow light from inside. Mosquitoes would not even draw another from his hard leathery skin and dry old bone. The cream in his veins was sour, his face had made love too often to the cruel maritime wind, leaving lines like glacial retreats. He had three kids with two other women.

He didn’t know if they were living or dead, nor did it look like he cared. Once the sets of the circus were taken down, maybe he’d flatfoot up north for a while, find some magical mistake in a bar and unbutton his fly for yet another lonely pow. He scratched that sagging navy tattoo and told me how he once wanted to be a great ballplayer. He told me a tale about a time in a Chicago pool hall where he had to snooker his way out of a debt, a story involving a woman, three pounds of dope and a long night of pleading away his youth after every whiskeyball shot. He told me of a time in Richmond when he and a fallen pastor were riding rail and trading stories, the priest busying his hands carving crosses into bullets for a rusty old revolver. He told me how some woman had led him to a hayloft outside the antebellum Kentucky line, and how she ironed out his prick smooth, stole his wallet, and then had to hightail it when her brothers came looking for him with hot shotguns and a devilish will. He told me of a time he spent sleeping in the wet glades, so forced by hunger to cook roadkill, and had to clean himself up for work everyday at the nearby Texaco. His life a broken and unmade bed. He had the will of a roman candle.

Jack put his hand to short proems, but they were so wretchedly unpopular that Paul put a stop to them entirely. Jack continued to write them under the more bilingually bland name, Jacques Caulis.

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At my Threadbarest The plan is to make a carbon copy of my emails On sheets in triplicate On canary yellow, carbon On robin’s egg, carbon, In white primary copy to be filed, Below on each my signature All used up.

O Technosis!

You make my exchanges lolling affairs, As though I am dragging my testacles to the races To have them cupped by the emperor’s chief aid.

From these emails in triplicate, Including the one that goes to the little boy down the lane, I will write a novel or A grocery list. I have not decided.

I am crucified on the vel-disjunct of either/or, you see.

Jack K took the chic(k)-lit offensive…Whilst Paul, a pathos filled windbag governed unscrupulously over his mini-fiefdoms he called his “talent reservoirs” During a hasty engagement with the works of Northrop Frye, Jack decided to try his hand at third-stance narrative, creating a fictional character by the name of Kane who invents a fictional character called Jonkil Calembour. Everyone got along famously until they got to grousing about a few misplaced adjectives and the efficiency of English prepositions--most of which are idiomatically installed.

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Here Lies Here lies Jonkil Calembour, with alabastard eyes primed upward mobile, and here stands from behind technicolour curtain, Kane, from the name.

And from behind the nomadginary discourse of poenarrative he speaks, and speaks his name through the megaphonic conduit of Calembour, whom he needs no more to speak as he speaks and writes as he desires.

By the mouse's click he lands a blow perhaps upon the chipped shoulder to make Calembour wobble unsteadily on his terrapins.

Let Kane speak, say the hordes, but it is not the hordes whose voices are to be credited, but the singulars poetica voicespeech of one and few who make this request, to be honoured to reason and good judgement and schizflow.

Hide not behind the dead man charactacle of Calembour, and see to it that the gardener is credited for his rows upon rows of lines upon lines, to be harvested, fermented and made into wines rare, intoxicating, perhaps.

Let not Calembour be that vertiginous anchor, but an anchord plucked on an instrument that refuses its own mythologization as some rank guitarists do to their own.

Let Kane say, a la Picasso and the portrait of Gertrude Stein, that "it is not the portrait of you now, but in ten years' time".

Let Calembour be a prortrait of a given moment that eats itself hollow and spits its own seed into the abyss, happily and without malice, without utility or end, as dissoluble time melts as the tongue presses it into the palate and palette of crushed paints and tastes!

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Urdoxa, the Novel!

It is a big book that no one will read through, not even me!

It is dense and full of big words, The finery of passages, That no one will ever read.

It will never be a bestseller, It will never win prizes.

I think it looks pretty on peoples’ shelves, When I visit them.

Only my friends bought it because I asked them to.

They support my efforts even if they will never read it.

It is a big black book with gold letters and no picture.

There are laudatory notes on the back cover by others who, as well, Have never read it.

It is a daunting book.

It has a girth that exceeds many others And dwarfs my other texts with some exceptions.

Kane wrote a literary telephone book, A bible-sized book that no one will ever read.

