OMEGA 7 from hive this mind

OMEG A

OMEGA

to the memory of Jack Wiler Dec. 14, 1951 — Oct. 20, 2009

from

this

MICHAEL ANNIS HENRY AVIGNON BENJAMIN BALTHASER TOM BRADLEY CHARLES BUKOWSKI GINNETTA CORRELI JANE CROWN NABINA DAS TATJANA DEBELJACKI JARED DEMICK DUBBLEX RENEE DWYER STEVIE LEE EDWARDS ANNMARIE ELDON VICTORIA GANIM JOE GIGLIO GREGORY GREYHAWK LEIGH HERRICK SANDRA HUNTER MOLLY KAT JILLIAN ROSE KRUPP SUN YUNG LEE JOY LEFTOW HELLER LEVINSON OSWALD LE WINTER ELENOR LITTLE ADRIAN C . LOUIS MICHAEL D. MAIN STACY MUSZYNSKI EDWARD MYCUE MARY NEWELL VALERY OISTEANU JOHN OLSON LAURA OREM DAVID RAY PAUL CORMAN ROBERTS KENNETH ROSEN ADAM ROUFBERG ALBERT SALINAS LILVIA SOTO THOM. [WORDWULF] STERNER ROSS VASSILEV JACK WILER FRANK WINTERS JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT

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OMEGA ONLINE JOURNAL OF LITERATURE & ART MICHAEL ANNIS: FOUNDER, CREATOR, SENIOR EDITOR, ART DIRECTOR & DESIGNER JOY LEFTOW: ASSOCIATE OFFICER for ONLINE GROUPS HENRY AVIGNON: ARTIST – OMEGA 7 http://HenryAvignonArt.viewbook.com

COPYRIGHT © 2009 BY HOWLING DOG PRESS / OMEGA All rights reserved by individual contributors relevant to their contributions in each specific issue of OMEGA. No part of this magazine may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, Howling Dog Press, through its senior editor or associate editors, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews, studies, critical articles or analyses, or within blogs. Any quotations excerpted from the work herein must be fully cited to the quotation’s source. Visual elements included within this magazine may not be reproduced without permission and must also be cited and sourced as being published in OMEGA; furthermore, the artistic creator of the work must receive full credit. Entire contents of all OMEGA online magazines are Copyright © 2003—2009 by individual contributors through Howling Dog Press. All rights reserved. Duplication or republication without the express written consent of OMEGA and/or its contributors is strictly prohibited. Prior consent is given to reproduce short excerpts in blogs or reviews if accompanied by full source citations and credits.

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To the memory of

Mark Stryker

To the memory of

Will Inman

b. October 31, 1949 d. August , 2009

b. May 4, 1923 d. October 3, 2009

Artist, conservator, author, photographer, humorist, intellectual, world traveler, and sacred friend always loved.

You filled our world with joy, hilarity, adventure, and the fine wine of life , love and art.

One of America’s truly great ones: natural born poet, humanitarian, anti-war activist, equal rights advocate, lover of earth & all of its creatures, bringer of peace and justice.

Good man of profound spirit.

DEDICATED TO THE TRANSMIGRATORS OF THE SPIRIT HINGED IN THE HIVEMIND, WHO, RATHER THAN BOW DOWN TO THE MOLOCHIAN GODHEAD, OR ACQUIESCE TO DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL VILLAINS OF FINANCE (a.k.a. JACK THE RIPPERS OF ECONOMIC PLUNDER AND POLITICAL USURY) CONTINUE DEFIANTLY THE HUMAN STRUGGLE AGAINST PANDEMIC EXTORTION, COERCION, TYRANNY, INJUSTICE, AND GENOCIDE OF ALL LIFE ON EARTH. WITH PLANETARY DESOLATION PERPETUATED BY EITHER/OR, WITH -US/AGAINST-US THIEVING CORPORATE THEOLOGIES, CORPORATE TERRORISTS BID US DO THEIR WILL: “Buy! Consume! Possess the nations, it’s an Empire not a Planet! Guilty~not guilty, shop ’til you drop! God would have no fields of misery ripe for the harvest of His miracles if thou were not all pharmaceutically dependent, sick unto death, corpulent with consumption, gullets stoked gluttonizing fossil fuels, poverty stricken, devoid of healthcare, trampled under credit card debt, slain by your own sloth, greed, lust and self-imposed ignorance. FASTER! FASTER! Work, drink, fuck! FASTER! FASTER! Spend that buck! “ THESE STINGY, SOULLESS ENTITIES VORACIOUSLY FEEDING OFF OTHERS’ TRAGEDIES, RAMMING FEAR INTO THE MASS MIND ‘ATMASSFEAR’, INDOCTRINATE TO WAGE THEIR WARS TO BENEFIT THEIR TREASURIES! “Devour, rape, scourge Earth’s biosphere! We’re the nation that steals from others that are smaller, poorer, weaker, claiming God is on our side. For God SHALL tarry until not one of you hath a pot to piss in, hopeless beyond all measure, groveling in thy own shit from dawn ’til midnight, and then He shall cometh in all His glory, unleashing His furious pestilences against the Socialist Evildoers.” Etc. F R O M A C O U N T R Y I G N I T E D

BY FREEDOM’S RULE OF LAW, TO ONE WITHERED AND STRANGLED UNDER THE RULE OF CORPORATE BY-LAWS & PROPAG A N D A , D U M B E D - D O W N T O U N P R E C E D E N T E D S H A L L O W S O F B I G O T R Y & I D I O C Y , W E A R E A M E R I K A ! (or, we were in some textbook …)

P A U L C O R M A N - R O B E R T S 12 spawn of enron, alarm clock prayer, mosquito, john wieners at the roxie—1982, the liberal who lived in a bubble

M A R Y N E W E L L 20 fillmore crossing, hunger dreams, denominators of the common lot, city sea change, my neighbor, from beaver this rivulet TO M B R A D L E Y 24 support the troops by giving them posthumous boners, procedures for an American military wife stationed in Hiroshima during times of increased terrorist activity, a trio of questionable youngsters A N N M A R I E E L D O N compents, fendtz, sturt, s’end

30

B E N J A M I N B A L T H A S E R 34 dedication 1 for someone’s memory, dedication for moe stein, brooklyn bridge, august 2006, dedication campaign J A N E C R O W N 38 objective man, work, tarzan, the pawing corpse, serial killer K E N N E T H R O S E N 42 argosies of hair, adagios of stone, the prisoner addresses the tribunal, crossing into lefkosha V I C TO R I A G A N I M with plié, …

47

R E N E E D W Y E R 48 the airplane’s going down, crisscrossing scars ..., the reductionist view of love, drowning was something we could own, sometimes they steal pieces…, untitled D A V I D R A Y 52 of biblical proportions & possibility, the war, the wonders of science, status quo 2009, ptsd, another invisible elephant, eyeless in gaza, my good fortune, another documentary, irony like a little girl chased by napalm comes unsought, why I don’t miss george w. bush

this mind

from hive

A D R I A N C . L O U I S 16 american vampire, at sioux monument, helicopter pecker, cowboys &, i thought i saw dick cheney chasing a bus in Minneapolis, venison child

L A U R A O R E M 58 the boy in the snow, notes to the mother of James Henry Stuart, turner, OR, pfc, usmc, born june 24, 1947, killed in action september 7, 1967

S U N

Y U N G L E E shrivel portfolio

65

S TA C Y M U S Z Y N S K I real women don’t squat like that

66

J O H N O L S O N 68 the importance of being amphibious, the exquisite oil of gearshift hay, lapidarian, omelette, parabolic balloons L E I G H H E R R I C K 74 elegy for voice set in waves & dunes, and who they weren’t teaching, snow, decorated, from the ruins of the (little) white house, reading levi, piety in time of war, silence, staring out a window F R A N K W I N T E R S 86 ptica roparica, biti, brezvestnez, gristi, navrodni pevec, tovaris, narodnoosvobodilna vojska, umetniski, razpored, razbojnik, tovaristvo, upodabljajoce umetnosti E DWA R D M Y C U E 49er

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S T E V I E L E E E D W A R D S 92 poem for a blackfoot ghost, synedoche, what is the rain?, woman, my war protest T H O M A S ( W O R D W U L F ) S T E R N E R 96 above and beyond the sky & tears, fastball, green helicopters..., madman chronicles: new blood, REM/steel bird, salutation J E F F R E Y C Y P H E R S W R I G H T 100 save the weasels, gauntlet, made in tinseltown, lead with the chin, flesh coupon A D A M R O U F B E R G 104 masses struggling like unanswered whys, with twisted love, from allowable possibilities, in the ultimate flavor of phase space, causal relations drawn to cast [CONTENTS CONTINUED NEXT PAGE

this mind

from hive

J A R E D D E M I C K 62 war as tv star, “isn’t their food just delicious?”, empty, “and what do you want to be when you grow up?”

V A L E R Y O I S T E A N U 108 new orleans hurricane blues, sexual ports of call, barcelona tango, Italian faces and places, king dali

G R E G O R Y G R E Y H A W K 118 cover letter, sans resumÊ, for application to the godhead, war game, sapper, hill 239, puddle jumping down thunder road, r & r, diapers, pablum, ciggies & bus money, orenda, when we take the land back E L E N O R L I T T L E 124 prosthetic mind, the circus, burrows H E N RY AV I G N O N 132 butterfly’s effecting, elegy for the uncommon, stairs descending a nude, rhythmic aneurysm(ic), with abstract this reality O S WA L D L E W I N T E R 144 the night swimmers, hemingway, intipunku, gateway of the sun, suicide bomber, berryman, mapping a country without borders, art & time C H A R L E S B U K O W S K I 150 reach for the sun (letter), an enemy to the king, right, baby, right, fall of the roman empire, the last, lost note L I L V I A S O T O 156 song of empire, carding, the murdered, not my son!, pink alert, or happy is the color of subversion J O E G I G L I O 162 sopor collider, (f)ear marks, par (for the coarse), running #s, stick figures J O Y L E F T O W 168 I sing the blues for you today, blues part ii, i’ve always been bad, 15 minutes of fame, the eye in my sky is crying M I C H A E L D . M A I N 174 origami lyre, into airstream rails, piccolo ecstatic preposition, birdland, articulocutor hinge cycle

this mind

from hive

S A N D R A H U N T E R & A L B E R T S A L I N A S 114 pneumatic harmonics, quarter daughter, luna tuna, it's only love, god forbid, crown glorious

TAT J A N A D E B E L J A Č K I gord-a-dan, odana, devoted

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N A B I N A D A S 190 dead river longings, for sukanta, history lessons,1950, questionnaire, the korobi song R O S S V A S S I L E V 194 open letter to the american news media in time of war, land of the free, amerika über alles, a miserable profession, cataracts, the new napalm, yellow eyes, these old bones M O L L Y K A T 198 this is a different kind of passport 19, just kiss me, cocaine 14 J A C K W I L E R 202 praises for the insect & mammalian dead, the poem where i say thank you, the names of god, talking with nat, why i like money D U B B L E X 208 so a black man is president, the people’s republic of america, stop this society, where is private ortiz?, tribute 2 john Coltrane J I L L I A N R O S E K R U P P silhouette of my fingertips

214

M I C H A E L A N N I S 220 from hive this mind (part 1), war (excerpt from brave new world order), through the slits of Orlando’s eyelids G I N N E T T A C O R R E L I 234 disintegration, his name is bullet, sonny’s goodbye, the baby pool

THE CONTRIBUTORS 238 DONATIONS TO OMEGA 245 SUBMISSIONS 246 AVIGNON ART PURCHASING INFO 247 NEW HOWLS FROM HDP 248-250

this mind

from hive

H E L L E R L E V I N S O N 180 disassembly, from sonic this equipoise, from storm this sonic, in the stone of sonic, in the sonic of stone, sonic like altitudinous skin

Suddenly he raises his arms as though he were about to speak. But he falls backward without a word, shot straight through the heart. The attack has begun. Through the slits of Orlando’s eyelids, his eyes are no more than a black thread, burning with fever and terror. Suddenly, from the wall of foliage, bright flashes of light begin to appear everywhere: firearms being discharged. The first to fall beneath the volley of gunfire is Torino, our second guide. He had been trying to go to his comrade’s rescue. Two more of our men are wounded. They crawl back on their hands and knees toward the rest of the column as we fire our weapons to give them cover. There is a lull then, the quiet disturbed only by the rattle of the firearms as they are reloaded. In the silence the speaker with the head of a proconsul slowly articulates each word in a deep bass voice, slightly distorted by the metallic crackling of the loudspeaker. Es por eso (That is why, the interpreter whispers) que propongo para el párrafo cuatro (I propose for paragraph four) la siguiente redaccion (the following wording): el escritor se define politicamente (the writer defines himself politically) por su particapicion active, tanto spiritual como fisica, a la lucha revolucionaria (by his active participation, both spiritual and physical, in the revolutionary struggle). A slight murmur of protest runs the length of the two rows of bodies on either side of the green table….

—Claude Simon, “Conducting Bodies”

David Sisneros,

To the memory of beloved nephew b. April 13, 1973 d. June 13, 2009 Your music thundered through us.

spawn of enron

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PAUL CORMANROBERTS ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ PAUL CORMAN ROBERTS CONTINUES TO PG 15

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…What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? — William Butler Yeats

How can we be losing the war on terror if the stock market is rolling?

If the top 500 corporations are showing unlimited growth then wasn’t it all worth it?

In a matter of days we’ll be celebrating the grand opening of the Baghdad Wal-Mart.

Shouldn’t the freedom loving peoples of Iraq be entitled to three hundred dollars of annual health care?

Shouldn’t the freedom loving peoples of Iraq not have to endure the inequity of unions?

It’s too bad Ken Lay and Andy Fastow weren’t able to make this party.

How much this operation reminds us of how things used to run in Houston.

PAUL CORMANROBERTS

Just imagine how many no-bid contracts the great energy provider would have secured.

If only those good ole boys had hung in there for another year and a half.

Then we wouldn’t have to endure the whining of those who weren’t strong enough to sell on time.

Price fixing in Kirkuk overloading in Mosul Rolling blackouts in Tikrit what could be more American?

Who would ever complain about Haliburton and Bechtel?

Why shouldn’t the freedom loving peoples of Iraq also benefit from the magic of deregulation?

Why shouldn’t the freedom loving peoples of Iraq not be subject to the will of the World Bank?

So long as they don’t mind not participating in their infrastructure…

So long as the free trade of commodities is limited to genie lamps And e-baying those few clay museum pots that weren’t smashed or stolen… …won’t it all be worth it when the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil occurs? …won’t it all be worth it to be able to say “at least it wasn’t Saddam?”

~

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alarm clock prayer Borne through vast plains of black ice ghost train howls back and forth between Warsaw and Budapest in the godless winter in the sexless night Banshee of Mammon The Morlock Siren calling out its first broadcast over reluctant roofs of the sleeping city.

A hollow roar Through a hollow emanates from the tubular void.

Yea, this is the invocation Let us speak now in the ways in which the devout cannot.

The secular supplicants have already prepared the way You never see as many bow ties On the platform as you do in these godless hours in a sexless winter The scurrying pious of Babylon Long ago outmaneuvered All Helios’ steeds All the better to juxtapose shining statistics ~

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luminous logistics Alarm Clock Prayer glowing prognostics these secular mystics & their calculations evaluations forever in quest for market mutations Let us pray now in the ways the devout cannot.

Hollow gray Leviathan Draping down over the coast Draping down on the city Draping itself around your shoulders & gently massaging your ears with a whisper & your nose with a kiss & we will call this freedom & we will call this deliverance among the burdens of our own making.

Let us now love each other in the ways in which the devout cannot

PAUL CORMANROBERTS among these storms of our making & we will call this redemption borne through the vast plains of black ice in a godless night.

This is

m o s

for real, life in the margins

q u i t o

The secular rain I love, though direct exposure to the open faucet of sky would mean lingering decay In here

sacrifice a price I am only too willing to collect from the edge of your secretions

A reef secreted from ideas An atoll of intellect merely guarding the borders of a feeding ground

Waiting for a season an abstract reason for risk couldn’t be more clear in the post-humidity of your window where in your modern twilight scene you’re seen

the liberal who lived

Flyover country is Closed for repairs Under reconstruction This morning fading beneath Long cumulus scaffolding Haphazardly bolted To the Sierra Nevada Ground Line Stapled by tornado Shaped reinforcements Over the continental Crack

in a bubbl e

john wieners at the Roxie — 1982

One can’t help but wonder if it exists at all If it isn’t just a vast hoax Perpetrated by CNN To fill in the empty spaces Where advertising just doesn’t matter In this dreamy ludicrosity Until the long vacuum bubble touches Down in

Once in a rare hurricane The eye again falls Upon the old mad poets Who are afforded The brief luxury of remembering Jesters and pranksters and troubadours and merrymakers have been left in charge of an apocalypse abdicated by its makers Yet in spite of this It is still a good deal to be king none the richer.

Kc-St-louienash-vegasville-chicagorleans-atlantimorebrookyork & the hustlers & the dreamers & the downtrodden & cnn Are all still there When flyover country isn’t.

PAUL CORMANROBERTS ~

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american vampire

ADRIAN C. LOUIS ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ ADRIAN C. LOUIS CONTINUES TO PG 19

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As a boy on a dare from his best friend he drank a tiny frog & subsequently slurped his friend.

Then he fanged all friendships, the flag, fatherhood, & finally fire.

Finis? No, he’s still around, but blood that once dribbled down his jowls in bukkake torrents is congealed & sour & now the old vampire is perched atop the western ribcage of this republic listening to dirges that flutter up from his pacemaker.

at sioux monument

At Sioux Monument one mile past Martin on SD Highway 73 recent tribal history is indexed in the long row of tombstones.

Granite from as far away as Pennsylvania protrudes from old snow in this, the saddest of all Lakota winter counts.

But, there are no loved ones asleep under these markers.

Here lie unpaid balances, due upon delivery of stone to grave.

Here lie the hearts of families fractured by cosmic poverty.

ADRIAN C. LOUIS

helicopter pecker Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A platitude of bugs, that whirligig of Beatles in Billy’s basement room.

I didn’t know what the hell they signified or why the music moved us or why from left field Billy whipped it out & twirled it, dancing around like a drunken helicopter & we were as sober as church mice & we chorused, “Yeah, yeah, yeah” & laughed, would laugh whenever we heard that song & when he was sacrificed for nothing five years later in a war against rice-eaters, I imagined him resurrected, whirring through clouds to Heaven via his helicopter pecker until his cousin told me an AK-47 had chopped his crotch to hamburger.

~

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Outside my pastures of gray, the sacred cow of war was being milked dry by hairless cowboys of my generation who never got laid or high.

Done milking, they cloaked the old bovine with banners, banged & splayed her, spread her legs & birthed a hundred thousand devil dogs marching to the udder beat of a little black book, deployed simply to suck out the marrow of the ancient bone-tribes.

It’s how the white man rolls.

cowboys &

i thought i saw dick cheney chasing a bus in minneapolis

I thought I saw Dick Cheney chasing a bus in Minneapolis.

He looked just like himself & was wearing baggy new Levi’s with one of those chain things hooked to a belt loop & then to his wallet & God I’d never wear such a gizmo as this old bastard who was huffing & puffing through traffic unaware his head was nearly bald & his ponytail was constructed of neck hair.

I wanted to sneak up & ask if he were fatally worn out from fucking his beloved country, ask if he had enjoyed playing the player, but he jumped on the bus & was gone, gone, gone.

ADRIAN C. LOUIS ~

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venison child

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KENNETH ROSEN ][ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

ART: HENRY AVIGNON

The humid air is clotted with corn & soy dust.

Boys, whose scared & supple scrotums are filled with helium, squeal tires in perfect orbits of the Wal-Mart.

Jealous & confused, I shoot a deer, slit open its stomach & crawl into its steaming guts.

Later, when the town quiets I slither out & in the dying warmth & wetness I force a smile & ignite a Marlboro.

Born again into starry night, I am still & decrepit still.

Gathered onlookers shrug.

Some toss small coins, but most tiptoe quickly toward their cars & pretend they can’t smell their own puckered-ass fear of the wild.

ADRIAN C. LOUIS

~

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fillmore crossing MARY NEWELL ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ MARY NEWELL CONTINUES TO PG 23

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On lower Haight I breakfast with my California son, guitarless for the moment.

He orders eggs Benedict with lox me, a spinach and onion omelet no toast and steam-hot coffee – two soy lattes.

Near Fillmore and Haight a five dollar folding alarm clock that works a money machine that might.

Slurring druggies in shades hesitant ex-druggies Young white collars thin hips, fast paced, eyes dart to take me in headsets they readily remove to give directions Old southern blacks hail friends. limpid magnolia twilights linger in hearty greetings.

Waitresses with short hair glazed up straight tattoos, all over or strategic dreads smokers blowing smoke in doorways A Bush with beard under a Wanted headline a sweatshirt store a jacket for fifty – too much but

colder than I remember Good Thai food a smoothie shoppe a health food store open till 7 that carries wine a sausage store with more German than I know On Lower Haight a plump man on a milkcrate outside the pharmacy selling the homeless paper I didn’t buy but flashed my holiday smile. jolly, he sends a compliment my way— “pig meat” —even though I’m middle aged and white.

On Fillmore kaleidoscopic house front banter in shared kitchen.

Parallel play: I Photoshop my Canyon shots; he uploads music and arranges for a gathering.

Together we watch indie films, laugh at ourselves and other strays.

I listen as he modulates new tunes, and sometimes murmur harmony.

While he collects his messages, I watch wisteria and mint cling in fragrant back gardens.

MARY NEWELL

hunger dreams

“I’d like to open a vegetarian cafe chain, to broadcast health,” you say, eating your greasy sausage.

My eyebrows jut up.

You want to make money while helping people.

Ok, I think it’s unlikely.

I’ve tried…

But I won’t judge you.

You’ve come to the right place, dropping your dream off here.

After all, I’m the queen of the impossible dream I’m dancing after walking zigzag for two years that proves one can plummet and recover sunny side up.

You lick your lips and wave for another helping.

I slog my vitamins and listen to the discord. ~

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denominators of the common lot I’m at 125 street train station again, braided voices clipped by passing trains.

And the girl pumping up the stairs, wispy dishwater blond damp-curled straggly hair elk legs Italian accent, doesn’t know which track On the common frequency train facts travel to her and to the woman striding steadily behind, whose voice announces Jamaica, I think, sturdy, unwavering smile, curly black tendrils splayed on solid shoulders.

Both in sweaters, this season’s apple green, one half-buttoned, one tight on ivory and mahogany.

They don’t know each other but now we all know

~

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which track is which at least.

Me, I’m in basic brown, freckles as always, my backpack full of dissertation drafts And next to me in silver and olive sweats, slicked wavy hair, a guy buffered with hazy gaze.

Now it’s raining quietly on everyone, slicking the surfaces.

I scold the sky, irreverent “Today, why today?”

My pack is not waterproof and my very important papers are, well, damp.

MARY NEWELL

My benchmate doesn’t do that wooden thing, but laughs, and soon we’re bantering about rain-triggered singing.

He’s going to the DMV in Yonkers to get off the hook And I’m going home to dry out my draft.

And he gets on the Brewster train And the wispy girl gets on the orange train leaving, as far as I can tell, no traces at the station And I’m still waiting with the dampness soaking through my skin, watching the drizzle clean New York.

from beavers this rivulet

city sea change The minute you leave I summon the sea, turn the fan toward shimmering seashell discs in the kitchen doorway.

All night long the abalone curtain clinks breakers subdue busses, muffle sirens.

Velvet-centered waves wrap around tight corners lap though doorways slap back on themselves at the edge of my bed.

Sea foam gurgles through my glial cells, effervesces my dreams.

my neighbor Below an orange-smudged sky early morning sun glints on rosette windows, shines the eastern edge of buff stone pinnacles St. Monica’s parish started in a feed store — yes, picture 1880: livestock in Manhattan!

Now video cameras mar the stately arch below which, sun sliver misses by two feet the homeless body in the doorway horizontal, wrapped in plastic.

Rising somewhat later, he packs up and rambles off in search of food.

MARY NEWELL

Seven foot span with tail scale matching first-growth trees Miocene beavers made meadows from forests dam after dam.

Wetlands spread behind their giant chomps, clarifying water, saving silt.

Group log rolls dammed streams shaped buzzing interweave of niches, wary cohabitation.

At stream outlets log islands floating spreading seed breeding peak riparian scenes.

Great shapers of water flows abducted for fashion trap by trap hat by hat dwindling into style.

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support the troops by giving them posthumous boners TOM BRADLEY ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ TOM BRADLEY CONTINUES TO PG 29

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Are you retarded enough to reckon that was an actual decision on your part? You were part of the plan all along, Corporal Corpse. Your nation was methodically over-lawyered in preparation for your nativity, divorce was facilitated, your generation well-farmed, incubated in broken homes, corn-fed golem oafs too heart- and brain-damaged to do more than rampage in a proxy war on behalf of that boa-constricting entity which I, your priestess, for self preservation’s sake, even here in this Christian sanctuary, must euphemize, in a whisper, as “the Trans-national Corporatocracy.”

“Behold this bleeding breast of mine Gashed with the sacramental sign.

I stanch the blood, the wafer soaks, High Priestess moistened death invokes.

This Bread I gorge, this Oath I swear As I enflame myself with prayer.”

–Aleister Crowley, Mass of the Phoenix

Distinguished, decorated, not much longer corporeal Corporal, trenchered out piecemeal in our laps, your bronze whatzit with fig leaf clusters or almond clusters, or whatever, pinned on your thorax, reamedout, stainless steel-stanted, don’t you fret, my handsome boy.

We promise not to tattle to absentee Pa that you, literally gutless, failed to complete your eighth stop-lossed tour of duty, way over there in Eyerack, running interference for Halliburton’s pricey mercenaries.

Not from us will ex-pregnant-teen Ma hear that you unmetaphorically crapped out before she could hold a bake sale for E-Bay body armor, your penultimate birthday-boy surprise.

Meanwhile, allow me to hoist the hem of my pastoral cassock, climb on the casket rim, and squat, knickerless, like Greer over her mirror. Pucker up, youngster. Don’t pout. We intend to give you every benefit of the doubt.

Nourished from infancy on meat and sugar, you brat of an illiterate slag, reared in the roar of televised blood and shit and sperm, numbed to your neurons by the fumes of Ma’s kitchenette meth lab, capable of only a bored child’s-eye video-view of the manifested universe, blood addict, insane with black hate-spleen.

Their pet execs in the recording industry soaked your existence, in-utero onward, with perpetual grunting decibels, drumming monotony, aural steroids. You obediently i-podded it straight into the side of your learningdisabled head while slogging through Fallujah’s scab-clogged gutters.

Just following orders, carrying out YHWH’s immemorial injunction from on high, as we find in today’s reading from the second and third verses of the fifteenth chapter of the First Book of You-Know-Who (with wet thighs I mount the lectern, pry apart the Good Book’s buttocks, and declaim): Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.

Such a useful runt. I brim with affection for you, my boy-toy. We need to breed whole fleets of Bradley Urban Assault Vehicles jam-full of lovely, drooly, bristly, backward-bending hard-ons like you.

TOM BRADLEY

You popped a chubby in the middle of a pep rally back in hi-skool a few months ago, got called a homo by jocks, jeered by cheerleaders. You said to yourself (back when you had tongue and lips that were something more than ash primped with jizz-colored mortuary wax), “Gol-dang, I need some o’ that—what-d’-you-call-it—dissy-plin in m’ life. I better enlist, yupyup-yup.”

That other military empire, Grand Assyria, whose ashes you made mud with your shit and blood, had the right idea. High on the ramparts they impaled any teen Ma, any unpatriotic hussy, who sought to procure miscarriage.

Speaking of writhing on a spike, with my sacerdotal labia majora I now squeeze your jar head. Here’s a trigger for you to pull, kissy-boy. I twist your muscled neck to wring a final requiescat stiffy.

Ten-hut. Support them troops. ~

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~

procedures for an American military wife in Hiroshima during times of increased During afternoon naptime, in the absence of your husband's snores, you will resort to lulling yourself and the babies to sleep electronically. Moving with all available dispatch, you will open up the balcony screens and lasso the radio's aerial wire across two or three laundry lines, in order to pick up, by way of a morale booster, the signal of the American Forces Network.

You will twist the knob and fill the apartment with the sounds of America, chopped into near indecipherability by the Hueys and Cobras and whatnot that hover and strafe in dry maneuvers over the base. Nearly overdosed on Japlish and baby talk, you will find your ears straining in spite of themselves to hear AFN's native speakers of English--such as they are.

They bark about combat-ready pride. America's proud military heritage. Pride as a virtue rather than the cardinal sin under whose influence all others grow heinous. (But that's just the residual Christian talking inside you.)

Army Spec-five Journalist Sergeant Flimbidder Frombisher (or something like that) interrupts the regular programming to announce, in an adenoidal Georgia accent, that the base is on Red Security Condition Alert, which indicates an increased threat of "tarstacktibbletay" in and around the surrounding environs.

game that, in turn, preempts Associated Press coverage of the proud smart-bomb extermination of the civilian population of whatever third-world country we have chosen as the backdrop for our latest "manageable war." Or are we flushing demons from caves this time?

Mom is advising little Buffy not to wear her pink and orange ruffled birthday dress for the family's off-base outing because it's too conspicuous: "Being a proud American military family, Sweetheart, we don't want to attract attention, if you know what I mean."

"Gee, Mom," squeaks little Buffy. "That's a pretty heavy trip you're laying down on my head. So, what else can we do to protect ourselves from the threat of increased terrorist activity in and around our overseas military installation?"

"Well, little Buffy, your father has removed and closeted his uniform for the afternoon.

In addition, he has memorized all the numbers on our important official ID papers and other tempting documents, so he can keep them under wraps at all times. Plus he has requested that we, as a proud American military family, speak as little as possible in public, for English is a sure-fire attention-grabber for potential terrorists."

"Oh boy, that's swell, Mom! " Buffy takes a deep breath and continues. "Now, may we go on our off-base outing and have plenty of fun and relaxation because we've taken all reasonable precautions and will nevertheless continue to remain proud yet alert?"

TOM BRADLEY

~

"ID will be checked at any time and under any circumstances. We repeat--" And he repeats, then bows out in favor of scheduled programming.

"I don't see why not, little Buffy!"

On comes a public service announcement disguised as a little radio drama, a kind of morality play, squeezed between halftime activities during a foot- or base- or whateverball

Before you can follow that dimly foreboding train of thought any further, one of the babies will begin elbowing you, to persuade you to roust yourself from this daddyless Es-

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[ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

stationed terrorist activity kimo nest and switch off the American Forces Network. From the pointiness of the bones, you will reckon, in the curtained darkness, that it's the littler daughter, the freshly baptized one, objecting to what is being broadcast.

So it's time to kill the radio. Go ahead and tempt fate. Open the balcony screens for the second time today, and quickly reel in the aerial wire.

If the odd neighbor happens to be shirking his/her fitting sixteen-hour-per-day contribution to society, and if he/she happens to be self-indulgent enough to allow him/herself a moment to look up from whatever make-work chore is keeping his/her brain and body occupied, and if, by some horrific coincidence, Usama Bin Laden has chosen this moment to come and pitch you and the babies off the balcony--no problem.

Hiroshimites, already self-conscious about the history with which they've been burdened, value the appearance of social order too much to discuss such sights. A patrol car and an ambulance will be summoned to tidy up the parking lot with a mop and a body bag, and that will be the end of it.

TOM BRADLEY

a trio of questionable youngsters 1. FOUL FIEND FLIBBERTIGIBBET ...he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the hare-lip...

—King Lear, III, iv, 17-20 With no true mouth at birth, you early grew used to feeding through a tube, stretched out, allowing sustenance to pour in slow and warm.

The effects of a rift in the center of the face: Unfinished spot engenders a need to merge self with self, to fuck souls. Oral cavity and nostril flange get artificially stitched when they’re supposed to flap in incubator breezes. The sense of humor manifests itself as a bend or rift in the mind’s connective tissue—flash-flood gorges, Wadis Kidron, gutters for ram blood cracked in the salted [ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

~

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desert.

The psyche ends like cities built on tectonic faults, or novels scrawled on selfcannibalizing sheets, impregnated, like someone’s nervous system, with caustic substances, to speed pulping processes.

Outside the chicken-wired nursery window, the mountains’ spring snow is a chipped circle: the sugar-crusted rim of a milk cup—except for a gap, north-bynortheast.

You hadn’t the instinct to suck your fetal thumb. Nothing with which to suck, no place to house the appetency.

Don’t you recall how she mouthed your fingers and bit your nails, so no sutures snagged as you lay, cribbed, undulating your tongue to the breast pump’s click and suck?

2. THE ETERNAL FEMININE DRAWS US ON One gray sunset, Flip had arrived at the algae-contaminated body of water where he made gestures toward bathing himself, and was just popping his cock and balls out from under his belt, when he glanced up and, a couple feet to his left, saw something he hadn’t noticed before.

Something mousy and fuscous, nondescript, possessing nothing but faith, nakedness, and maidenhood, plus an abnormally low, deep-pleated sinciput, underdeveloped button-eyes and-nose, the face’s sole purpose on earth being not to offend. He’d seen pieces of lint drop out of his navel that looked more significant. So he just kept undressing and looking at it awhile, waiting for something to register.

A dusty little fifteen- or sixteen- or seventeen- or eighteen-year-old girl, leaning against a dioxin-belching culvert in the nighttime, displaying her lobster claw.

Flip gave it a good, long, careful look: one lonesome finger- and/or thumbnail peeping out from under a hood of wrinkles, clipped back. Webs of pores in weird configuration with flecks of grit.

And, with that, he made the connection: she was the bus girl at the hash house where he ate his free crackers and ketchup, locally famous for using her lobster claw more or less expertly to pinch up a plate or a corner of a place mat. Older-seeming than the other bus girls, this hired handicap, a tad retarded, perhaps.

After work she liked to lean for hours against the bulletin board at the Zippy Mart on the downhill end of town, displaying her specialty and watching people intensely to see if their eyes blenched away. Most nights someone with singular tastes—not necessarily old or filthy, but definitely suffering self-image problems—came along and gave her a ride and wound up examining her lobster claw very closely. Tonight her

venue was not Zippy Mart, but Flip’s territory, the town’s culinary water supply. She’d dogged him out here.

Nevertheless, Flip and the bus girl did not share a pair-bonding situation that night. Ostensibly it was because he wasn’t sure of her age, and neither was she, and it wouldn’t do to share a pair-bonding situation with someone under-age. Really, though, it was because the more masculine component of this cute-meet did not enjoy the proper level of self-esteem at this point in his career to permit him to share pair-bonding situations very much at all under any circumstances. So, instead, he lay back in the lumpy fluid and described to her all the embarrassing scenes that might take place if they ever attempted to get pair-bonded.

If somebody with infrared binoculars had been observing the sudsing shores of Moroni Reservoir that night, and if pair-bonding had indeed occurred, the observer would’ve been impressed with a revelation, an analogy, a microcosm, or something else sweeping of that nature: something of national or even hemispherical import; something pertaining to the decay of sexuality, no, to the decay of physicality; something adumbrating the extinction, as it might be, the death rattles, of Homo sapiens as a species.

A pale stretch-marked thing, crawling on atrophied, knock-kneed legs out of filthy, oily, post-primordial soup, approaches the randomly chosen mate, gray and stunted, dull, terrified and fully-clothed on the dark orange froth that passes for beach.

His clammy white lump of a vestigial copulatory appendage, his half-dead grub worm, which he vaguely contemns as much as he does her, is presented to her face in the most unsubtle, unritualistic way: chilled, impersonal, dispassionate, by no means bestial, this gesture, for it is lacking in any lustfulness or even persuasiveness—a velleity, amoebic, a reversion to conjugation, to a single-cellular exchange of what diluted genetic material these two individuals of a dissolving species can muster.

She takes the proffered thing in her hand and mouth, with no accompanying grace of spinal undulation, which is vouchsafed even to the cow in the barn at the moment of seduction by the farmer’s forearm. He moves not at all in the next few seconds. She soon turns her face and weakly coughs genetic material into diesel puddle. Genetic material clings to rust-flecked surface of Orange Crush can. Yellow cloud of smoke from nearby open-pit copper mine obscures this strictly imaginary scene.

Prissy Clyster (or whatever her name was) bit her fingernails and the cuticular segment of her pincer by an idiosyncratic single-snap, peel-back method, excruciating to watch. Her normal canines would snap once down into the sweet black restaurant grit at one corner, after which her incisors would shift into position and peel the nail back off the rest of the way, leaving a yellow crescent of quick exposed, throbbing, sometimes bleeding a little. Some of the menisci she’d swallow; some she’d wedge between her

TOM BRADLEY

~

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[ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

well-brushed, but still yellow teeth, presumably for a snack later; others, the biggest ones from her thumb and pincer, she’d hold in a saliva suspension in the palm of her good hand, and she’d ponder them as these two unusual youngsters spent the night together in the back of Flip’s mom’s red Volvo station wagon (which is where he lived, his address: “in the back of Mom’s red vulva”). Her bit fingernails were jaundiced, and scalloped along the concave edges, like the pockmarked new moon floundering in the sulfur over nearby Mount Timpanogos, which was supposed to be shaped like a dead Indian princess or something.

There were neither birds nor bugs in this waste to keep them awake. Gradually, Flip began to be visited by dream rebuses on the theme of his little bus girl: Ewig Weibliche, eye-fig-wipe-leash.

3. HUGH OF PROVO ...O deere child, I halsen thee, in vertu of the hooly Trinitee, Tel me what is thy cause for to synge, Sith that thy throte is kut to my semynge?

—Prioress’ Tale, 645-8

TOM BRADLEY ART: HENRY AVIGNON

A disturbed adolescent, daughter of inbred survivalist neighbors, creepy-crawls our backyard with her cat. She steals our few grape wads and leaves spoor among the unmown pear mush: Marie Osmond-brand perfume atomizers, toy Tampax tubes.

Even allowing for accelerated maturation rates among rural polygamist females, I estimate she’s too old for toys. Every night, all night, her ashen cat copulates with everything furred the neighborhood has to offer, under our bagged air conditioner, though my wife sleeps clear through.

Sometimes these two marauders seep through the drapes in vaporous form and reintegrate on the skin of my chest, where the larger, more anthropomorphic one squats in a vulgar position, something furred, taloned, coiling around her plump limbs.

She hisses in my ear: Medieval times are coming to your neighborhood, Tom. Your Catholic spouse, who accepts spirits and so can dismiss them, will snore through it all. But you, you aging acid head, with your hoed rows of secular humanist psilocybin cubensis, you’re in for it.

Walpurgisnacht will erupt in your darkness, not mushrooms.

We will turn into a sweet-singing boy, and you into a Jew. The fiberglass of your greenhouse will melt down into a cesspool, and we’ll see who seduces whom. ~

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~

*compents* *fendtz* *sturt* *s’end* ANNMARIE ELDON ~

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~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ ANNMARIE ELDON CONTINUES TO PG 33

DONATE TO OMEGA

[

*compents*

]

lepers’ squittle quoins overhung the rain-offspring bought

[

*fendtz*

]

y/our functional run to the lazarhouse

in to crane for crumbs

you/r corralled the leap-needs' fence: I

regular with attendant with protocol

you/r say grace start-

duck under a feign to miss lower

the paparazzi its ringfence its

er’s pistol funnels

myself my prowess one

inmate-keep past them with

newcomers into

abstained

y/our visit-basket: we salve

rice faints a

voice

their drupe-limbs: we halve

few coins

you/r hoist re-

their conspicuous yearn-

saved for generations lost reigns lost-raised

mains chartered

ing with our strickle

a one-hundreth penny worn as a talisman

you/r federalled ghosts

unction a return to

tossed in prayer a burned face a

doubled partner me on a lone

carve a water re-

huddled group of ancients paw

illusion a conquer space drive drug

union for tap

public incantations a common

you/r neoned the pioneer fodder signs their

mouth in

dish of brain the kuru-brave

trek aura trails squamous n

fact

truant slaves spital-queue

hideously mudded baked n

hope: I fly my standard over

in the fray-ward: we

caked up in pretty little

a severance bay, here all

shelter all with

plastics with like

nameless spare-limbs

our abhor our

instruments

gather, there all

charity deeds

...stools

ticket talk gets where-labelled the hurricaned the destitute hovelled soup sippers: I cool their tongues with a ruach babel: I smooth baby blankets to recognizable con-

ANNMARIE ELDON but their

to the mouth: I

family

shout my escape anthem to my parody federary pardners their consociating palms fingerless their thumbprints mute feedvox

tours a dottel-child rabble forms [ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

~

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[

*sturt*

]

after starve their pickings only

I: crawl the corruptible my find

how the world defends against

after the fact obvious

for necessary a possible

the cankering blurts

after an ideal-

screen-pareil: I hoik

the sold-secrets

famine: I

my mudskirt as a

abetted and slotted in a hem that

scatter fools’

use-trade divide

all promises are provisional all

gold upon the eatage

find cockles in

positions quasi

mounds scrounge any

a history

-tenable my

mirage matter to be mustered, a

pocket

petticoats gone rag my

scutch of spurious kweek-mass tender

you/r babycries

marriage sack a plea of

soddened to a class war, faux,

sewn on this windward

haggles the corn besmirched

unnecessary you/r sessy

you/r owned hand offering

by poppies the field-yield spoiled

begone bribe token falls

a plot or a charm or inclusion: I

to a saprogenic roil: I

me to phantomland its

have only chaff tamed

search for a square

cool propaganda a

spurious at best can

meal find only

pool from where

keep fire going at

trade eggs never

we are all

least loofah up

other than denizens or trenches

merely

a thin-black

stains for flowers same same

taken out

ANNMARIE ELDON dust-veil, universal: I

you bargain skeletons in

palm-knot stockings into a

return for a shame

make-shift garner the

amnesty and: I

barter’d a torpid

pull cloak

deem rationality

~

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considered reasons

]

you/r drop in the graw gut: I ambivalate my decide there, deep: I

ART: HENRY AVIGNON

[

*s’end*

my recumbrance rebursed my sweat: I digged and stranded slopt

and could not but read the best always

mire my words to eat

into. You/r fed ego

also its after-stink

you/r keeping it topped

also its pretty-past

you/r pride cache glooping over

its pattern also-derides

its side remark garnering arc

you/r took sark-lace from its ab-

its stow a hived sup, carpéd

stracted pact and survived an’

for the constant nice-acts

coproducted from spat

use of belief to uphold

and this and its garnering

need for lack to

seduct and hope-rape and answering

prove denies

back its justification needs its puts-on-

*not* the time

the

for after effects’

spots bottom line abnegation: I

retch nor place for deprives

solidate y/our like-slut pit

but should’ave been a gluttony

you/r regurgitated

despite or sickeningly beautiful was

so-didactic pitch

slack proventriculus

worse to me

to a malphigian remembrance

seep’d in the trust-loss

for that you/r many manic never

quirk quoted my

ANNMARIE ELDON

partially was literally fetched up after the fact

~

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~

dedication dedication dedication dedication dedication dedication BENJAMIN BALTHASER ~

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~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ BENJAMIN BALTHASER CONTINUES TO PG 37

DONATE TO OMEGA

1 for someone’s memory How can I tell you how it was? The way Khrushchev papers are inseparable from April. A fine mud over shoe leather. That it's the month the tenant's union started in Bridgeport, a month of hope let's say, for new things.

And winter, quiet envelopes of greasy bills to those out of work. The way we sat up at night during the Cuban Crisis, paining over a statement while the world ran past notions of will or idea. November. Blue unwritten page at morning. And you remember, nights making calls and running off leaflets, rank smell of old carpet. The way she held your head between her breasts and you took first her fingers and then her nipple: 10 years' silence worn like gauze. August.

The month of leaving, Jacob with the wrong coat as the office door rattled closed for good you're better off, that coat was ugly, Mary Reznick whose hands touched piano keys in her sleep and who blamed us for spidery arthritis, days at the mimeograph machine, Mamie who called to say goodbye and you didn't ask where she was going, Al Shumaker, remember for instance, how you carried Al home when his wife left him, the air gone out of his body, just weight, just the clumsy weight of a body. He turns in the sunlight without nodding.

How did the incidental become the story?

As if rain could blacken a city for good. As if the smoke-dampened sky of late summer had stayed. As a boy you imagined Dimitroff, who worked for the Bulgarian finance minister in the day, and ran off leaflets at night, when spreading the word was something physical, a fire touching fire. For forty years, you set type, the black weight of the machine that shook the roofbeams, the word made with the mass of that grease and metal. Not even Marx would have seen the slender boy, black chinbeard and beret behind the computer, the impossible lightness of the machine they dismantled the press carefully, dressing each part in crenolin. This is December.

BENJAMIN BALTHASER

Your own dismemberment comes in private, your body now in parts: ribcage, knee-joint, isolate muscle of the heart. You joke: the only thing current in the Daily Worker is the obituaries. Black unwelcome crows in the cypress. Birds unravel in air, not in unison, but the way an anchor drags the heavy rope body of a net to finally open. At the end of the century, at the end of the millennium, no net can gather the storm. Black highway, grimace of dust.

Sometimes in your mind, you still set type, the letters so hot their shapes nearly burn into your fingers. Sometimes you can even read what the letters say. You want to say they spell CISPES, ANSWER, Hands Off El Salvador, guest lectures in history courses on communism. They spell the names of the living, the ones who still matter, the ones you would do anything for. ~

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~

for moe stein: brooklyn bridge, august 2006

:

There is the noise of the city to be discovered.

There is your absence, the universe of it, for which there will be no recording.

We meet at the Paul Robeson Foundation Office.

We meet on the street in front of Actors’ Equity.

You give me a ride to Brooklyn, across the bridge.

The light gleams on the cables. A whole city intact and shimmering. Washington Roebling wrote “the bridge is equilibrium….the catenary curve.... ....harmony of compression and tension...."

You want to know if I have questions.

You want to know what I want from you.

If you talk, you talk, if you don’t, the hiss and pop of simple wordlessness will be worked in, I will have to make use.

Beyond, the Hudson, the color of machine grease.

Ocean faded in haze. Beside us, a woman, shirt open, driving to the city. The outward slope of her breasts.

You give me stories in newsclippings. The American Student Union. The rallies for Spain.

The scale in the Student Union Building, weighted with coins for the Republic. Lem Bates, ball player for City, Jim Crowed from southern colleges, sex education on the Commons, and then the Scare, ~

36

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strike in Gloversville, the AFL red baiting you and the other leaders, your play for the labor theater, Zero Mostel yelling “fuck you” on Lennox Ave., laughing. Henry James saw a monster in the bridge, a ravenous spider devouring an older, simpler way of life.

The cables gleam with light. And still, what you won’t talk about: the Rapp-Coudert Committee the school in Brooklyn you drive past, shuttered in the heat, the basketball court still as a gallows and you tell me the man who showed at your hearing, the family friend, turned you in, testified against you “Look, we never felt like failures, we did so much.”

Curtains sucked inward in the breeze of a dark, hot afternoon.

Fired in ’47 as a public school teacher, you were saved the fate of most by a well connected family, by a city that forgives all crimes but one: exhaustion. And even at ninety, your car seat stained with piss, you field calls and call the half the city council your personal friends.

“Look, I love this bridge,” you tell me, the simplicity

BENJAMIN BALTHASER

of the parts working together, the beauty of function.

People survive. Roebling was crippled for life, Caisson’s Disease, and watched the bridge from his balcony with a telescope. And I believe you would tell me that too

is the beauty of function. We stop on a street in Bed-Stuy.

It’s summer, heat textured as smoke, a weight on bodies as they move from the shade of porches to the shade of liquor stores and butcher’s shops.

“That was the school I taught at all those years.”

A circle of kids lace sneakers and snap a cracked ball against the chain link fence. And next is the joke about the Ukrainian farmer. “And that was Paul Robeson’s house, before he had to leave the country.” In the town your parents are from.

A story about a happy farmer, the happiest man alive in 1916. The boys shuffle to the hole broken into chain link, half hidden by the shade of a popular tree. After the war, the family moved to the border -- the farmer’s fields were on the German side. A woman with a stack of papers walks into a dark classroom.

Her keys stick in the lock, and the papers waver.

The future is what cannot be recovered.

The kids break into teams. And this is how the joke goes: his farm is on the German side.

The trees break into light and dark. Her papers fall like leaves, beautiful, catching the sun, they fall from her arms, catching the light like the wings of birds. Get it, you say, he lived on the German side, the German side where everyone in Russia knows it is warm.

campaign They were called 'colonizers.'

For some, it was the first time they worked with their hands.

Their fingers bled

hustle and jerk, why the lines in a man's face deepen rather than, like a falling wall, grow longer: nothing changes, only more so.

And some of them were sent out into the darkness

on the bandsaw, blades looping loose as they fed sheetmetal too fast.

They pulled their backs lifting boxes. Forklifts stalled and fat packages of pus swelled under press burns. They reddened when dressed down by the foreman, fists shrinking up their shirt-sleeves and some of them walked off, back to Princeton or Brown, back to music and houseguests back to a boxcar or pallet in an alleyway. Some kept working.

By the second crew they knew the speedup, the bevel angle on a lathe, the right mix of salt, nitric and hydrochloric acid to polish brass, how to

of Ohio, Tennessee, landscapes filling with shadow, where they vanished into a motel sign, a parking lot, plastic in a canyon of sand, trailers parked around road bends, in which sleep is less rest and more like an engine ticking until it finally goes silent, and some died there.

And they talked. Sold copies of the Daily Worker.

Held meetings. Led strikes, if there were strikes, formed unions, if there were unions to form.

Or wandered, isolate amongst a people

with whom they could never communicate, whose silence is a language they couldn't learn.

Or maybe they spoke, explained how a pair of gloves could keep fingernails from peeling off in the brass polish, how Jenkins, cut Adam's apple to testicles, saved the company 3 dollars for a railguard on the walk how the mangle of scar tissue on hands fattens hands invisible as the ancient pharaohs.

Or simply, said what could be done about it.

And some wondered how a kid who knew work secondhand, like something borrowed, a spare coat could explain the meaning of work

BENJAMIN BALTHASER

a man who knew nothing of their lives or value could make them believe in their own life and its value lives change partner, the world changes we make it change.

~

37

~

objective m a n JANE CROWN ~

38

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ JANE CROWN CONTINUES TO PG 41

DONATE TO OMEGA

He's bashing his head for an unforgivable clarity

never finding synapse or movement

for a trombone's sound and spirit fires remiss of heat

he'll pine to you about yesteryear

to know without touching, yet sticking his dirty

and 5 cent bread, easy dreams and energy aplenty

gin soaked fingers in, pulling tumblers

orbing nonsense moments into ecstatic pleasures

sousing bullets alive

what does he want from this kicking thing?

divining his mortality with skins upon

To find a happy rage of his own

his wall, exotic exclamations and kittens coy

to point and shudder his thoughts into

making sure that his heaping music eeks his calamity into reason

charms only he can swagger into, his solitude is

characterizing flesh as truth

not to be trusted; his Cartesian ways insipid

he sharpens his canines with skyscrapers and rotten greed

he is the third eye blinded to the world

feigning happiness from agony

as he himself is near to niggling his way eventually out of it

he has this unabashed need to call

give him thorns and thistles to comb his dangerous head

his hearth reason; this ephemera

soap the windows of your love for him

groping and ripping until

don't look out for his good deeds

the rust of pantomime feeding lay flat in his caving stomach

he does not posses anything any other animal

he fills sockets of darkness

does not, he will never be free.

JANE CROWN ~

39

~

work

tar

His torso a bruised truck barreling nowhere arms batons for defence of ragged love eyes finding danger where dubious men fight barelegged he simpers on

Forgive the ape in him. remember trees are his fraternity. your womb seems dank and plain, and without him,

fingers on cotton degrade him to working classes his sacred valve his tonnage of plural hurt used for obtaining a manacle of money

for a man works as a tool splays open the earth or a man dies unburied in a culture of cheap pine boxes.

~

40

~

he knows it is just his opposable thumb

za n

that wrecks it for both of us.

JANE CROWN

∆ k i

He is a hiss of gin a rowdy, balding thing

p a w i n g

he gropes that breath of death on you

mug

the thing under the back yard swimming pool,

he scratches himself rotten and wonders why sex is not absolutely everything to the dead.

corpse

at the gate near the kid's trampoline endless places he hides them.

A

N

E

e serial

he told them to die,yet they thumped and sprang like a memory machine in his head. he recalled how he held flesh so loosely

like a toy; not a woman's face,not a hand or heart something like an apple; again,again,again

J

L L

a corset could have been his twin.

{

you toss your drink square in his

he lay in bed stiffened by his fantasies

C

R

O

W

N

§

§

the

ART: HENRY AVIGNON

~

41

~

argosies of hair, adagios of stone KENNETH ROSEN ~

42

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ KENNETH ROSEN CONTINUES TO PG 46

DONATE TO OMEGA

Ian MacMillan (1941-2008) 1.

That ruined nobleman, relic Of stagnant Spanish Catholicism, Don Quixote, Assaulted an emblem of the ruthless, Protestant, And imperial Dutch middle-class, an upright Windmill, with his willow of a lance, His knock-kneed steed, and Claude Simon, That accidental cavalier and ironical Communist, Born on stolen colonial land, a farm On an island off Madagascar, got sent to defend The Maginot Line against the Wehrmacht Tank invasion, each with a pterodactyl's Iron bill, fire breathing and flinging The word unintelligible, death. All land Is stolen. Thanks to my loathing a pair Of bio-flicks, Capote and I'm Not There, Which inexorably explored the underlying Dynamics of a crowd of well-adjusted, Well-heeled consumers, gathered beneath A window ledge and urging an eloquent But deranged freak to leap and reward them With significance of witness, with emotion, And enrich this spectacle of misery and confusion With death, there appeared abruptly Among my internet rental options, TORTURED GENIUS—the poet, writer, Individual maker, jeered from the perspective Of the collective, the Warner brothers' Paramount, the Weinsteins' Miramax, Goldwyn and Mayer's roaring lion, toothless We're told, and Twentieth Century Fox,

Columbia's Miss Liberty carrying the torch For everybody in her opaque white nightie, An ideal mannequin with an impervious box.

The first to fall was Torino, attempting To rescue a friend. Above the silence A deep voice addressed us all, a speaker With the head of a pro-consul, Proposing by law the way for writers To prove they were politically okay: Become consumed, physically And spiritually, by the revolution, As defined by the pro-consul. Or when Dead as Torino, thought Claude Simon, As the words flew overhead like pebbles, Bullets of reality, with death's irrelevant Finality. The king's soldiers hung the boy Absalom, disobedient young revolutionary, In a tree. The men blamed the vanity Of the lad's extravagant hair, but David wept, For Absalom his son, for all that his life Had ruined, and wished it were him, Dead. Sometimes he danced, his life so evil, Glorious, dangerous and sad, All the way to incapable and cold old age, When he tried to revive himself by defiling Abishag, a doe-eyed Jewish virgin, and failed.

2.

KENNETH ROSEN

The old Jews knew that Saul was not Such an evil bastard, forbearing to kill The Amalekite utterly, or slaughter them Even unto their last fatling, as the rabbis And rabid land-grabbers had required. Many Empathized with his entering the tent Of a Witch of Endor to savor her heathen

Human stew, getting so boiled and bent He saw emerge from the vapors of her furred Caldron, the face of the prophet Samuel, Who chastised him for playing so languidly And loose with her poisonous truth, for trifling With her truffle. The folk who demanded A soldier-hero for a king, kept naming The most solid of their children Saul Long after his suicide by sword in battle, Disgrace and replacement by David ben Jesse, The rabbis' protégé. Angry Jewish girls To this day discover themselves called Michal After Saul's daughter, briefly betrothed To that handsome, turncoat, mercenary captain, Who for long-term use preferred that shameless Scythian bareback rider, Bathsheba, Married to Uriah the Hittite—which meant Urban Scythian—they named Ankara, First city in the world, after his wife's Angora—check it out—everyone else did, Finally David, who finally got rid of Uriah.

3.

A pterodactyl was a quadruped. It knuckled Forward on all fours in bed or arose Wearing its wings as a rapist's cape, a pinhead With a colossal bill who'd demolish anything Innocent and tender. Then it fled, or flew Guiding the membrane and bones of its wings With the fingers at each end of its forelegs, Croaking and grinding the teeth of its beak Like a pelican. Then a Neanderthal Lay with a Cro-Magnum, and the fruit Of their union were a Homo sapien,

[ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

~

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Who slew the earth's Goliaths with words, Queer noises painful and opaque as pebbles To all giants and animals, making space For the pygmies of nervously frenzied Incest and interbreeding. Among us a stripling With a slingshot, a poet of prayers, challenged The sky with his name, one of those dwarfs Of our vocabulary, seeking to cleave The forehead of reality and vindicate Human insufficiency. It hit the spot, But from this hole in the facts of life Sprung Love, the goddess Aphrodite, meaning Beautiful behind, or aft, the hind that hides The oracle's apocalypse, site of the truth That surpasses the rocks in your head And the moss of your so-called understanding: Love promised thus to be, not just make babies.

4.

Jews feel around in the unmowed grass Or load their pockets in advance For a memorial pebble to set On a gravestone and show loyalty To the dead—See, somebody came— And thus proclaim, each time we succumb To the cemetery's magnetism, incomprehension, Humility and shame. My friend, Ian MacMillan, Was a rock, I hardly knew him, and he won't Come again. So sit still, little pebble, In wind and rain, for one who died mostly Uncomplaining, though in terrible pain.

Our every word and thought is an honest lie, An alibi for being. Nobody comes again.

~

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~

the prisoner addresses the tribunal 1.

I leave in your hands the camel And its load for you To do whatever you wish Your trials are a sham And as slow as a turtle After the collapse of the towers After the collapse of the Pentagon All these false masks fell away And your wrongs were exposed The whole world Has a headache 2.

From your hypocrisy I repeat for the thousandth time I don't want an attorney To represent me Not a military one Not a civilian volunteer Not one I could hire British detainees Once segregated here In the same pre-trial Prison camp

KENNETH ROSEN

3.

Have long ago Gone home Never triedAt the insistence Of their government The only war crime That I committed For which I am being tried today, And to which I confess Is my nationality I am a citizen 4.

Of one of the Third World Countries As you classify it My crime is that I Am a Sudanese citizen One day we will all stand together In front of the divine court Where Allah will judge The only just one I will boycott The procedures of this court I will leave the field to you 5.

IBRAHIM AHMED MAHMOUD AL QOSI GUANTANAMO (By April 2008 His beard had gone white.

In 2004, he was accused Of being al Qaeda'a Accountant and managing The organization payroll.

In 2008, he was accused Of being Osama bin Laden's Bodyguard and driver.)

crossing into lefkosha The Ledra Palace checkpoint is available to authorized government vehicles and pedestrians. ~ Rough Guide, Cyprus (2005)

1.

I watched four Russian whores pedestrian themselves Into the North, or Lefkosha, near Ledra Palace: Ivanko knew where to find clients With penises able to triumph their principals’ penury With adequate cash somewhere, A mile or so past that ruin-strewn, turd and weed Furred remnant of the old Cypriot capital– The Buffer Zone, cordon insanitaire–now Quarantined by legal nuisance, Hellenic ferocity, And pious hysterical history. Or real-politik In life’s rough tussle for blood of the other, And treasure, wherein oneself Was a mere naive, chameleon American, blushing, And half in love with everything.

In Lefkosha, the Turkish half, Anatolians stared from shops barren of goods And customers like wolves or hawks baffled By history’s implacable leg-hold, the trap Of industrial destiny. These Russian girlies Were naturally artificial blondes, Pale and sickly as old eggs soft-boiled Or sunny-side up, or lemons, with their lifeless Cotton-candy hair: white moss.

They stumbled forward thrilled with fear In crummy princess dresses, 2.

Raspberry, ivory, lavender, and lime medicinal Gauzes, these and their underwear From flea market stalls on the Greek, legitimate side, Or over there, in breakaway T.R.O.N.K.,

Toward which they now tottered on those sexually Famous, backless high heels. A pimpled Fish-belly face is a dubious oxymoron, but what Can you do, hygiene abandoned with girlhood And dreams, eyes gas-blue from drink Or drugs, powdered white and rouged but ugly.

This island, Cyprus, this fishbone Stuck in the gullet of the Mediterranean’s Middle East, Was once Aphrodite country, And poets insist that Eros adores the borders Between timorousness (fear) and temerity (boldness) To be blurred as rainbows. The girls Were nervous, preceded by a swarthy bruiser Swaggering solo, pretending He didn’t know them, who followed him enfilade, Yellow ducks with identical goofy grins for bills, Apprentice anthropologists, trailed Or shepherded by another brute who came Holding hands with a sauntering, Businesslike blonde, an elderly Oddity, the madam or somebody’s 3.

Mother: “Ah, my dears, we were born to leak water From a shaven sieve, and fuck for love and money!

So let’s play Jack and Jill stumble all over the hill Altogether!” The hill was a flat-land, And end of the line for the bottom of the barrel.

T.R.O.N.K., sanction-strangled, (Lefkosha a Turkish version of the Roman name For the island’s inland capital, Nicosia) Could not afford much of a vice-squad either, so maybe The girls had a brief, transient future here as default butt Of primal need’s self-hatred, The male army that grieves and aches

KENNETH ROSEN

To make personal impression by the invention Of sadistic whim a girl must seek to gratify and swim Or survive. Before this school of fish Swish past the Greek Cypriot passport police, they ran A semiotic gauntlet, young self-martyred patriots, Woman-and-child atrocity billboards, Kyrenia absurd City Hall in exile, Coastal jewel-box of a home torn from the hearts Of many of Nicosia’s displaced refugees, But over the mountains, beside the sea, And firmly in the Turkish Republic of North Kibris, T.R.O.N.K, and poster home the girls Must waltz before, valentines to Turkish Asians 4.

Advertising Hellenic mastery of European culture And love of domesticity’s peace, well-polished brass Name and address plates, doorbells and knockers Each with traces of green polishing grease, Potted crimson geraniums, whose crushed leaves Smell like cat piss, yet get confused with that pagan Slavic guarantor of health, zdravets, source Of the eponymous Zdravey!, “Good boisterousness!”

The Goethe Institute is here, and an Auxiliary Fulbright Center. Huge coils of razor surmount The former five star Ledra, Now a blue-helmet barracks, sprinkled among all this, Bullet-pocked shells of houses, And then the visa police, and then the fifty meter Or yards of Buffer Zone, a litter-box Of EOKA, Enosis, the Cyprus war, George Grivas-Digenis and Archbishop Makarios, Plastic bags, empty bottles from soda and water all In pastels as pale as the girls’ Clownish gowns, and hiding, here and there, ersatz Homes of the refugees who never went anywhere, Stragglers caught between Greek [ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

~

45

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And Turkish lines, squatters from anywhere, holdouts, Political indignation’s non-statistics.

Fifty yards of dirt, the girls’ gauze Getting dusty, the heat assuredly making them sweaty, And then T.R.ON.K itself, 5.

The other side, a red flag of Mother Turkey, The white one of T.R.O.N.K pride, Ottoman Crescent and star on both, and more passport cops, Their orders straight from Ankara, dead taxis, and the girls, The four whores of the apocalypse.

In a day they will service a hundred circumcised, rancid Erections, eagerly dumb mushroom cocks Craving the psyche’s detested relief, the spirit’s bliss Of privilege, to sink and faintly Perish in the bleak sea of feminine sweetness, to each Away from rage, pain, hope, poverty and despair, Into what each of the girl’s possesses, a poppy’s Pair of stems, each pod slit open to lick, finger Or fornicate like dog and feel luck’s opium And God harvested here despite The pus, the rash, their shaved or hairy, Marinated sacs of death-in-life, And life-in-death: O lady, I love you! I hate you! I love you!

Semantics lie. There is only sex, And the rush of being that insists reality is trash.

To each his own enosis, or border zone of dirt, The trail blazed in a delicious Forest by God’s axe, so unreal A peace, so briefly familiar the task and tax.

KENNETH ROSEN

ART: HENRY AVIGNON

with pliĂŠ, ...

with pliĂŠ, ...

manubrium

distancing the down angulation spiral advantage taken from a deepening marrow in flight coiling weeping lineage

V I C T O R I A

G A N I M

~

47

~

[the airplane’s going down] RENEE DWYER ~

48

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ RENEE DWYER CONTINUES TO PG 51

DONATE TO OMEGA

[crisscrossing scars ...]

the airplane’s going down and we’re breathing into each other’s mouths, trace amounts of oxygen in exhalations. i want to reach down your throat, punch through to your heart, inject it to keep it pumping, love like an epinephrine. you don’t like needles so i keep mine hidden under my tongue. save the moment for something worth saving, and this is, i whisper to him as the hydraulics fail. your mind is a black box, indestructible, holding secrets that they’ll only find after we die. we are flightless kiwis who dream of the sky. cloud cover can try to hide desire, but this free-fall will last forever and we’re bound to be revealed eventually. kiss me again, i am dizzy with dropping pressure and if this goes on long enough, we’ll be swimming through the air inside the cabin, astronaut imitations, where we can’t tell which is spinning, the world or us.

crisscrossing scars like fleshy hatch marks line her skin in a tic-tac-toe of who will bleed most, whose razor is sharper, rustier, who can get closer to feeling alive when everything filters through a numb hazy film. she just wants the attention, they say, and she steps back and flinches, dropping metal. that hurts more than what i’m doing to myself, she says silently, waving her stump of a tongue in an indifferent mouth. flickering hands are so sure when they need to be. bitten by steel, she carves out a message and and twists her arm to and fro in the light, hoping someone will see her signal.

R ENEE DWYER ~

49

~

[the reductionist v i e w of love]

the reductionist view of love says that if you have a heart in your hands you should eat it. he followed directions and ate it raw, and i had a strange warm sensation in my chest as i watched him swallow, a consumption that felt oddly familiar, as if i’d been through this before, as if my chest were a tree that kept dropping off hearts to be eaten in a leisurely manner. we remember ourselves through stories of desire bitten and lost. i strike a match to burn the orchard. you mix the ash with tears to make fertilizer, he says. he shows me how to do it gently, as soft as love-making on cushioned boughs. but even that will be forgotten. now i plant saplings in the empty space in the cavity, pray for a good rain.

[drowning was

s o m e -thing we could own] drowning was something we could own as children staring through the grates from the top of the light house, reaching out to touch a horizon so flat we could draw a line against it but our pencils would never reach far enough. we breathed in the tang of ocean air but wanted salt in our lungs instead, for our boots to become so water-logged that they would just slip off our feet and we could kick away into safety. as we grew older we realized just how hard it was to hold our heads under the water long enough. how bodies betray. how we were left with nothing but sand in our mouths.

R ENEE DWYER ~

50

~

[sometimes they steal [sometimes they steal pieces of your skin afterwards, make bookmarks out of you, stretch you into lamp shades. some of them don’t even realize what they’re doing, wake up one morning to admire the wallpaper they didn’t know they had. there is a piece of you in every bedroom in every apartment, turned anonymous and functional. they turn your tattoos into decorative doillies, your back (once caressed in the half-light) into a placemat where they eat at a table that used to be set for two. you wake up one morning missing a few inches of calf and know they’re just patching up a pair of pants, smoothing out the old fingerprints, snipping with care they never showed you in the first place. soon you will be nothing but exposed muscle, a switchboard of breathing raw nerves. press here and you will raise your empty hands, press here and your heart will explode over and over again.

pieces ...]

R ENEE DWYER

[untitled] i. open up like a moon-blooming flower crossing statelines at midnight, i picked up a guy who told me that if you eat enough marigolds, you turn into the sun, hovering above an ocean that gleams like the sweat-soaked small of a back, where we could hear an eternal chanting ofom with everything in a freeze-framed mushroom cloud of histrionic bliss. ii. fuck like phospherescence it’s okay, you can hurt me, i want to tell him. he cups my chin in his hands like an egg in a spoon. he kisses me and his eyes are the color of lit televisions. he would never hurt me. i graffiti myself on the bedroom ceiling afterwards, a glow-inthe-dark picture of necessary narcissism. iii. close the world like a light i will fold my hands like origami and create an eclipse that will shadow your heart, and feed you marigolds that will still shine in the darkness. we will craft our own hallucinations out of glowing filaments of loneliness and find each other there at the edge of the world, keeping our eyes open as we fall into the universe.

~

51

~

of biblical proportions & possibility

DAVID RAY ~

52

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ DAVID RAY CONTINUES TO PG 57

DONATE TO OMEGA

I look for anti-war poems in the magazines and find not one.

I see Congressmen on television, including those we elected to promptly stop the war, and see not one who tries to honor the promise, and as we move from jungle to desert, desert to craggy mountains, this village to that, and from these faces and bodies

the war I am ashamed of watching it, for I too could get the fever.

amidst rubble and ash to others I ponder the mystery of how again

gazing right through the invisible elephants, mourning nothing but their own poverty.

Research on bee navigation turns out to be most helpful in the designing of drones that bomb villages in Afghanistan although they are manned from the safe distance of the U.S.A. with no danger

and again the grand illusion of victory -whatever that is -- seduces another leader and millions who are willing yet again to share the illusion, the delusion,

the wonders of science

at all to the pilot who grew up playing video games,

DAVID RAY

but none of the research seems to diminish the admiration humanity has for inhumanity.

~

53

~

status quo 2009

Bush is back on his ranch in Texas, Rumsfeld to his in New Mexico, and Cheney is yakking as if he’s running again, this time for the presidency in name as well as robotic reality.

The war we voted to end has only moved over, stinks more like Vietnam every day, dead children speechless.

thumbs lost to dynamite, cigarette breaks even down there, far deeper underground than graves of their grandfathers.

War’s the way out, as it was for my uncles -Mac, Orville, and Norman -not to mention my dad, Dowell Adolphus.

although they sent him home to be a normal man.

They had statistics, knew the odds predicting that thousands like him

No war crimes indictments in sight, urban blight ubiquitous, Appalachian poverty worse than when it was front page news more than half a century ago -dust of snow by Christmas though.

Mountain Dew still rots kids’ teeth, throw the cans anywhere, and according to litter in schoolyards Marlboro’s still the most popular smoke, mountains all around leveled, mother earth with mastectomies, runoff too bloody toxic to measure.

Teenage fathers on their way to black lung underground, heaving the pickaxe, breathing the fumes,

~

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~

He came home with his mind in ruins, the doctors said,

ptsd

would sooner or later put bullets through their heads. These troops might as well have been killed on a battlefield, though even a belated demise serves the nation that sent them to war, for suicides can never collect

DAVID RAY

on entitlements and thus the State saves at a remarkable rate.

an invisible eleph o a t n h t e r I’m glad we’ve got a clean war now, one that nobody notices

except mothers who excessively weep because they do not comprehend

the priorities. They, sadly, are much like those who refused to take comfort

when General Schwarzkopf commented nearly twenty years ago that our losses

in Father Bush’s war had been insignificant.

Then too, some of us who did not understand

the war, not just move it over a bit and add sufficient spicing with doublethink bullshit.

The spy is considered a hero by both sides who fought a swift and historic war, rearranging borders, leaving behind wounds that will bleed for centuries.

Both winner and loser nations exalt him, do their best to refute their enemy’s claim that he was their savior, having only betrayed his homeland, not their foes whose leaders declare that he was worth every penny.

And can we who learn of this situation not help but be envious, for this spy is assured double credit forever as his legacy

the appeal of war in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and all those others hot spots in need of our good deeds are still alive and foolish enough to have voted to end

eyeless in gaza

while we ourselves have all too often been caught in the crossfire, blamed

DAVID RAY

by both sides and by even ourselves, as if it is we and not they who beguile and betray, and yet we do no more than send along bombs with the best will in the world, wishing both sides well -- any side at all, whatever it takes. ~

55

~

“Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”

—Thomas Merton "Chant to Be Used in Processions Around a Site with Furnaces"

How they must envy me, for I live not in Baghdad or anywhere else called one of earth’s hot spots I need carry no weapon.

My meals are quite regular and the plumbing works well.

The furnace in winter doth warm me, and in summer it doth cool, though outside the air is as hot as it is in Iraq, but the bombs and copters, the rubble and body parts, are missing, for we do not live in the ancient cradle of civilization. Our doors are not kicked in except by an occasional burglar.

~

56

~

Our carpets are not trampled and muddied by unwelcome boots. We sleep with only demons in dreams to be feared.

We have not seen a gun in years except on television and in movies.

No wonder our leaders say we are blessed, God’s chosen!

But have others not heard such reassurance before their own cities and children caught fire?

my good fortune

And strangely laudatory it is as the film shows how pilots, a term that is appropriate (since these are the men and women who control the drone planes that bomb on the other side of the world) sit in perfectly safe shacks

another documentary

in the Southwestern United States of America. The bombs are dropped on villages or remote houses where alleged terrorists may be lurking along with those to be collaterally damaged. How odd is my logic, for I might not be quite so enraged if the pilots at least assumed a smidgeon of risk so that now

DAVID RAY

and then a drone would be brought down, as if this war were not just a video game in which those disappeared — including the collateral children — were digital.

irony like a little girl chased by napalm comes unsought —For Miles Santetos, after watching the movie Frost/Nixon

Nixon is wily, evasive, a formidable opponent, expert at blaming others for everything, but in the last of the interviews, conducted in San Clemente, David Frost, like a prosecutor, confronts the former president not only with a list of his high crimes and misdemeanors but with horrible and familiar film footage of the Vietnam war as it was shown to us night after night, year after year in our homes – the napalming of villages, corpses everywhere though we could not smell them so far away.

And I recall the naked little girl screaming as she ran toward the camera, chased by roiling fire yellow as McDonald arches, wailing and screaming out for rescue.

Appealing to us, whose arms were too short to clasp her in our arms and offer a home.

And with these images barely glanced at, Richard Milhous Nixon makes the remark that he himself was the last casualty of that war, and it is clear that he regarded himself as the only victim. But just then as if to refute such a gargantuan lie our phone rings and it is the wife of our friend Miles, our former Tai Chi instructor, who came back from Vietnam with PTSD and fought what he called evil angels for decades until at last he has given up, face down in his own swimming pool.

And sadly, regrettably, our friend Miles – no more than Richard Milhous Nixon – is not the last casualty, no matter how tired of counting, naming, grieving we may be.

We’ll take up Tai Chi again to honor him.

why I don’t miss george w. bush “It’s impossible to get everything perfect in war, so it’s important to get everything as near perfect as possible.”

— George W. Bush

I think it’s safe to say, Mr. Bush, that your war was as perfect as possible -- so nearly perfect that Satan himself would have been pleased.

You didn’t leave much out, came just short of what nuclear bombs would have done, and no doubt you’d have ordered those too

DAVID RAY

had your advisers recommended that strategy.

But then you’d not have been the great decider or qualified for a prime spot in history, prime as Satan was prime in Paradise Lost.

~

57

~

the boy in the snow LAURA OREM ~

58

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ LAURA OREM CONTINUES TO PG 60

DONATE TO OMEGA

All night you lay there bleeding until an early morning commuter spied you and called the cops. You were still

You were fourteen. You sprawled black against white turning pink, turning red, a knit cap askew on your head, baggy jeans twisted around your hips, diffused by their silent, interior elegy that a boy like you, alone at night, with no one to miss you, got what he deserved.

alive when they got there, despite two stab wounds to the chest, despite the chill of the snowbank you wrapped

Through a gate of trees beyond your body, the cops could see the lights of houses so close they might have heard you

yourself around for hours.