Less a complaint than a fact, I might add, Since it no longer belongs to me, But to that other Kane who works feverishly At night and in the morning, Preparing a manuscript he does not know will ever be published, And wracking his dreams of it being published.

Now it is. It festers.

Like Hume’s book, it fell stillborn from the press.

I wonder if that Kane knew this was going to happen.

I wonder if I know right now as I prepare book two, The same fate awaits it?

The Pen-sword that is drawn is indistinguishable From its casting its shadow across the land O regressus O complot O return…

Spin me, spin me, on my heel Or on the pivot of this boustrophedic pen.

Paul made his fortune by incubating a series of greedy tentacles instead of authors, making Paul the New Yorker of the neo-avant-garde, and other empty skeuomorphs.

His use of pronouns was picked from a pool of rank amateurs. It wasn’t the book’s fault that the writing was so dreadful. His book proves that an author’s motivation is not necessarily socially transmissible to the readers.

31 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Abbauhaus taking a few jerks out on the grass for a diamondtooth seance under a sun that is as old as it is new, From a galactical pulsar implosion I have returned to tell you all you're wrong.

I am no Kant with springs in his pockets to keep up his stockings and sockets!

I am no Hegel looking for absolute at the bottom of ein gutes bier (Napoleon will not pay your tab! Run!) I am no Schopenhauer with loaded pistols by the bedside or to die at breakfast or run as far as Frankfurt to avoid cholera (which is the real absolute!) O Eugenics of Love!

I am no Bentham with so many hedons in that calculus-bank, a hole in the wall.

I am no Freudaboyd, freund to none, pushing us into and out of oceanic zero of satiety I am no Comte who has hooked everyone to a silly machine of social alarm clocks nor, am I Francis Galton with moral darwinism (what a meandering kook!).

Look at the ascendent star of saturnalia satyrs, it is Artaud in the incredible earthenware zeppelin tossing out all his organs, a ticker tocker tapeless parade!

In the etymology of terror I turn to Borges in spanish where the word really means to be taken from the earth and placed in the polis. which is why the romans placed their shield upon terra deterra detierra deterritories deterritorialization go ahead and de-terror the body as body without organs! govts have it all wrong--one cannot anti-terror the terror without making mediations, making it a median a meridian thereby sanctifying the opposition forever!

32 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

One must deterror deterra and lift earth from earth not cities from earth not police from the geology of morals!

Forget Antaeus, that cumbersome wrestler lifted as little helpless boy since we must forget Hercules too who was lifted.

Remember Nessos remember his "love salve" remember that myth is always double and more! remember the hydra whose blood it was that killed hercules in his own tunic. remember that hercules was an antiterror agent, a cosmically ordained officer of the Law the Logon zoon DZeus.

Remember this myth more than Plato's for Plato only spins myth when his thought can reach no further or when he is cornered in like fashion, a thousand and one nights of dialogues. put ye not a crown on plato's dialogues just because they are old.

I put no crowns on old things just because just because, as they seem to ask in the schools.

And you, over there, culture cynic!-Do not be a fat fat ugly fat fat Hegel!

Do not be so many bitter and lugubrious Schopenhauers with all your gloomy despair that the will is Here and There, Now and Always!

Be Ernst Junger who Heidegger could not comprehend.

Be a smirking Buddha-Hume Be a Nietzsche of pure surprise!

Of the four apostolic books, everyone but John is synoptic, a trait the Germans love because it is too easy.

But John is the poet of the bunch, the orientalizer, the many-headed Shiva dragons with so many horns and crowns.

Speak like a dragon!

Be a false prophet!

For it is only at the gates of the simulacrum where It is Happening, not in fat fat heavens galore or among babylonian whores or warkrists with swords pushing out from their mouths or horseback archetypes of yawn.

The women at the reading drew their strength from a communal bund, and that uncanny and perhaps vengefully sinister force that lurks behind some women’s support groups like a Mouai statue.

33 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

On nO No oN! E (e) The state is whistling that sour tune note tone And it has made a chromatics of living boring boring O so say can yo you saw A little whittle of wood?

O so say can yo you galilee Or cana golgotha.

Give me a staple of switches Give me a few spare crowns to put On someone else’s head, not mine For martyrs are victims are sleepy.

Keep your big bad boy on a stick.

When the Son who was Father was on the earth Getting the crap kicked out of him, Who was tending the above?

Was the earth free of transcendentalizing rubbish, Given at least a 33 year reprise?

Think of it: a godless world, even for a short time!

34 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Chronophagica Jean Genet and Georges Bataille for pope, For popes run in packs, and I am the master geometer of all my substances.

Andre Gide cardinals and E. M. Cioran grand inquisitors.

Let us revamp the Vatican And revampirize the clergy cloth.

Descartes is on the spindex.

35 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

An Apology to the Reader Dear reader, I must give my most humble apologies.

You see, this part of the poem I had outsourced To a Castilian to translate it into this language.

He came cheaply, and is not very good.

This poem has traveled, since It was later translated into French, Then into Latin, and then Back into English by a team of Three rogue scholars who worked Line by line.

This poem was broken apart and appears In four anthologies, each a bit different.

The word “abjection” occurs in two versions, But not at all in the others (it was struck in favour of either “melancholoy”--a bad choice--or was removed entirely for brevity).

This line you are now reading Does not appear in the final draft.

An esperonto version has been offered.

This poem appears in its native Hungarian As you are now reading it, unless Someone else has translated it into another language.

I cannot account for the slippage of language and Translation. Something is always lost Something is always gained.

I have been asked to translate this poem back Into my own tongue, this poem That has been translated from a translation from Another translation.

I no longer recognize it as my own.

It is no longer my own.

This poem is with Shakespeare now.

Teach me to be a writer like you, the hordes begged. Come teach at our Creative Writing Program, others begged. Jack was overwhelmed. “I can’t teach you all…I’m tired!” The mob would not have it. He was a miracle machine of verse construction: “Edit my verses!”

“Should I put this last line on the top?” “Can I be both a French symbolist and a dadasuperrealist?” “How do I commute more First Nations people into my poems?” “Do you think I’m a good poet like you?” “Is it true that you kissed Bob MacLenin’s ring and are now blessed?” “Do long or short poems get published?” Jack ran screaming from the flurry of the crowd.

36 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Skeuomorph Astromorph-exomorph, a thin glam-alien seduction of stellar In retro-kitsch sci-fi pornoziggytwiggy.

Everything you speak with the brush new new new You know is not so.

He could not have fanned out further In the voracious sexual appetites of skin not sin.

Jack had been invited to a very big literary shindig in Toronto, full of frou-frou and chic twiggy publicists, Basquiatech artistes, cinema jet-setters and flim-flam trendsetters.

Absolutely everyone who was anyone was going to be there. This caused a shortage of limousines and a run on organic elderberry wine. Jack, who had arranged his travel plans far too late had to settle on the embarrassment of being ferried to this party in a rented Honda Civic, the most reliable donkey of cars.

37 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Livegas The Vegas high rollers are engaged In potlach A ‘squandary’ The roulette wheel is wobbly & returns the unexpected.

A true sovereign, says Bataille, Merrily dumps wealth On a number, a bet And the feeling dissipates If there is return on investment.

Investment sully acts of expenditure.

It renders the value of life nil.

There is a chapel in North Las Vegas Where further investments can be made To an afterlife, this life = nil.

To justify lustful encounters, The stamp of legitimacy A priest, a god, a cock.

The high roller fails If he wins Or If he regrets.

Sisyphus is much happier To forget all about the top of the hill.

An elementary school teacher recognized Jack at the grocery store and promptly went up to him on receiving the Miller Prize. Of course, Jack hadn’t even been shortlisted. The teacher told him how she has her students read some of his less obscene poems. So enthused, however, was she that this was Jack Krist that she had to poke him with a spearlike finger to see if he was real. “Are you really the king of the poets?” she asked. He said yes. Sadly, for Jack, another poet of some repute overheard this exchange, immediately went home in a kind of good humour, wrote a lampooning poem entitled ‘Jack, K(ing) of the Poets’, which won such favour at the next round of poetry readings that one could not dissociate between Jack the poet and the biting poem about him. This poet now works for the Glob und Mall book review section, hailed as the second coming of Mencken. There have been some very tasteless pictures of Jack circulating on PoetBook online that come with a caption above his head that indeed reads, "king of the poets".

38 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Americabana An impossibly vast tarp Is pulled over a nation which Resembles either an incomplete brain Or a white grand pinao.

One last thought or one last note as Along the border are several identical figures Wearing togas, Playing fiddles, Eyes papered by the reflection Of an inferno.

Someone said the wrong thing In all times, in all places, for all people.