They had no idea who you were, no one had reported you missing or truant or run away.

shout, if you had time to shout.

LAURA OREM ~

59

~

LAURA OREM

notes to the mother of James Henry Stuart, Turner, OR; PFC, USMC born June 24, 1947, killed in action September 7, 1967 Today I have brought my sons here to learn a little history. It’s going to rain, a spring thunderstorm threatening

in the east, so we hurry down the angled walk. I show them the fat black book, how to look up a loved one in the directory of the dead.

At random, we choose a name – your son’s name – and read the simple details of who he was:

rank, service, dates of birth and death, hometown and where we may find him: panel 26E, line 31.

~

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~

We count the panels, then the rows, then the names, until, shoulder-high, there he is.

If we knew each other, you and I, we would talk of our children. I would ask your advice on raising boys, how do you cope with a teenager,

all temperament & appetite, how do you protect them from the dangerous world? We both know this language.

But I can’t save my sons from the world any more than you could save yours.

I’ve forgotten to bring a pencil, so we scratch a rubbing of his name with a fingernail, the impression clearer than we expect.

You inhabit a country I’m glad I can’t enter, but I put the paper in my pocket as if he were mine to take home.

ART PGS 60-61: HENRY AVIGNON

~

61 ~

WAR as TV star

JARED DEMICK ~

62

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ JARED DEMICK CONTINUES TO PG 64

DONATE TO OMEGA

"The corpse is the new personality"

- Gang of Four, "5:45"

snow

“isn’t their food just delicious?”

static

cathode catharsis (or plasma screens more vivid than our blood) "Glad it's not me!" corpses in a line-- "Hey! No cutsies!"

“Club Med: a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.”

In this “brutalidade jardim” where beaches shine with bare breasts and dictators have fizzled with sangue de Coca-Cola,

What am I doing here in this endless winter?

But stasis never crystallizes at 35 frames per second it's eye-peristalsis, gluttonous visuals,

samba sex is conveniently packaged: NOW INCLUDING CONDOMS! I sail through Rio de Janiero, girls’ faces slashed by neonlights, while suited men declare “The only underdevelopment here is glandular!”

every image erased by the next corpses making such orderly rows "They're always so quiet too. The perfect neighbors really."

Our deaths tried to reach you, but you didn't answer.

JARED DEMICK

"Hon! Don't answer it, it's just another one of those telemarketers."

"The show's back on! Can you get me another beer?"

~

63

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e m p t y

~

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EMPTY EMPTY BLOOD SAND SUN BLOOD EMPTY SAND BLOODSUN SOAKS SAND SUNHOLES EMPTY BLOOD ONTO HELMETS SHARDS TEARS SUNSHARDS BLOOD TEARS SOAK BLOODSANDS EMPTY HOLES DRINKS TEARS IN SUNNIGHT NIGHTMARES DRINK SAND EMPTY BLACKMARES NIGHTSAND HELMETS TEARS FROM SUN SUN'S MOUTH BLOODTEAR STAINED EVERLASTING STAIN SAND CAN'T EMPTY SHARDHOLES BANDAGED IN TEARS LIMBS DANCE IN SUNNIGHT EARSIGHT EARSIGHT SHARDS BULLETS BIRTH SHARDS BULLETDOLLARS BLOODFLAGS BIRTH SHARDS TEARSHARDS FROM MOTHERS EVERLASTING BLOODTEARS EVERLASTING SANDMINDS EVERLASTING BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK

“and what do you want I don't want to be a great man.

I don't want to be inscribed in your history.

to be when you grow up?”

JARED DEMICK

Her black eyes stare into the darkness; her pupils piercing through the darkness by the reflection of the dull fluorescent lights shining through the thin rectangle panes of the cell door windows.

Her hip bones peek out from the waist of her pants. Her legs have lost some of their muscle tone. She eats; the portions of her tray are small, but she never feels hungry anymore. She closes her eyes, but she is not sleeping. Why does she feel so lonely at night? She does not spend her time with the women of the module during the day. She leaves her cell only occasionally. As darkness falls, her sadness falls. She is slipping into depression. She scrambles and reaches to stop herself, but she is at bay. Is it about learning how to avoid depression, or is it about learning how to survive the emotional torture during depression? At night she cannot keep her mind from racing. She stares out her tiny window. City lights twinkle in the dark. There are no stars, no mountains.

She steps in line with the other women to go outside to the yard.

She bends down to roll her pantlegs; she is so accustomed to their voices her mind does not even attempt to decipher the monotone buzzing that fills the air around her, wishing only to block it out. She looks up, glances into the large, square window that allows one to see into the Special Management and Disciplinary Unit for Men—men’s headcases and mentally ill, housed with the jail’s administrative segregations — the hole, 23-hour lockdown. Strange that the two are housed together.

The doped-up, sad faces look to her, to any woman, with watery bloodshot eyes for just one smile; some recognition, some acknowledgement that they are still men despite their current state of being. Their eyes beg — look beyond the madness of my hair, my unshaven face, my soiled clothes, and maybe, just maybe ...

shrivel portfolio

SUN YUNG LEE

i, walking out of the building don’t forget the laundry i, under the sky – blanketed walkway, puddled don’t forget the laundry i, feeling the drops don’t forget the laundry i, standing at my feet, moving without direction don’t forget the laundry i, seeing the worms scattered along the path enjoying cool, wet concrete i’ll save them each & every one – i’ll save them i, standing in line, … waiting, thinking i’ll save them each & every one i, taking my medications i’ll save them each & every one i, walking back upon the prison path …

“Malia … don’t forget!”

Nothing sadder than the shriveled bodies of the worms that couldn’t make it back Before the Sun.

She moves swiftly, determined → precise steps, directed → a solid mass feminine, fluid → they look at her → they cannot see her → they look at her hair, seeing only a man’s → short, cropped, thick, black → not knowing, they would not understand her roots → they look at her eyes, thinking how they’d like those → eyes to look at them → perfect spheres, night’s milkyways → not knowing they would not withstand her gaze → they look at her mouth, and want her to speak to them → satin streaming, moving → not knowing they would not understand her words → they look at her body, wanting it next to theirs → graceful, strong, built, maintained → not knowing they would not know how to embrace it → they look at her heart, wanting it to be theirs → beating, pumping → not knowing how they would wound it → they look at her, wanting Her → kind, unguarded, willful, proud → not knowing She would destroy them in their simple ignorance → I look at Her as my pen runs dry → excited, scared, cautious, lovingly → not knowing what she’ll do to me → because I do not look at Her → I see Her → they look at Her hands → do they look at Her hands → soft, small → not knowing they cannot see Her at all. ~ ART: HENRY AVIGNON ~

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real women don’t squat like that STACY MUSZYNSKI ~

66

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ STACY MUSZYNSKI CONTINUES TO PG 67

DONATE TO OMEGA

The changling secretarygirl type, that's you. You're behind Bernie's desk, or maybe it's mine. Anyway, it's at the office. You're tall, lanky, mousey one minute. Brassy and titty the next. First you're wearing Underoos—all primary colors, thick stitch and lump, like my four-year-old son's. No other clothes. Then our attention—Bernie's with me you remember—drifts or something, just for a second, and you've got this blond bob and you're changing your clothes.

You're at the foot of the stairs, we're at the top. It's an old, empty building, big falling-down house maybe—something that looks like it'd be next to the old train station, where that guy, you know, was found frozen in a two-foot puddle in the empty elevator shaft, his legs sticking out like popsicle sticks, the poor fuck. The joint looks like it should smell, but it don't. You tell us you've got a shrink appointment you don't want to be late for. Bernie says, But we want you here. My mouth is taped, what the hell can I say? The carpet is ground into the floor, like my first apartment. The walls are paneled in spots, peeled to the wood bones elsewheres. The lights don't work. You're climbing the old staircase because you have to go to the bathroom so bad you say.

Bernie and me follow you into the bathroom. "hAppy twAt dAy" says the door in dripping black letters. Inside, a bunch of rave parties, a meth lab, Detroit itself, worse, been and gone. Stalls torn down, just a row of, like, outhouse openings, holes in the floor. Lots of air and another floor below. You finished doing whatever. We can't hold it, either, so we squat, hoping it's quick, hoping not to slip through to the down below. Bernie sounds like a Clidesdale in the next stall, gnashing around, neighing and whatnot. He kills me. I try not to grunt. It's useless. I can't take a shit that just slides out easy.

Take Metamucil, my wife always says. Bah.

place!—in corners, wadded up, tossed aside here, there, sticky side down, color side up. Remember the scene in that Airplane movie where the passengers were reenacting a crash and people were scattered upside down and every which way, across seats, in the aisles, even June Cleaver, all old now.

Even she's upside down, on her head. Like that, but no smell. No dirt, even.

Just what was once inside now old and shed. Showing.

Gah. But it ain't me, I ain't that kind.

And you disappear. Just—pht—and now I'm blond and bobbed and. So I'm thinking to myself: These once-here women are my kind? These are not my kind. I am not this kind. But what can you do? And I'm carefully wrapping my own pad in white tissue, round and round, nice, sanitary-like. But looking around there's not toilet paper left to do what one does with it, not a garbage pail—and in barges my wife like somebody's chasing her—and all a sudden my blood pressure's through the roof—I can't be found contaminated with. Well, you know what I mean. Getting charged in on like that and. Eh, Bernie's gone.

It's just me. You're gone. Bernie's gone. I'm in this place, looking like I belong to it, or worse—maybe I like it. But I ain't this kind.

So I chuck the wad in the corner of the room, trying to think up a story, some lie because here I am.

So my pad wad is sailing across the carcasses of who knows what shinola's in there, towards this open window but it don't make it. And my wife kinda joglopes-like over to me—mind you, my ass is still waving in the breeze like a surrender flag or whatever, and I'm giving her this what the— look, and she says, Hi honey, having a good time? with this tiny little shit-eating smirk and that hAppy twAt dAy door behind her a ways...and all the while I'm thinking, Oh god I am this kind. I am somehow exactly this kind.

STACY MUSZYNSKI

I turn to my right, looking for the TP, I guess. I always look right first. Always put my right sock, right shoe, do up my right laces first. Just the way it goes.

There, on my right...used maxi pads or whatever stuck to surfaces, all over the

~

67

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the importance of being amphibious JOHN OLSON ~

68

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ JOHN OLSON CONTINUES TO PG 73

DONATE TO OMEGA

Inception and blister, democrat, television and misbehavior, ignition and cheesecloth.

Note the pulsation, the rhetoric of veins. Scarlet on scarlet.

Jail no apparition, fireworks are a pantomime of copper, imitation is quixotic and a frost bite is February.

Kits in hallucinating is scenery. There is a dissonant opal vowel that carries fire and a tantalizing fiber that kindles pertinence.

The hole is plunging through itself. This is why beatitude is so grueling.

Jonquil. No jonquil is dazzling and correct. No jonquil has a flagrant feather. Expression is kerosene.

No jonquil is a felon’s scrawl. A jonquil which is not an emotion shows the appearance of combat. It points to clogs. The gesture which is any wad is the same as milk.

That gesture is unanimous that vanquishes insult.

Taste has an auxiliary, it is a sticky substance, this which is not churned is not glazed, it is aromatic, it is lavish and demonstrable, it is sticky. It being oily ticking is taxing and what is truculent is hot and girdling. It is verbal and so much more than the painting of a scalpel.

Consonants are spoons. They are appendages.

Distinctness is not hurt by including jiggling or growing bones in a sentence. And it is beans that welcome permeation that deposits and a fetus that raises itself into knowledge. It warms the colon to opulence. It assumes the gender of a male or female.

It chatters. It yanks. It fishes for complements. It swims in a lake.

It there is time enough then the steeples will fit the sky and it will be considered thick to feel crowds. Taps in a circle. Arteries in a circle. Twilight in a circle. Arteries in circulation. Articles in tea. Art in pecan. Cajolery in bowling. Gastric juices in mills.

If the toes are quickly and the fur is correspondent the words will finish themselves as coleslaw. That scruples wax. Anyone can be a pulse. But it takes a kimono to be an umbrella.

The faucet is not make of silver and a ukulele is placed in a blanket and the chenille, the entire chenille, patches socialism. Socialism is a political system involving weave, wave, and folds of cultivated land.

If hanging a glass Monday is viable and blood is in motion there will also be oceans and rivers and tangerines.

It is easy to make a sentence. The sensations which rise from lips will be used to describe a river and a wheel will roll toward sculpture. Imagine sculpture. What do you see? Do you see a trigger? A loaf? An embryo?

There is the complete absence of lactation for a lesion in oak. The time has the elbows of a feeling of Thursday. The season is clearly blackberries. Energy, watermelon, and thunder. Jelly and paste and thin locks with eyes and a dollop of blue in a camaraderie of red.

There is a penny in that.

Technical does not technically mean technical. It means tools are patent. It means meat is deliberate. And all the awls are awnings and all the awnings are ostensible.

Time is not a clap.

These lines are pleasant to me, these lines that I have written using words, and tides, and bark, and verdure.

The time and place of a tool is no convenience if it has not been scrutinized or judged, and if there is a drip there is dripping, which is verbal and personal when the zeitgeist sneezes quarks.

Do not crinkle what is miscalculated because surely there will be tapestries in gluing darkness to an attic. If the area is shown to be anomalous there is no use in balm or napkins. There will be balm in abundance and parables and commentary to ease the mind. We can always chain the finish to the fish and the copper to the obligation.

If I speak as if an abstraction were real it is because holes are perspectives that hold actual aphorisms.

The time came when there was an occasion for mustangs.

This did not mean thump.

It meant daydream. It meant glaze and steeple. Flagstone and bounce. These handstands were understood as yardarms. As night. As Christmas. As Christmas night. As plazas and explosions. In understanding biography the business of whittling demonstrates the chain of brains there is in ginseng. A hole formed in the personality and the song died. This is why the quintet did not come anymore. And then beauty dwelled in objects like jaws and bells. That is to say there jokes, lozenges and ponds, places in which to grip oak.

Chestnuts are not entrails.

The use we make of words is sometimes unnatural, sometimes a matter of antique environments, shovels and shoulders and shadows and shale, shoulders lovely as those of Venus, of vanilla, valleys and valves and generalities of night, jaguars moving with stealth and grace, the brain behind the cephalopod eye, arms flashing in bursts of brilliant bluish light, the terrible meaning of the silence of the darkness in the deep sea, luminous bacteria, the enchantment of words, chains of words, hectic mineral words in strips of glittering metal, adrenaline lights, nerves unfolded in watercress.

The amphibious life is the best life and that which is tartan is focus.

Anxiety is not a hobby. An avocado is not an ultimatum. In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed. Make yourself superfluous to a robbery. Horsepower does not necessarily flaunt plywood. Breathing leads to blisters. Blisters lead to basements.

Basements lead to nothing.

Now what shall we talk about? Death? Life? Have you ever seen anyone die? What was it like? Do you believe that any of these words will arrive, even by accident, at anything like insight into the human condition? There is taste in toast and suppleness in tentacles. The light shines directly to show the inflamma~ ~

JOHN OLSON

CONTINUES TO NEXT PAGE

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tion of an incision to be blue instead of incidental. It appeals and it drains, it does not appall and destroy earnings, it does not hiss in a color, it does not make a question yellow.

Green is a calamity, it makes all the temperament greasy. It follows that when time is chickens that television equals the radius of prayer. A gargoyle is not the same as when logic slobbers television on a miracle and it is ice that furnishes paradise and expulsion that delivers income. We are disturbed by a mountain because it carries the sky across our dreams.

This is a sentence without any meaning.

This sentence has meaning.

Which sentence is without meaning, and which sentence is tartan? Which sentence wants to argue with you? Which sentence clobbers ginseng until it is bedding?

I like the shape of this life. This life which is round. This life which is dissolving.

This life which is epicurean, and steaming and hands.

Jack Nicholson coming out of the shower.

What an image.

I apologize for that.

A bulb there is that shames the darkness with its opinion concerning light. It is sensible to be present when the deep awakens folds of perspective. If it happens that a swell appears in the basement perhaps it is best to surf engenderment.

This is the reason. The reason to write anything has nothing to do with writing.

Writing is putting words together in the hope that they may generate some heat and warm the mind with flares and yellow and yesterday. Which implies that reading is sugar.

The question is are there molecules? The way of settling all this is by grinding coffee and drinking it black which is in accord with washing and fir and animosity which resembles obstacles and the ones that disturb motion by tangling yearning with hair.

This comes so soon that trembling is hanging.

A blaze is not a house and a house is not a crayon. To explain this it is necessary to use some words. These words, for instance, which may journey somewhat toward the incision I have made in the air. The one that is crawling across the water.

Which is jewelry in the light and waves and permeation, just like a scrotum. Emotion, however, is primarily veins and legs. A thread of wealth and an agate with a logic of its own. The hairpiece is amphibious but the hardwood warrants eternity and the meaning of this is abnormally enlarged to contain a language on its way to serendipity.

the exquisite oil of gearshift hay A washcloth xenon in tacit calcification makes diamonds pertinent to denim. A faster ogre than fever veers the pants into pepperoni. Even gingham markets grit and waffles.

Waffles are a quintessence of quandary the television varies by volt.

Jack curry the feasible granite. Knead was zippers declaimed by faucet. Opus tangerine which begins mittens. Blear fern the boiler for another janitor. A candle to float since nails are teams.

Everyone and iron jamborees licorice.

Is any of this going to scout a gastronomy?

A truck is so greasy it clanks. Data that nose in pop. Here we are in habit. Nick it only if it bubbles. Unanimous like a story or wavelength.

Minaret tumbling was that cold it beckoned. Airship or tender ginger the nature of it made an engine.

Meanwhile these words are completing a lone shovel. Karat glitter to beaver by incision. Whatever a goldfish does to taper. Something a lemon might do to a wart, or a quart of dimples.

Sometimes a bark will hypothesize a tree into daughters. Zither dog anyone can grin further into comparison with cotton. Or latitude, which is an anachronism fueled by softly pedaled stars.

History is to be soaked with causes. Blackboard in feeling because the nobler gases appeal to science. Especially albums that copper begins to veer to blacksmiths who dream of clamorous effacement.

Dollop of wisdom from pain. Or a dangerous energy called poetry. Which raises camellias from an apparent lip of sudden fire. This misbegotten galaxy of words, for instance, engendered by an immersion in names. Atoms beating against the calico they whirl into beatitude. Quarks and shoes. The subatomic world of a fluid perspective.

Or attack on banality.

Which is the pang of any landscape. The clarinet on the back of the bicycle. The rattle of banks. The churn of letters. The bramble of the mind. A memory eating a radish.

Which tastes of immensity, and dirt.

Which is a thing to admire.

Which is a root.

And a language filled with claws.

JOHN OLSON

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l a p I d a r I a n

Behind every pathos is a renaissance flawed with propellers. Specimens of feeling bounced off the back of a participle, existential and tin. We speak of wire and incline toward thinking. These words may not connect with what you’re thinking. But they are words. Fifteen vibrations and a slow induction. If a sound is apparent than the apparatus is working. This is why we give names to experiences. Names like calculus and consciousness. Gratification and warmth. Polypropylene and calcify.

Any color is deer. Nailing is suggested by the plenitude of blood pounding in necks. That is where meaning has a home in dishes.

Slap a postulate silly and what you get is mountains. Pearls and personality. Foreign perceptions. Cubism. Tickets or rain.

Braque’s rebellion had shattering implications. Space itself changed shape. Space became a sudden insatiable pencil.

Space became a dos-à-dos.

Mass became a mattress. An imposing stone with regard to the material world.

Reticence has its charms. The pulse of momentum in a ghostly dog.

A highway flare gravid with night. It is steep to consider screwdrivers.

Burlap begins the glitter of revelation. Sidewalk ripples tumbled into amulets and chickens. Tarts equal to tinfoil will later be narcotic and laboratories leaking reality will shout beauty into blisters. The wagon is enforced by incentive, and drips with screwy merchandise.

There is fat in the yell during the epaulet idea. Its chill was pink among that Democratic chemistry and lace hoists that made the calculus nasty with just the right dashboard. As pills to columns and garters to gargoyles, the oblique in the ketchup is inundated by quandary. Such pastels as yonder calendar persuade the eyes that reality is some haphazard mirror, an apology to the toes and an occupation for the nose. The beatific biography of a mechanic is the ultimate kayak in phenomenon and elevators. The fairytale skies that milk themselves in the pine are bundled in delicate membranes. As a lighthouse imbued with Tuesday the magnet is tongue to the ladle of names. The driveway is soaked in its gravel. The earthquake is nestled in its pegs. A raft drifts through the cafeteria beckoning to our inner nature the way a grease will sometimes anticipate thought.

Hack the mime with your twinkle dart. Humor the next beast with cleats. How a femininity evaporates indicates that it snows within paprika.

There is oil in pathos and hickory is habitable in a tripod bean. Heat is an exponent to the finery below the waterfall, its intricacy an engine for the geography of personality.

Zinc was once a highway. A humid scram alone could denote its

vaudeville. Floating was always beat, and you the logo king in which a blunted eyeball later inveigled its own manufacture at the bureau of existence. The power queen in her syntax is only thrust and quill. Chaos pantomimes gristle because the crocodile is pertinent to its bones. Go yell something unassuming at the environment. Ask yourself, environment of what? The verbal gauntlet as a black gardenia. Umpteen rough adobe adverbs slowly lavish in their house and quaver.

There is a word in which light is a fork and beauty is varicose. In which sound is deliriously venerated and the misfit apparatus cajoles perception with its scarves and tarpaulin. To which a lanolin nose is appended by shadow and tornados are hacked into jobs. Our laughter grows green over it. The xylophone ripples with jewels. The azaleas engage the garage in conversation. The hose is wound. The car is parked.

There are cans of varnish on the shelf. There is a zinnia in each window.

There is an emotion that thaws and a feeling that hardens into ideals and words. There are words that drip and words that nail. There are words.

The delinquent antler once had an automotive hole in which to breed its vast economy. A lamé can unbind its eggs in a labial mustang.

The sword of day lacerates the pond. The story is crammed with a blue chicken. Anyone’s elbow can drop into autumn. The washing sparkles. A wavelength of henna squirms in the toolbox. Pathos is anyone’s back. Sugar the kayak. Pepper the ball. It is lambent to fecundate blackjack, but gallant to revive the velocity of red.

Poetry is a dangerous gastronomy. You can eat the sun, but thought hungers for silk. The diet is more like fog. Rain in gravitational bedding, a database of dirt with a washcloth on it.

Imagine a lung with the color of a swimming pool. Imagine its apparitions. The current in an eyeball. The automotive splendor of a pink appliance rumbling with pushy lactations. Here is where reverie turns native with wolves. Zippers are used for clarification. A flock of mirrors in a quantum bicycle honor the squid surrounding the lighthouse. We can feel ourselves in lilies. Mittens on a cold February morning. Another verb ignites in fur and beckons the river to quicken its blade.

The lake gets up and carries itself into the mind of a goldfish.

Can there be an art of emotion? Can an emotion be created in the same way that a house or a boat or a poem is created?

A tattoo animates a jiggle of skin. A biography is written. A life is lived. A knowledge is acquired. A song is sung. A momentum is formed.

An appetite is appointed. A tongue is upholstered. A fever is enameled and an anthology of exotic temperatures turns to stone. Emerald, opal, and turquoise. Onyx, chalcedony, and jade. ~

JOHN OLSON

71

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o m e l e t t e ~

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I feel myself a tiger of perusal today. I prowl through a book on Braque looking for a dangerous alphabet by which to construct a visceral gyroscope, something to orient my body of incumbent quandary, my speculations and angles.

Or did I mean angels? Angles are angels of innovative aplomb.

I prowl through the light of the room looking for a sound I can use as an engine to drive a subversive metaphor toward total incongruity. Drive it until it is erratic and tattered and zero. Drive it until it is out of the world. Far, far out of the world.

I keep a mnemonic anaconda in the glove compartment to remind me of the desolate existence of commas. I gargle the word ‘beauty.’ I put lipsticks on wasps. I find pleasure in the inevitability of denim.

No matter how oblique or weird my car happens to be, it always seems to have wheels. Those big fat round things with tread on them. Those large doughnuts of rubber. Those perpetually rolling ventriloquists of the road.

If there is a jack in the truck we are blessed and happy. If there is not, we may want to stop in some town and look for one. There is a spare, but spares can be tricky. Spares can sometimes offset a perception of imminent doom, of augury and portent. Spares may create a false sense of security. I know. I know. It helps to be prudent. I’m not arguing against the use of spares.

I’m just saying that a spare without a jack is like standing outside a restaurant with your keys in hand only to discover that your car has been stolen.

Or towed. Which amounts to the same thing.

Let me be frank. Each epoch has its zeitgeist, its top ten albums and hit songs, its manner of dress, its way of handling money, its attitudes and behaviors. Its clans and cabals. Its conspiracies and predominant feelings. But where does any of this get you? You simply blend into the crowd. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Anonymity has its joys. But so do aviaries and zoos. What I want to share with you is better than that. Better than these things. What I want to share with you is black and medicinal. Something that will thread its way through you to some revelation, some new perception, some particularity that we can both immerse ourselves in, if only to emerge as fish in human form, our eyes a thesis of inner vision, our opacity an obvious legacy of equivocation.

As for the cerebellum, its role in muscular coordination has never been quite clear to me, much less its relation to the intellect. However, if we explore some of the principles of Buddhism, we find that cherries hang a little heavier on the bough after it rains. This would tend to indicate that the mind is more than a tool for orientation, but that a continual looping exists between the weight of a thing and its apprehension in the mind, and that something out there in the margins, some vague proprioception patterns our view-

point of nature and makes us explode with invective whenever our encounters with it prove too strong. The water is too cold, the woods are absurdly entangled, the air reeks of sulfur and methane, the tendons are excruciatingly strained, or the mud we just stepped in turns out to be surprisingly deeper than the rim of our boots.

Hope, meanwhile, remains obstinate. Hope is more than a habit, more than a disposition. Hope is a nuclear reactor, dangerous and intangible. It keeps us going when we would rather just sit down and be done with it.

Done with the burdens. Done with the lesions and therapy. Done with the noise, done with the smirks and omens.

Yesterday I saw an old woman struggle to get up the front steps of her house. How long, I wondered, had she lived there? There must have been a time when she went up the steps without giving them any thought. Now, old, obese, decrepit, she could not come and go without taking them into consideration, without factoring them into her daily equations. The journey to the garage. The odyssey to the store. Each day a saga. Each night a labyrinth of memories and wool.

Experience, with the Greeks, is equivalent to art. If they do not result in insight, they at least lead to an enjoyed perception, an enhancement of the receptive appreciation and assimilation of objects separate from their baser utility. There can be such a thing as an aesthetic of experience as well as an aesthetic of art. Art begins with experience. Light, absorption, geometry, and waves. Night, harpsichord, coleslaw, iodine. Each emotion becomes native to a tapestry of sensations and quarrels with the conditions that gave it form.

True wealth consists in answering the enigmas of existence with a certain equal temperament, major and minor, sharps and flats, and stuffing them with music.

If there can be a calculus for shapes in time and space, might there not also be a calculus for jodhpurs in kitchens and melodramas and jackets?

Mushrooms in soup? Gasoline in poetry? The logic of beards is hectic with bombastic analogies. And why shouldn’t it be?

The radium of the word is inexplicable, but the mechanism that brings it into being is generally violet. It is hormones, simple biochemistry, that cause so much disorder in our lives with their insatiable desires, hungers that can never be fully satisfied. Hence, the importance of paper. It is the one place where we can distill our anxieties, cook them, simmer them, boil and blanch and braise them, and watch as they sublimate, turn to a cloud of insouciant vapor. Because what steam isn’t, after all, some perpetual omission of worried distraction, a quick resolution of air? Your omelette is the perfect medium. Broken eggs incidental to the chin of churning abstraction.

JOHN OLSON

parabolic balloons Pink ink alights on a word of crunchy butterscotch. The word turns red. It incubates. It hatches a furious moral. Clouds juggle the sky. Quartz performs miracles of hospitality. Appliances shine. Insects cohere. Medicines poise ghostly perceptions. Appointments hibernate in umbrellas. Napkins are folded. Tartans are worn. Even mittens persist in color. The world is a big round faucet. But what does it mean to appease the flesh with scrapbooks?

Do not quibble with a quill which sparkles with being.

There are washers that give cleanliness to shirts with agitations of water and soap. The scooter succeeds in its hardware. The pecan is stretched into violet.

Since kelp can verge on a map and a flaw can thaw a shoulder the sand flaps the masts wobble and the surf slams into boardwalks.

The knee is a mechanism of bumps legion with bone.

Oil is a method for engines to clap opportunities into chickens.

Vapor lacks arteries and so you must begin to glide by quiet infringement. There is cheese in aversion and clamps in construction and all the intrinsic gravel you can lift with a forehead. Flash a quandary if the tariff is fat. I am not emptying words of meaning I am filling them with sounds. If a trout refers to water and a mist refers to crimson it is because these words have allowed your mind to become a reservoir.

Imagine Amy Winehouse as a house of wine.

There has been a wagon here once that bore darkness to an island. I am throwing realms at everyone. Each realm has a pop machine in it, a lanai and a tarantula.

Only the lonely are truly social. The rest are cuticles.

Ginseng is when you stomach nature.

But what about blood? Chairs? Biography? Balloons?

The biography of the balloon is thin with school. Bobbing and twitching. Toast and camellias clobbered by random epistemologies. But what balloon? Which balloon? The Balloon of Queasy Solutions? The Balloon of Undeveloped Photographs? The Balloon of Underwater Colors? The Balloon of Time and Language and Eyes and Orchards?

The Balloon of Metallic Crackling? The Balloon of Revolutionary Struggle?

The Balloon of Galactic Evolution. The Balloon of Unstable Particles.

The Balloon That Opens By Weather And Closes By Moss. The Balloon Deposited Into Our Nerves By Way Of Syllables And Syntax.

The syllables squeak and hiss and the syntax provides a string. Perception is mostly parables. Emotions gripping ghosts. Kaleidoscopic tattoos on the biceps of a hummingbird. Words embarrassed by paper. Reality bounced through a language in large, pink, anarchical glee.

JOHN OLSON ~

73

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elegy for voice set in waves & dunes LEIGH HERRICK ~

74

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ LEIGH HERRICK CONTINUES TO PG 85

DONATE TO OMEGA

In the dream the sea calls up I am the dying sea-soft belly the under-patch of heaven caught in waves I am your skin sand in time singing hours a dazed backdrop a landscape feeding ground the one breath holding itself full-promised saying You are beautiful Come I am the melt and glacial upending the death-sea rolling forward & backward & forward again I am sea to is as sun will not be I am no name ongoing of sunrise evening afternoons star of dark-to-white red masses collapsing tomato soil’s shamanic spurts cicadic summer’s pitched call septembered- silence burn of crickets ice-dissolved living in Word waiting on return restore all future verbs Come I am the dying sea in promises rolled from each licking wave sand-languid saying: I am the sea of your craving I am the sea of languaged lament your agent non-provocateur your subtle solicitor shadowed green meaning slow and fluid opposition of instances in instant sea memory forgetting will & seamy spoils the human trefoil divinities come & gone & these are my yellow utterances driven to deliverance in foam-I am your sea salty membrane from whose flood you come swollen urge tempted recollection peaked bayed relief purpled frieze of the million storms I the dying sea am undertaking filled raw bone of the All transformed found breaking waves the lined horizon pulling down derivative sunken poems unworthiness I am sea body bulge and buoy wet sag daily travails half-filled enmities bubbled veracity sea of states and disease of under-deliberation perpetual sleep without dream food without sustenance echoed reflection for gods among subjects burning burning without love And what would I look for in dreams of the sea which angel what time who ridden in ink of rank and taint along descended corruption lines market rows warehoused art speaking holdings for speaking in such-&-such time saying this flesh & that or not at all send only cindered whispers paint only hot unimagined wind the summers you thought you knew without sulfuric sense What would I look for What is the dream whose train is pulling in is pulling out as train of making and undoing train of letter hieroglyphic cuneiform a readable sign morphemic aspect earthshattering cultural wonderment sending slightest fracture most minimal sound: war :train of never: war :of never should have: warrior :of could & would have & if only in hours of emptied men who say for instance: “Dry your eyes…you are not the sea …Walk a little…Walk with me”

LEIGH HERRICK

************************************************** And who will call America looking for response saying: “We are the Ones among portraits lost & found”

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75

~

And who will answer with no answer at all rolled up from dying in sands miraged days witnesses turned dried mammalian flask as sea calls again saying Listen listen: here is your flesh the rolling toll the evening bell the last son in your changed horizon delivered welcomed Heroed home who would have if he could have said: “if only you knew what I’ve known if only you’d seen what’s been” but small fish swallow hard dreams whole like wind-driven stricture like desert-stinging tours like hope called freedom your sudden friend a marine reserved traded educated enabled to save future ombudsman now packed and ready now sent home But it won’t matter calls the sea

stilled

though back he won’t return entirely or try to explain he’ll only leave the dog-tags of men he killed simply his father will find him alone in the basement all anger guilt awareness bad dreams all memory all startle reflex thoughts of death done1

LEIGH HERRICK

**************************************************

~

76

~

America who will read to you who will you read to who will you tend in the garden of minds’ imagining how little tumbling down of brick of stone of block of wood it takes in certain & uncertain hours the star’s name its burning tissue pathetic fallacy intention lifting flake after flake of peaceable thought made flesh all skinned for violent ends seized dreams made personal form floating away progress uncivilized accustomed savagery difference of language made indifferent 1 matter & state constantly conferred Marine Lance Corporal Jeffrey Lucey, 2004, America who will read casualty by suicide, after his tour of duty in Iraq

************************************************** And the sea will return after Sunday’s dinner prayed upon made up confessed to flinted as stone fish mouth of god & you are left to leaving the sea will say whose midnight hour backs into each regurgitational phrase chaotics deeply organizational space sun framed heaven constitutionally tripled ghost stories of rivers parallel time gods left for home earth-emptied angelic need now only a tree to cling to only the tiny wonder of life damp word warm equatorial hum toward which the blameless sea will come signing return return heavy in your eyes saying you meaning I & you meaning the sea to say ride ride the blue orbed ex-cluster star ride the word terrible ride as you are take back nights among worms take back enveloped day smallest frog snipping bills mallards pecking lake bottomed shores sifting take back the fall plumped short of rains take back memory memory of something before rained sweet woodsy smells ride ride before all leaves let go And the sea will be the alarmed cell through dropped & fallen miles of land a vast interior driving on moving in heading out arriving next door toward neighbors whose lines are delivered hard faultless poems : Your child is killed : Gave Life to the Operation which coast to continent is spelled and called

LEIGH HERRICK

Desert Dream, Vigilant Sentinel, Pacific Haven, Provide Comfort, Desert Falcon, Southern Watch, New Horizons, Gatekeeper, Hold-the-Line, Golden Pheasant, Desert Strike, Desert Thunder, Desert Fox, Desert Focus, Vigilant Warrior, Quick Lift, Nomad Vigil, Silent Promise, Fundamental Response, Zorro II, Safe Border, Quiet Resolve, Garden Plot, Desert Storm, Desert Shield, Imminent Thunder, Proven Force, Desert Sword, Desert Sabre, Desert Calm, Desert Farewell, Infinite Justice, Enduring Freedom 2

2

A partial list of US military operations

Your child America done for jobs completed for jobs to come for whom the sea will always return saying flow down dreams of sable sands but America who will read who

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77

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who leaves with pompanos with bread in hand who quits tired Oracles framed heaven’s dissent who rends the garden host called Earth who rakes auspicious tenants bares trees strips cracks wide deveins makes spectacle the daring phrase: We are a company of ghosts Ω No angels now the sea will say but language for each forgotten life marketed as metaphor spelled scaffold of children ours theirs in thunder of time in space once filled the emptied place now called chair at the table bed gnarl of feeling twist of throated terms the hopeful bend in vain the cry loneliness loneliness from the isolated breast as sea verbs thunder rumbling heads cloud-over flood flashing OM against the stratified against all structure enpoemed as this: Hero, it no longer matters war makes your lips Dust is your body your birth earth-all created skin grown over fleshed again Hero fertilized omnipotence sewn deferential possession obsequious tongue-ranked imagined before you were born— Hero sifted you drift among ghosts drafted intellect lexicon separated sacrificed for ground-Worshippers on Sundays bring the word good Worshippers on Sundays bring the word bad for justice and company in freedom with gods for which the sea prepares itself in rain for which deception’s fragility finds Kin for which concrete conceptions rubble down taking deserts forests prairies taking all saying ‘Hero we are the ghosts of the emptied eye the haunted poem the silence formed in uni-verse ghosts by now well-known’

LEIGH HERRICK ~

78

~

Ω

Bernard-Henri Levy: Preface, war, evil, and the end of history

They weren't teaching Aimé Césaire They weren't teaching César Vallejo

They taught only Mouth of Authority in I-speak Nobody said this It was inferred

They taught Ginsberg because he was still hanging in back when most of America remembered the 60's

weren’t

and who they

teaching

But nobody teaches Genevieve Vaughan Not in writing classes

Because writing is not political It has nothing to do with society or culture It is the Program Director heralding philosophically deficient linguistic signs: Poetry does not mean but is

But they didn't teach Amiri Baraka

You can take that filtering is to the presses Call it language-laundering

They weren't teaching Meridel LeSeuer Rosa Luxembourg

In the end everything comes up clean In the end memory is simply that new space

Marx Not that he was perfect He wasn't He missed the problem of the paradigm

where egalitarian fails to make it in the lexicon

LEIGH HERRICK

The problem Genevieve Vaughan has begun to address taking up de Saussure's comparing linguistic and economic value

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79

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I don’t know why this heavy sense of severance on a snowy evening when earth stutters into its own purposeful quietude of falling flakes of flake-filling streets of yards and roofs and motionless cars full of flakes I say to the flakes coming down Are You The Dead?

There is no reply

snow

There is only further snowing as the flakes come taking their place at the table of noticeable accumulation landing anywhere landing as definitive transformations hand the hours of spring into the hours of snow that tomorrow will drift like this passage formed through shadows of fractioned moonlight fallen and freed of names

decorated

“Look at my teeth!” he said and smiled in his fifties having finally gone for dental repairs and gum treatment he was so proud his fixed teeth and cleansed gums so proud he’d joke and call them gooms and feign a smile like the Cheshire Cat— he was always good at that so he’d do it again—smile like the Cheshire Cat and he would settle into flossing between all the hard to get at places between the teeth and psyche settling in as one settles in marriage as one settles toward retirement except little did anyone know he was heading out his cells prepping his body to be prepared to settle fixed teeth and all readied in his best tan suit, his wedding ring his gold band with black onyx stone even his tri-focals over his glued shut eyes the glasses I bumped when I kissed him goodbye like I kiss all my dead releasing Goodbye in cheeky kisses where they lie coffined in wait among the many guests expressing to family the grief the joy the disbelief and we could not see his beautiful teeth the day they laid him down we couldn’t even see them before the funeral played itself out we couldn’t see them even when he lay wide-eyed and open-mouthed escaped one might say from the vessel of disease called body that remains from which we couldn’t even see the beautiful teeth of so few years before he vanished into transformation and they boxed him up for the Fort Snelling grave —2005

LEIGH HERRICK ~

80

~

from the ruins of the 1 white house

I looked upon them as enemies of our people. —Höss Given like Höss to matters of deadly affairs —of hundreds waiting under the blossom-laden fruit trees while life, the orchard, fruit, proved only this picture of death — we have accepted the term enemy we have reasoned the program seemed right

(little)

while from beneath the heavy eyelids of poems as between the fingernails of first-quarter moons grove seedlings spread like troops at dawn [ United States, 2007]

1.

“Before the construction of the four large gas chambers at Birkenau was finished in 1943, the gassing of the Jews took place in two old farmhouses, described as ‘the little white house’ and ‘the little red house.’ Of the gassing within the white house, Commandant Rudolf Höss wrote, ‘Hundreds of men and women in the full bloom of life walked all unsuspecting to their death in the gas chambers under the blossom-laden fruit trees of the orchard. This picture of death in the midst of life remains with me to this day. I looked upon them as enemies of our people. The reasons behind the Extermination Program seemed to me right.’” http://www.scrapbookpages.com/auschwitzscrapbook/history/articles/Birkenau03.html (last accessed 9.08)

LEIGH HERRICK

~

81

~

reading Levi

Primo Levi said dawn came like a betrayer— And in my dream last night some renewed dawn of open spaces country a dog shadows of time unfurled the moment innocent— Awake I think Galapagos, undone fallen ocean floors warm-forested bark beetles chewing, chewing, chewing among dead pines and not woodpecker enough to keep the beetles in check not enough effort against decline And as Primo boards his train he says—just as Wiesel did—how: Nevertheless each mother for her child cooked that last night cooked and packed a suitcase and acted as though the next dawn would be like every other in all the days through which she had so far lived and loved

LEIGH HERRICK ~

82

~

— March 11, 2008

In the moment of private tongues the seven hippos ceremoniously surround the eaten cow In the moment of cow whose head only whose neck & head only remain In the moment of discovery the seven hippos approach & begin quietly slowly deliberately & with intent licking slowly licking the cow head the ears the nape & what remains of the neck

piety in time of war

each pink tongue going on and over & over & on licking the what's left of the eaten cow & this has never been seen In the private ritual of seven tongues the seven hippos surround what is left of the eaten cow they have licked in ceremony & this has never before been caught on film & before now this has never been known and after after the moment of discovery, after the ritual licking the seven hippos encircle the cow & now they turn around now they turn & are facing outward in a circle facing outward from the remains of the cow & in the moment of seemingly sacred watchfulness they lie down they lie in silent vigil

LEIGH HERRICK

and this has never been caught on film & this has never been known before now

~

83

~

silence

there is no other mouth out of which i might speak there is no other laboriously alphabetized chain of symbols from which i might draw each note past its criminal caesura springing into the empty canal of sound carved against time’s mimetic echoing trickle there is no void for the blind dweller of nothing eradicated into decoration there is no hour no expanse of day no hair parted no elbow leaned upon no hip ground into no brow wiped of its bead no quivering lip no ecstasy expressed not a single touched tongue that doesn’t know its own aching its own low fog against the graying armpit of reason Deliverer of shorn facts in the archaeology of deconstructed buttock and planetary thigh wrapped around womb and ocean pelvic sunrise there is no inflated language for the millennia of heartbeat forms breathed into blood into diamond toes into shimmering liquid broken toward fingered dawn there is only this melted ticking this wound of truculent haze for which in a galaxy of hours handed over the billion palms coloring the universe’s trillion limbs

LEIGH HERRICK

i have only the pointillist’s dots only the noon-painted paucity only these flecks of flung resistance this anti-station charged by its indeterminate ruddy thrum galloping against its midnight terror its edenic antipathy its conditional rant of marauding gods fallen like horizons leapt of their own pervasive rims from which this fractious and besieged root clings exculpatory as an amazonian prayer or poem

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84

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[9/28/08]

ART PG 85: HENRY AVIGNON

staring out (Traveling with Vets for Peace to Protest at the SOA, Fort Benning, GA)

L E I

All my life I heard my voice saying I have lived next to loneliness

G

And what is that — a human being staring into vast implications of green splashes lit late autumn along the road of headlights—

H

Which galaxies don’t blend I wonder Which nights pit themselves against stars Which suns say no

H

There is music for you in the vibration you cannot feel

E R

Say it. Go ahead. Say pulse

R

There are myriad of stars to turn to

I [ November 2007]

a window

C K ~

85

~

ptíca roparíca

FRANK WINTERS ~

86

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ FRANK WINTERS CONTINUES TO PG 90

DONATE TO OMEGA

brezvestnez Preying hawks swooped down on the grain hungry rats running Turning and twisting the falcon in a small circle ate his prey Inside a swift aerial loop the eagle gathered his wings to land Carouseling parrots outside Muzzafarpur landed on power lines Angelic wings beating controlled their speed to find his soul in Nepal … as he stared at the Stone Garuda Restive wild eagles sunned themselves in the high branches Osprey flights careened to the meadow to corner their prey Parrots on telephone wires spread their multi-colored wings to fly Artists on train rides through India saw vultures and buzzards eat the dead Romantic thoughts filled his mind as the falcon circled overhead Ingots of gold had been cemented in the Holy Eagle’s wild eyes Crashing to the ground he heard the wild flying screech And the battle that ensued between Bird of Prey and tiny mouse

bítí Betrayed by the drum beat that pounds in your head Initial anger and alienation spirals downward again Tormented mind warps toward shadows lastly Inconsequential diatribe of the moon mirage mind

FRANK WINTERS

Bluster of the desperado was the poetry in his soul Reeking from the heavy sweat of travel he told his stories Enlivened by wine he viewed the women in the streets Zero in his pocket and a mind filled with words he heard Visions of the outlaw and the tender God he saw everywhere Eternity in a whisper or a shout was what God was about Silently he’d draw his sculptures trying to find a route to the Lord Trying to incorporate his vision of time and space together Nihilist of black leather was the American measure of Buddha Enlightenment was in the thorny crown of being renowned Zest of life was part of the madman’s constant strife

grístí Bluster of the desperado was the poetry in his soul Reeking from the heavy sweat of travel he told his stories Enlivened by wine he viewed the women in the streets Zero in his pocket and a mind filled with words he heard Visions of the outlaw and the tender God he saw everywhere Eternity in a whisper or a shout was what God was about

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87

~

navrodní pevec Naturally the mountain bard had to be very hard Attacking the corrupt tyrant with his free words Violence was the structured equation in his voice Roaring like a waterfall or a surging campfire On the mountain tops he sang his songs to his people Deliberating for hours over the poetry he wrote Nihilist bard of the high mountains he voiced against oppression In the tall timber he chanted his rebellious message People formed a liberation army to overthrow the tyrants Every member of the bard’s village joined his cause Violent methods were taken by the mountain anarchist Every battle was remembered from his guerilla poetry Constant assaults led to a lasting victory for the people

tovarís Tito led the guerilla forces in the mountains to victory Owing the spirit of his comrades in the successful fighting Victory after victory overturned the Nazi invading hordes Attacks in the mountains and acts of terror on villagers Resulted in the final defeat of the killers on high ground Instituting a government for the people of the Republic Since those successful victories over fascism have held

~

88

~

narodnoosvobodílna vojska Nihilists organized a Peoples’ Liberation Army on the streets Anarchy of the few to enlighten the mindless multitude Reaction to the shit piled on them and the painful slavery Onslaught of the rewards they never got finally arrived Demented jive asses ran up the mountain passes Nihilists became close in the Peoples’ Liberation Army Onward they marched with songs and angry poems Only the campfires’ light kept the fighters awake Silvery clouds crossed the encampment at night Violence became the trademark of new recruits Onward the Peoples’ Liberation Army climbed the mountains Building their forces in the small villages in the hills Ominous looks bespoke the guilt rampant in the torn sector Defeating the better trained and more experienced enemy Initially they suffered great losses but survived Leadership was strong and strategy overwhelming Nihilist guerillas battling in the moonlit forests Anarchy of the night warriors was unsurpassed

FRANK WINTERS

Violent guerillas of the Sacred Madonna Smile Onward the Peoples’ Liberation Army climbs the hills Joyous in their victories and singing great songs Supreme bravery repelled the alien invaders again Kings were beheaded by the guerillas at last Anarchy achieved its goal & guerillas held the fold

umetnískí

razbojník

Unless he found something eternal he did not feel artistic Multiple forms that represented sacred thought constructed Endless feelings of despair balanced by some love Tortured by his broken dreams he felt alienated Nihilist of poems and sculpture he suffered Instead of giving up his dreams he trudged ahead Slovenian artists suffered as guerillas in the hills Kindest motivation to his artistic aims was his mother In the long search for truth he had forgotten her smile

Robber bandit of the night achieved great heights Answered the law with lawless flights of thievery Zealous in his skills at overturning the system Bandit of the mountains riding down on corrupt cities Only this Slovenian bandit could elude the law Just in his love of the Madonna he fed the poor Nihilist bandit of the mountains fixed the score Inside his cave the impassioned poet planned his wild attacks Kings’ heads rolled as he rode from the mountain fold

tovarístvo

razpored Relentless battles ensued on the mountainous incline Array of the guerillas across the forested land Zealous in their attacks they defeated the invaders Pounding the enemy with light artillery they stood Onward they marched toward the encampment Running the invaders from their Sacred Motherland Eliminating the heartless killers that enslaved their lives Daring in their bravery they united their country

FRANK WINTERS

Tito defeated the Nazi killers in the mountaintops Onward the guerilla fighters marched into battle Valiant men from Slovenian villages armed to fight Fascists Aligned against aggression and terror that had overrun their land Reports of great victories caused the villagers to celebrate Integral strategies of comradeship overthrew the invaders Systematic concepts led to the defeat of the killers in the streets Tito stopped the terror and murderous invaders of his land Victorious guerilla soldiers celebrated their Victory On the day of the final victory over Fascism they cheered

~

89

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upodabljajoce umetnostĂ­ Unified by the desire to create something beautiful Partisan guerillas fought for truth and vision Onward they marched toward a poetic victory Declared despair occurred when beauty blurred Albatross on the sinking anchor their hopes fell Battling the injustice of the invaders they stood Lazy minds became alert when war reached villages Justice was the ability to overcome the Nazi invaders Arrayed on the mountainside the guerillas did battle Judging their efforts harshly they withstood invasion On the last day before victory they fought hard Children laughed and people cheered their victory Endless celebrations were held on the mountainside

FRANK ~

90

~

Unidentified dead were claimed by a local village Merchant sailors smiled as they arrived Elegant women threw their arms around their necks Tyrants deposed hung upside-down on the ropes Nowhere was artistry as fine as the fine arts of victory Only the children laughed and smiled openly Slovenian Partisans victorious over the German & Italian invaders Terrible slaughter by the invaders only surpassed by Jews killed in Poland Invaders defeated by the Partisan Guerillas for Freedom

WINTERS

49er

his name was David and he would have been fifty this week after he died by the hand that ripped-out the shunt implanted in his chest (so that needles could be inserted in the heart veins because those in his arms and legs by now had collapsed). David was an outdoor worker, big and lusty, before he acquired immune deficiencies surrendering his body to every invasion. When he was forty-four, just short of his forty-fifth birthday, he’d entered into a longterm love with a twenty-five year old man named (?) bill. Call me Bill. The third year he began his death journey that he completed last month. The week before he died, he’d invited his special friends to celebrate and say good-by to another California forty-niner. The next Saturday he gathered his pills and told the thirty-year old goodbye and asked him to come back in two hours and call the police. Time to die. When I came back at three (call me Bill) he shouted from behind the bathroom door it was taking longer and to go away again. Please, Bill. The pills they’d given him were weak or slow. Then in the warm tub, thin man now in commanding water, hair patchy, lower limbs wasted away, David ripped-out the tubes to his heart.

EDWARD

MYCUE ART: HENRY AVIGNON

~

91

~

poem for a blackfoot ghost STEVIE LEE EDWARDS ~

92

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ STEVIE LEE EDWARDS CONTINUES TO PG 95

DONATE TO OMEGA

synedoche A mighty woman emerges before me, akimbo.

She runs her fingers through my molecules, tracing familiar features.

She knows I left her story suspended in wind, abandoned for tales of her captor, great white adventurer stranded in Michigan. He saw her gallop in wilderness. Had to capture her, had to beat her wild, gentle fire out.

Left only ashes.

I am cantelope; tap me with the palm of your hand to see if I’m ripe.

Listen for a hollow sound.

I am pasteurized milk. I have a shelf life of two to three weeks. When I go, first the smell comes, then the chunks.

I am wound, strange stigmata.

To stop the bleeding, apply direct pressure, elevate me above the heart.

I am fish. Take good care of me when you catch me,— Makes me taste better. Put me on ice until you can fillet and clean me.

STEVIE LEE EDWARDS ~

93

~

what is the rain?

—for Walt Whitman My brother asked of me What is the rain?

I guess it must be what runs through my veins, seasonal— rushes with the fury of a thousand indecisions on humid July days. Pitt-patters, cooling the anger from the air.

Or I guess the rain a harmonica riff my uncle plays, notes dropping through nicotined and whiskied air, needling into every pore, electrocuting every atom with the truths of blues.

Or I guess the rain is a woman falling drunken in stilettos down two flights of stairs— paint her body in black and blue; ice her wounds with freezer-burned peas.

Or I guess the rain is a gentle drumming of fingers over a woman’s back, massaging out her cramped cubicle, hands flowing down to each and every cuticle.

Or I guess the rain beats out the curve of her breast beneath her white button down and plasters loose tendrils of hair to the side of her face.

~

94

~

woman We came together as strangers, having nobody else with whom to live and sleep and love. To talk of literature and plans and grand theories and the cruelness of capitalism’s destruction of so many wonderful things and people. You wore spandex leggings with flannel shirts and never shaved and cut your hair off short.

And, when I put a little gin in you, you’d sing Broadway songs and tap dance.

You did and said all the things I never had the courage for. And we talked till dawn about how we needed sleep. And you have this candid walk, unwavering that makes me want to unwrap you and wrap you in the warmth

STEVIE LEE EDWARDS

of soft musk and skin and songs of resplendence until morning.

To tangle myself up in the freckles scattered over your moon-pale back.

my war protest Shades of green and brown almost merge into each other, but halt before bleeding together, like an invisible color-by-number scheme and child who’d learned well to stay inside the lines.

Careful embroidery on the breast: spells my cousin’s name on the right, Army on the left over coarse fabric, harsh to my touch, meant to cover his strong shoulders (make them disappear into the scenery).

ART: HENRY AVIGNON

He doesn’t need it in the Al-Hajarah, giant sand box, green and brown serve no camaflage as he marches in strict formation through no-man’s-land, where the people he’s ordered to “save” pray he’d lie down and make red sand-angels.

S TE VI E

L EE

E D W A R D S 95 ~

~

above and beyond the sky and tears THOMAS STERNER [WORDWULF] ~

96

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ THOMAS (WORDWULF) STERNER CONTINUES TO PG 99

DONATE TO OMEGA

Children suffering villages peopled by the ghosts of fresh slaughter naked gunmen pissing on the edge of dawn Children suffering Children playing amongst the carcasses fighter jets and smart bombs the maimed stand by leaning on crutches they hop like crows Children playing Children watching camels and halftracks one-handed beggars clapping an arm and gimme!

Harsh as bird-speak they jabber and jab point with the stump of a once-thieving hand Children watching Children sleeping whose lives have learned to ally the night where if luck has provided

a handful of crumbs to hold them close in dark houses with one eye open await the dawn Children sleeping Children alive of moment, of whim dim providence provides masks for the blind shoes for the footless bandaids for the starving stick-gum handed out by blue-eyed men in khaki arms at rest Children alive Children dying a dark awareness enters their eyes replaces their vibrant innocence at once with a yellow pus disease of war and hate Gods and stick men have denied them cold steel in their hands hot vengeance in their hearts those whom survive are Children dying

[WORDWULF]

green helicopters ... fastball

Hurtling through space across a spherical wilderness united through velocity orbital path, future and past dependent upon gravity synchronicity and precision hurled by tightfisted Gods perfect and devoid of purpose take ’em where they fall whose creatures each, these orbs may exist in harmony life systems respected and held the misuse of which invite error, the glitch question marks on the Heavens poor odds to bet the mark of self-destruction by those whom name this Universe a hiccup in its arc wobble, a precursor to endgame

THOMAS STERNER

Environmentally friendly ammunition designed to dissolve natural as the body through which it travels sometimes stops Masters of pollution manipulators of evolution There is no evidence of import no one left alive to accuse them Their Earth friendly bullets may slay its creatures reign empirical in the dawn masques of mother teats poison our lips The friendly bird approaches tosses darts to save us forever watching it watch us sometimes it takes us destroys and recycles us

~

97

~

madman chronicles: new blood New Man sneaks a wrist blade under the feint of the warrior carves a scar on the flesh of his left heart breast stands back to admire his fresh made work best holds low the blade whose part introduced and carried through The warrior steps into that space vanity makes through the shadow of New Man smashes him double-fisted flush in his face roars with certainty battle fully joined victory imminent

THOMAS ~

98

~

So is the field become a killing field young upstarts astonished at this new-found depth though seldom spared and death on their faces flowers thrive on their blood The warrior goes home to laugh his woman bounce his Children and dress his wounds He wears the wrist blade and the reminder of New Man on his flesh hopes his sons will be poets

REM / s t e e l bird

[WORDWULF]

I am brick lain down easy flat on the bottom Mortar my surrounds Smother my face in gray dust Wear me ‘cross centuries Spall my body with your killing guns I am a chimney open end of a lonely room Heat divides my breath I am, my throat, a dragon Bend you over, clap your hands Spill your witch’s brew on me Drown me in a storm of sorrow I am a church where People gather Gods Sit and sing my belly Read your Book of Numbers Consecrate my web of flesh Cry unto the face of me Weave me in your cloak of Word I am a watchtower rifles thrust into my eyes become windows of doom Killing ground, my surrounds make me cold, invincible Bathe me in a wash of blood Condemn, search and destroy me

STERNER

I am a sepulcher a dry wind blowing through an onion skin of flesh wandering echo, mute chorus

cracks in the wall where worms and dry rot may reach out to feed I am a step of man upon the face of stone within the heat of the fire The House of God resides where I lay me down where I lift me up dark wing and ransomed flesh I am a damned liar a brick fallen from the wall lain in a latrine of Angels I kiss their Angelic ass make dead dreams of far halo a rush of wind against the glass helicopter in the yard I am a memory random events yet unhappened photo negative of Earth on fire a drowning dinosaur lake where freedom goes to die a slap in the face of life gasoline and a barrel of blood I am your Children’s Children We are a fear of haunting dim dreams of naked flesh a charred bone to gnaw on brother, sister, friend?

No, it’s the old man’s story Ha ha! It’s the old man’s bones!

salutation Finally, is that the same sky whose singer and the audacity to stand and howl cry out to the heavens defy the close luxury of Satan’s gates one foot in the fire the other on the fence threatening to leap never going in forever getting out existence between stones and clouds naïve, ignorant of their differences Yes, the sky is the same whose vapor, essence of soldiers slain on foreign soil the singer voices protest laments decades of violence

a path of loaded guns and empty boots too many kisses spent on the face of death a lifting of the shroud Mother, he was there Someone made a hole in him and he just leaked away The young man on the last page knows exactly where he is going would laugh in the face of his older self first then embrace him and weep their assemblage of years the near darkness of art broken promises and second guesses the certainty that wrong

never becomes right stung to the marrow by the arrow of mediocrity as it pierces his heart and makes his name There is joy on the pillow peace for those whom sleep delivers smooth tunnel dreams life mates on the soul train clickety-clack tracks of life These are the poet’s muse the lies he tells himself as he whittles through the carving sticks of his days alone, hollow passenger riding in the ghost car spinning phantastic webs inventing lovers, impossible loyalties destined to be the one last man standing at the station A familiar salute hands lifted proud brows, handsome faces waving, waving; hello, farewell Mother, he was there Someone made a hole in him and he just leaked away

THOMAS [WORDWULF] STERNER ~

99

~

save the weasels

~

100

JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT ~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT CONTINUES TO PG 103

DONATE TO OMEGA

Left bank, East River.

I live in exile between B & C. An orphaned parrot of a hanged pirate, left on my perch to call out a list of deserted isles.

Thrust out, marooned.

Cast off.

A black cormorant stretches wet wings at Stuyvesant Cove in the wan sun.

I too have auditioned with despair and fear on this salty estuary as low tide suckles the sand gasping for air.

YOUR NAME HERE Can I still count on all my fingers to pull me through what can only

be done alone, high upon a mount?

Alpha Victor Whiskey Come in, Red Dog. Deconstruct the storm, outrider. Another round of highballs over here, dear.

Aqui, mon ami.

Cerberus in the henhouse.

How much do I owe, you ask yourself again.

Oh, mouthpiece star, word on a wire, how much do I owe?

How much chiseled Charybdis doom?

The worms too await their turn.

Mad Hatters unite!

These I called friends, slaphappy haberdashers talking to the six winds.

Gangs of New York School unite!

Your heroes are regrettably unable to save you but they leave a few marbled leaves and finest gold flake to press against your pages.

I dream of collages, fire alarms. Scrambling over hard scrabble barely able to keep pace with… . “No, what?”

You know what — the grim rapier.

Save the Weasels.

I found you hiding in “Hell’s Waiting Room.”

You were like there.

Afloat in your houseboat of peripatetic days.

“Let me put my drink on the mantelpiece,” says Tom Carey so debonairly at Telephone Bar.

JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT “I found a found poem in my poem,” Dorothy says at the Club.

Aragon was here.

Find the leader.

Lead the followers.

Follow the flowers.

Jasmine climbs the “trellis of minutes” into your sights.

Separatists unite!

Above the sky in your eyes a key begins to internally combust.

How much was it again, you say I owe?

Smithers, may I have this dance with your credit swap derivative?

Blind librarians unite!

A candle on my tongue, I lick the sun’s shadow.

Maybe now we can finally lay us down together.

Come in Bluebird Leader,

this is Foxtrot Alpha Tango.

Commend me again to your maker.

Oh, blind spot I look for ever seeing the seconds fleeing, like red taillights in the black rearview as we speed on into the unknown — that’s all we truly know.

Man your post, starblazer.

Follow the light, Bravo Echo Zombie.

Inflate your tires.

Practice your lines.

Devoutly the hours devour.

Only the truly thirsty can hope to transcribe water’s tremulous threnody.

Call for back up.

Retract your animator.

Boneheads, stage right!

Pull out. Eject!

Storm the barracudas!

SAVE THE WEASELS Baker Lucky Zulu, UNITE!

~

101

~

gauntlet ~for Allan Kaplan

Show me the evacuation route.

Let the sirens begin their alpha wail.

Let the crow fly ahead like a black flag between rows of skeletons rattling their swords.

Let slip the reins and run all willy nilly and pell mell away from here now the sun is down.

The odyssey is not easy.

Every turn is crowned by blows.

Giants eat your friends. The jealous and scorned await for revenge.

Pray, let me be fast, Lord.

Let each trial become your word.

~

102

~

made in tinseltown —for Heller Levinson

You would know it by its cross bill and wing bars Alternating bouts of flapping with gliding It can seem like a long time before hand Ruled by convention’s readout (redoubt) Who among you shall be judged by innocence?

No more to the tower come, trespasser No more, Aurora, to find a free signifier Gone now the days of rosy fingered fireworks The Glass Menagerie a Trois, a mere distraction Unmoored by Hinge Theory at KGB’s on East 4th Cables of impulse tribute so inclined entwined Season of the clutch hitter vs. the pinch hitter It’s always the external stomp duet inside Naked and invisible on the road to La Mama Etc

JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT

lead Ermine galaxy, hoodlette of the divine. Who’d a thunk it? Gotcha!

chin

with

Dream trampoline. Coup de fille, let me show you the rope and you can climb right out of here.

the

ART: HENRY AVIGNON

America, watch out!

The clocks will not hide your malnutritious fat people much longer.

We weren’t sent here merely to be great!

I must have more than a photographic memory.

Call out the squadron of dragoons who answers for these absurd ideals with the inviolate jism of squandered dreams.

Here. I insist. I want to pay them all back.

coupon JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT

masses struggling like unanswered whys ADAM ROUFBERG ~

104

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ ADAM ROUFBERG CONTINUES TO PG 107

DONATE TO OMEGA

masses struggling like unanswered whys

with

pushing towards suggestive reactionaries

with twisted love,

delving right with suspicious anecdotes

...

of this be that be because be is be

sophisticated and covert

as if we had no choice but to ponder

contort forged

unanswered whys

obligatory anachronistic comb over for

with wise answers more reliable than the question itself

jurisprudent dissociate trenching

which suggests insanity or some kind of tissue deficit disorder

miles between the road to slow road

nests of restless I's

and the truth of your bullshit

shrugging towards floorospheric boundaries

twisted love

inverted tight fisted visionaries' lurid fantasies of why beyond when what did how with who

from allowable possibilities from allowable possibilities this equation change self evolve self into other intelligence change equation of possibility infinite network of universes mind in finite net work of one equation grand unification god in numbersymbolism god

ADAM ROUFBERG

is numbers with attitudes with personality goddess numbers flowering death camas generating the possible change of equation genera taking form of allowable possibilities to change this equation of change ~

105

~

in the u l t I m a

conspired by worldlords conjured by wordlords

in the ultimate flavor of phase space you tongue-tied time to savor

of eternal discharge

remarkable tastes

the fluid flows

molecular journey

vein to vein

from time immemorial

body to body

thence hither

spirit to spirit

hit my mouth once

in anharmonic disguise

one time around

to let others try

salivexchange

imbibe from the fountain

chronolingus

I spit you out

f l a v o r of phase s p a c e empirical pinnacle

te

to decide for themselves if there exists absolutes

~

106

~

ADAM ROUFBERG

causal relations drawn to cast causal relations drawn to cast delusive matrices molesting minds like fabled faubus lost in the presence of history naked and inaccurate ART: HENRY AVIGNON

slanting exculpated visionaries vulcanizing intrepid headstock into numbers on scales as deals on chattel to keep the mechanism in full swing

A D A M

R O U F B E R G ~

107

~

new orleans hurricane blues VALERY OISTEANU ~

108

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ VALERY OISTEANU CONTINUES TO PG 113

DONATE TO OMEGA

Woke up this morning in eight feet of mud Visions of a drowned city and more bad luck No house, no woman, dog stuck in a ditch There ain’t no way out, my Chevy’s on the roof And its still raining, life’s a bitch Dark skies over New Orleans, over and over The city of Lois Armstrong washed away Every thing was muddy water and mold Dead and debris and smell of Hell Stink everywhere, screams for help Survivors are clawing away At the roofs from the inside To escape the rising dark waters Saved the children, lost a wife Lootings, shootings killings.

The Highway’s full of water The Jailhouse empty of men The supermarket robed and trashed The bottom of the whiskey glass is dry Wild South’s last stand, armed gangs on the street Curfew, martial law and crooked police Katrina and Rita’s unmerciful destruction Three levees fixed, went to sleep Next day déjà vu -disaster in the same place Three levees broke, one two punch Re-flooding of New Orleans Why is it God punishing us?

Talking to the anonymous dead Where is our God above nation?

Where is the sound of funeral jazz?

The noises of Mardi Gras?

Ghost town, partially dead Barking birds, barking cats Floating surreal carcasses Barking survivors, evaporations of death No exit known for the poor of the America Stench drifting toward starved ones Pumping out dirty waters, evaporating Dirty chemical waters out Pumped “toxic-death” is killing fish The cows are dying of starvation and thirst Even the dead were uprooted Headstones & coffins washed away To the rivers of Eternal Rest, Unknown direction for floating corpses Eternal damnation or “air-conditioned-Paradise” As for “Katrina-Survivors”, nothing left But television intoxication The masochistic life of pain and fixation From welfare-retribution To Retro-evolution Don’t think we are up to that!

Save the immortal spirit of New Orleans from Involution And save us the mortals from “hurricane-blues”

VALERY OISTEANU

~

109

~

Erotic fantasy-ports of call: In swinging Bangkok Plenty of tattooed cock On the Island of Hvar Croatian men wait naked at the bar In the Adriatic breeze Most nudists don’t sneeze In the former Yugoslav They have heard of Polyluv Ménage a trois in Su casa, Poli-amori couples-fest in Budapest Ménage A GO-GO at the Hotel Indigo Love stuck hotel on a giant cruise One moment you snooze You’re sure to lose De Sade ceremony in Toulouse You must be young at heart at least In Byron Bay, Australia’s far east To join the Straight swingers-list Polyluv in Polynesia

sexual + ports ↑ of call

Psychedelic orgy in Indonesia Multi-orgasmic in Bali At Erotica dua party with you & me Pirates of sex during the day Pussy-whipped by night Leather-perverts for pay Underwater sex next to Bermuda So watch for the genital snapping barracuda The Marrakech Harem majoon Served by belly dancers in the afternoon Made by the Emir of Tangier as a party dish Sweet with plenty of hashish, And lastly beyond The Lady Liberty Hypnotic, masturbatory, marathon Lovemaking of a poet in New York Crystal cleansing lower Chacras Pure lust-ification, purification, Illumination through endless ejaculation In the ocean of tantric elation!

VALERY OISTEANU ~

110

~

barcelona

No such luck Alone in Barcelona?

People bump into you Steal your wallet Then invite you for a Tango In this web of poetry and art A conceptual Port-Selona by Joan Brossa A surrealist in Barcelona?

Dali, Bunuel, Granell Miro-mira on the wall!

Shake your ass at Picasso class Barcelonia Gaudi-mania At Pipas Club music with a bang Voices of Buenos Aires slang Amore y muerte, Tabacumba Drop the pipe, smoke a cigar Hold on to your bags The guitars are synchronized With a bullfighter on a Sunday afternoon Red bordello of black beauties Bar-ce-lo-nia, Babylonia The tango has just begun!

tango

Breaking the silence Barcelona’s music-soundscape Fast trains and boats and planes All at once Minotaur brain drain Cars full of travelers breaking the light Dark bars, full of dark men Sound of Argentine guitars Alone in Bars-e-lonely Who am I now?

Dali, Lorca, Gala?

Tango with a long curved mustache Put on a sailor’s T-shirt Picasso in Barcelona Standing frozen on the Ramblas for 1000 pesetas Looking like Dracula, Columbus or a Roman soldier Playing Pan’s flute Barcelona on the roof with Roberto Llimos Bar-ce-lona tango: one-two-step, step and back Che Guevara tango at a night vending machine For condoms and cigarettes Bar-ce-lonian? Barce-lon-ley?

VALERY OISTEANU ~

111

~

~

First is the face of the friendly driver at the Leonardo da Vinci airport The fake smile of the porter when I tip him with US dollars The unsophisticated faces of the visitors at the galleria Villa Borghese The face of Franco Trevisi and the chase on foot to the Trevi Fountain The face of the owner of La Piccolo Aranha when we sent the vine back He returns with another bottle and a ball of strawberries All this and more was immortalized in writings, on photos and videos Interlaced Roman profiles, Mediterranean eyes, stares, races, grimaces The desperate faces of Asian women selling scarves in Piazza Navona The perverse smile of the people that give us in purpose the wrong direction The guard’s angry faces when I photograph the paintings at Borghese gallery The confused face of the guide at the Coliseum when asked what is a “camelopard” At Fico bar in Rome the excited face of Sandro Dernini the art impresario The impatient faces of artists and writers when Massimo prepares Risotto The grave faces of City Officials on a St. Catherine Parade in Siena Transplaced pilgrimage to retrace Dante’s face and his steps in exile Embracing the Mediterranean spaces, Tuscan places and Etruscan graces To the towers of Purgatory! My fellow travelers! Heads up!

A vertical hoarse race on the narrow staircase, from the top to the base The long faces of marching soldiers when I tell them to go back to Iraq The blaze face of the old jogger when I ask for Santa Croce in Florence The annoyed face of the old waiter when I ask him if he knew Marrinetti The Florentine face of the lady that compares herself to the painting of Botticelli The wise faces of the Jews in the Venice ghetto and in Florence’s synagogue The distorted faces of Catholic Priests, nuns and worshipers at Mass in Como The defaced on purpose Marilyn Monroe face sells for big bucks at a gallery The radiant faces of Stash, Katherina and their son Micha in Bellagio and Lecco The confused faces of Elena and Gianpaulo driving from Milano to Picasso The Fellini-like expression of the count Frederico Sangiardi Quinto Di Wardal His blue-blood family tree “growing” since Egyptian times This is the face of Italy, the faces reminiscent of Dante’s Divine Comedy The faces of Kings, heroes and nobles, of poets, artist, concubines and dancers This are the faces and places hard to describe and even harder to forget.

Italian faces

and places

VALERY

OISTEANU

112

~

king dali

VALERY

2004! The year of nonstop Dalí! Einz, Zwei, Cry! : Viva Dalí!

Take the Dalí bus to the Dalí Theater-Museum just around the corner El Pays de Dalí! Viva L’avanguardia! Gala No! Dalí Si! My brain is full of symbols of Andalusian dog with breasts White ants crawl out of the cracks in the palm of my hand Donna Gala at dawn plays the piano through a deformed skull A philosopher kills himself, still holding Eugenio d’Ors:”Treaty on Paranoia” Dali’s sausage in honey for surreal squishy-desserts Dali’s ghost rules in Barcelona, from Venus of Venice to Figueres A poltergeist shrieks into the instrument at Theater El Jardi The city of his birth shakes: Take your daily dosage of Dalí!

Rational irrationally Daaalííí! Ecstatically-egomaniac Daleeeeee!

The King of “rhinocerontic” people!

I am woozy from so much Dalí! And the grinning aging nympho Gala!

I have touched Dalí’s teddy bear, his bathroom, and his walking sticks Everyone told him he was a genius so he became one-and a half Jump on the Dalí express to the Dalí Global Network Ride a train to Cadaques filled with Dalí ghosts melting Read his name backwards IlaD rodavlaS The King of rodavlasians Long legged elephants step over golden ants The world stays still in front of Gala & Dalí holy shrines The apotheosis of grand illusion: Gala e fini! Overload Dalí!

An electric fire crippled him in Gala’s spooky Castle It came from a spark in a hand bell over-used by the aging maestro So bring in the last dessert for the Marqise de Pubol St. Dalí’s soft cakes, sorbet of lime & thyme Today is St. Dalí-Day! Drink King’s brandy and wine The King is not so dead! Long live St. Dalí

OISTEANU

VALERY OISTEANU

~

113

~

pneumatic harmonics

pneumatic SANDRA HUNTER ~

114

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ HUNTER & SALINAS CONTINUE TO PG 117

& DONATE TO OMEGA

ALBERT SALINAS

She flicks his nipple against the metal of her braces, plays a single note on a perforated sheet of a player piano tonic tip-toes to supertonic but finds his flesh so middle C because on a scale of one to seven she usually gets pushed off Maybe it’s her father’s lips that sucked spit off reeds; a heavy chord u-bending her soft cadenzas--

quarter daughter Light lisps across this unopened door

She picks a stray Cheerio from her back teeth

One Size Fits All, NO Returns

Will the curve of his neck remind her of hard peaches?

Unplug this listless mouth: one tampon She's drooling so uses her fingers to wipe her lips

He shuts out all that white noise in the background,

Unskeining eight silver chains, blackened

sets his needle in slick black vinyl groove,

glamless celebrity jewelry knockoffs

rearranges his F clef and stumbles; fretting hand

hooks a lip under the gold-plated front tooth

sensing fingers forward

Insert Quarter, Out of Order

hammers-on, pulls-off

Slot slams shut; smell of disinfectant clogs the throat

he slurs her name with the sloppy strum of a single bow stroke

She cozies up on a bathroom stall loveseat

three notes, a rest; a re-firming of the lips

Closes sticky eyes and waits for redemption

from shining C to sliding scale of offers

Leaves lipstick loveletters on single-ply TP Slips one finger inside leopard thong; signs her name

she falls into minor key, turns her back to another page of sheet music chews a finger and lifts it to catch a leading note he cups the air at her harp-curve shoulder rethinks

Faith, yesterday Hope, tomorrow Grace, one day Joy

HUNTER & SALINAS

says hit me ~

115

~

I do not remember the restless lisp of sea, nor the curdled gull's call, Or drifting, immersed, through damp quilts placed over the shimmering void.