Although sales were slumping despite Paul’s appearance of his belly becoming more like a vat from fine dining, Jack received from Paul a congratulatory bottle of wine. It had, unfortunately, gone off in the bottle, tasting quite sour. Jack was about to give it a taste when a sudden attack of neuralgia caused him to knock over the bottle. He spent the last remaining three minutes of his fame sponging it off the floor.

39 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Lynchbox Sanctimonious diets, Dogmatic nutrition, A medical moralizing Over bodies To control and curb pleasure.

I watch as The gaunt woman at lunch hour, Squeezed thin by the thick and fast Double rhetoric of health & body image desire pulls out her lynchbox, she: another dietary auto-flagellant.

She pulls each item out ritually, Arraying them carefully As though tools of torture or surgical implements.

One carrot.

One niblet of extra lean chicken.

One protein shake.

One bottled water.

She believes in The necessary connection between Eating and self-punishment.

She counts her calories carefully, Again and again, Making her table one for the accountant, not The bacchant.

She is aghast at my irreverence As I stuff a large quantity of greasy fries Down an insatiable hole, A caloric count spiralling into a horrifying infinity.

At the ninth hour, his books falling off the shelves, shipped back to the distributors, and replaced with Mahmoud Kreenan’s saucy biography of Stewie McCaffeine (soon to be made into a motion picture by the Brothers of Atom Egoyan Emulation Trust), Jack was heard to cry out, “Paul, Paul, lama sbachthani!”

40 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

1 telepoem 2 (an embedded tele-prompter) these things here we must speak-show are not for the eating.

But that you effervesce Prior to being on air In an illusion of being (as) On earth.

You are on the air when Thales says You are on water Treading.

You ground in air floating city Japan as Stone sunk Aerolith Petros Peter o’ Apono Neo/paleo+palneo No, we are cutting a Clip Clop Clap (+canned laughter—cued sigh) The edit is clipped in clip to manufacture effects As we cut to clip And foreign armed corresponded under press mandate Or funadament-a-list Ambersadour.

We cut now with screen blade To a violent bible In bled-led Toronto/Toronaut Or old pop at last “yer tour is a gun” But this kind of music is Channelswapped Click P& .

Paul had exercised some imprudently risky ventures on a collective of Cuban poets that declared themselves uni-anti-rationalists of the new Lang-Po. Although Christopher Bloch was tagged to write an effusive and fatuous introduction, Paul was forced to seek a bail-out subsidy from the Canada Council. During this time of fiscal anxiety, Paul directed Jack K to feign suicide in a last ditch effort to salvage slumping sales of Jack K’s most recent flop, Water to Wine Ratios & Fine Dining Poems for the Plumpish Paternalist.

41 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

The Anchordata of Krist II (Or, P.K.Dick will Build you) [rec’d reading: fast at high volume, as mantra] Work crew/cible-blithe Mortuatara!

Lizar ars ardoretum If gene splicing and splixing/micing in labs Twixt two plinths or a science fugue rood Woodslattern shatshattered Blacknot Equals trini-trinoleum Abstracted from the Shroud of Tourism As code Equals Tryptocryptotryptocrypto Gene three therapy is A genomenon!

So exclaims the one who maps the frontier of The body A filtered cigarette A subway lung Pull Pall Pell ancholy In the spirit of charitable retrospection, the CBC Radio XII decided to ret-con Jack K by inviting him into the studio to speak about his experiences as a once glorious poet. This show aired at 2 am, and the last half of the interview devolved into the interviewer broadly panning Jack K’s last half decade of work. This tape was eventually sold to a collection of mildly interested college radio stations. It was also rumoured that immediately after the taping, Jack literally ate his hat.

42 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

This book is(ituationism) ©/Copyright 1968 A dead press All rights suspended The author (et al) with a new translation by blank.

Translator’s introduction (ix) Printed in ever-ergonomic Swaziland & Moravia Library of Uncollected Cataloguing Numeral Symphony in Publication Dada Poet, a/the This book is.

Translation of cette livre ici Includes bibliographemical references (requisite taxonomy for school-faring vessels) Poetry—academic satire, demonstrative somnambulism & logoplegia Titular Title (withheld; pending re-view, bestowed as a papal bull) Numbers & Letters year more numbers ISBN numerical tyranny (cont.) (paper, vellum, corrugated flesh) The paper used in this book meets The minimum req. of vague standard for The permanent paper printed library information science First published --Millionth-zeroth printing Following the sordidly lucrative trends of publishing stories about boy wizards and the infantilization of a readership, Paul altered the publishing house’s mandate to include more canned poetry loosely based around pastoral and culinary themes geared for weepyeyed Canadian pseudo-naturalists and effete suburban housewives. Paul was keen on producing books that would be sold in large book box stores next to overpriced latte bric-abrac. Upon moving into the daytime television inspired book club market, much of the old list was being phased out and excluded from reprints. If anything, Paul wanted to do honour to Wyndham Lewis' comment that Canada was indeed the most parochial nationette. Such comments would not spare him from being back catalogued.