I do not recall the dull clop and shift of water against the lid of night, Or sweet scent of women swaying like drunkards off polished planks And the distillation of stars rushed the ears, filled the lungs Urchins scamping about darlings tread on their frayed lace That fluttered up to meet the sea-moths coming in and out like tides I remember braiding strands of pearls into mermaids' seaweed hair And white whales turned and dipped below to graze the dying coral.

I remember sifted bounties draped about my neck; the wavering bleed of rubies Caught unblinking in black and jasper patterned scales razor side up.

My wrist adorned with swirls of glistening silver Sun-shot faille and brittle silk lingering above the sharp tails.

Salty water tasting of the tears drawing me to this place.

Once more, my body spirals through falling light, and I go down Down to this land where memories are replaced by dreams.

As blue screen fades to dark mist lens, the trident men are here.

The earth quakes when they step from the saddles of their bottle-nose steeds.

I push away hands groping through murk. Sirens take stage. Let their song fill my ears.

Let their glass-blown cadence pierce me, let their pale throat breathing fill me Let me be impaled, bleeding thick staves of arpeggios that hang, descend, For then I must swallow this turbulent coda and drift-Let me fall below the surface surge, let me down to the last coral’s waiting claws-Am I to be nothing more than salted nourishment Washed over with the sour salad of plastic bags, tentacled by strange squid I place a peck upon its beak and cover from the stinging rain with translucent umbrellas Shy-moving sheaths too pale for the sun’s arrows. I, too, turn toward the dark, empty palms, And marvel at the moon in its fullness casting a single shadow on stirred sands

Each breath, a wavering bridge

luna tuna

116

~

each dawn, spilling over jagged edges each escape more staggered than the last each pregnant raindrop shattering glass.

What shard-deep memory rips open each gash, my eyes slit open geisha-wide, my ribs

it’s only love

HUNTER & SALINAS

~

each cut, a wild ribbon of light

the ivory garden you trample, plume over my broken fingers your drunken scent and shadow settling on my lips I would speak, even while these fractures displace and my tongue splinters and all the junk-strewn rivers of my languages overflow the chambers of your fists in carmine, vermillion, flame; breathe me

god forbid

Our hanging light which art in the bottom drawer with golden fringed wire weaved through rusty chain-link Give us this day our daily flail and sew our lips together Let our muffled screams be a sweet song unto your ear Let half-fled dreams climb our putrid fear and wait upon your judgment While we stand soiled and humbled in the presence of your stories And roll up our sleeves to receive the wholly subcutaneous jab For blessed are the battered, the bleeding and bruised Thrice blessed are the blind-folded, the betrayed and bereft Comfort me with bestialities sheathed in beatitude prophylactics Comfort me with loaves of unleavened children, sickness-glazed We have torn off our ears. Babble on until the little ones run from the gate Hiding their eyes from swinging vicissitudinal head; now smile, now rage Your unnerving visage cast from rose petals, tortillas, and potato chips Your Boschness distilled to the finest vodka. Hear us, we besmirch thee; Grant us the wisdom to realize we are more real than you As we grant you our forgotten miseries branded on the inside of our wrists the value of our souls depreciates. You demand so much from your supply and we demand much more of our imagined selves: from nothing—to nothing Why strive for your heaven when we can dream of fantastic others while you, bored of your infinity, strive for ours Voyeur, we perpetuate your existence through sadomasochism Ah, kiss us with blistered lips, our peeling tongues like candlewicks lit then razor split to twist inside the mouths of destructive charismatics Their woven-wire song repeats, undulating through sliced spleen: we overflow Look through the holes in your hands at the holes in our heads And observe the heart-breaking eclipse of disappointment Third eye rolled-eye, strabismus and holy whiplash: from nothing—to nothing.

crown glorious Crown-glorious he turns, surveys, humbled by emotional insecurities oozing under his white and gold sandals frailties woven beneath stern brow the blood weeping from the end of his sword this unconsciousness brings new realities if he has taken life — where is it now?

Eyes once blazon with courage now smolder his broken shield, its leaking colors A study in hues runs from rust to bile, Trickles to mud, sucked and swallowed: earth’s grief the weeper of storms, the sobber of tempests while far below, the rage of grinding crusts echo the tremble of his core and what-have-we-done madrigal cracks his ears

HUNTER & SALINAS

Crack his spine, crack his neck, and he bows To accept the hero’s wreath, from bloodied hand to bloodied brow If he has reaped his reward — what now?

~

117

~

cover letter, sans resumé, for application to the godhead GREGORY GREYHAWK ~

118

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ GREGORY GREYHAWK CONTINUES TO PG 123

DONATE TO OMEGA

I’d work 24 hours each day, making life truly meaningful for each and every one of you — I know that sounds too abstract, but I’d see you saw each point as clear as any beckoning star at sea.

By my participation, you’d learn faster, understand Justice, and all that; you’d learn to be good — it might take a few years, but you would seethe with light.

Hell’s too final for a free-will dogma, so I’d incorporate reincarnation for the stubborn: each tour progressively more challenging, each death, unwelcome surprise.

Snapping Miraculous Fingers, supplying the Answers …

I couldn’t stoop to that, but I’d retain some Tradition: the exercise of the Sacraments; solemn Latin Masses; some of the Eastern variables; a little white voo-doo …

I would keep the sacrifice of Jesus, so you’d know I meant business, so I could say I know the feeling.

game —near Quang Tri, late 1971

Oh, I’d do a miracle here, blast a warning there — maybe have the B.V.M. appear to Congress, admonish them with the thunder of Sister Veronica back in grade 6 …

Yes, they’d behave all right, or I’d make them U.N. soldiers, or Beirut realtors, or any caddy to any statesman. The Russians would crumble, finding water in vodka bottles; the Japanese made to marry ambitious American women; Jews and Arabs forced to share the same country clubs; and the Irish would suffer their conquest of Britain.

like puppies kicked to innocent hatred, bared teeth, armed roses, vicious teddy-bears, snails with guns, we marched, finally afraid, to our big snow-ball fight — sharp stones in our snow-balls for strange boys from another school, who thought they were smarter than us, cooler than us.

In those huge, mucky puddles their fathers used to grow rice in, we surprised their splashing bare butts: there was alot of yelling and swearing and screaming screaming — all the popcorn in the world popping at once! all the fires we could start, as much smoke as we could raise; all the blood we could bleed, and not get shit for. ’Til all the guys in the other gang were counted out, or had run away, or had given up, most naked and scared shitless. then we stole their money, and rings, and toys, and we smoked joints and opium and teased them about Doing It to their girl friends; and then we beat up our prisoners, and made them tell us where their fort was; then we cleaned up some of the mess, and took a neat ride in helicopters, back to our secret fort, to get more snow-balls, such sweet darlings all.

GREGORY GREYHAWK

Souls worn as soap in Pilate’s bath would eventually heal.

Children would inherit the hope they were promised.

All animals could speak for one month out of the year.

Simple, sincere prayer would suffice, perhaps a candle for some reasonable request.

And I would reward you, of course, with what you all really want.

war

~

119

~

Thuds thump the tree-line: Whomp! Whomp! Whack! We encounter no resistance. The ARVN clean-ups advance, counting the bodies, shooting the dying. They glean the husks, the survivors, the useful wounded, for the talents of the ROKs, who will torment, torture them, for the answers that Intelligence things they need to know.

We are short-handed, so there are only two grunts per squad, a platoon corporal in tactical command: last night’s battle is over: the NVA, the VCs battle is finished: for all his sacrifice, his blood, his effort, he has been subdued, he has been crushed ….

I am assigned to the left flank this operation, because most of the people I engaged last night should be found dead here. I’m a snuffy, and I don’t normally do this kind of work: my job is to sit up all night, and sometimes, a large part of the day, pickin’ off people we don’t do biz with …. Some of the infiltrators who imagined they could evade ol’ Spider are quiet now, beyond interrogation this morning, just because some zealous officer ordered them active, told them to probe our positions last night.

One sapper I reported shot last night is found thirty yards from where I predicted we should find him. He’s an old man, about sixty-five: hipshattered, the bullet left a cunt-sized hole below his right kidney, just over his butt, now matted with caked blood, and the dry tips of the season-dry elephant grass.

Sgt. Cruz kicks him in the shoulder where the second shot I served him up has turned him purple-and-black, hollering: “Crawl! you ol’ coot! Sit the fuck up!”

I bend to help him up, whispering, “Vas-y vieillard, veilles-y! Tu es trop de vieil à jouer ces jeux Apàché maintenant ….” * He smiles the grin of the old man too old to hate anybody — me, Cruz, us, the French, or his superiors — he has no idea it’s me who took him out last night, slapped his idealistic, shouldastayed-at-home, wants-his-land-back ass down under the bright, betray-all moon. He puts two fingers to his dessicated, blood-loss-blue lips. When I reach into my flak-jacket to fish him a ciggie, Cruz blows his eyes out, eggsplash, into the constant explosions of the sword– and elephant grass ….

“That ol’ coot shoulda known better than to be out playin’ Army last night. This is one o’ your tags, ain’t it Spider?”

I nod an “Aye, Sarge.” Cruz says, “I’ll take that ciggie, snuffy, you take his pack ….”

s a p p e r

GREGORY GREYHAWK

~

120

~

* “Come on, coot … come on! You’re too old to play Apache games now….”

hill 239 i smoke the delicious Luckies in my blind knowing not caring if the dinks can smell it — & they can smell it half a klick away; but i don’t give a fuck — i want them to know i’m out here, want them to sit still. in the daytime the Thunderbirds will find them dug in deep, or dig them deeper. tonight i even do a coupla hitsa O; i have a major eye-strain headache: seeing nothing burns your vision, brightens the pain … a coupla V.C. run guns on bikes near the riverbed.

They’re kids: but they know what they’re doing — & i will see to it they remain young forever.

e l d pud

jumping

in the year of The Pig, my journey-string not yet heavy with the moons of many winters, i become a scout for the Long-Knives: before i can trap silver, steal sweet corn from the flint fields of Hockey, i must first plant arrows, farm scalps in the rice-rinks of Asia. over the vast blue First Nation, i ride to the rain gardens of the bean-yellow people, where Iouskeha wakes the Wind to rise and straddle the horses. like Menominee, the slopes fish the snakemoon rivers, and bind light, each step each day paintight, eyes down.

Each night overlooks the rim of the rice bowl of morning, where hope herself might brew a little tea, perhaps share her cigarettes. the Stick Injuns walk when the trees walk, between the shuddering slink of stars, faster-than-light; but i gag sound still-born in its womb, breathe the last, breathless word in their ears: with one finger, i weave long trap-lines from windsilk and moonshadow, stitch and tuck ragged racks of black pajamas into the rice-paddy quilts. i burn mean, know cheap, like the White Eyes; striking the flints of the Fifty Fires, i feel i kindle the torches

down

thunder

d a ro

that raze black my own cornfields, my clan long-house, my tabac: i want to hack down my squad-mates like weeds wild in the squash, but the wine jug of money buys my tongue like any ghost in Gallup, so Iibury the red tomahawk in my pride instead, giving birth to a pup in a dream of old dogs who will forever bark the rooster awake, eat only fish, and hunt only sleep when the weasel claims his chickens in the road-games of the future.

GREGORY GREYHAWK

r&r i am the angel of death. i’m on vacation at the moment, but i’m bored.

You see, i hate each and every one of you so much, that i can’t wait to get back to work …

—China Beach, Da Nang summer, ‘71

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diapers, pablum cig g ies & bus money

When I call the man whom I’ve robbed, I tell him I can’t talk too long, that I don’t have much time, I tell him I’m calling from some not-yet-vandalized phone booth near the freight yard, that it’s raining, that it’s just starting to hail, that I must keep this call brief, or I’ll be late for my beans at the bread line.

When he starts to holler like a general who blames the graveyard for the war that he’s lost, I interrupt, and tell him to go ahead and hate me; I tell him which bridge I intend to sleep under, should he feel the sanctimonious need to come down and try to kill me.

He wails that he thought I was his friend, that he can’t understand why I would rob him. The reason, I lie, that you can’t understand why I robbed you, is because I didn’t rob you. I tell him: But see! the cops were waiting inside that house as complacent as spiders in a garden in August! and what did he want me to do? when they asked me for Whom? was I making this purchase? I tell him that I told them that I was buying the stuff for me, and did he think I should’ve brought those cops outside for an introduction to his very self?

I tell him I squealed on the main distributor, so as to save my own ass, and that my ol’ lady kicked me Out on the street afterwards, because she became paranoid.

Wryly, I reiterate that I didn’t rob him at all, that he just assumed as much; I also remind him that I am now sleeping under any bridge, while he sleeps unsuspected and safe under his nice, warm tent of reasonably-intact bank account.

At that, this man whom I’ve robbed condescends that he doesn’t hate me, and he graciously offers that I should now repair my self-esteem, and apply myself to redressing the proper scheme of things. He further advises that I should get my shit together. “Get your shit together,” he says. That admirably said, he hangs up.

It really is raining — a nice, soft, romantic Vancouver drizzle. I squeeze again the relatively large paper roll in my pocket. I feel closer now to my target, his money, and promise myself not to lose it to some fucking liar who has his shit together.

DE PRAETERGRATIS HABENTIBUS

orenda

Quare?

Why?

Deo clemenus god? precamini? do you ask mercy?

DeforIllo ignoratis: you do not know

god:

it is

est

Deus Qui dentes god in mundo who put the teeth in the world, and

posuit; et

it is i who bears the mercy, reapse tu ipse est qui i

who will decide

misericordiam fertis where

the bullet will go,

et tu ipse qui states, how long

GREGORY qua sagitta penetrabit, et GREYHAWKergo longinquitas temporis transet

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it will take you to die

antequam hostes mortem obent.

when we t a k e the land back when you’ve, at last, palled your long, blind fall through the shocked nights of your sleeping gods, when you’ve buried your loose cadres of hungry ghosts, Agnonha, then the Stick Injuns will rise again from the graves of the fallen timbers, dancing wet smoke, like the old Fires, in which all will see once more the silver lance of the Shooting Star . . . they will surprise you: most will wear the Wolverine masks, teeth furred, eyes proof against your paper, your steel medicine, mere fathers heavily armed with the fear of facing the open, empty mouths of their children. their diversions, their tactics will succeed: soon they are inside the wire, crossing your card-table yard, past the fainted folding chairs: the tea, still warm, the cookies, still fresh; through the garden, now free to walk, then quick, between the gazebo and the hot-tubs, your martinis, olives wide-eyed, yet untouched, ciggies weaving steam twine; they

track you to the dock, search the boat-house, spot your tiny, white dot way downriver. later that night, you and your family will be captured by a patrol boat, when you try to drift by the river frontier. despite your fears, you are not executed: your woman is blonde — this is good medicine, she is fortunate: she will not have to tend corn, nor strip rice, nor pick tobacco. your son will not live in a city; he will be made a warrior, a hunter; he will be one of the people. your daughter will make a man out of another such as he.

All will be safe and happy. and you — you will help, too: when our next offensive begins, we will dress you in paint and feathers, in braids and leathers; and you will show us, Agnonha, where your machine guns are, you will show us how you die …

ART: HENRY AVIGNON

G R E G O R Y

G R E Y H A W K

ELENOR LITTLE ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ ELENOR LITTLE CONTINUES TO PG 131

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mind

prosthetic

A man had somehow forgotten how to live, misplaced his passions somewhere beneath an important document in his filing tray. If living is the part that happens prior and post-reflection, then he was like a faulty pendulum that had stopped ticking between these two modes of being. His incessant reasoning would ironically conclude ‘a good dose of the irrational is essential in life’, and yet his reasoning couldn’t help him obtain it.

For a year he devoted himself to debauchery, assured that this would overwhelm him into a ‘moment’ similarly to how a large wave knocks you rolling to the shore. However, his meticulous exploration of all the perversions on offer failed, and only left him with an increased immunity to life.

Feeling defeated into inertia, he next spiralled in to the vice of ambitious distractions; he earned himself a promotion, took on more work than he could manage and wasted his free time tangling himself in all sorts of voluntary projects and social affairs. This proved effective at halting his thoughts. And when any spare hours snuck out at him, he combated them with a self-induced (albeit thoroughly insincere) addiction to soaps and celebrity gossip.

The heart of the matter was this: that he intended to forget completely his own beliefs and all the paths of reasoning that led him there. He dreamt of that part of his mind withering in to a neglected stump. Perhaps he’d become sub-human or animal; be alive without being conscious of it. And those were the last thoughts he’d had on the matter, the last thoughts he’d allowed himself to have.

ter. His day had been like a mathematical equation.

Its legitimacy was irrefutable, though it seemed to run parallel and detached from anything of consequence.

The crows scattered like darts of ink. They cluttered branches, shielding themselves from the rain which tapped with increased ferocity upon the steel roof.

His pulse began to replicate the speedy drumming.

And next his mind, as if caught in its slingshot, had no choice but to follow suit.

Ravenous thoughts were born and ~ sifting through the desert of his mindscape ~ they inevitably ended up circling the memory of a woman he passed each day on his journey to work. Seeing her face gleaming like a moon from her window had subtly developed in to the only glimmer in his day. She seemed to be waiting there only for him, and that notion revitalised him, reacquainted him with his own presence.

He stood for a moment, trying to recollect the first time he’d noticed her watching him, and what he could piece together of her features, or perhaps make a guess of her age.

It was a Friday, and on Friday’s in particular he often had an indecipherable, and incredibly tenuous, internal zing of rebellion. It was as if the dreary symmetry of his week begged him to take a hammer to it. The liberation he felt on a Friday could be likened to a spiralling speeding belt to the surface of the ocean to gasp at air.

ELENOR LITTLE

And now, weighted under his overgrown coat that had become wet in the rain, he stood crumbling like damp cigarette embers, beneath the empty bus shel-

This zing occasionally brought about a semi-rash decision on his part. And, twinned with the mental stirrings for the stranger at the window, he now felt compelled to walk to her house where he would look upwards, devilishly, accusingly, in search of a possible moment ~ a meeting, or confrontation.

Even if only their eyes met and maybe an unreadable smile came of it, well, a smile could last him a month at least. He’d learnt to digest things slowly, as his life so far seemed only to offer him scraps.

And, if the window just so happened to be absent, then it wouldn’t necessarily be a disappointment. Because even then something could be gleaned from it.

Evidently, it would imply that she wasn’t always at her window, watching the world. No, she purposely went to the window to watch for him.

At this conclusion, he leapt forward in to the rain, almost in to the speeding shadow of a car that ripped through the world like paper. The hollow beats remained for a moment, making him feel alarmed and untamed in his rashness. The perched blackbirds shrieked and dove up into the dark clouds.

He continued again, and this time he was halted by the vision of the face he recognised. His silent watcher, the woman at the window; she was hurrying through the rain on the other side of the road.

He squinted at her flickering form; her heals digging at the concrete to give her speed, her hands clenching her coat tight at the neck. And, she was dressed in a nurse’s uniform.

After pausing whilst she turned into an alleyway ~ which he knew led to the local hospital ~ he to follow her to her workplace.

His compulsion had grown to unearth the secret of his watcher, his metaphysical lover. This shielded him from his own angst at entering the hospital; a portal – he’d always maintained ~ to death and all the horrors of human existence.

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However, upon entering, the filth he found there ex[ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

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ceeded his imaginings. He found there a dripping, destitute hospital bed, deserted in an ocean of excretal mess. The surrounding space seemed wormed with the cavities left behind from the deceased. Everything stunk of negation; dusty silence and shadowed walls.

An atrophied wilderness, purposely fucking its own oblivion.

Even the drips seemed hollow. Yet the wet tiles embraced them, like a virile corpse, excited at each watery serenade.

A half-vanishing creature, only aware of her shame, scuffed past him, shit slopping down her leg. The rows of beds brought to life their lost lovers amidst the stale burrows of sheets, where sickly stringy muscles had fornicated with their host.

Some comatose animal, foetal and gasping, raised a dying arm. “I’m melting in to my bed.” Her words swarmed to him, as the whites of her eyeballs sank to the floor like discharge. He forced his gaze to the floor, internally screaming the mantra ‘Don’t read the ghosts. Don’t read the ghosts’.

“Stop hiding boy. We’re all of us bound to matter and decay. Men can hide from it easiest, but you can’t hide for ever!”

He clasped at his forehead; claustrophobic within his own skull and wishing it was malleable to prize open like gates. Her blood leaked through his mind like dye.

She would evaporate, leaving only stains behind.

The tight shriek of trolley wheels ended the spell, as the nurse ~ his nurse ~ mechanically handed out grey jugs of still water, sometimes popping straws in the patient’s unresponsive mouths. She marched past the other staff as if they were weeds in her path, and they scowled and shared whispers about her before returning to their clinically sanguine eagerness to clean up shit.

Still sunk in his corner, neurotic and now tensely clutching his knees, he was farcically overlooked, as if his outburst was as commonplace as the disinfected floor tiles.

And so he had time to make a few hasty guesses at the nurse’s character, and her relationship with the others. He decided that the other nurses judged her to be a solemn bitch, because she refused to integrate with them through their banal humour. He also had time to ask himself what might become of a mind like her, exposed daily to the grotesque and abject, never allowed to forget her own physicality and inevitable expiry. Would these visions be heavy to carry?

Would such a woman need a mental retreat, so that she didn’t . . . sink like a flooded vessel?

His put his questions on pause, as he tried to calculate how much time had passed. He expected an uncomfortable greeting to happen soon ~ surely his nursewatcher would have found a free moment to deal with his presence. And, since those other bitches that worked here hated her so much, they’d probably jibed and nagged at every chance so she’d be eager to get him to leave.

ELENOR

The bed sheets swaddled her like the rigid cocoon of a spider’s prey. Someone once told him that spiders gain sexual pleasure when they consume victims and he imagined the shadows beneath her bed, with woven tongues, drooling expectantly over her death.

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It struck him that he’d never rehearsed a greeting that was based on two months of shared ‘watching’ and he

felt a pang of nausea at the prospect of being unrehearsed in his speech.

Eventually she approached him with the clinical indifference only a nurse can possess. Her words tumbled from her with little expression, her tongue were a blank receipt. He took note of her greying brown curls ~ some were an enchanting pearly white ~ all static as a wild animal’s tail. Her brown stocking ankles swiftly perched before him like chicken feet. She handed him a cup that smelt of bleach and bile, poured in steaming water and then pushed her trolley away, leaving him with a jumbled collection of her presence and the echo of her shoes tapping on the tiles. Lifting up his cup, he found a folded note, damp with steam, stuck to the palm of his hand.

Come and see me tonight. At home.

He fled, breathless through the swinging doors of hospital. The world dipped and creaked like a lost boat as he wheezed. *

*

*

Out on the open streets, his shadow crept the distance of desolation, but his hope became a prominent beacon, pulsing, as if he’d swallowed a live bird. It seemed he was the only movement in an inert space, where every sound thanked him for its birth.

He walked until he reached the lady’s home, where he had grown accustomed to noticing her watching him from her dirty window. There she coiled amidst the stained glass, a step back from the social world.

Perhaps she would consider his presence an intrusion. Perhaps she preferred only to gaze within the

LITTLE

[ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

embrace of her four walls. If you gaze long enough, then when the actuality presents itself, it can somehow seem less real. Or at least a clumsy replica, lacking in the kind of magic that is brewed in solitude.

Anxious to step out of the purgatory of this anonymous blackness, he strode purposely to her door, hesitated, and then tapped with the bone of his knuckle.

Was she still fixed at her viewing spot, willingly paralysed? He envisaged her dark pupils, rapt, piercing small holes through her window . Perhaps she watched everyone, and he was no exception.

He scraped a last disheartened drawl of a tap, against the splintering wood of the door. And this time, his call was answered. She opened the door to him in her white nightgown, and stepped back to let him enter. The trails of her gown danced in dust, her blackened heals peeking from the lace trim. He followed her steps, which led them to the room where the window was focal; the window that had been familiar to him only from the outside, which he was now entombed behind.

She retook her place there, and he observed that her actions held no warmth to them. Instead she glided solemn and broken. Her body had an untouched purity, glistening like snow and she fell in to the chair like stars. The scent of stale petals made a whirlwind around her. He was captivated and yet he wanted to vomit out every scraping impact she’d made on his insides.

The clock cracked time like a hammer upon ice until he could hardly bare it. Sweat began to surface on his palms leaving handprints on the table where he’d rested them.

He turned to his hostess for consolation or distraction from his irrational terror, but she set a dead gaze on him, as if she’d been stuffed in that very chair. Her features appeared to be subtly sinking as if they concealed a great void. He stammered “what is

this . . .?”

Her mouth, widening and darkening, began suddenly to miscarry. Blood bubbled and erupted, her eyeballs boiling and shuddering like a horrific orgasm.

A witch. With bird’s feet. Bird’s feet peeking from her white nightdress.

Insistent, through the blazing blackness, the heat, the fluidic boiling matter, his hands gripped tight to his face, he bawled “What is this?! What drug . . .or curse” “It’s your cure” she snapped, as if scolding an ungrateful child.

He blinked, and the clock struck ~ its pendulum wiping reality clean and returning him to a blank canvas, where new nightmares simmered below the façade of forms.

“Everything is disgusting. Even being with you is disgusting, and you’re the only one who talks to me . . .”

“I’m the only one you want to talk to.” “. . . Just make it stop” She threw back her head to laugh, and as she did so a rain of flies fell dead to the floor, as if her breath was noxious.

“This is what you want to see. Don’t tell me it isn’t. You spoilt little voyeur, you want a window to perch at, you want a world that lives up to the artificial carnality you’ve brewed in your solitude.”

“Make it stop” he repeated, humbly pleading.

She retaliated then, maternal embers in her voice.

“Come with me to the kitchen and drink some water. It will clear your head” She led him out of the room, down a dusty wooden-panelled corridor that smelt of the honey of pine cones. She seemed quite titillated to be entertaining a guest, despite his apparent misery. Black feathers clung to his feet like oil, but he was grateful to leave behind the malicious clock-beat that had started to cause a terrible sea-sickness, which fortu-

ELENOR LITTLE

nately abated as he entered the kitchen.

Propelled into motion, like an electrocuted doll, she battered round the piles of dirty crockery, scavenging for a clean glass. She broke away from the task briefly to scoop out the rotting food that was blocking the sink and, clenching it until it squelched through her knuckles; she swiped it at the dogs that yapped round her ankles.

“There. Have that, you fools . . .Can’t you just tell these pups are all men? Tsk. Never ashamed by their own need.”

She continued to prattle on contentedly as she poured him a glass of water from the tap.

“Now, listen. Immunity is the worst kind of sickness I could ever diagnose. I know this from experience; my job allows me to become immune to the most violent truths of life. It has made me selfish.

Now I only fear my own death, my own pain ~ but am unmoved by others. I could quite easily kill a person.

In fact, the moment I became aware of this disability, this apathy, I contemplated doing so, to jolt me out of it. And my work environment would allow me to get away with one . . . crafty death. As long as it’s just the once, you see, it would be considered an accident.”

She kicked away a dog that was pawing amorously at her slippers.

“Well, but then I went and had a change of heart. I thought, if only I cared enough for a person, were intimate with them. Then I wouldn’t be acting out of obligation or for a wage, I’d really feel it.”

He nodded sulkily, and tilted the swamp in his cup from side to side, transfixed; a severed robins head came bobbing to the surface.

“Don’t be dispirited, the hallucinations will subside. Follow me. I have something to show you.”

With a naive light in her eyes she led him silently to her bedroom.

“I saved this little treasure all my life. I had it since being a babba." [ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

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She reached for a cluster of shell chimes that hung from the window frame, and let them clink in delicate harmonies.

“It still comforts me. Better than any man sharing my bed. I watch this and it sends me straight to sleep. No ghosts.” “ . . . No ghosts,” he echoed, drained from his visions.

“You want to feel real, don’t you? Listen, I’m like you. I know that when you look out of the window it may as well be a child‘s sketch and you’re wondering when the outlines are going to fill up with substance.

She accentuated her next line, as if secure in her role as wise prophetess. One finger rose knowingly.

“When . . . will there . . . be meaning?”

She’d caught his attention now, and he perched himself upon the windowsill, enthralled. His thoughts however ~ now cleansed of torturous visions ~ was impatient for her to arrive at the conclusion, the cure.

And this was the cause of his silence, an attempt to forge a direct path through the winding trail of her talk.

“You know, the world will always be there waiting for you. Well . . . what’s left of it.”

She joined him at the window. Rested her head in her palms and gazed out of it, in a way familiar to him as he had peered up at her from the outside.

“You don’t talk much do you? I was hoping for more from my friendly stranger” “What’s . . . the cure?” he asked directly, wanting to take her knowledge and run. Even his routine of soap operas and morning coffees at work now seemed to magnetise him back to their tranquil glow.

The flickering tv, calling to him like a siren. His lonely bed, like a post-bickering apology, lay outstretched in wait of his embrace.

“I told you the cure already!” she hissed. “I ~

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showed you it. Those moments of horror in my own front room were life happening. It’s only since you snapped out of it that you’ve started rationalizing again, wanting to be back there secretly, back in the moment” He ventured “But can a moment not be. . . pleasant!

“Pleasant? Pleasant?! How sickeningly dull!”

Her eyes became the black pearls of a crow, inspecting him sideways in sly flickering motion. Grand wings unfurled behind her, shadowing the room.

“How could anything ‘pleasant’ send you spinning into oblivion? What you need from your nurse is a good hard dose of . . . HORROR.” Her white gown spilt like sour milk upon the floor, revealing a crawling mass of maggots where her stomach should me. And beneath it, propped upon her pelvic bone, lay a nest-like womb, where bald headed chicks pecked greedily at her stringy flesh.

“And . . .” she added indignantly, “I am a woman after all, which means essentially I’m infested.”

Her two black eyes dropped to the floor like marbles and rolled along the wood to nestle by his feet. Wind wailed through her blooded sockets and ash rained like Armageddon; a small hell conjured in the haze of her room. The door slammed shut …

ELENOR LITTLE

the circus PART 1.

Welcome! Welcome! We hold within our thinskinned bubblegum walls, thrills and horrors, spectacular spectacles, honest delights. Take time to consider now, if you should allow us darlings to lead you there. And prepare yourself. Beware! Beware!

You may have noticed our wretched guide here, grimacing in his furs, with only his groin exposed to the bitter cold (it is a shameful punishment for a misdemeanour committed in his youth and he has born it for so long that his soul has turned to vapour and he hardly feels at all). Well it is this very impediment ~ his absolute vacancy ~ that created in him the special talent he holds today. That is, the skill to create other realms based on the customer’s imagination.

See how his eyes pierce you as he gapes blankly in to your most sacred inner life ~ watching your mind like a theatre, seeing all there is to see. He is the gateway, my dear. So don’t keep him waiting.

Come along, come along. We are children; simple and sweet. Our hands are sticky with candyfloss.

We promise to take good care of you. Oh it's a gamble we admit that, like any dose of life in its purest form. But you couldn’t possibly be in better company . ..

My name is Dot and my mute twin here is

[ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

Janice. She is swollen with child at the tender age of seven, I’m afraid, but she will never give birth. That’s her perpetual condition. She spends eternity suffering for our youth. What a sacrifice she makes brewing all that magic in her cauldron belly. And yet look at her; she beams broadly like a fool. She knows she has a purpose you see. Everyone needs a purpose.

We aren’t identical in every way, us girly-girly sister pals. As you can tell, I do the talking. Also, most importantly, she likes to play with dolls for fun whereas I like to tickle people until they squeal. We’re quite unique as far as twins go.

Oh you are being very cautious Sir and perhaps you need more convincing. This is a circus that will stain you on the inside, and embed there a coil of fantasy that you might slide down again if you dare. It’s like madness only better, it’s birth and death all rolled in to one. Sound appealing? How can you resist.

That's it mister. Step in to the red glow and be close to the guide at all times.

Now beyond the curtain lies another land ~ a land born from your unconscious yearnings ~ and I'm as curious as you are to discover what may unfold as we venture inside, so make haste. See our guide staring at our path ~ his eyes create the way and the destination. He is the pore through which your dreams will

seep out before you, a cleansing if you will.

Those chimes you hear are the voices of time, calling it to a halt for you. The nausea will pass; it is your heart having its triumph.

PART 2.

And what did he face when he entered? A colorful banquet of fruits on a circular table. And behind ~ a row of women of different forms and beauties, lay naked and paralysed in eternal sleep.

His mind raced with strange and curious impulses that he could now satisfy. But he mustn’t rush, he should prolong it. He has forever to indulge. And they shan’t wake.

So for the first hour he focused on one woman alone, choosing her as a canvas to create a fruity masterpiece. A grape in the belly button, halved peaches in her armpits, sliced pineapple circled the nipples and the finale; bananas inserted into each orifice. She lay as if dead, a decorated object. He trembled with the empathy he wished he had for the feelings she wasn't having!

Time sped quickly on and he picked next a woman with a sly and boastful seeming face. He

should not and could not judge a sleeping stranger, but this was a dream and it seemed only right that he could create truths in such a realm. He designated her the least favored of the maidens on offer and decided that he disliked her, she was a spiteful creature deserving of humiliation. He ate strawberries then, over her wide, staring eyeballs until the white turned pink and strawberry tears were dribbling down her face.

Ideas quickly flooded him and tickled at his genitals like teasing demons. He now rushed to perform each before the allure of a new idea had taken him over, enjoying the torment of his urges pressing at his soul like a tide.

Next he chose a frail looking brunette though her face remained a blur. His task, he decided, was to stuff as much in her mouth and down her throat as she could possibly contain until it overflowed like some fruity overdose vomit. This accomplished he sat on her face, rocking back and forth, until the fruity mush smeared round her head and leaked into her hair.

His impulses growing more sexual in nature his next focus was a plump girl's vagina where he decided upon a delicate and clinical procedure of placing an apple pip between her clitoris and its hood.

Oh all the possibilities from one small set up ~ he looked to the guide and the guide looked on.

ELENOR LITTLE ~

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burrows

I respected my abuser—he was a sorcerer of sorts.

That flight to the dark A surrender Sea foaming and frothing The lost dead eyes, aculmilated in the matter that shrouds us All these truths, the kind that only creep out in the dark Awoke in me And I lusted for them, And for him.

I needed to seek him, as if I was cursed by a villain and a creep And that’s how it felt.

When we met, we never spoke He led me to another room (he was dj-ing at the time) So he led me to this room out back, after his set And asked no questions of how I found him But pressed me against the wall, and I heard his belt rattle then And he rummaged for his cock And sternly whispered ‘should I fuck you right here, is that what you want?’

As if I’d tempted him, provoked him somehow As if he saw the spirits I’d summoned, swirling in my belly But he also saw fear light up in my eyes And realised that I’m also innocent, So he released me, and sank in to a chair, flustered and confused by his own urgent action, his own loss of control And I sat on the desk.

Accustomed to the shadowy space, I realised it was a small office I was perched next to some documents—book keeping—I noticed And out of the window was a row of static red lights, of back alley ways of clubs, fenced-off yards and silver beer barrels He was silent, seemed to be planning, deciding how to behave next I was calm, somehow. I just waited for him.

He said ‘I knew you’d come to find me.’

He walked over to me then, seized my wrists painfully and said ‘and now we can’t turn back’ As if we were wed to an inevitable chain of events, and should submit to the current.

Though it seems nonsensical, absurd, fantasy when I talk about it in the innocuous day I recognised each of his words, because my mind seemed to already carry its unspoken twin, we ran in parallel.

So he bent me then, over the desk, lifted up my skirt

ELENOR LITTLE

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I didn’t struggle against him, though I couldn’t tell if i wanted this or not—I didn’t care for my feelings, they were eclipsed by the momentum of fate Some would call it rape, but it wasn’t. It wouldn’t even make sense to say such a thing.

And anyway, so what if I felt the real stain of a man left inside me? And that incomprehensible suddenness, the outcry inside as if my younger girl self has been stabbed at.

Sex is supposed to be ugly.

Though we can embed it in discourse like it’s antiseptic, all the disgusting and beguiling creatures in our psyche need to crawl out of their burrows for a carnival.

And if you refuse them, then—since they’re very cunning—they will make use of the very barriers you put up against them.

It’s a lesson a young girl needs to learn fast.

And then you can begin exploiting all those feelings of being protected and untouched.

It wasn’t so long ago I felt like that, but I could sense it abating.

So I went back to him numerous times.

He told me lies. He told me he didn’t respect me in the way he respected his girlfriend.

And that I was only fit for scraps. He’d make me repeat that as I bent over for him “I only deserve scraps.”

He’d never let me look in to his eyes. He’d even push my head down, smother it in something, show me my mind was irrelevant.

But these were all games. And anyway, I suspected that actually I was the only woman he was seeing. This was romance and theatre; none of it defiled any deeper sense of connection that slept at its roots.

I didn’t want to get too comfortable in that thought though. Nor did I want him to let me. Like I’ve said before, We only want to fuck personas.

I have to believe in the lie. I have to ask myself every night. And if I laugh or shrug rather than shudder, then I know it’s over.

ELENOR LITTLE ~

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butter fly’s g n i effect HENRY AVIGNON ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ HENRY AVIGNON CONTINUES TO PG 143

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~For Michael Annis & Heller Levinson I

II

Theoretical Physicist, Edward Lorenz, presented his paper [Butterflies Effecting] on Chaos Theory (in) Spring of 1972—days before Henry's primal (birth) Hinge.

Henry is this to this for this from this nothingness and physical impossibility

We learn the effect of (force) air of butterflies flap-molecular wing of Brazil...

Henry is his flowing (out) of origin back to original black

Across a world, Henry's father sits open by a window of Air Force Hospice::vital::topical::hosptial

Henry is his beaconing (in) light Henry is this projecting (out) luminescent signature

Aye! {Lorca] Breezes, soft instincts

Henry is his becoming radical this in(out)word simultaneity

Father push-forward (out) With fear With wife With dying. The Room Filled the woman Flowed a woman Toward Henry’s funneling Toward desperate cries (out)

Henry the instant Henry defining Henry periodic Henry exponential Henry from negative Speed of Dark to positive is Speed of Light (slower)

Father claps father slaps father flaps The wing of henry’s lung...

Blows a whispery howl, bemoans a slovenly salvation A Cross (her) This landscape fluttering Still. Tropic flesh, Henrylessness torn; Any body's river(ing) the effort (out) One year later Pablo(s) Neruda and Picasso Are death is death as death each a tornado received is another averted deflected relinquished nonexisted.

HENRY AVIGNON

From timeless placement prior-life...ad nothingness; ad antispace of pure potentate being place(ing)ed prior to consummation by light-phase (life) With astral articulation: BEING -- communicated lit into present / prescience lit into observable states lit delineated by time lit demarcated with phenomenological.

III Faster than the Speed of Light, the Speed of Dark. ~

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Birth and death being calculations being ejaculations being toward organismic variables organizing (dis) organizing into / out of life-cycle

Potentate dead points pursuing causa sui convergence through processes forwarding rapidity‌ Being after divergence by law of universal expansion.

VI

Life-cycle: phase space where experience is Light projected (out) of birth (expansion) becomes Light reflecting (death lit)

Henry is born into matrices of dead points Hinge (selfhood / being)

Life and death: both ends of Chaotic field in deference to negative Speed of Dark - each life being its fractal of velocity.

Henry is (a)massing volume of Light

Velocity: infinite process of visible expansion; time (is)at the Speed of Light.

Henry is accumulation / mathematical expression of symbolic languages of self-amassing

Faster than the Speed of Life, the Speed of Dark.

Henry is written into experience: the particulate accumulation of dead points / Light

IV Theoretical physics establishes a complete state of knowledge (symbolic summation of language / Light reflecting off the flow of dark speed) about the dynamical system at every single point (dead point / Dark point / negative point between moments) is the collapse of time

VII

past present future.

Theoreticians predict instants of collapse are complete systems Containing everything, surrounded by nothingness (postulate of the Speed of Dark Hinge dead points of Light / phenomenological existence).

Life is dynamic multi-dimensional shape shifting (out) of bared velocities; dynamic system of dead points of light between Hinge.

HENRY AVIGNON

Material systems known to science are fundamentally patterns governed by laws Articulating outcomes .

V

Dynamical systems are multi-dimensional and described by physicists as attractors.

Each dead point of life/light hinges to the next at the Speed (anti speed/simultaneity) of Dark.

It is demonstrated: attractors / dead points attracting energies / infinities / trajectories‌ ~

Clusters of light exhibit as a rule the law of all symbolic languages: (out) of Speed of Dark Light ushers to communicate shapes of bared velocities of appearances.

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Probable: meta-systems operate parallel and prior-life and post-death, energy dispersed into human form functioned at the Speed of Dark.

VIII Prior-life and post-death: a macro step up model of this acknowledged micro system of Hinge.

Collapsing dead points enabling convergence and divergence to become Chaotic stability understood as time as it functions.

X

By logic Life(time) is the singular dead point.

Image(s) of finite wing(s) of our Pablo(s).

Birth and death as transformational aspects of the Hinge moment: Light accelerating to the Speed of Dark.

Impure O’s of char wreckage of a house fire that claims many lives young and old over and over these dead points.

Model (super)imposing what comes before the 'Big Bang."

Image(s) as homage(s)

Singular Universe being singular dead point of Light writing (out) symbolic expansions in arabesques of phenomena at the speed of light.

Renderings of absolute transformative experience of violent nature.

Model-up macro system which parallels our own, and single cell amoeba.

Prior-bang and post-bang is Hinge potentate being nothingness at the Speed of Dark and timeless.

XI Effect Of Wings Of fire, Swept across Lingering:

IX How many dead points later?

How many timeless Hinge-events of revelation?

After how much velocity accumulated?

Impure as in not translucent-giving off lesser light order to portray a spectacle of darkness as productions; art definitively impure, writhing away from Light at The Speed of Dark.

The ugly tornado Of human sensitivities to death...

HENRY AVIGNON

Pablo(s) Neruda & Picasso distant by exactly Henry's lifetime unfolding, converging, collapsing thought to thought, light to light, stop to stop.

The beautiful absences of time captured in charred remains...

Neruda vomited multitudes. Picasso gathered these multitudes and bound them for posterity.

Toward an impure poetry Neruda lived Toward and impure art Picasso died

~

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elegy for the uncommon

Discovering hive-eclectic shadows cast-off wrought iron-fenced run around their rotund

as darkness as lightness by bishops

(I) of nations debased

Seizures! King(s) governance by nothing like votes

I

II

"...of thermodynamics Stairs make sense

Who canNot make

Seizing! Queen(s) wasp(ed) impaling from concurrent angles

Of a mystery Bouffe (or) climber's case Descending

Up For entropy (?) i (e) n case (d)

The nude Away from heatDeath's tyranny

Of us(a),...child of sic sensed–full of dreading

Stings of opaque seeds miring across(ed) society-the-game board hunting papered tigers of couture

Of containment like lead streaming in blood

Center-decentralized nothing civilianized about faced freedom

Source-

Civility the morality the pawn Culture the norm the rook Liberty the queer the horse

As when–

………………………

(I) chickened hawked in-wired Of us(a) enclaved children Of dawn Of noon Of dusk

The laws?... What Us(a) divided By/ into chaos of opposites (Us)a represented

~

stairs descending a nude

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By penultimate move(s) Mighty The crowning

The stepped machine runs

Forwarding medi (as) ocrity (res) From upper planal

Centrally positioned order(ed)ing

HENRY AVIGNON

Are mated to die

Down The nude

Double egging Is doubling the helix As redoubling Is doubling of prolepsis

III All the ways To base (ment) mind Is coolCrawling in mud Is foolScrawling in feces Letters appearing randomly Homogenized."

rhythmic aneurysm(ic) “From hive this mind, that Hinge is integral to our nature, to our being; what is hinging(?), it is to dream awake, to become the dream of language, as language dreams us into being, as being manuf(r)actures reality, resuturing to become the abstraction of interconnection among minds and species … Shall we not dream each other awake; shall we not abstract ourselves into one another's being? ... The personal interpretation of the abstract is the only reality.” –Michael Annis

I “Henry is dreaming Of being Dreamt. Driving, Listless, drifting; not listening, aimless, Staring at the glass Of coincidence, Clouds forming Unparalleled conClusions, Everyone passing For a clump Of cascading green: Tall trees And small shrubs Defining narcissism.

II Then Arch of alabaster gulls, Then Stony gray of crows Bellicose in flight, Then Sun lurching behind An abscess of white, Then Returning to the blades.

Blurry concord Of rudimentary shapes Pass on A sentenced structure...

Cars race beyond Their vehicular nature, Shadowed by haste, Our gaze.

Of darkness!

Of lightness!

Of crowness!

Of grassness!

Of treeness!

V

IV

A place between darkness and life:

To become material (Is) the speed of light...

Voices whisper...

(Is) felt, present

III We, alone: Our black/dark culmination of Colors, portray Absence of traces...

Without light Is darkness W(h)erein resides Links of language To limitless potentates Elsewhere readied to reveal.

Voices whisper...

We, alone: Our white / lights Portray absence of colors; illuminate...

We, alone: Out-lined, phenomenological, present, Forge the signatures of color...

Empty space of the gaze We inhabit Translucent plasma Through/on which consciousness Floats in day And day out.

HENRY AVIGNON

We, alone: Together as us by now, All of us Henry(ing) in our way...

VI Between us all—hinge Is absence of detail Is dimensional otherness Is cleverly everywhere Is without our knowing The perfect balance of light time of dark timeless All of thou enveloping All "I" envelops

Voices whisper...

Our states of grace And emptiness allowing For distance

Processes by which "I" manuf(r)actures Reality— Are we illusory?" ~

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I

II

With the ledge edge depluming and sweetness beyonding In the mystery Abstraction is being all the more post-intuitive All though(s) aside And THOUGH Beforehanding still:: Alone seeks its nessnesses Aye! Pre-qualitative still:: To remember (I). Forget Is abstraction Is not graceful Is the hindmost organization of inNate Processes that make Nature Out of preternatural nothing But the deep Nessnesses

~

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with abstract this reality

with abstract this reality

With daffodils of Kandinsky(s) Words [without plausibility] said Henry to Henry [is (is) not organ(s)ic] And Nature is (not) naturally::Abstracted and de-pre-planted of Language is soiled as civilization is Bulbously empty Without Language is (is) not A plastic God Is godly plastic With bloodless petals popped in SOME Earth like dirty disTurbance::abstract-

HENRY AVIGNON

Ion Is full of black sun And singular truth Regardlessing humans Obsess at order And containment

CanNot order Be disAttained CanNot attainMent be disOrdered

Leav (ing) abstracted and burn (ing) On what devouring [does the adhering now?] makes of men more Than a rough draft Of a classic insufferable beast-life Abstract::Is an APATHETIC FALLACY Always tindering the silence Always silencing the cinder Always capacitating the inhumane Always dehumanizing the identified Always indenturing apprehension

But none of this is true if all of this is true if It’s not (Not) true because I THINK it not I am this...

This ( ) is undertow of all surfacing ability This ( ) is capacity to perceive.

This ( ) is assignation of signs [it may rain] This ( ) is equivalence of [archetechtonic] shifts Of geologic (no) primordial (no) suicidal (no) vigilant (no) obscure (no) autonomous (no) independent (no) silent (no) suffering (no) exclusive (no) nothing (no) thing (n) o mind.

But without this the-like outcome, this being-like “I” is wrought from organ(s)ic matter Descending The onely (homo) ascends With sapient simultaneity Being now and then now and then now a growthling of entropy Blossoming now and then now and then now into flowers Blackening the world with(out) possibility.

IV

III Abstraction ISM :: Say it like you mean it dum(b) fuck! ISM is ISM is ISM is ISM is ISM is ISM Is arch /:: ING (no) ED (no) S (no) ::\ e-typical [yes…that’s it] Innanimous notion(ing)::AbstractIonIng The ISM takes Time and dum(b) fucks the ING out of dodge

Abstract::our ability to utilize the emoticon Of arterial sensation (no) to articulate Unique relations with death.

HENRY AVIGNON

Abstract::functionality hinge Pathos and Ethos Abstract::allow(s) the mind (im)balance [What is it like Henry? NO…No…no…what Is what like Henry’s sickness—NOT Henry?]

Churning sea of chaos inBeTwixt ~

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[NO Henry!]

Immediately offering the necessitated contingencies

…antiquated aspects of Self or syrup [he means spirit] Or trap doors [he is meaningless] Or ruse [he is rude] Or without The future to freely design form.

[what the FUCK Does that mean?

Fuck or that or mean?]

But chaos is complexity Is the order of disOrder Is the same Order of abstraction(s) manifest

Setting and events which reinforce narrative is presently Communicating::Abstract

Of dialogue, character, action [Henry strikes Henry as benign while Henry knows Henry is malignant.]

(In the mind of the…) [perceiver! Shut up… NO…you shut the dum(b) fuck up] As compositions which expose / comment on / materialize the beautiful Necessity of process Oriented confusions / problems to be solved.

Death is the model for all abstraction: What is more abstract than death? [Not dying,

The voice of consciousness, second person (as commentary) The voice of a subconscious drive to empower the first person device, and finally, third person The voice of instinct to defer the probability of death away from Self / unto The "other"Omnipotence...

Abstraction is the intrusive narrator. Realism in art is unintrusive, full of narration that does not evaluate mankind's primal motivator.--Death!

Fool! Shut the dum(b)Fuck OUT Of hear (ing)] Art is a Death(s) application & ABSTRACT::the figuration Of the death-wracked.

V

First person narration being

VI Abstract’s strength is the poetic license of Death.

Death is poetic justice for Mr. Abstraction.

HENRY AVIGNON

Confronted by abstract::we are mindless leaps To connect and we are: “the point of view is…?"

As individuals deeply connected (not in-den(tured)ial) to sinuous as-

Death is a rare pun--equivoque. Word That defies [defiles! Shut the FUCK…] words, meaning Both: life's value and life's cessation.

Death: a portmanteau and a word; bag

Pects of death::Abstract

~

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O’ bones carried through life Stolen in a final moment of laughable abstraction.

IX Final momentum to UN Think feel act invent dispose and hark [who leaves here…Henry?]

Life is the endless play.

VII

X

Slaves to the "imitation" of Aristotle we are

[Where did we go Henry?]

[nice sentence stricture Henry!

You meant structure didn’t you…Henry? How did you mean? How Henry are you last…do you at last [didn’t you mean] represent our shared hand Moving through space ( SPACE ) To embrace some other(s) hand Is fundamental gesture Is deliberative act of survival Do you convey our rhythms Do you convey our patterns Do you convey our rhetoric

XI …Of verbal and non-verbal patterns moving in the only available direction.

XII Head-on Constant traffic Against a current of limitless potential to surface at the moment of imminent breath [You meant de…shut OUT]

The “what” that disarms The “why” of I

All of this immense pressure All of this onslaught of unknowable circumstances All that accumulated these sentences And structures…

VIII So much depends upon the chaotic arrangement of materials in time and space to effect streams of competent communication on every level.

[But what plays the vital role?

What maintains the search What gives us the feeling of being in-blur?]

HENRY AVIGNON

So much depends upon persuasion of the other to believe one's countenance is saved from the ominous moment death; as when we drive to and fro, down endless lanes, across towns, counties, and countries in the head-on position we were conceived to pursue.

XIII

[Let(s) move faster than light, shall we? And be in-blur--faster than light—at the speed of darknesses? Be at the speed Of darkness, of nothing, of no thing, of no, of, o.] ~

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Ab Stract::being In-blur. InBlur inBeing inSpirit **Kandinsky thought Abstractions to be spiritual works of art: "Born from the 'artist:' a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation." And "art in its entirety is not a goalless creation flowing into nothingness."

Blur ING Blur ISM Blur IN Blur IM Blur IS::Abstract Is the fringe Is its capacity to manage This awesome power (lessness) This limitless truth (lessness)

HENRY AVIGNON ~

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the night swimmers OSWALD LE WINTER ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ OSWALD LE WINTER CONTINUES TO PG 149

DONATE TO OMEGA

the night swimmers The glaucous sea grows indistinct as the light sinks. Boulders huddle near the shore like bathers waiting for the ebb-tide to subside.

They never found you, exiled to death among grimuldi shrimp. I have come back each time reports of a corpse washed ashore filled some corner of the local news.

The ghostly scene returns my mind to a digested year, to this spot, where I watched you join the intrepid nightswimmers as they pranced into the surf.

I’ve stared at ballooned remains in vain.

The sea must be malevolent to offer me no opportunity of closure, not allowing me to mourn a newborn love

Young, jubilant in the courage of your matchless body as it sliced the water’s iridescence in a dive.

I loved you then as if I had discovered love.

whose mature stages might have changed both our lives. Instead, death paces endlessly in a tomb I raised from memories, where despite the crawl of time, grief survives.

The cavorting chorus turned the scene into a church, its nave filled with the innocence of those convinced they could defeat the legendary undertow at Rock Sound.

I heard their music rise and fall, proud introits, until the sea claimed its revenge, to prove the Atlantic’s mastery is no fable.

hemingway Death is the final act of creation; the riddle of the frozen carcass in the hunter’s mind, not the leopard’s, and it becomes a riddle when the hunter’s lost the whole of which he was a part.

Hemingway’s life was a maze he shaped into words.

At the center no Minotaur, only Ernest without an inch of thread to find his way out.

He found no power could alter the bedeviled ego that whirled in his head like a storm loosed on the hills of Idaho, or furl the black sail under which his mind entered the final harbor where no memory exists only the skull blasted to hash and crumbs of bone.

OSWALD LE WINTER ~

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intipunku, gateway of the sun — In memoriam, Naftali Reyes

Under my palm, a heavy stone moves.

I have taught this mass of nature well, it responds to touch. I rub its surface gently as a petal or wounded bird.

Charo suggested it as our donkeys grazed up the serpentine puna trail to Intipunku.

“Imperial Gods sleep in old stone,” he said, “and their daughters, the winds and mighty son, the rain, respond with long life, when they awake from a caress.”

He believed it. I had doubts, but stroked the week I camped at wet Huinay Huayna.

Once I sat beside a stela in a phallic temple in crowded Chichen Itza as a one-legged Pedro told a coven of prim teachers how infertile Maya women journeyed, weeks, to lie at night on stone benches, legs spread for Kukulcan, for the winged snake’s sperm, after priests stole their wakefulness with mushroom brew.

The pale teachers gaped at so much faith until the guide cracked the hidden door

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in the temple’s wall, to reveal how priests, weighed down by plumed mantles, came to mate them at night. Later they bore Gods.

Faith can blind even a cynic’s eyes. Gold-robed Inca brothers, Huascar and Atahualpa died by trusting chimeric legends preached by Villac-umu, the high priest, for his increased prestige and power.

The shaman claimed three great haloes of the moon, blood-red, black with green, and ashen as the dreck of winter solstice fires-- foretold the coming of a silver-skinned God. Emperors of North and South, they believed Villac-umu knew what omens meant, and sat motionless while fear and superstition married.

Though resolute enough to shape a great code of laws, they let ignorance chase them to chaos and destruction.

When Pizarro appeared on the skirts of the Chimborazo, with less than two-hundred men, Atahualpa, neck-high in the baths at Caxabamba, kept

OSWALD LE WINTER

his army, fifty-thousand strong, leashed like jaguars.

He sent gifts instead of spears to Spaniards who coveted the gold of El Dorado .

The invaders marched south near a shore fringed with a belt of mangrove trees, their roots an underwater lattice-work. Near Chimbote they turned inland through bearded forests and climbed the Cordilleras to Cuzco, Spanish muskets, magic to natives, primed to fire: Raised crosses pledged to topple alien gods.

High Andean winds wail among the ruins of Machu Picchu. The sounds lack an identity.

Some hear the cries of the sun’s virgins, defiled by wild conquerors. Others detect a dirge of slaughtered gods or hordes of condors pulled by shot out of the sky to adorn Castilian widows for a year.

A poet, centuries later, understood the insanity of history.

He knew civilizations that invent weapons to kill great numbers, judge those they target as barbaric, too low to deserve survival, and immortalized the heights, on which ideas and minds died together, condemned by Dominican pride.

suicide bomber A bloody cabbage from the dismembered bus rolls into the gutter—a goal— one point for the Palestinian, in shreds together with the twelve Jews, young and old, whose groceries lie scattered on the screaming street; Red Stars of David, sirens howling, lights gyrating for intersections, slalom traffic to the nearest hospital.

Five hours away, my T.V. chronicles the news like an action film, without heroes, not the harmless blasted into history for returning from market just then to prepare Sabbath, no villains, not the Arab too young to leave school but old enough to hate and believe martyrdom guarantees him a cushion of virgins. And if I switch my Sony off would revenge end? Hatred layered here like eras of geology, a land that markets bloody vegetables and charred bodies for the consuming world, which insists shock alone is saleable; a charnel house that forces murderers to live and die ignorant as Arafat, who whimpers I did nothing, and he’s right.

berryman Failure carries us to loneliness amid jovial crowds, where the most intimate gesture moves nothing, not even itself, not even poems so unique and strange the future germinating in them hasn’t yet arrived.

Sleepwalkers on balconies of purple slate slink through our nights like hungry mice until we realize they are not flesh and fur but silent longings that daylight deletes from our consciousness but not from the blind lakes in which our pain swims like piranhas waiting for a herd of desires to strip, leaving nothing but a few bones thin as an old man’s hair. Sealed in an aspic of despair, our achievements can’t connect with our hearts.

Even the judgment of peers that says our life’s work stands like a monument, will not keep us one wintry morning from plunging into mute eternity.

OSWALD LE WINTER ~

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mapping a country without borders Like a snake swallowing its rattle, my thoughts return to their inceptions, seeking completion of an egg or persistence of teeth able to puncture gums in sleep, painlessly.

guided by instinct like a fly alighting on a peach left half-eaten on the table. I have followed my eye, quicker than feet, from copse to copse, past imaginary lines I drew in my own mind

Each word owns its future, mysterious as light, no knife can sever from its source.

Even History is a calyx in whose center the circle of events perfects itself with time.

to cover leagues, coveting borders that eluded me while the country grew, syllable by syllable, spreading beyond mileposts of belief, using non-existent stars by which to navigate.

Why seek questions to answers I already know?

None of us are born explorers, merely curious— first with eyes and mouths, then with fingers and finally, after speech, with words on white.

From the center of sentences energy escapes to traverse an unknowable topography. Out, Out, beyond imaginary limits of intuition, like Portuguese sailors who craved worlds joined

Light comes in many forms, as verbs, gerunds, as a noun whose passion is to flood the dark like a glittering river that runs its substance into caves harboring worlds. I have witnessed it,

by boisterous oceans, and having found them, returned to their beginnings. In the beginning is the end, the end in the beginning, two circles---doors into each other, where light and dark form one intensity.

OSWALD LE WINTER ~

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art & time I sit and daydream.

I’ve woven clouds and sounds, songs and longing, into poems filled with meager strands of memory, its half seen faces, and faded limbs once parted to accept young lust.

All this I give to poetry.

Poems keep vanished afternoons from ever ending to remind us, so wisely, even Time succumbs to Art.

OSWALD LE WINTER ART: HENRY AVIGNON

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reach for the sun CHARLES BUKOWSKI ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ CHARLES BUKOWSKI CONTINUES TO PG 155

DONATE TO OMEGA

In the early 1990s, I corresponded with Charles Bukowski. As a result, he sent me several unpublished poems for publication.

I told him that I would wait for just the right time, making sure that the context was absolutely definitive. Originally, I had intended to use them in STILETTO III: THE REBELLION OF THE HANGED (subtitle derived from B. Traven’s great novel), but that didn’t happen.

The letter you see reprinted here was included in the Bukowski collection, REACH FOR THE SUN, published by Black Sparrow Press and edited by Seamus Cooney.

The John Fante screenplay, “Storm Point,” remains unpublished (and unfilmed) to this day, but the following four poems by Buk no longer await the “definitive context.” OMEGA 7: FROM HIVE THIS MIND releases them herein.

—Michael Annis

~

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I kept looking at him and thinking, the ears don’t fit right and the mouth is foolish and the eyes are wrong. his shoes don’t fit right and the voice is a turd. the shirt hangs on his shoulders as if it disliked him. he chews his food like a dog and look at that Adam’s Apple, I’d like to cut it out and roll it along the floor. and why are his favorite words “money” and “work”? why does he splash so much when he bathes? and why does he hate me? and why do I hate him? why are we enemies? why does he look like a fool when he drives his car? when will I get away from him?

“WHAT THE HELL YOU LOOKING AT?” he screamed.

“GO TO YOUR ROOM! I’LL DEAL WITH YOU LATER!”

WAY! GO TO YOUR ROOM!”

an enemy to the king

CHARLES

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the room was beautiful.

I couldn’t see him anywhere.

I couldn’t hear his voice.

I looked at the dresser. the dresser was beautiful.

I looked at the rug. the rug was beautiful.

I sat in a chair and waited for him. come on, come on, please! hours passed. it was dark.

I could hear them listening to the radio. shit.

I kicked the screen open and dropped out the window. then I was out in the night, walking.

BUKOWSKI

“any time.”

I was 15 years old, looking for anything.

“YOU CAN’T TALK TO ME THAT

it wasn’t there.

somehow the sounds from the radio are like little pieces of ice. it has been a torn and woeful day and the ice sounds are soothing. a man needs to be soothed by something, some time, somehow. so he can build up to handle more adversity, right? right, baby, right. we float through our adversity like a soggy kite in a rainy time. right? kite, right, kite. feeling lousy too long can send you right over the edge. so, it’s good piano coming through the radio and I accept it. a balm. a balm of good luck. the drink helps too. and this Jamaican cigar. we prop ourselves up. we kid ourselves along. ice piano.

right, baby, right

good crap.

I think this bucks me up for another two days. it beats watching a movie about Billy the Kid. but now I’ve got to get up and piss. what a shame. of course, all this that I’m telling you is blather. but you see, I’m really telling it to myself. now pardon me, like we used to say in the old days: “I’ve got to bleed the lizard.” but I’m going to leave the bathroom door open so the ice sounds can mingle in with me there.

I think a bad day has been righted.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

p.s.: good night.

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fall of the roman empire car on its side in the moonlight. wheels toward the sky still spinning. a man crawls out of the broken window of the door. he is wearing a white shirt with splotches of blood. inside the car the radio is still playing loudly. the man walks across the street, sits down on the curbing. he was on his way to pick up a girlfriend for dinner. he will be late, very late. in fact, there will be no dinner. the wheels have stopped spinning. it was just one of those things which happen like the fall of the Roman Empire. somebody puts a blanket about the man. he asks for a cigarette, gets one. somebody lights it for him, he inhales, exhales. then the ambulance is there. the police cruiser.

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“he ran a red likght,” said the man to the cop, “I hit the brakes, clipped his rear end and somehow flipped. that son of a bitch.” “he left the scene?” the cop asked. “yeah,” said the man, “the son of a bitch.” the people stood off a little in the distance, staring. their night had become interesting. all of them were glad they weren’t the man sitting on the curbing. it was better than tv. “you been drinking?” asked the cop, “I smell liquor.”

“I had a few beers…”. “how many?”

“2… 3…” it was getting interesting. the car radio was still playing. rap music. a boy of about 6 started dancing to the music. two ambulance drivers walked up. one of them needed a shave.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

the one who needed a shave asked the cop, “can he walk or will he need a stretcher?” “can you walk to the ambulance?” the cop asked the man. “sure,” he said. he stood up and began walking toward the ambulance. he took a misstep, seemed to twist to the right. then lost his balance and fell. he hit the street hard. his head bounced up once, then fell back. he was still. it looked ugly. the ambulance driver who needed a shave knelt down over him. it was a hot July night in a decent little neighborhood. then the radio in the car stopped. a few of the people turned and walked off. they had seen enough. the others waited. in the brilliant and lovely moonlight.

the blazing, imbecilic tides, the ever tides— pushing through them to be swarmed over by more and more of them. to continue, to continue for the sake of continuance without reason. what a simple, galling, senseless fate. the gods have locked us out and in. no noble cause for us. just the nibbling of time. just the complaints of the days and the nights. just the eyes of the dog staring from our skull. just a stranger’s hatred screaming along the eaves. no sense, no sense, no sense. nonsense. nonsense justified, elevated, endured. a life set up, named, clothed, wasted. the worm of anger curled in the heart.

the last, lost note

CHARLES BUKOWSKI

it could have been so much better. now it never will be. life can’t save it. death can’t cure it. it could have been so much better. we are back of the mirror, stuck. the odds are off the board. the hero never existed and the dream is sick. it could have been so much. but it wasn’t. isn’t. the living don’t live, the dead die. what we are is what we aren’t. this is the last place. it can’t go further. it’s quits, my jumbo silverette. perfidious. slithering off. off.

OMEGA 7: FROM HIVE THIS MIND, Howling Dog Press, 2009 Artist: Henry Avignon; Editor & Designer: Michael Annis

song of empire LILVIA SOTO ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ LILVIA SOTO CONTINUES TO PG 161

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S ONG

OF

E MPIRE

An Empire is not a place to raise a child.

Woman, if you bear a child of Empire, he will tear your heart.

If drought, occupation, or family upheaval, send you on a journey to the center of Empire, do not marry one of its sons.

In his mother's womb he dreamed of conquest, in his mother's milk he drank of arrogance, in his heart you will always be the other.

If you love one of Empire's sons, woman, tear out your womb, do not bear his child.

If you have a child with a son of Empire, your child will tear your heart.

From his father he will learn to feel superior, from his country he will learn you are the other.

The culture in your bones will shatter in your child's bones as dust of the day.

The traditions in your veins will run in his veins as shadows of the past.

The compassion in your heart will transmute in his heart into dreams of conquest.

The whispers of your past will echo in your child's ear as voices of the dead.

The cries of the world will echo in his mind as noises of unworthiness.

Your seeds of tenderness will sprout in his eyes as blossoms of Narcissus.

If you journey to the heart of Empire, woman, tear out your womb.

Do not bear a master.

Do not bear a child for Empire.

An Empire is not a place to raise a child.

Is not.

LILVIA SOTO

carding Women comb hair till they bleed.

- David Ray, “Fascism Again�

Dancing in the street or alone in their cells, to kill the devil in their souls men chant, beat their chests.

With whips, chains, thorns, they flail, cover their penance with stiff hair shirts.

Before their scabs heal, they flagellate again.

Now women card their hair, and have no shirt to cover their head.

Each cards harder each day for the devil whispers she could have thrown her warrior son from the wall.

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the murdered But the murdered are replenished. Everyday they are born.

- Mahmoud Darwish, Green Flies Please tell me about the young men buried in Arlington and in cemeteries large and small across the land.

Are they the reincarnation of the French and the Americans interred in Flanders, the Napoleonic soldiers who lost their lives to the Russian winter, or did they last die at Gettysburg?

Did they slaughter the Aztecs at Tenochtitlán?

Did they with Scipio Aemilianus burn Carthage to the ground?

Did a rain of arrows pierce their hearts at Thermopylae?

Did they go on raids against the Nubians with King Menes of Memphis?

Are young men, and, now, women, willing to die for the greed their leaders call freedom, for the vengeance they praise as honor, born and reborn, mere human clay baked in different hues, trying to use up the karma they gathered in their previous lives of carnage, only to accrue new crimes on their wandering soul’s tally?

Are they simple pawns without value, ready to be played by the masters who win the glory and cash the prizes? ~

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Is their vocation for anonymous sacrifice undiminished after each cycle, born anew with a piranha’s ferocity each time they join a new generation, die in a different continent?

Is it self-sacrifice, or lust for glory because they don’t understand how common medals have become, how in a few years bargain hunters will get theirs for a dollar in a flea market?

Or are the dead of all the wars in all the lands of this earth virgin flesh, bone, sinew, fresh blood pumping strong hearts, readying them to kill and be killed?

Are they first-time-on-this-earth souls, creatures separate and distinct from all others, born to replenish the murdered?

And the kings, czars, führers, emperors, and presidents for life who send them off to conquer Lebensraum, stoke their lust for blood, avenge their fathers, reclaim their Helens, assuage their fears of the abyss, are they all avatars of Wotan, Ares, Huitzilopochtli?

LILVIA SOTO

Are they to be pitied for their deadly drive to control and accumulate, for their impotence for life?

Are they interchangeable, since the more they hate each other, the more alike they seem?

Do the corporals and the rulers trade places with each turn of the wheel?

And the woman who gives birth to each, washes and feeds him, loves him more than the sun in the sky, the songbird on her window, the air in her lungs, more than her own salvation— is she willing to raise her son through mumps, broken bones, all-night fevers, his puppy’s death, his girlfriend’s betrayal, and then, before he's even a full man, just hand him over to a chieftain, an admiral, a tyrant, knowing her boy will come back a dead or broken body or a soul murdered for having made of death his whore, murdered other women’s sons?

Can a mother hand her son over knowing the body that comes back in a coffin or paralyzed from the shoulders down carries the unspent seed of his loins, her murdered grandsons?

Is a mother such an unnatural creature that she will do what no other beast on land, air, or water will— listen to the fears of old men who have forgotten that the blood running through a young man’s veins is for begetting, not spilling?

Is she so denatured that she will believe the lies of a coward who will not go to battle himself nor send his own to steal the gold and the crown of laurel his shriveled manhood and dusty heart crave, instead of trusting beyond any ruse or deceit the life pulsating in her son’s veins?

Can a mother do less than the midwives of the Hebrews who refused to follow the Pharaoh’s orders and found a way to save the men children?

Can she do less than Moses' mother, who when she could no longer hide him, put her baby in a bulrush basket daubed with slime and pitch and left him in the sedges by the river’s brink?

And if she cannot protect him, better to throw her son from a wall, see her infant dead before her eyes rather than have him come back from war a wreck who wishes he were dead, or worse, a venal ruler who orders murder on a global scale.

As creation’s helpmate, a woman has the power to withhold.

She can refuse to be a witness to destruction, tear out her womb before she will bear the murdered or the murderer.

not my son!

Democracy assassinated the family that was here - graffiti on a Haditha house Your son could not have done it, your boy is not a murderer, but you have seen the pictures, the large and the small bundles wrapped in flowered blankets, colorful rugs, the bodies on the trucks, on the floor of the morgue, the little girl sitting cross-legged on the ground between the blood-splattered wall and her uncle's bare feet, the girl who hugs herself, shoulders stooped, gaze of terror, mouth open, screaming, mouth that is the scream, girl who is the scream, scream whose name is Eman Walid Abdul Hamid, scream that lives because she hid under the bed, arms tight around her little brother Abdul Rahman.

LILVIA SOTO

You have read that in the house next door thirteen-year-old Safa Younis, covered in her mother’s blood, pretended to be dead, when the Americans left, she held her little brother Mohammed until his death.

You have seen, you have read, you have heard, you want to scream, Not my son!

You will have months to sit in a courtroom, listen to the horror, wait, hope, pray.

You will have years to visit him in jail, take him brownies and cigarettes, leave early because there’s nothing to say.

You will have all the days of your life to ask yourself what happened.

He’s a stranger.

Did you hold him enough, kiss him good night?

Did you speak against the war?

Should you have pushed him to flee, taught him to question, resist his friends’ pressure, his leaders’ lies, the media’s rah, rah, rah?

Did you?

Were you gentle with him? ~

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pink alert

or

happy is the color of s u b v e r s i o n

—For Cindy Sheehan and Medea Benjamin

On a wall in a Madrid eatery hangs a sign that says: No Singing.

On a wall in the airport of Rio de Janeiro hangs a sign that says: No Playing with Luggage Carts.

Ergo: There are still people who sing, there are still people who play.

— Eduardo Galeano, Window on Prohibitions, Walking Words

They would be remiss if they didn't dress in orange jump suits the worst of the worst, the dangerous men they picked up abroad, and rendered to Cuba and hid behind wire, and labeled with logic that's razored and words somewhat oranged.

Black is for mourning, but don’t mention that.

Corpses come home at midnight and burials with orphans in black are not allowed in the news’ light.

Red is for danger and death.

Your son’s blood was drained in the sand, but in his casket he looks almost alive.

So don’t think of blood, for you should remember that red is for danger.

Orange means warning of danger, your leaders must warn you and warn you.

~

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They would be remiss if they didn't remind you of al-Qaida and terrorist cells and people with turbans and veils, Saddam and Iran, Korea and its bomb, explosives in heels, and nail files in bags, white powder in letters, uranium from Niger, and mushroom-shaped clouds.

LILVIA SOTO

Yellow means wait, wait, and keep waiting, for tomorrow is sure to be orange or red.

And while you are waiting, you must also worry.

If you do not fret, then you're un-American, and we need to warn others about you.

[ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

~

You wouldn't think anybody could turn the beauty and joy, the becoming, of pink into perfidious offenses, but when four middle-aged women in pink tried to deliver a petition for peace to the US Mission in New York, they were handcuffed, dragged to a wagon, and locked in The Tombs, a jail full of felons and roaches.

L I L V I

They were charged with trespassing, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and obstructing the administration of government.

A

At their trial months later, Mission staff, security guards, police officers, and various and sundry patriots declared the women's plan to get arrested a publicity stunt.

S

Richard Grennell, the head of communications for the Mission, professed he perceived the women as threat for they were dressed in pink, and laughing, and singing Give Peace a Chance, and they were... they were... they were clearly happy.

ART: HENRY AVIGNON

Pink is for babies and peonies and roses, and the soft cheeks of children, and the radiance of lovers.

The sky can betray a suggestion of pink for a moment at dawn, and magnolias give just a hint of its softness before they open their blossoms.