43 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

A Face Nebunii Joc de zorzoane, Pe cap de sperietoare.

In tumultul risipa Altceva in neregula.

Jack K had discovered that he had been anthologized which, in CanLit parlance, meant two things: he had arrived and that he was as dead as Seamus Heaney.

44 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

A Mass of Black Fat That what is called My brain Is just a fortuitous and prosperous Bacteria.

Religion has it That I am descended from A crucified lemur.

God-lemur.

Science has it That the son of Darwin Evolved for my sins.

Philosophy has it That I can have it any way I choose Like renting An able whore.

All hail The Lemur of evolved Reason.

This brain they cut From a piece Of my asshole.

In an attempt to stir up a new generation of readers, Paul demanded that Jack K meet certain pre-fab poetry benchmarks. Ringfenced by a return to tepid sensationalism and nouveau traditional poetics, Jack K committed all the stinkers he could into verse.

45 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Atoria Cogicurator, O you Corpicured brainstem Flowerpot thought process Dead remainder Dialectically unleashed Powder puff.

Recogitator, O you Cognated phantom Twixt two languages Spokenread eyetongue Dead replicator Synchronically caged Wordplay weasel.

Disrespectator, O you Voyeurized tenderloin Hollow-eyed scopophile Dead orbitonicker Transcendentally corrupt Mini-sun.

Poetator, O you Imitative utterance Repetithe paid to Dead canon Literarily barren Teletypist.

Jack K, despondent over his own fading popularity and the fact that Paul had failed to renew his publishing contract, took the Fitzgerald route through dipsomania and inveterate hackery. This was met, ironically, with audience enthusiasm despite (and because of) the clichĂŠ historicism of it all. This marked a brief-lived Jack K revival that rippled through much of Southwestern Ontario and some areas of the British Columbia interior from March until September inclusive. He was hailed as the toast of Wertherville (pop. 219)

46 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Auto-Sodomination You pulled the infant man From the fire.

All this time, you stink And all this time the ossuary I was building remains Irrelevant.

You, go suffer gangrene of the brain.

You, go articulate your syphilis.

You, go conjugate your rickets.

You, go choke on your own black fat.

You sodomized yourself To make god a man And a mockery of all hitherto divine.

And then you sodomized the old values And forced them to beget monsters.

On a stick, no less For all to see.

You shy from such things now, At least in the parlour Where one side blanches and the other blushes hotly.

But your buggery Is the way you buckle under orgasm.

Look up: Even the sky hiccoughs and barfs on you.

Tiring of his preachy maundering, the audience that once supported Jack K—including his coffee klatch of fellow Toronto poets—abandoned him to reassessing his poetic motivations and verse methodology. Many quite cheekily and rudely recommended that he receive remedial instruction in poetics in general

47 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Cagamosis He had the look Of someone whose bishops were blitzed In under 5 moves onboard.

“We broke up,” he opined.

There’s not a problem, I said, That you can’t drink away.

Apparently, she was beautiful And perfect, But so is a poem in the head Before one writes it down and ruins Everything.

“You’re a textual idealist,” he said.

No, I’m an alcoholic optimist, And a morning nihilist.

Pull up a chair, ante up, Pitch to poker (lucky at cards, unlucky at love), She’s gone: Freedom and weep.

Isolated and with no publisher willing to risk even a kopek on any of Jack K’s recent output, Jack took flight to Eastern Europe on what he magnanimously dubbed a combination book tour and an inspirational journey. It turned out that he was as equally unpopular in other languages.

48 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Codaphone Grand dogpapa and dogmama: An icepick for your sins And a plastic shrink-wrapped silver toy train Wrapped in a serviette under cooling window sill pie Une capitale d’une l’autre.

Planning is central, Failure is peripheral (it always comes in from the sides, Inundating, a diluvium of nomad monkeywrench).

That is the lesson of political amoebism.

Codaphone, ho!

Split the committee pomegranate.

Why has it always been a mustache That really makes 20th century politik?

Post Scriptum: Your word hurtled toward my glass ear And shattered it.

All that is left are shards of Ideology, Scattered nonsense.

Sidling up to and piggybacking an avant-garde group of performance artists from Prague, Jack K donned a black beret and attempted to fool others that his newfound crypticism was a indication of his cerebral profundity. The group eventually cut him loose over a disagreement concerning an outstanding drinks bill, this disagreement thinly masking the more core dissatisfaction the group had with Jack K’s rather mundane attempts at creativity. An irate and cheeky rodeo clown cum gypsy razzed him in public, a moment that was caught on film and may become stock footage in an upcoming film starring Klaus Kinski.

49 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Confestication “ I am: An unclaimed son.

An acquired taste.

The rigoletto of numberlucked Being; In the foreground, soubrettes.

In the background, sawbone barbers.

(axiom)

(corollary)

Adversity, to me, moves (proof) From the prenom to the phenom.

Emanation, to me, takes A geyser of blood in order to keep the ground Greek.

The sun and I are on a pulley, (explanandum) That one goes up so the other may go down.

The state of literature today (provisional conclusion) as author to itself: Romantic microwave burrito-for-two The vicious circle of referentiality, Hyper-awareness of history, And every “man of letters” must by necessity Also be a “man of criticism”. “ Attempting another comeback as the comeback artist, Jack K experimented, and subsequently failed, at producing concrete poetry. A collection of broadsides were produced by a Xerox-y small press engineer who decided to abandon the pile of them by the offices of the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC). A homeless man by the name of "Pete" found them unsuitable as a makeshift pillow.

50 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Contumelia There is no mercy in sexual grammar And the tests of law are outpaced by their politics.

Blame is the game of accusatory mathematics, And the disclosure of false attributions.

Have you ever ridden the mechanical preacher Of the word, of an opprobrium in crescendo?— Perhaps in the spirit of the jilted lover, As you gave license to every hidden contempt.

In a letter where behind that accusing finger Is someone trying to retreat to moral high ground.

But such ground is a valley.

But such perception is a shadow.

The harsh word is a quick come-on medium.

It has only one purpose.

It is catharsis made avant la lettre, Forged ex cathedra the usual encomiums to romance, An invective epistle designed To abolish good memory by smothering it.

It is to dissipate all responsibility.

Polemic incinerates peaceful possibility.

A voice of contempt that charges in Napoleonic flourish.

But when the high tide of polemic rolls back, And catharsis is spent, Remorse combs the field, Mourning the bones.

Jack K took ill after a long bout of starvation mixed with over-consumption of alcohol. A doctor told him that he had developed a terminal illness. Jack K could only think of how this could be used to increase his market value as a poet in terms of sales and more visiting poet honouraria. He contacted Paul after many years of silence. Their conversation was decidedly awkward. Paul was rejected once again for a post as a writer-in-residence at the local university. His Bukowski affectations of being a great blue-collar drunkard poet were largely ignored.

51 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Exsurgency: A New Primer for Water Torture In Latinate hue, tingling is horror Pro-nounced without ‘i’ or ‘they’.

Con furioso; Yours; Truly mine, stops water block heater solid.

Leaks incessantly with sharp tinkle-tingle Of aqueous terrorism, but…

Although I do appreciate the armrests, The politickery of your brigandage brigadiers of New rhetorice Chine, is sloppy at best, And at worst, finds itself unspeaking.

52 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Estimada Cliente ¿ Are you 1st in the 3rd World? ¿ 3rd in the First? ¿ A What on second? ¿ And a slugger for high finance? ¿ Will you pinch-hit a run For the 1st of the 3rd At the bottom of the 2nd? ¿ Or will you steal a base first As the third of all firsts, At the risk of pushing the 3rd man forward? ¿ A “thirst”-world hombre?

Please reply.

53 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Generation of the Goose-Egg Faceless powerful many, Populated full with silverbacks Worry about transfat today and climate tomorrow.

What can I do in the infinite potential of impotence?

--Oh, well, what’s for lunch?

Faceless powerful many, Activism is failure.

Storm the barricades, Justify higher police budgets, Wear the rebel-gear sold you by that which You rebel against, and Buy the barricades back on eBay as nostalgia items.

The only people defending the workers nowadays Are those who have never worked.

Faceless powerful many, The intellect is contra State, So punish us with debts to keep us in good faith While all you desire of us Is to be good tax-paying citizens.

I open my ears to the thoughts of suburbia In order to hear crickets.