O T O ~

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s → o →↑ p collider r →

sopor →

JOE GIGLIO ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ JOE GIGLIO CONTINUES TO PG 167

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scenic, zero divided wind-false prophet(time t)ic(ked ): laid out i(n)de(m)n(t)ify close contacts scrap evening’s opera - in canned essence reve(a)l while it’s fresh… secret(e) edifice – bldg. # not visable

←↓

the real me reel, spun out mo’-r(e)al-ity - jitney to the corporeal jitters clustered demons cornered at 60mph… re-hashed resin of resistance, once more visited upon sidelined smashers measured deceleration un-recorded

JOE GIGLIO

collider

→

sopor→collider

seraphic warlords gather curtain(ed) swatches: paint drip/blood-soaked, a kerchiefed ascetic’s snarl pleasure: de-centered w/o proud judas .edu preceeded by brain-rape = vaunted palaces of dire con(tra)-sequenced higher learning disembodied spirit maps, encircle hopefuls… (be)side-wa(l)ked cafes of latter day, muleskinner’s theme music-encumber(land)ed gaping holes in resolute theories: solation wired to spark upon blinking, timed to extrude wounded matters of the art-in passing… embossed, covered, flaxen-haired beauties returned multi-plane existence, balanced only by good fortune’s generosity – speaks of the heightened senses of the past if only to charm defenseless coincidence… revisited upon daily breath, taking (back) liberty after a protracted, forward-motioned retreat footprint shadows - cast in step time

JOE GIGLIO

magnificence in pursuit of defining momentum (di)visions clouded by hindsight - less the options… ascendence through osmotic devotion captures no essence bartering thought for sensation – for-(e)-closure

~

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acrid lyrics work deep grooved impressions of late, the dead are discounted as traitors early on, the living made the rules

(f)ear

3-4 colors primarily set a pall, upon which torrents rend horizons to splinters tempered with rainwater gathered in inkwells edits outnumber axioms mercifully, we proceed in life unaware of our modularity replaced by oneself, innocently enthusiastic & hopeful the foregone conclusion feigns mystery, to dissimulate the fix mutinous notions, pre-regulated as hangdog depravity swirl in dervish-like ambiguity, permitting only tacet isms the crime of mentation carries with it the punishment of consciousness

marks marks

nascent armistice, archaic in concept, weak willed in nature cobbles together disparate, ideologically crazed soul-splitters latticed jet(s) stream(ed) cross thatched, fractal patterned clusters

marks

surprisingly vacant, not withstanding a ¼ century education urbane, erudite, egg-cartoned, web-windowed, frozen – pacified → god closes around the clubhouse turn… little remains to (in)fantasize – algorithms sculpt feelings ÷ expectations the last page of every story awaits our morbid curiosity seek, & you will find your horror…

JOE GIGLIO

contrived reasons to be present, themselves of dubious motive, (m)ask imminent surrender a surfeit of true ardor, once soul-tattooed – replaced by a yen for, a cold glass of water… sighting love: absolution+a supreme 'be in'…

~

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with no ending insight, ~

words play on...

par (for the coarse)

mad slide slush fun(d)house of mere roars tricked out sawed off hipshot flotilla synched to strope flamed spin floors wide draped pants striped, hands wiped, blood typed just right, piped hype more doors…

5-6 w/ kicks, side split quick pics, find double helix rest stop white pop, soul note long coat, reach out re-mix stare at eyes shut, take that god smut, outback church hut blues licks… misstep in depth red dress death bless - hide stash dis-pep noir-esque news desk act rash re:hash source out bad rep don’t flout school prep out shout bridge lept bring cash…

JOE GIGLIO

pay-day en-slaved no way be saved make hay sun-craved bait switch son’s bitch dug ditch pull stitch don’t snitch get rich call off white cloth gypsy moth fall soft don’t cough points shaved… out-rage burn sage free cage torn page ease up Big Boy Cruddup bottleneck throttled wreck high brow low tech sus-pect wow pow de-tect e-rect pays lee for me holy see pop-py hero wins chinny chin more fine therein fucked up…

JOE GIGLIO ~

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ire strained re: past-tells - canvas the nigh well sprung wolf’s scent gnashing ondeoline choirs: (s)wordless drag defeated proponents of gas house greens, peppered w/ starblind drippings… ask(ance)/(fore)stall/(har)binge(r)/cu(l)t pre-measured despondence flames chablis dressed shaman: matched (des)pair… soot shadowed eyes have it (on faith) earthen shards, end haze chilled responses – shuffle filtered meaning from un-stepped on detritus decelleration of dependence amassed… signing games of telephone drown out the quiesence: still life keening over(t) lost innocent’s self-portrait uncensored homily vs. epiphany… knife-edge balance evenly dispersed among non-partisan realists: a predilection for cronyism reprised …not as I do

JOE GIGLIO

i think i remind others of someone and so, expect me to act in character caricature… i know nothing about him on instinct, i navigate pre-vi-cariously amid turgid ranting yet they are only star(v)ing…

running #s

pointillistic, blue-green headlights visible in leaded aperture, spell stilled life in source code 5→7pm tear stained window glass… draw a line through traumas 1&2, from a list of dozens: 104 possible finger cross combinations hollowed feeling pit deep – twice only for cause…

5 stories/14 facial markers – genotyped by distance from the sum, rotating char remains pat for the moment seek un-shuttered sensibilities: extant/eponymous … crawl into battle - when scoring the stock, cross-thatch if necessary: 1 for you, 100 for me 4 clicks past solace stands denial – defiantly…

~

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+/- 7B human dots intuitive rhythm presides→ lest we self-destruct earlier than predicted orbits toleranced to the 25th decimal point circumvent parallel realities the sun bounces off the pitiless ocean shining like egg-tempera

banned practice left-loft turned-toward e.t.a. 900 our’s/your’s half cough-caf mid-sigh wreck loose, choose boots on the ground ’n go fourth, a state meant for few of a mind splattered, wile away...

artifice linked>>inter-faith/faced revisionist: offset/based calls>>traced beverage laced

stick figures

poisoned doily>>anti-massacre

in-terpret/trepid stance red shoes bled dry ice: embraced per rain’s daily briefing fools lash

infer lined page: entry declined

memory: a race to judgment>>dais raised on pointed spi(r)(k)es fists enraged: lovers rent unclothed, erased... a top(ic) less than credible, voicings cries sensory

of accord reached: dancer’s metered renouncement

no cares, one knows: content meant for a_way with words deal down bod(i)es, hoards street’s invocation sin tax (r)(l)eve(a)ls killing fields: plow(ed) under dimes stored left b(l)anked filled w/dreamed morsels toward a come-on, good for the missi(v)(le)s sigh(s) low

JOE GIGLIO

swe(e)(a)t carried outàtaken in conquest order(ed) by numbness, en masse context:less the principle (d)...

shares the (w)(st)ealth w/tha ’din (know you car(ri)ed) a lull in the frightening ‘act shunned’ or axion postulates abide & by(e)the fissures (sul)lied in true character meted out in censored dozens axiom’s action-to act on deride(s) of a life_time/line slow to reflect an imagined misstep in (en)live(nd) deadlock ~

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i sing the blues for you today JOY LEFTOW ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ JOY LEFTOW CONTINUES TO PG 173

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I want to do poetry like Billy Holiday singing the blues I want to do poetry like Ella Fitzgerald I want to be me singing my holiday blues Billie’s songs are poetry so fine it makes me think I’m her doing rhyme Thoughts about Billie make me go off line, hook line & sinker, she puts me back in time I sing to my lover, I want to make your poetry mine because you spout rhymes while observing my life become an unending grocery list of things to get done Your life or mine, yours is on my mind – the list of to dos keeps growing exponentially Number 1, try out a mattress, 2, buy it, 3, buy new locks to keep someone out number 4, find someone to install it, make 10 million calls & keep writing lists. What did you say? How many sessions, any lessons in storage? Will the Divine power of intervention help?

I don’t want to bore you with the details and derail you from my song.

Damn, wonder if I’ll ever see Willa Dean again – oh man, you know the women I mean Kept her head wrapped up like an African Queen with her creamy coffee looking self?

Willa said the secret to good potato salad is to go heavy on the mayo Willa Dean days, they’re all in a haze now. I was so high back then.

The memory lingers, listening & watching while she told stories. She’d whisper, her voice barely a breeze, tell me about her lovers, say, “I’m gonna get me some.” Sometimes I’d get confused & asked did she mean her husband or lover. Willa’d have dinner waiting when her husband got tired of cab driving & came home to rest. She’d show me wilted lettuce and bring it back to life telling me about her lovers, drugs, & children while making potato salad. I thought, she’s a woman of many talents, a stoned cold junkie and a working mom combined The nose that knows, her preference was coke, good moist coke at a good right price too on the upper-upper west side in Washington Heights, 162nd street to be exact Willa was friends with a famous New York jazzman and his wife, a New York City teacher. Willa had class & style combined; she took me to dress models at the Ritz one time. Got paid for it too. It was such a pleasure to do. I even got a pair of designer gloves out of it.

People accepted Willa everywhere we went – We were at jazzman’s apartment, small tight crowded living room upper west side 90’s.

Willa’s friend sat across from me staring at my big breasts. I can see how tight your muscles are.

Let me massage you she said aggressively hurting me so bad physically we had an argument instead.

Passing through hundreds of lives so many colors Let me take you back to what we share – strivings for love – wanting to go somewhere – wanting to discover who we really are – got anywhere to go? – ~ see ourselves through the eyes of others and – finally see who we really are. extend this power to the umpteenth degree. We still wonder who they think we are ~ uncover recover to turn to return to who we want to be Dreams are reality – stop thinking, dreams are the color of my true love’s hair Beyond the color of my true love’s hair, his dreads caress my bare hands A whole-years grocery list pressed into a foggy mist of autumn red turns bright chartreuse before bleakly the list dissolves before my eyes True colors make my heart sneeze amidst a perpetual mist of violet-blues a dream more real than a memory

JOY LEFTOW

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The who am I lost & found in who I am, a contradictory introspection of a delusion of who I want to be mixed with who I already am, the me that is so deep it transcends lucidity the me that fires synapses constantly. I am the me with no home inside, listless, desolate, discontent, abjective, retrospective, lost in grim moments of lost wishes and dreams of who I could be if Clinton was my family, or even Obama would be better for me, I love color. I’ll sell myself for less. I promise I’ll settle.

You can't always get what you want You can't always get what you want but if you try sometimes – well you just might find you get what you need, oh baby

blues part ii

Let me sing the blues for you again today like I sang for you yesterday My eyes run misty blue for you The holiday a passed disgrace I saved no face my eyes stay misty blue for you An outcast jew singing outcast blues, my mother sang them before me. I want to sing misty blue for you this season.

Freshly showered I emerge to sing the blues for you, to bring you back to where I want to be I go back in time to rhyme with you, keep my flow to your flow, the glow of my flow keeping rhyme to your rhythm.

You go Charley Brown; come back to hear me sing misty blues Your eyes shine misty in return I see beyond your armor, sing misty with me Come in, stay a spell, let me sing misty blue for you.

I put a spell on you I’m a give you some real life southern comfort, a few pecans, flow the red river stills your mind without forgetting the questions, I falter, our laughter fills volumes of silent banter, I stand before you, my sensibility turning chill while I wait for the lantern of my sou to light this space Make this day holy, my life skips an Eartha Kitt beat my mind feels my heart sing for rain is misty blue I’m sensing changes maybe I’ll wait for you, what if I don’t know all I claim to what about you do you play misty blue and know more than I know.

Inky blue, dusk settles a cool blanket on the sky glimmers of silver clouds shimmer remain Do you see the same inky sky I see when I see what you see when I look for you to see if you’re looking where I’mmm looking for you, I want a raspberry sky to roll its toll onto golden unplowed fields of ripe green wheat Common Daddy let the good times roll Common Daddy let me fill your soul Common Daddy don’t you be late I think I may have a date with fate I’ve got this date for old time’s sake, just let me fill your plate Let the good times roll for old times, for old soul’s sake Sing me those old time blues give me a taste of those old soul blues A blue eyed soul girl singing the old soul blues for you Daddy

JOY LEFTOW

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i’ve always been bad Pieces of myself dropping like raindrops I watch the raindrops of myself Drip down my big legs To the ground – that space inside myself Where I fall into the abyss I’ve always been bad I need a hand Hand me some crazy glue to hold together the pieces of my life Pieces of me falling by the way side as I make a move on living That me that is so bad That me that seizes the night rain in my fist … I take a fast train I should take the next plane instead; it’s faster And I like speeding I have my tickets to prove it You can look up my record on the computer

Kicking it on the corner with my bf and got busted for it I’m the one who at 14 knocked on the hippies’ door Up in the hood when they were the first ones who moved in And just happened to have a door at the street level No one else would knock since none of us had met any of them before But I wanted to knock on their door and chill I hung out in bars with them where I chilled and danced all night And sometimes sneaked a sip of alcohol I’m that bad girl who left one man for another Left a man in the lurch when she’d had enough Of the stuff to make you crazy, who’s fault is it he became lazy It’s all hazy now, right or wrong we make choices, we all try, we live and die

I’ve always been bad the kind of bad that makes you feel uncomfortable Makes you look at others around you to see if they see what you see when you look at me I’m the kind of bad that makes others be afraid to hear my bad The kind of bad that makes you itch with discomfort when people hear my name they twinge with disgust I’ve always been bad I’m the one who smoked cigarettes at 11 years old

I’ve always been bad I’m that bad girl who started smoking blunts down in the park on a bench at sunset kickin’ it back and staring into nature, getting my marijuana giggles and passing them on to all the people I turned on I’m that bad girl who found some people to laugh with me while others turned up their noses And complained about how I jumped right into dialogue without even saying hi first I can’t tell you much more about it except to reiterate I’ve always been bad I can’t help it…

That’s the way it’s always been

JOY LEFTOW

~

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15 minutes of fame

An open moment to eternity Fastidious, attached to passing moments I live in Warhol days An open heart mends wounds Are you for or against them?

What’s your political game?

Everyone's got his15-minutes of fame Are you on their side or mine?

Is it them or is it us Is there an us anymore Who is us anymore anyway Anywhere I’m supposed to know?

Did you know …

My headache keeps me awake to cover the worldwide news An open wound Nightly sound of the evening news A bleeding ulcer seeking to be healed Closer to home news too, All news is bad news Except the rescued puppy thrown in to control you A news-forecast makes everything worse – Ignore the news a week or two Say your regards to Pluto Ignore my bleak forecast of doom All of us are doomed As we all are doomed anyway The more you do - the more gets done When you stop doing there’s no more to get done Open another wound Always a dream remains of Another go-round Take care, Hope …

To see you there If there is another go-round

the eye in my See my fears roll down the street Tears allayed by stares in space A cell phone in hand, no dial tone, a blues band commands my adrenal glands Understand it’s my wedding band, not a new brand of incense, I take a firm stand on a crash land course stuck in the meadowlands of York Passion fruit seeps from my sweat glands Swerving into oblivion on the freeway, an alien shaman ~ that’s me An alligator devoured my right hand – Now I have 2 left feet left Beauty is nothing but a backdrop for the blues We all want beauty peace a little food and empathy I keep trying and failing to decompartmentalize; an exemplary fit Lost my wit – cut it out stupid twit see what’s writ do as befits, I observe others fare better The eye in my sky reflects humanity’s tears their fears that life can’t be any better or go anywhere except to all one place eventually Do you want to be easily forgot, your family there A score or two more no one will know you Damn give your shell to charity No formaldehyde either, please.

I use the excuse I’m Jewish; bury me green please I keep saying son it will pass you by before we come noon to sun

JOY LEFTOW

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON

sky is crying Is this how you want to spend your last day My man loves his drugs Almost as much or more than me He gets them easily supercalifragilisticexpialidociouslly, Tons of prescriptions legally His drugs do him right Momentarily maniacal he says he’s feelin’ so tight I see him in a new light struggling to write Doctrinally following clinical struggles, a mix of Geodon, Ambien Lamogine, To name a few - some are noxious others only for allergies Billy Jean’s not his lover; enervated after meds no more energy when he’s through throw some synergy into the fray Walking up Bombay Broadway Brings me back to tears rolling down the street I refuse to admit defeat repeat it all again and again The eye in my sky is crying

JOY

LEFTOW ~

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or

i

g

m

a

(i) lyre

MICHAEL D. MAIN ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ MICHAEL D. MAIN CONTINUES TO PG 177

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( for Francesca Filia Aestas )

I. toward francesca, . . . an appeal apollo's yearning, apples given in trees a queried garden, stories of netted sun a tilting of earth, gold shifted hives near

into airstream rails

into swept, . . . interleavers cloak docking nails, the door outside airstream, its trail hitch starshell, oil and gas, evanescence, ever clear :: bet clearing, clarifying, comical position

honey hollows, a mounting upfallen sky

outgassed sphere, rollicking, life rolling

:: rain dancing

rejoinder to road, to dust, to shot put descending the distance, the thunderhead

in remonstrance, sowings of stillmost

lightning:

starry sequins, begowning heart beats

red tongue in sickle

pulsar in thunder, shoulders of the god hoisting hips aloft, granting the beloved every ground.

MICHAEL D. MAIN ~

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piccolo e c s t a t MICHAEL i D. MAIN c preposition 176 ~ for Heller Levinson & Michael Annis

birdland

through

~ for Henry Avignon

stasis, ... appropriating

~

~

piccolos, rapid weaving corpuscles

above

adjoined in woodland's play: first day

a stairway, ... down!

dawns, kind of blue, outtakes astride

descender raven, black crow cousin

shadow off pigskin's tuff, upstaging

skittering for corn, quick a pellet

blood gutted strings, bone saw trembling

of existence, thrash sprint clacking

fear of root cellar's black, ten drifting

winner's lunch game card: broker's

straw notes, hotcross suspense, timelock

stakes from crib sheets strafing

fasteners, stripping the hatch

chance operations ::

:: would you

rafters crushed in breaking tar surf

smelling mary,

tide, a caw repetitious, suspicious

live in a world without its yarrow gold

caw bitching innards, cleaning machine

planing pulp throats in sensate tongues

operator, operator, break open a five

where lips, failing, mark zero(ist) spaces

street cleaner, rip pay it forward -

save but a poet's ear, ash gray, tickling

kettle tap meddling avenue cashier

bare nothing?

a tic, a tac, a twitch, a swiggle off birdland

[ articulocutor

hinge

cycle ]

I.

II.

III.

"OF LINGUA FRANCA"

"IF BY LAND"

"BLOODWORK JOURNAL: NO. 1"

from

from

from

stratocasting, ... voicefalls

acquiring, ... word(hood)

freedomwalking, ... hand clapper

windless wired tongues (un)lisping

infalling reminiscence snaking grass

bells recognizance, drum skittle blacktop

tracing the knuckles, fine smelted

out of doors, exfoliating timbrels

rolling (up)rising river fore(telling)

palm and pencil, limbic tapping lobe

titular crown of thorns tied fast

ain't a whisper, ain't a judge, but keys

:: circulating

to a tree

:: uncuffing

sonic attentive flasks, flesh(willed)

:: keeping be(e)

skate the stratagems, don't sweat rapids

inward canal needling theadbare reticulums, a query, a question(full) tic asking more

MICHAEL D. MAIN joiner of cause to postop perception

it's not the undoing, it's the journey(wide)

who is waking, take the 'A' train up

it's the journey, to be counted (un)shot

window blind tracks where(by) the sun

at foot(souled) march

itself might speak, where, tagged signs stalk sun

~

177

~

gord-a-dan

TATJANA DEBELJAČKI ~

178

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ TATJANA DEBELJACKI CONTINUES TO PG 179

DONATE TO OMEGA

THE ROOTS ARE CLAIRVOYANT, GRASPING UNTOUCHABLE WISDOM. THAT IS THE WAY IT STARTS, THE SIGN OF TIMES IS DECEIVING. IT IS THE TIME TO SEE THE DROWNED. DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE READING? YOU ARE BRINGING AS SMALL AMOUNTS AS YOU LIKE TO. YOUR IMAGE IS STILL GROWING AND CRYING. COMING CLOSER AND GOING AWAY, STRONG WEAKNESS. THE WORLD THAT IS SPREADING BUT DOES NOT BELONG TO ANYONE, GIVE SOMETHING FROM YOURSELF THAT COULD BRING SENSE FROM THE THREAD OF WILL. TRY LOOKING WITH DIFFERENT EYES TO THE LIGHT. EVIL IS DANGEROUS, CONTAGEOUS ILLNESS, MOVE OUT OF THAT EVIL, IT MAKES THE CENTURY LONGER."GORD-A-DAN" THE TEAR RIVERS ARE NOW MURMURING, THE DOG IS WAILING, YOU ARE GONE. BREAK LOOSE I BEG YOU! AND SILENTLY, THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR, COME TO ATTEND THE FEAST OF PRESERVED EMOTIONS, DAYDREAMS, THE HAPPY MOMENTS! DECENT GIFT, HUNGRY CRAVING IN THE BUNK OF FEATHERS, SILK AS PURE AS THE SNOW, WITH THE FORCE OF SILENCE. FLOWERS OF DANDELLIONS LET'S DANCE FROM AFAR WITH OUR LOOKS, WITH OUR BODIES, LET'S TOUCH WITH PALMS ONLY.

Istina ne postoji, Istina i laž Se podržavaju!

Svaka istina nužno U sebi nosi nešto lažno!

Ambiciozna laž nije toliko lažna, izmišljena, nije večna.

U sebi ne sadrži istinu prilagodjenu samu od sebe.

Rešava enigmu tajanstvenosti ne obazirući se da li istina kada se preokrene čini laž!

Ove dve suprotne moći uzastopno pokreću jedna drugu, negiraju se u igri reči, pokreću bes, osvetnički gnev.

Zagonetno, odgonetno, stidim te se!

Skriven mi pogled pod velom, boja svetlosti zadivljujući opus!!!

odana

There is no truth, the truth and the lie support each other!

In every truth there is something deceiving!

The ambitious lie is not so deceiving, fictional, not eternal.

There is no truth contained in it adjusted by itself.

It is solving the riddle of mystery not paying attention if the truth when is twisted becomes the lie!

These two opposite powers continuously set each other to motion, they deny each other in word puns, start up fury, revenging rage.

Riddling, solving, I’m ashamed of you!

My eyes are hidden under the veil, colors of light astonishing scale!!!

devoted

TATJANA DEBELJAČKI

~

179

~

d is a s sem b ly HELLER LEVINSON ~

180

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ HELLER LEVINSON CONTINUES TO PG 189

DONATE TO OMEGA

In twenty years there will be no glaciers on the planet. — Gretel Ehrlich Every person in the world now has in his bones a measurable deposit of stontium-90 traceable to the fallout from atmospheric nuclear testing. — Jonathan Schell

HELLER

coming & uncoming becoming

LEVINSON

activates assembly twists diurnal raids pitiless no match for the captain’s apoplexy he eats with his stomach

publishing houses

devoted to recitative plead more bass

-- a meltdown is composition decomposing –

harlequins flattering trapezius bramble storm decomposition:ending – a falsification ignoring tern nutrients developmental processes collusional inspired by the disintegrative bloom

in-

herent in loot a climate recovering from dog bites milkless titted Kilimanjaro infraredded the Larsen Ice Shelf infraredded moulins in assembly Cha-Tur-Anga

spinal flexions equator soulful playlands the spine is keyboard is lumbar & ro-

mance tomato soup hardy winter coccygeal ramp the penetrative rehearsing breakdown asanas foil the temperature ‘We live in the oddest moment since our species first stood upright, the moment when we are finally grown so big in numbers and in appetite that we alter everything around us.’ ~

181

~

prolonged childhood permits culture

‘6 ½ million spent supporting migratory wildlife while 3 ½ million was spent on migratory MIS

workers.’

‘Harvest of Shame’

TREAT

‘The Sweatshops of the Soil’ this earth once floor to the sky

MENTS

pitched in fitful but enduring dialogues the ozone buck-shotted the nightmare pustulant redolent with sulfuric discursive & cannot

oscine

breath curls no more spasmic briefs cooled in cyber-iconic miniaturizations the modern soul a goddamn shrivellization exercise the deputies gone Wyatt on the fly perhaps some chance at reckoning the burly & the brutalized brew having-a-sale quibbles heuristic links damaged by the 22 minute news bringing you the world the canvas tanked now keltoid to American Idol the breach foreswore ‘polar bears weigh hundreds of pounds less than they did thirty years ago, because the ice fields where they hunt have shrunk’

HELLER

thinning down dumbing down dumbfound larceny in the candidacy to insure annuals are never planted in vague salt provides intent within the context of mortar

~

182

‘modern human beings are machines for burning fossil fuels’ ~

LEVINSON

furnish

funnelfulls

fractuosities Frankensteins!

concussing the intertropical convergence zone underarm-deodorizing de-creates flame- gutters cramp the church petechiae undermine the litany religions require a long holiday …..

History will define Homo sapiens sapiens as that species which ushered artificial intelligence onto planet earth. when the nation is imperiled – SPEND! politics = consumerism one human being in five sees ER every week a plead: spinal innovations to retrieve lost masteries parading chlorofluorocarbon densities

FIFTY FIVE THOUSAND NUCLEAR WARHEADS EXTANT

parents spend $30,000.00 a year to send their children to elite kindergartens ‘I have seen the best’ I have seen the worst I have seen the mediocre even seen the already dead destroyed & I see the destruction to come … what fresh

HELLER LEVINSON hell

is

this

microcephalous routings reboot

~

183

~

cloud-claws rip the countryside stars chime libidinous deficit the radar is surly the last rivers guffaw from the mouths of the newly radiated fungal migrations release cords of jaguar spit pustulant-pimpled-scabrous ventricles sprout leprous sores & carbuncles vomit-lava roams aorta hairspray is antecedent to Vaseline & fission is no longer the chocolate chip in the carpool thermal pulses/blast waves/firestorms/3 stages of radiation sickness (no end to the ways to die) – this is not a warning but a comeuppance

barley baking in rectums

sludges the turnpikes rancidity rakes the matinees speech jumps to elbows for refuge scientists regard the ass as the worlds first draft animal vintage Volkswagens in lust

cud curly zamouse in lust BETA Italian baby carriages on Park Avenue in lust civil wars in lust

BURN

cranberry in lust lusty isotopic phalanxes worthiness parallels dragon-fire if love is conjunction is sex fracture myth catalogues suspensions bridges

~

184

continental interstitials ~

albedo rusings

HELLER LEVINSON

the Greco gods callable upon receipt [1512 speedometers Only at Behlmann’s in stock now!] the way home is obedient Spring & purchasing bulk mulch in Fairfield County, CT subnivian empires cogitate the meaning of gold the thirst is for language to burn horizon exaggerates horizon & out of what complexes/complexities does nuclear arise (shadow-washing does complexity have a complex do all complexes contain complexities without complexity do we have complex trollops port inspiration trollops port revelation uninspiring trollops die broke

HELLER

‘Arctic terns know that the return is different from the beginning’

LEVINSON

to return to the place of non-return (brushstroking a retreating canvas) ‘the turn [le tour], the turret or tower [la tour], turns & towers, these

things of return, this cause of an eternal return even in the mortality of a day, in the undeniable finitude of the ephemeral.’ ~

185

~

pillaging thermohaline circulation but in America we don’t condone lynchings anymore history is tungsten backsliding

grapnels spike earth’s larynx while the returning students of advanced meteoritics find themselves without subsidy the chain saw is in the woods FIRE

walk the dog have you run today?

STORMS

boating 4 stroke 300 horsepower twin Yamaha Outboards the troposphere & stratosphere voided of canticle

‘a single multi-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated one hundred and twenty five miles over Omaha, Nebraska could detonate an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to damage solid-

HELLER

LEVINSON

state electrical circuits throughout the entire United States and in parts of Canada and Mexico

…’ identically incapacitating the modern urban soul – skeletal structures posturized by technology,

embryos now develop with palms smashed to ear in preparation for a lifetime of cell phone activity …

~

186

~

at a time like this

Sources

is it appropriate to be studying Deepak Chopra’s * Edward R. Murrow’s documentary Harvest of Shame, produced by CBS.

‘The Seven Spiritual Laws of Love’?

* Rachel Carson, The Silent Spring

thermonuclear reactions decrease mass

* Bill McKibbin, The End of Nature

if we de- materialized could we prevent Holocaust

* Gretel Ehrlich, The Future of Ice * Johnathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth

the modern urban soul = its techno-toys

* Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason

on the buses the streets the underground

* Rainer Maria Rilke, The Eighth Duino Elegy, translated by Robert Kelly

I count them

* Allen Ginsberg, Howl * T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

death dribbles their eyeballs

* The movie, An Inconvenient Truth

‘With all their eyes, all creatures see the open. Only our eyes are turned around, and surround it with pitfalls …’ no aprils no roots language unpulverized in the radioactive fallout undergoes a renewed becoming oxygenates non-peevishly … it’s going to be ugly

HELLER LEVINSON ~

187

~

from sonic this equipoise

tumbling encomium

(after Tannery Brook

dispositional grace ecclesiastic spur

catchall

collaboration

leathery rendering

cutthroat

larksupr

hark the heralds

(poise

mark spark

critical

combing dash interval allegiance hatchings saunter sarabande

sound of wear

re-mark

rivuletr(t)inglingaleviobringing

sinewy tendon sargasso strategies shuffle

wear sounding

water/rock/lap

suppling cohabitational particle collusions sprint enharmonic scaling feints accomplice ensiform scumbling sluice cataract roundabout marshmallow petitionings slurs

era(compo)sure establishing

pouring insessorial

tributes

slice

trib slips

u scull

taries

ing

arials

scythe rumble scalp promissory m(pl)oan

crewel calibrates

plaint (pliant (compliant

lodgings ://: dislodgings sickling

flame flounce flamingo petticoats sau(or)cer(y)(ie)s spinning

HELLER LEVINSON

(spun conjugationals pla

g

int ive

~

ly

188

~

sing – in

spring-ing

in the stone of sonic timbre

timpanitremolo (petulance

petulance bedded

from storm this sonic outriggery coiling

coin

bedizened

a vehemence troweling tonal rills creation ://: eruption abatement ladders terminal velocities

caulk caul cauldron en-coiling

bedecked

a vacuum of

encoding

blottings

clusterclub

sonic like altitudinous skin ramparts smithereened

perturbative prolix ailing caterwaul crinoline curling collapse syndrome

glabrous glow

earthenware vortex splits rupture rent revel ation

pretext

asunder

a mercy land

merriment displacements

gatherings regroup from upheaval unearthly glances

skein & the development of nomenclature agricultural imperatives

eyes dazzling lifetimes to decipher

HELLER LEVINSON in the sonic of stone trombones skipping across the sea

sickles grazing upon glaziery breathing on naked geometries

a form of prayer

~

189

~

dead river longings NABINA DAS ~

190

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ NABINA DAS CONTINUES TO PG 193

DONATE TO OMEGA

for Sukanta

That was a poet who pined for a sickle-curved river Golden perhaps or emitting a glitter through its ripples The river name evoked glinted crop crowns; he wrote about Jade paddy fields sliced by crow yells and bloodied streams.

Sukanta, do you hear us, this is when we need you the most So we can carve away with your pen of predictions even today The festering dereliction and warmongering in the grains

That was a poet who walked the morose city streets alone Uttering words usually unspeaking, like flow and tide; In stumps of concrete habitats he did graffiti of a rising sea.

In such forgetfulness, some say drunken stupor, he died Cut by a car when street cleaners came dusting the morning.

Or was he beaten unconscious and thrown by the police?

Out on the dirt, because the bugger wouldn’t stop chanting

Sukanta, you told us of a stunned earth in your poem, a fruit, it Grew on us full of seeds that planted hope, to never die or wilt Strange how burnt still is the bread we dream as the moon Sukanta you pleaded with time to stay by our side, timeless, so We could all walk free like they’ve sung in epics and lyrics Let this verse be a mail runner for our faith to brim over, soon.

About his mist-shadowed river of dying ivory dolphins That buried incoherent songs in soft mud made softer by Human waste. What haste hides is that he came back after Moon’s wane, on his lips: that river, ujani, is still my bride.

(Sukanta Bhattacharya, 1926-1947; a Left-wing poet, he is one of Bengali literature’s most famous for his tone of rebellion and social change. This piece refers to his poems “Poetry and Being”, “Runner” and “Impression”.)

NABINA DAS ~

191

~

history lessons, 1950 From rag-wearing villages of Bengal, they crossed mustard fields, dark swamps, small rivers in crowded ferries with a bit of Mars attached to bodies, a crater from that 1950’s day of becoming history books when they rattled metal bowls & glasses told the masters there won’t be any compromise.

Won’t listen Won’t eat Will want all rights to be restored to dialogue, to be heard they spoke & they smirked handholding their tiny fates.

They stood behind iron bars with backs to a faded wall uninvaded. Stood in a Eight by eight Feet cell, angry Tired as hell

~

192

~

That was when, his cheeks smelled of fresh lime leaves the beard on his chin grew hard like lotus stalk the soldiers knew from childhood (they swam with them in lotus ponds), yet they fired. Left uprooted trees, piles of jellyfish drying on a deserted seashore. The molten moon falling in a swift swipe, between porous pebble & muck, he saw the inside of his thigh a Martian blotch. A bullet. A red-hot cave of history lessons the land still hides.

(From my father’s recounting of the 1950 Rajshahi Jail Uprising in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, where he was one of the participants)

NABINA DAS

Specify your destination Feel free to bounce with me and rise above the sham, you’ll see me there State the reason for your visit I noticed the man flip out a gun and shoot the woodchuck because he had no food Show us your papers Sucking my thumb is what I do when I am struck with anxiety, not fear Have you a family?

They ask me if I have weapons in my hands or burp in my spleens Do you intend to take up work?

Please let me know when you need to be scared, I’m good for such tricks Do not trespass what is barred to you Probably I’m fine with sleeping with the monkfish in your frozen boxes This country is free and open, FYI I love the landfills incinerators dirty lakes and the craven looks everywhere Look at the camera, prepare to be photographed You’ll see in me a person who lent me his intestines while he fell down and died Place your index finger right here If only I had the idea you love toenails better …

NABINA DAS

korobi song Yellow our soil Yellow the river’s flow, can you see?

It brings us the faces of water-weeds Raccoons trapped under mudslides Yellow with silt

the

questionnaire

You may start with your name They call me Alien, I come from the unclean hilltops

There was a tree in your courtyard Lighting up the night Yellow, some white Finger-flowers touched by none Yellow and yearning for a song The Korobi sings all alone For a Korobi who never came back home Yellow her skin, Korobi’s silk The tree knows where the silt was sieved Yellowing water, muddied hands Sew limbs in the sludge, and look!

A dead rooster too.

(Korobi is a flower commonly found in northeastern India; also a feminine name in Assamese)

You may sign here, welcome dear alien!

I won’t pitchfork your neck, won’t eat your breadcrumbs I toss my own head away in the crevice, show you why I preferred getting killed

~

193

~

open letter to the american news media in time of war ROSS VASSILEV ~

194

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ ROSS VASSILEV CONTINUES TO PG 197

DONATE TO OMEGA

you poison people’s minds with your distortions you learned from Goebbels that a big lie is more believable than a small one that a lie repeated often enough becomes truth the sewers are less toxic than what you spew you repeat the lies of the corporations that own you

land of the free

you exterminated the Indians (almost) in the name of God. they gave you food when you were hungry and you repaid them with slaughter. they were more noble than you their Gods more humane than your God.

and if they say it’s so you proclaim to the world that it’s so

America, you were born in genocide

you’re worse than lung cancer

and now your troops are in Iraq—

using the television sets for mass mind control it’s so damn simple it works

nothing has changed. but there’s at least one mind you’ve lost i used to be an idiot but not anymore i’m turning you shitheads off forever i can think for myself.

ROSS VASSILEV ~

195

~

amerika Ăźber a l l e s my friend Bob Flanagan wrote a novel called Maggot about the horrors of Parris Island where they turn Marine recruits into killing machines

hearing the stories on the news of what American soldiers do to Iraqi civilians i'd say mission accomplished but the business of the American people is war without war we'd be just another peaceful country

wasting away the summer afternoons drinking beer and smoking pot in the glorious setting sun. ~

196

~

a miserable profession i'm the poet who moved back in with his parents after getting fired from his last job i'm the 6-foot-1 poet who's fat and has diabetes i'm the would-be pseudo-poet who's giving it a try i'm the poet who sits on the patio summer nights listening to the crickets and staring up at the stars i'm the poet who doesn't have health insurance i'm the poet who downloads girls-with-dildos movies on my computer i'm the poet who listens to X i'm the poet rotting in a small town in Ohio i'm the poet who writes poetry to kill time while i'm dying.

ROSS VASSILEV

cataracts the eyes are going and my toes are turning brown the mind went a long time ago. nothing much here as the sweat rolls down my back and the sun crashes in through the curtains. poverty ransacks Eastern Europe and there’s nothing I can do. life wasting away like a weed rotting in the sun.

I’m less than a fly on the wall my Red flags turning to dust.

yellow eyes the new napalm you'd cut my head off and feed it to Saddam Hussein use it to fertilize the white phosphorous desert the ashes of my personal sorrow will keep the stock market up and fill your barren heart with atomic warheads i'm sick of porn sick of fat sick of myself my head bursts out in flowers that wither under your military-congressional consumer cannibal zombie deathplex that the hangman laughs at in his white phosphorous dreams.

my head dripping sweat on the desk my mind dripping green bile the nightmare flies and the worms of my heart maybe there's other lonely insane people who suffer as much as i do and i'm sure they're all poets i'm still fighting the Turks kill the lights cuz the Russians are coming heed America's national paranoia doctrine or they'll throw you in prison without trial i'm a crazy person in a land of loonies feeling right at home.