Alpha males throwing a stone at another.

Dominate nature with a Mercedes.

Faceless powerful many, You want to force-feed me middle-class aspiration Served on a chipped plate.

You yank the cigarette from my mouth for public safety While you aim your guns at children in lands You refuse to understand.

Faceless powerful many, Your illusion of care Is a threadbare blanket that leaves my feet uncovered, And is infected with the pox of State’s paternalism.

Faceless powerful many, I need your warning labels as a tablature by which To live my life according to your Will.

I obey to the letter.

We, the comfortably resigned.

The millennium has cycled over 54 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

And we no longer feel panic.

Global warming is a concern of a mild order, And we appreciate your taking it mildly seriously.

We appreciate your topical summits And your carbon-offset flights.

And now you can reduce our personal tax To have solar panels installed on our skullcaps.

Faceless powerful many, We all know that the predictions of globalitarian Corporate dominance-in-structure has come true.

But I want my cheap burritos.

I can only raise a small peep, Muttered quietly into my wallet.

Faceless powerful many, Is revolution just the new pink for the season?

I have my cell phone, my SUV, my cargo pants, and I’m ready to march under the sign of the consumer cross.

You’ve proven that a commercial gulag Can be pleasing.

Faceless powerful many, I have dim memories of when the Wall came down.

We of the MSNism philosophy are curious To see it built back up again.

Faceless powerful many, I’ve plugged in my lapdog, But I lack the drivers To access your commercial kill floor.

The e-glut is deafening.

Faceless powerful many, I saw you on sale just the other day.

I was going to wave hello, But, you see, I was really busy And I didn’t want to embarrass you By spotting spotty you.

Faceless powerful many, Cold wars mean just as good business As the hot varieties do, And it will take a thermodynamic miracle To reheat a lukewarm economy.

55 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Faceless powerful many, Such big words from small minds As we scream Uncle for oil, In your guts-for-garters program.

Did you see how quickly the despised Other Sank into the tar sands?

Faceless powerful many, There are no more safe inoculations against The television as virus And there is no more room on our shelves For all your canned culture.

Faceless powerful many, I am trying to turn to you, to face you, You great moral majority, for I am seeking a solution you may have kept Beside the preserves or on DVD. But you have no features, no face, And the things I can buy I can’t swallow. .

56 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Guraphysics Of square and circle And before through to after And the given conditions of things I can readily define, But what matter these things When the cold lip of the glass Gives and receives its kisses on a balmy night?

For the Rule and Laws of Logic Become fancifully distorted The more deeply I kiss at the lip Of this sudsy glass.

And to kiss in pairs As the lip kisses away smoke from the very end Of a cigarette.

I know this world almost primarily Through lips While the eye only secures what must be kissed.

Perhaps across the lips passes the famous chariot Of speech with peers joyfully bellying up to the bar, Or perhaps these lips will find their mark On some lovely-lonely nocturne nymph Who lives as fervently by the lip as I do.

Of square and circle I know all too well, But in a place where the lip reigns, It is merely a jagged tooth lodged In the broken jaw of academic discourse.

The high knowledge would rather be As a chap rather than a balm upon that which Already has a natural split.

57 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Heirlock Above a pink paint scaled bureau Beside curling photographs Through a postered closet door Is a lock of hair that once belonged To a bouffant bouquet of its kind A bush that once rimed a face.

It is tied together with an elastic, And it has kept its colour (all these years).

A horse tail A used makeup brush A brown furry jetty A hirsute fountain An heirlock Of you.

58 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Imbible The taps are now open.

Upon comets we now ride, With cavalier words And intrepidly buoyant actions.

Courage is purchased by the pint, And thoughts of revolution Tickle the air electric.

Great resolutions, Grand simplifications, Ultimate plans to redress the entire world, Loudmouthedly‌ The taps are now closed, And the comet trails have faded, And we disperse ourselves Back into the shadows.

59 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Ossuary For Faulkner, Grieving on universal bones.

For Artaud, Pain sweating inside the bone.

The bone-womb Where nothing outgrowths Because what grows is soft And the womb is Like the inside of an erection.

Man or god—it is the same thing.

I fry my time In a coffin And crucify All my opposites.

Thoughts should be croquee For the cuisine of thinking Should be hard on the teeth.

I think with my teeth For they are closest to the bone In sockets.

And they all fall out One by one By one.

60 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

This book is(ituationism) ©/Copyright 1968 A dead press All rights suspended The author (et al) with a new translation by blank.

Translator’s introduction (ix) Printed in ever-ergonomic Swaziland & Moravia Library of Uncollected Cataloguing Numeral Symphony in Publication Dada Poet, a/the This book is.

Translation of cette livre ici Includes bibliographemical references (requisite taxonomy for school-faring vessels) Poetry—academic satire, demonstrative somnambulism & logoplegia Titular Title (withheld; pending re-view, bestowed as a papal bull) Numbers & Letters year more numbers ISBN numerical tyranny (cont.) (paper, vellum, corrugated flesh) The paper used in this book meets The minimum req. of vague standard for The permanent paper printed library information science First published --Millionth-zeroth printing

61 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Pollock is Dead Art has no eyes Literature has no legs.

I’ve got pepper and a truncheon: Let’s make some maker.

And the critic speaks: The King of Tricks Slips make skips rail, A talking doctor.

Armed with twisdom (widomine patre vomitus) Preaching from chair-conditioned office With the time of cactusk Gifted unto him by a prick.

Art rests in piece and the artist is mute The critic is schixotic And always has the last tilt.

62 | M o r p h o m e t r i e s

Whorizon Great crumbling bastions of Nixon-Mitchell architecture, And from this, as if to sluice from an invisible nipple, Is succored the burbs that taste of hoi polloi finance And sap the core urban tax base, and the urban floor Is crumbling from having its milk sucked from beneath it.

War was once an effective policy instrument for territorial expansion.

Now territories are built on economic frontiers, And how far those lines can be pushed.

I saw it myself, once, many times, at some sacred site Where embedded into the ornate masonry, a commercial meteorite, Was the new instant classic antiquity Of a soda or a cell phone or an operating system advert.

Misery is a rainbow of many shades, And misery can be absorbed and disseminated In the wilting and crumbling edifices Across the architectural horizon.

This horizon has already been sold, And the contracts have been signed.

Stamped, double-approved, sealed.

Sentiments in architecture Age poorly.

A new skin is the graft of the popular, Treasured to the nth degree, sitting with Smug bloatedness Upon an already purchased whorizon.

All that shall be left Will be the scandalous lipstick print Of history as strumpet marketplace.

Jack K died on Christmas Day of organ failure. A few notable poets came to give lukewarm eulogies and to plug their own chapbooks in the presence of only three newspaper reporters, all from scantly read college rags. Some vacuous words were spoken of Jack K’s place in the canon of CanLit, and how his legacy would live on—all of it a carnival of mendacity and posture.

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Zoviet pushka in aero.

A tossed hunger is like a laugh and Purges no fear.

Sky blanches, the powder of a shot That unsettles the horses; A run for repetition.

Throw back all those buckshot teeth With the trigger of that laugh, You’ll assassinate the social event With a furtive joke Sniping in from an unseen boarded-up window.

A year after Jack K’s death, Paul took it upon himself to re-release all of Jack K’s work in rather high-quality collected editions. Riding the crest of such a wave, Paul put together a fatuous biography of Jack K he had written, riddled with impossible fabulation and fictionalizations designed to make a legend out of a man never publicly vetted by Marjorie Spitwood. Paul was able to rake in a considerable earning from this venture, and thenceforth took the proceeds to refurbish his Vancouver condominium.

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List of poetry books by Jack K: Money changing in the Sock Drawer, Golgotha Press (1994).

Clock Rage, Golgotha Press (1995).

De Board of De Rectors, Self-published (1995).

Poeletics: One, Golgotha Press (1998).

Poisonous Athletics, Golgotha Press (1999).

Acts Today, Clay Tomorrow, Golgotha Press (2000).

Water to Wine Ratios & Fine Dining Poems for the Plumpish Paternalist, Golgotha Press (2002).

Zone Interchanges of the Semiotic Coup, (under the pseudonym, Jacques Caulis), Unreadable Press (2003).

King of the Poets, Laugh at the Ground Press (2003).

Return of the King of the Poets, Desktiptop Publishing (2004).

Santa at the Slaughterhouse, Who That? Press (2005).

Approximate Server, Underhanded Press (2005).

I am Fabulous, Thank you for Asking, Mustache Ride Press (2006).

Read, See, Be, Golgotha Press (2007).

Awards: 1995 Nice Try Award for Poetry 1996 Award for the Promotion of Aphasia Understanding 1998 Short-listed for the Not-Quite-Giller Prize 2003 Baffling Persistence Despite Reality Award

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