ROSS VASSILEV

these old bones Patrick Swayze is dying and so am I though in a different manner spiritual death is perhaps even worse than physical no hope of renewal an escape from the slow rot within decay like a dead furry animal in the forest like diabetic toes turning brown on quiet afternoons the spirit is dead or dying but the body doesn’t know it yet. ~

197

~

this is a different kind of passport 19 MOLLY KAT ~

198

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ MOLLY KAT CONTINUES TO PG 201

DONATE TO OMEGA

Getting you ready Molly kat

By bongo playing bitch hands Your body is not an instrument

This is a different kind of passport It’s for traveling outside of Your own body, it’s for traveling to Flat stones in desert gardens Growing sand sculptures and snake ravines Tree pose, side plank, and triangle pose

This is your page number Memorize it Two thousand and ninety three Each boy will have his own page But for now, you are the back cover

This is your ID, so I can assign a personality Name them Monday, Tuesday, or Friday Name you the Thursday I locked my keys in my car Name you Medusa Wednesday, paint your eyes crooked and cruel Here, the name for the night I realized You are everyman And no man And another man I’ll forget I dreamt up In the first place Here is your one way ticket to my lucid dreams Here is the dose I accidentally dropped in your Soy banana smoothie Here’s the reason I will turn you into a shawl

MOLLY KAT

This is your back stage pass Harder I screamed, when you couldn’t unbutton my snaps Harder, when you wanted other women Harder, instead of longer Harder than the steal of bones Banged one too many times

Here is your pen You can write verses down my vertebrae Until the ink runs out But it is invisible And if you don’t stop in time The metal point will scratch skin till blood blisters An ugly cacophony of silence I lick my scars, because They are not wounds And never were This is your warning I never named you Sunday Stole back my bra and the color blue Thought I’d paint my eyes back to sky Seal the broken locks and smoke my own barrel I saw the green trying to get at me Saw the tire marks and tooth scars Saw where we’d bite the dust Draw the dawn Harder, I’ll say Harder, and we can pretend you’ve hurt me

~

199

~

just kiss me 5 Just kiss me, kiss me so my mouth is full of something so I can stop talking stop thinking, turn my skin into sheets my eyes to emeralds. My lips are only a starting point, unleash the languages of dead cultures into my ears, whisper in tongues down the bend of my neck, follow my arms until rivers appear in my wrists; just kiss me. Teach me to leave my words at the door, smash the hour glass revealing that time is not made of sand, but fireflies, chase after them, cradle them in palms, watch them glow, and set them free. Kiss me with your entire body, tongues dancing Tango, passionate to the point of pain proved wrong by the slight turn of a smile; life is fleeting. The moment is not, it’s a galaxy of fireflies dancing in circles across bedroom ceilings lighting the alter of my hips, the sensitive skin behind a knee, each different pitch of xylophone vertebrae, I don’t mind bruises if you can get my bones to sing, make my face glow, you are my bar room bull and the quarter’s getting hot, the mechanisms are starting to smoke, cogs are losing teeth, sparks fly everywhere one last pitch of its torso and I’m on my back, alone, staring at the ceiling, the firefly sky pretending to be stars, pretending to be time. It’s not always the lips; sometimes just the kiss, if you don’t want this, just please, don’t return the quarter. Just kiss me, hard and soft deep enough to leave a scar so I can turn my skin into a lantern, fill my insides with fireflies, and see where I’ve been, trace each lovers name across my body like words carved into bark, see what marks they’ve made, you know trees die where we cut into them? I am not made of wood, not mechanisms or cogs, nothing that can jam smoke spark and die when the quarter runs hot, when the water stops soaking soil, no; I run on kisses, I run hot, I run sparking and burning and slowly glowing with the buzzing of fireflies left behind by each set of lips to bless the altar of my hips, fall to my neck, fall off the bar room bull; don’t worry about me, I’ll glow stronger after you’ve run out of quarters, I’ve got every kiss flying around inside, make my eyes glow emerald, my cheeks burn red, Just kiss me.

MOLLY KAT

~

200

~

cocaine 14 Yea yea two hundred, two hundred Goosebumps spread over my skin Oil on water Right eye twitches a little, I breath deep smell it in the air remember it in my throat oh god Call someone, call anyone AA is bullshit but we pick pieces and clutch them like rosaries Don’t let me pray to this God, not this one, don’t let me worship this God So I call you. I don’t need you to tell me I’m stupid. I don’t need you to tell me not to do cocaine. I need to hear myself out loud rationalizing why I want it why I need it what happens when I have it where I came from what I was who I hurt how long it’s been NO I do not need it. I breathe slow listen to myself I am a horrible person when I do blow I can’t do one line take one bump just do it once I can’t do it once there is no once I’ll disappear I don’t want to disappear but god, I want a line time slows down speeds up at once dump bag onto table CD cover placemat center console toilet seat mirror highchair microwave break it up with razorblade student ID drivers license credit card hotel key health insurance gym membership card picture frame cut it into lines rails bumps roll up a receipt 50 dollar bill piece of straw loose leaf paper single phone bill twenty put it to your right nostril snort inhale snort snort snort like a fucking pig gag as the shit drips down your throat, taste it smell it love it hate it become it become nothing.

Remember what it really is take the lights down from around its name take it off Broadway put it in your back seat, pocket, put it on your mom baby sister little brother I don’t need anyone to tell me not to blow lines not to do coke I need to hear myself rationalizing out loud why it’s okay, why I want it hear the voice I used to believe was mine addiction is just the voice inside your head telling you one more won’t hurt the dilated pupils at the mention of his name the racing heart, red cheeks reserved now for sex and fear this used to be his territory I tell him to go fuck himself get the fuck away from me it’s been sixteen months Concentrate on the nose bleeds rehab doors locking behind you windows with bars the smell of stale smoke urine blood remember your mom’s face her tears hiding behind the visiting glass remember how death smelled how your skin fell like drapes under your eyes how faces can color purple take it off Broadway bring it back home I didn’t call you so you could tell me not to do it I just needed to hear a third voice so I could recognize my own

MOLLY KAT

~

201

~

praises for the insect & mammalian dead JACK WILER ~

202

~

ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ JACK WILER CONTINUES TO PG 207

DONATE TO OMEGA

I had a nice day today.

No one cursed me.

It was cold today.

Not as cold as yesterday but I have the feeling it will be colder tomorrow.

Cherish your mice, your rats, your roaches, your bedbugs!

Love them as you love your sons and daughters.

They are your children!

They live with you as much as you with them.

They huddle in little clutches terrified of destruction and they don’t even know about terrorists or nuclear devastation or satellites.

The little bugs and mice are the meek.

They wait patient under your stove for your castoff crumbs.

For your drops of water.

For the condensate on your pipes.

They are your poorest children.

They have no other home but yours.

You wretched misers of capital.

You own your apartments!

You own your lawns!

You own your skin and your hair and your sons and daughters!

You have lovers like me and you wish you owned them too but you don’t.

You hold them close on a winters night and know they can leave.

Like a breeze or a laugh.

But all of you muddle under the same dull January sky.

Each of you struggles for a bit of food, a spot of conversation, the day your boss says, oh, what a nice idea.

The day your lover says I love you too and the day you wonder if she does or if you do.

It will be cold thank God for several more months.

Men will stumble up to me on 9th avenue and ask for money.

They will say it is for food.

Perhaps it is.

My friend Jane’s boyfriend died suddenly from liver disease.

This should not have been a shock but it was.

To her.

To his children People will call me to solve difficult problems involving mice and rats and other pests.

They will be arrogant and they will be willing but they will be desperate.

They will be asking me for answers that aren’t simple.

I will fail in my explanations.

I will offer biological and social explanations but in their fear, in their worry, they will dismiss them.

To the people that I talk to everything I say is stupid.

Like everything we say to a lover we think is leaving.

Don’t go.

Don’t I do this or don’t I do that.

Didn’t I buy you this or didn’t I comfort you then.

It’s all stupid.

My consolation and explanations are all hollow.

Real.

But hollow.

You have mice. You have them because you’re a human in a densely populated region of the world populated by a rich mess of other humans.

Not everyone gives a shit about mice like you do.

Not everyone lies awake worrying about the bedbugs biting.

Some of them come from places where the bedbugs are like flies.

Some of them come from places where if you raise up your head someone else will lop it off.

This is the time to consider what will come.

Spring and rebirth and a thousand mice and cockroaches.

Ants and termites and love.

You’ll strut down the avenue and duck into little cafes and they’ll feed off your leavings happy as pets.

You and your lover or your family will talk and laugh and drop crumbs as carelessly as lies or compliments.

They are your children.

JACK WILER

They will grow strong and happy and democratic.

They will feed at the common table.

They will join with the bacteria and the viruses and the multitude of plagues to usher us into the world of paradise.

Say all power and all praises to our Children!

Grant them health and joy!

~

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~

[ the poem You know, it’s really not that bad that I get paid seven an hour for work that needs to be done.

Work I would do for free.

Work that needs to be done.

Like a farmer who has a second job so he can afford to bring in the hay each summer.

Like a painter who labors as a printer then goes home to some dirty loft, paints for five hours, alone, to make something people might never see.

It’s not the money.

It’s not job advancement.

It’s the accretion of paint, the tufts of hay glowing in the late summer, the roar of the tractor, the shouts of the boy in the back of the truck.

It’s the great deep gulp of water after hours of hard work.

It’s the mumbled gasp of awe when a friend walks into the studio and says, Oh, my God Oh, my God

~

204

We go to work.

We buy our coffee in paper cups and pour in cream.

We want to do well and we get frustrated when we fail.

But we still have the loft.

We still have the field.

The field our father left us.

The farm eaten by sub divisions so all that is left is six small acres and only my brother cares about the farm.

He still gets up at five and trudges out in his boots ~

w h e r e JACK WILER

i say to see to the cows and the pigs and the scraggly chickens and when he tells people at work he’s a farmer they laugh.

A farmer.

Why do you get up early to feed the stupid pigs and come home late to plow the land and ask the boss for a couple days off at haying time and he says haying time what the fuck is that.

What indeed.

What about the crisp smell of turpentine and oil?

What about the rasp of knife on canvas?

What about the question of white?

What about the happy rush of pigs to the trough, the satisfying turn of plow through earth?

The deep smell of things long buried?

Who else knows and who else cares and still you take up brush and knife and cleaver and plow.

Dig deep in the earth and work and work and think this is it.

This is it?

Oh, but my friend this is it!

This is the glorious rush of fruition!

This is harvest.

This is pumpkins dotting the soil everywhere.

Potatoes spilling up out of the ground like angry bones.

This is ugly red and awkward gesso and the spread of manure.

This is the man with dirty boots walking at 5am in a field in South Jersey saying what the fuck am I doing?

This is our job.

The housewife rising at 6 to put the sandwiches in the bags for lunch for the kids that are so sick of peanut butter and jelly they’d kill for bologna.

This is the mechanic sick with a hangover

thank you ] sliding under an engine at 7am that’s got to be ready for some old guy by 9 and you think he could wait at least a little.

This is the girl in the WaWa filling urn after urn of okay coffee for league upon league of men in dirty boots spilling out of pick up after pick up after pick up.

She says last night my daughter and I made a mountain out of paste for her project.

It was a map of the universe and I didn’t even know where Wanaque was but there it was right where my father grew up.

Right next to the factory where he worked for twenty odd years till he had sense enough to move.

Who works?

Who paints?

Who are we?

People who farm.

People who work.

People with courage and kids and jobs that pay okay and at least I have benefits and I think every day I wake up that it’s a blessing I have today.

A blessing.

So the farmer turns under the crop.

So the painter smears white over everything and starts again.

So you get up and take a shower and drink your coffee and kiss the wife and think your kids are ungrateful but then on the way to work You notice the way the air smells today.

You see the golden tinge of sun on the fields you drive by every day.

You notice the brief brush of clouds over the sun and the fog hugging the deep places on the back roads and you say, maybe, maybe It’s a blessing.

t h e

o f

I dreamed the other night about dogs.

In the dream I was hired to rid a school of some pests.

When I arrived at the school I entered a classroom and it was full of dogs.

That’s the name of god.

I had another dream.

I was sleeping in a room with several other people.

The young girl next to me reached over and stroked my penis.

That was the name of god.

G o d

My porch is littered with dead blossoms from the flowers I’ve planted.

Each blossom is one of God’s names.

Each time I walk past them I hear a quiet murmur.

I eat quickly and neglect my friends.

I sleep fitfully.

Behind the caterwauling and clutter I hear the quiet whisper of God’s name.

n a m e s JACK WILER

It’s not something you want to hear.

It’s literature left on the porch from 7th day Adventists.

It’s a half eaten dinner.

It’s wine turned sour sitting in the sun.

Then sometimes it announces itself loud and without ambiguity We can tell when that happens.

Say when your child is born or when a great man is struck down or a storm carries away a whole world.

Those names of God we all know.

It’s the other names that cause us concern and distress.

We know we hear them, we know we should attend, but it’s late and we’re tired.

We’d like to hold our loved ones close and shut out the noise of the world.

But it’s God’s world and it’s his noise and it never stops.

It would be sweet if all of God’s names were names we knew It would be sweet. ~

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~

talking with

Today I spent the end of the day talking with Nat. Nat is a tall, black man in his sixties.

He worked as a printer for most of his life.

Before he became a printer he was a drug addict, a stick up man, a con man, a crook.

He was, in his own words, a disappointment to his mother.

nat

Nat and I talked about regret.

About what we could have been.

Both of us working at Acme Exterminating.

Me a salesman, him a part time stock boy.

A stock boy.

A man that used to stroll into policy joints with a shotgun cocked and ready.

We each regret the stupid choices we made.

He remembers his wife.

He thinks of the house he could have had.

He talks of children unborn.

Of money pissed away.

Not so different than me.

I tell him it’s not that bad.

I say, wasn’t it a gas to knock over a joint?

Wasn’t there a rush of pleasure to run down the street with a sack of cash.

He says, Yeah man.

~

~

But there’s something to be said for sitting in a little room with your friends.

Smoking good weed and planning some wild scheme.

Then getting up half cocked and doing it.

Then you’re when it’s all over sitting alone in a room with a bag of money laughing and laughing and laughing.

It’s probably wrong to take huge amounts of drugs and make everyone you love think you’re a worthless piece of shit.

But they never get to sit in that room.

And you do.

God gave me and Nat a gift.

He gave me AIDS and he gave Nat a job as a printer.

He said pay attention and we did.

But he took away something too.

We’d really rather be running down the street whooping like wild Indians with the joy of our preposterous dream.

JACK WILER

He says, but I could have had a nice home.

I could have gone into the army and they’d have made a man of me.

I say, but you are a man.

He says, I could have moved back with my wife.

We could have had children.

206

I say, me too.

We all could have done things a little different.

But for a bad pick here and there we all might be accountants in a nice house in Lakewood.

Yes, we’re just going to get high with the cash.

Yes, it’s just somebody sucking your cock.

Yes ,it all blows away and you get old and die.

But the gift we got wouldn’t mean as much if we didn’t understand the price.

So me and Nat are sitting in Acme Exterminating on a lovely August afternoon talking about what could have been.

why I like money I like money because I like food.

It’s true you can make your own food but using money makes it easier.

I can grow vegetables.

Not many though, my space is small.

I like beef.

But the space question makes that impossible so I’m left with a small pig or chickens.

Chickens would work best but if you want anything other than eggs you have to kill them.

Then you have to pull off their feathers.

I think I’ve read you have to hang them upside down for a period of time to allow the blood to drain from their bodies.

I have no idea what you do with old chicken blood.

Next you have to pull out their guts.

Finally, after months of waiting for them to grow up and hours of struggle getting them ready to cook you can toss them in the oven.

Or, if you have money, you can go to the store.

There, in aisle after aisle is food.

Lots and lots of food.

Chickens with their guts conveniently removed.

Pieces of cows and pigs.

Bottles of milk.

Eggs by the dozen stacked all nice and neat.

All you have to do is wheel up your cart filled completely with food to the register and give them money.

That’s why I like money.

JACK WILER

I like money because this poem isn’t worth money.

That’s the other reason I love money.

There’s no money in poetry unless you put it there.

I like poems about money.

I like to hear paeans of praise to the all mighty dollar.

The rants of poor paper pushers against the monied.

The cruel jokes of miserable little fools complaining about the rich.

They’re poor and they wish they weren’t.

That’s the nice thing about poetry; You can tear up bags of money and throw them in the trash and no one ever cares.

In real life if I see a dollar bill on the street I count myself lucky.

In my other life I can ridicule the fools who work for money.

As if I don’t.

As if money grew on trees.

As if chickens came packed in little boxes stacked in some store for any poor fool to buy, to pop in some oven and eat.

As if anyone would believe that. ~

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so a black man is president DUBBLEX ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ DUBBLEX CONTINUES TO PG 213

DONATE TO OMEGA

We hold these truths to be self-evident When they wrote the constitution a black man could make no contribution After the Emancipation Proclamation We were still the problem and not the solution Legally declared 3/5ths of a man only good for a slave hand There were only whites in the white house now a black man his kids and his spouse I wonder what Jefferson Washington and Lincoln would think Would they toast him with a drink or think the country will sink We’re already on the brink of another great depression Our recession is now in session Mr. Obama will you help me get my reparations from this nation My 40 acres and a mule or am I just a naïve fool Because this country is still cruel We've come a long way from slave ship days From cotton picking plantation ways From strange fruit hanging high above tree roots From Jim Crow laws to masters whipping slaves backs bloody raw The atrocities this country claims it never saw slaves to servants to president But aren’t you half white and all of us blacks are any color but black - different shades of brown from all the raping and mixing gone around come a long way since lynching in 1868 back in slave and free states Still suffer from hate crimes in 2009 From bus boycotts to riots in Watts To Medgar Evers and Malcolm getting shot Now we all looking up to you standing on the top spot The Japanese during World War II got their dues so did some Jews So I just wonder if it could be true that you could come through For all my ancestors in 400 years of oppression deservers some type of compensation I know you will be busy trying to clean up 8 years of republican misery

Try to mend our relations with other nations getting our soldiers out of Iraq Bringing our boys back The banking crisis and the economy giving Iraq its true autonomy your family comes from Kenya you bring us hope of a Kennedy This once in a lifetime opportunity hoping this country and congress you can bring to unity From fighting for civil rights to KKK burning cross and throwing bombs at night.

From Dr. King let freedom ring To Rodney King 1992 Cali riot swings all these things Nat Turner leading slaves to rebel David Walker encouraged those enslaved to break from their cell John Brown and Fredrick Douglas the abolitionist To black power raising Olympic fist John Carlos and Tommie Smith Black panthers Angela Davis and Huey Newton patrolling with a shotgun To run Jesse run To the underground-railroad with Harriet Tubman This is where we come from Never succumb to oppression fighting for freedom We will not panic or get frantic You Mr. President will fix up this country like a political mechanic Yes you did I never thought I would live Long enough to see a black man in the white house crib but there it is Everybody got to do what he says cause for the next four years he's the pres-ident, it's no accident some meant to lament and resent but this is your moment Been waiting since the thirteenth Amendment Singing we shall over come from marching in Selma Alabama now we Barrack Obama From protest and picket lines to jail cells and welfare lines now it's our time to shine From niggers to negros Dreadlocks and Afros Look how we grow From African American to American Yes we can yes we can

DUBBLEX

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~

The dictator knows whom I call and who calls me The dictator knows where I go and whom I see The dictator knows the sites I surf ~ the emails I send The text messages I receive They know all my bank accounts and social security numbers and fake ID’s They know my race age my sexual orientation They know my tribal nation Political affiliation and activist organization I have been filmed and photographed too many times to mention filed and data based placed Tracked by satellites Followed by GPS OnStar hooked to my car The dictator censors the news - I only hear the untruth Their propaganda campaign distorts perceptions Protection from terrorists Protect me from dictatorships As my civil liberties have been stripped Innocent citizens detained tortured and whipped Illegal wars to over throw and take more The Geneva Convention is something that’s not mentioned Extraordinary Rendition covert political CIA missions My fellow Americans your democracy has been hijacked Not by terrorist But the Patriot Act Read the facts No search warrants Unlimited wire taps cast your vote note write it in quotes

republic of

the people’s

they change the name political scapegoats promote their result the so-called cleansing of the voting roles Blacks are bounced falsely accused criminals on parole Government officials on company payrolls The dictator commits crimes without consequence trails or sentence Hiding behind classified access lines denied no further reply as another war looms and more innocent die.

They put a microchip in my fingertip Tattooed a serial number on the back of my neck They want me to believe land of the free home of the brave Didn’t they kill millions of Native Americans and made my ancestors slaves

america

DUBBLEX

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stop this

Think Engel and Marx got it close Boasted the idea of the communist The basis of people who were equal No rich no poor All under government control Do what they are told But their model failed to recognize individual identity Structured in its outlined society Truth is all government systems laws and religions are structured to control people’s decisions The creation of class-ism makes people serve different forms of organization institution always with some affiliation That furthers their behavioral-ization To service a secret small world nation That has no name race or affiliation Money is their singular motivation They use the Islamists Catholics Protestants or Baptists The homicidal fundamentalist Islamist suicidal terrorist To hide themselves from truth that they exist Keep us fighting each other over their created bullshit Control a person’s consciousness

society !!!!!

We serve them faithfully and then make sure every cent is spent Societies the capitalist did invent Back to Roman and Byzantine times To Castro and Bush There has always been capitalist getting rich Form enslavement in ancient Egypt To gold African diamond mining ditch From cotton plantations Sweat shops and child labor in third world nations from indigent servants and field peasants To fast food workers in the present In our capitalist society we spend our entire life living in their created reality Stop this society!

Stop this society!

Stop this society!

DUBBLEX ~

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where is private ortiz I have an old friend in Iraq From time to time I wonder if he made it back I want to email his wife But I am afraid of the facts That he may be one of the 4,000 who did not make it back Except in a coffin American flag draped wrapped Dying for a lie Forced into combat Americans quickly forget the facts That invasion of Iraqi was an illegal act No weapons of mass destruction were found On Iraqi grounds But we still fill their country with depleted uranium rounds Rock[et] launcher sounds The U.S. terrorize their country with our brought on instability It’s a civil war with no civility America kills their leaders who use to work for the CIA criminally To cause fragility in world oil markets is the wars reality Over 300,000 Iraqis have died un-casual causalities Dixieland forgets about our soldiers and Iraqi’s

?

The news wants us to think about mortgages and the floundering economy Not allowed to film flag draped coffins coming in from over seas Ted Koppel on night Line forced to resign for showing the faces of soldiers who died from stepping on home made land mines ambushed by roof top snipers In the firing lines I wonder about Eric Got caught up in the propaganda of the politics Blinded by the rhetoric Decided to go for it A war — the news media finds a way to ignore it When all is said and done No war can be won Too many dying for the two percent upper echelon Calculate the loss of a soul Isn’t worth its price in black gold

DUBBLEX

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tribute 2 john coltrane

Rip rocking Sure shocken Be boppen Get things poppen Drown in the avalanche of sound Smooth riffs of saxophones Drum and bass a cacophony of tones Jazzy melodies and 20-minute solos In the flow watch it go Listen to him blow Up and down the scale Climbing to the top the cat sure can wail He's a musical genius he's tremendous the bass and sax make you tingle and relax He's a legend of jazz This he has Pushing it to ~ out of breath His breath control circular breathing Look close, you can see his chest heaving Covering the night club with a musical flood Sound so bold and bright playing deep into the night His fingers are quick in a split kicking off licks He makes it look so easy and sound so ready Accompanied by a throbbing bass and drumming pace Like busting through darkness His sound drips then gushes He lived that lush life stayed high as a kite drinks or smack he could play that sax Expressing emotions and feeling in his be bop beat no one else could compete so unique and complete be free style or off the sheet he captured the vibe of city streets

Back in the day that man could play Fast or slow sweet and mellow He played like the sound of a sunrise He played like the sound of the dawn Quiet like whispers of nightfall The beat of heavy rainfall, deep in the jungle call Notes squealing and squeaking like his instrument was speaking kept peeking the next level seeking Made you feel something playing music sounding like running so stunning backed with drumming bass fingers strumming He uncovered explored and opened sounds to his sax roar want more want more how that melody did soar in score after score The cymbal and the high hat the toe tap Played filling the empty spaces a colorful oasis with rhythm chases Guides our ears through a maze of amazing solos the way you blow Like no other like no other Saxophone smothered There you go again blowing like a northeasterly wind So free so easy so easy so free Holding those high notes making music float

playing in the haze of your dope Your music stands the test of time It is ever lasting forceful blasting I like to listen to you in my different mind states help me escape I want to ride that Blue Train With My Favorite things Making that soprano sax sing Want to make my Ascension with Giant Steps To the Afro Blue Impression To Meditations Got to hear that Love Supreme From the Blue Note to The Village Vanguard You were kicking it heavy and hard Getting down with Monk and Miles That free jazz invented your own style

X DUBBLEX X ~

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silhouette of my fingertips JILLIAN ROSE KRUPP ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ JILLIAN ROSE KRUPP CONTINUES TO PG 219

DONATE TO OMEGA

1. The silhouette of my fingertips has changed, lacking in finality of shape.

Did you do that to me? Or do I give you too much credit?

I’ve been picking away at the skin for days now, Leaving a line of red around the bitten nails.

I should figure out why I hate you, cuz I do.

And I guess there are people out there who hate me too but I want you in my lungs still, or what if I sweat you out of my pores? That's what it feels like!

Exactly.

Like you're pushing through me, penetrating, my skin tries to keep you in.

I wish you wanted to stay there.

I smell like alcohol again, spilling the rum on the table and into the dip of my lap. ‘click,click’ this typewriter has a mind of its own and the words I type Read like jokes.

JILLIAN ROSE KRUPP

Jokes like us thinking we could be Buddhist.

We tried it together once, throwing our cigarette packs out on your neighbors lawn, And I snuck back later in the night to pick them up again. ‘click, click’ Who knew you could delete mistakes?

~

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~

I should have left them alone, or let you buy a new pack by yourself.

You know, maybe that typewriter is smarter than I am.

2. I've been smoking those fucking spirits again. But this time, it was different. I got asked for identification and I had that moment of panic, that second of total forgetfulness of self, of place and of time. And then, I saw that the whole reason I had come there was null. I saw yellow, red and dark green packs but not my familiar light blue. The one I started buying when I was in 9th grade and I knew all the places to shop for fags and naty boh and Indian, foreign, waiting men.

That's when I started and my mind came flooding back as I dipped hand after what felt like hand into my woman bag and scraped old recites and broken credit cards and scraps of words written in black ink, on white napkins.

He said, he said they have what I'm looking for in the back and I protest saying, "No, no. I'll take the others anyway...". And then I look at the pack, the one I've had my eye on, the one whose color screams "SMOKE THE SHIT OUTTA ME" and I see it's menthol. Indian, smooth, creamy motha' fucking hunter s. Thompson green, menthol. And I buy it. And I don't hear how much it costs but remember to get free matches on my way out.

Menthol, buddy. Something new. I can't smoke the whole pack, too strong, too minty and fine.

So I'll cut back. So I'll lose that ID for a little while.

Menthol. Difference helps me cut back.

3. If eyesight were considered an indulgence, I would will it away here.

JILLIAN ROSE KRUPP

Step by step, over waters, maliciously teasing me into the waves.

I practice seeing as carefully as I practiced walking as a child.

You told me not to believe in God but now,

I crane my neck to push my throat up, searching for HIM,

~

216

Exposing sunshine. ~

You would laugh at me now, ‘How can you watch for God?’ The wooden planks lift with my feet, loosening, becoming ancient in structure.

I am stuck, in between the spaces, and This is the porthole.

Indulge no more and this will be, consequently, Your last bridge To cross.

4. You’re brown like the old, wet dirt At the end of the seasons Which change temperature like you change colors.

JILLIAN ROSE KRUPP

Shaped by soil into an accessory of a Sultans cap, you fall down on our Heads and when you’re all gone

The openness makes the concrete clear, giving way a path for the rain.

Lovers walk over you instead of walking

~

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~

Over each other and children Jump into you, whole piles scattering.

Someone sweet tells me you stole life From the sun, measured in smiles. And I try and watch Your movement for a while, to catch you In the act. But you don’t move, Only curve slightly to absorb the sun and bring life back down to us.

5. In a dump of beige concrete, you're given 25 years. You don't blink. The person staring back at you keeps talking but she shouldn't be the one to leave you with this news. And as you lean down to the bottom of the window where there are holes for speaking, you think how unfair it all is. Look around you; even I don't want to touch these walls. You're so young and the smell of this place is too strong. Blame the dust for tears.

But this is all make believe. You don't cry and you've grown used to the smells around you. 25 years. It's a safe enough place to keep us away from the street, if only for a little while. Back to the kitchen, to clean off piss filled tables.

Only the attorney seems guilty.

~

JILLIAN ROSE KRUPP

218

6. Bent over, in a quiet tumble, telling stories of old neighborhoods and moldy cheese with wine last Saturday night.

No one makes it through these winded streets, not like they used to anyway.

Stop, inhale, the air is thick like your monogrammed towels. I wash myself with them, terrorizing sleep and blemishing a melon dew face.

Go rest, ignore time for as long as you can (forever?) and I will tell you, no one will come running to stop the clock. ~

7. In spaces of delicacy, shapes fall like stained glass from lightning’s first strike.

I don't know what I'm doing, spreading myself thin over time. But now I know how you feel. I think it's just like me. You treat me like our kind has always treated others.

But it's too bad I can't find you, even worse that I can't let you go.

I don't want to be those things you think, the things I think about everyone but you.

A lie is so easy to tell it hurts.

How do we first learn to be dishonest?

I was taught by the best, but then again, you probably were too.

We should have been perfect, but I am not becoming.

Release.

Can you release me if you have it in you?

It's not your responsibility but I'd love to give it to you.

Curly pie, what a magician. I should have known your tricks.

(I use them too.)

8. Swallowed whole they slip back To the spinning world of what used to be Social deviance and is now Social conformity.

To the excess?

JILLIAN ROSE KRUPP

Perhaps.

And those extremes keep the extremities Of dharma bums content, for now.

Till crack gets too expensive.

~

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~

↑

mi⇌nd ↑ this hive 1

from

MICHAEL ANNIS ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ MICHAEL ANNIS CONTINUES TO PG 233

DONATE TO OMEGA

from hive this mind with apoptosis, …

awakening suitcase bomb revolution as evolutionary discharge evolution like revolutionary discharge REVOLUTION

powder keg nuke

cannon neutron implosion bullet brain,

linkage ↑ ⇌↓ particle :||: particle breath souls waves souls breath

of the imaginal discs →

death of morbid culture l’morte primitive! rotted masses melting on the road to blooming carcasses road → gruel incoherence churning boiling blooming carcasses on the road to resurrection road universal [not CHANGE liquid incendiary sweeter than honey [which bears MEANINGLESSNESS rêves de la langue explosive, langue pour éclater le fanatique! implosion de phoenix REVOLUTION EN MASSE

crowds

power c[enter]s mobs throngs

swarms

HIVE

greater complexity → greater chaos → volumnizing organization chaotic unity complexity fractaling infinity

LIG H T

DNA ↓ ⇌ ↑ = WAVES =

SO U ND

Time allwhere melancholia seat of the soul with, …

SPIRIT FRACTALING simultaneous transfiguration and i, ∞ of the i and i, bi-lithic unfolding tri-lithic billions of points billions of miles fibonacci expansion billions of years distant infinite unfolding We, each one, are from each I and I human free will IS human DNA particles of Light abstracted I (particle A) multi-dimensionally language dancing and I (particle B) = wave of light, MIND around fires of being.

HINGING: infinitely interconnected How can we not Hinge simultaneity QUANTUM WAVE PARTICLES from one another?

DIVINE MATRIX quantum entanglement, Particles of Light's DNA HIVE the language of light, bouncing from particle the light of being to wandering stars to particle that fiery light asteres planetes with the cumulative collaboration becomes the applicationmirrored in each linkage, … all creatures hinged together through thought abstraction; music, deeper hive language sound light reabstraction; than twisting itself free f(o)r(o)m logic waves whirling through sex primitive, raw, elemental, visceral, fertile, manuf(r)acturing constitute Mind, Hive mentality helix.

Simulacra → Hive Light hinged legions as Sym asymmetrical curved trajectory Helixed Darkness SOUND SEIGE

MICHAEL ANNIS

with, … abstraction this reality in reality → abstraction eternally what does a black hole sound like?

Nothing. Sound does not escape it; Light does not escape it; as if Light, a roaring sound surrounds it, infinitely loud, infinitely emotion dense, impenetrable, but at the event horizon woman tears watering flowers it is quiet as death; one’s screams the Silence; does the woman tear the Silence, screams one proliferating these flowers that water sound’s vacuum Ratiocination reincarnate consuming darkness hive of mind

][ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

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component of the universal swarm ⇌ universal DNA of microverse and macroverse :1 [a small number of boxes with white, blue, or green lids form unattractive patches of contrasting color here and there. At the top of the panel white letters in relief, made of a molded-plastic material, announce: Imported Cigars and Tobacco. Below this row of letters are …4

death of the proverbial son death of the migratory sun great guffaw laughter then stroke the Sun, the Moon, the way of the Dead Spirits clustered into Magellanic Clouds empowered and empowering a tornadic hive of spirits whirling spirallic as center of the divine matrix

WORDS DESCRIBING WORDS

[Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured … 100,000 stars residing in the crowded core of the globular cluster Omega Centauri. The full cluster, which lies about 16,000 light-years from Earth, boasts nearly 10 million stars, … between 10 billion and 12 billion years old.… 1 barattage

ebullition carcasses de floraison dessus la route à la route de résurrection universel plus doux incendiaire liquide que le miel dreams from the explosive tongue, language to burst fanatic!

language inquiring infinitely of nature evolves perpetual renaissance within our cells 100,000,000,000 star clusters exploding blossoms throughout eternity the binary I (eye)and(eye) I of language double :1⇌1: helix :1 a point, any and all points, are infinitely fractal 2 3 each point embodies Hive, fractal is Swarm 1: each point, each decimal, each organism, each entity fractaling infinitely; entity transfiguring into entity; fractecimal, becoming its own swarm within the swarm; all entities arising from the same swarm of points; all entities arising from the same point within the point. from hive this mind ⇌ as father as son ⇌ as mind this hive ⇌ this hive as point. thought describing idea ⇌ language describing language ⇌ life describing art describing life ⇌ space describing time ⇌ spirit describing spirit ⇌ light describing darkness ⇌ darkness describing light ⇌ godhead describing godhead all scribing, inscribing, describing the solitary swarm point ⇌ a cognitive, metaphysical

MICHAEL ANNIS

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are the letters; shaped just so, shaped as sound combining ⇌ recombining form morphemes syllables stretching holistic :||: entire words words swarming into one another forming clauses swarming sentences swarming paragraphs swarming miles of imagination swarming sheaves of characters all swirling cyclic recyclic a great and mighty bustle storming intensity unified conflict tension splitting resplitting intellectual zygote single, living organism hive moving, migrating, recombining mind to mind wind of wind dreams swarming chaos

[we are not the last … 6 endless proliferation helix

imago dei [just as the human soul takes leave of the body … one can truly see in the flying swarm an image of the departing human soul. 5

HINGE HIVE

the billion stranded Helix hive mind swarming language inseminating species evolution strength urgency desire identity ancestor magus horde singular complexity reconfigured congigued reborn ⇌ ↓

single organism ⇌ swarm soul ⇌ mind hive thought throng psychic swarming sensibilities mob mind cerebral crowd cogitation hermetic hive hinge with, … cogent cogitation roaring ratiocination as quantum light waves each particle of the Hive acts simultaneously with purpose arcing through space and time whirling around itself aswarm the components are one entity erupting simultaneous unfolding from solitary being transfiguring into beings instantly melded into one density attracting multitudinous particles from astray into the hive swarm razoring animal force intellect christ passion storm hunger incarnate the guts of the atom unsatiated

.

↑ ⇌ pyramidal instantaeity exclusive inclusive separated :||: joined double swarms double helix doubled tripled quadrupled quintupled awareness from here to there to beyond eternity

with language, …

.

(r)evolution

with ratiocin(initi)ation, …

re(in)surrection

with cogitation, …

chaos infinity

MICHAEL ANNIS with

infinite increase, … insemination increasing infinity collecting pollen from flowers, minds extract wisdom from experience as language evolves, the hive evolves the reorganization of language reorganizes the hive as language transfigures adaptability the capacity for adaptation rising neobiological of the hive species civilization increases exponential][ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE ~

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resuturing to become the abstraction of intercellular intercon⇌nection thrusts being among minds and species …

Shall we not dream each other awake; shall we not abstract ourselves into one another's being? ... to swarm with, … abstraction reality abstractly reflecting

ly the swarm ensures survival through inherent, intrinsic adaptability a swarm of language potent and explosive as hornets, hiving singular force, singular intent, singular will, singular mind, an organism of orgasmic cells comprising a singular being, vital and expanding outward ⇌ inward to fill the ⇌C⇌O⇌S⇌M⇌O⇌S⇌ swarm colony inherent in language entity, mind horde cumulative nucleus found in swarm found in individual mind universal law of vivisystems hoarding outward comprising cosmic undulation superorganism reproducing dream emergent pattern hoilstic point fractal oneness organism from organism multiplied one submerged complexity emerges i swarm orgasm our hive swarm is mind quantum riddle is of the hive mind reveals itself to be deeply specific : abstracted → • is stated fractally hive is swarm mind our orgasm swarm i emerges complexity submerged one multiplied organism from organism oneness fractal point holistic pattern emergent dream reproducing superorganism undulation cosmic comprising outward hoarding vivisystems of law universal mind individual in found swarm in found nucleus cumulative horde mind, entity language in inherent colony swarm

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quantum relativity

with, … ⇌

to swarm

invalid assumptions

of thought

enforced

to think

terror upon rationality

therefore

Religion hacking the world to terrified bits

to be i

am

i

am

i

am

i

am

spermatazoan fusion relativity ratiocination intercoursive chaos quantum insemination

MICHAEL ANNIS

from hive this mind, the swarm of Hinge moment momentum moment us integral to our nature, to our being, of our becoming; what is hinging(?),

the personal interpretation of the abstract is the only reality

it is to dream awake, to become the dream of language, as language dreams us into being, as being manuf(r)actures reality,

i am fractal language in the beginning beginning beginning beginning beginning … ∞ God swarm echo hive of i am always beginning ⇌ beginning always [in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god7 [in the ending always beginning is the word and the word is with us and the word is us8 Hive Mind: primeval dream incarnate; howling wisdom generative power; sacred symbol of ancients; manifest destiny of mind, undulating net of self-procreating space time continuum, personification of universal life force, tomb of Mysteries, living mask of interstellar queens

Philosophy swarmed by language evolving through anthropological cesspools reforming synapses exploding reason into orbits of fractal abstraction Banzai waves of morphemic warriors flooding deserts of theology; Castor and Pollux, Moses and Aaron, Language and Reason, syntactic structures of light dreaming darkness, darkness dreaming light;

MICHAEL ANNIS

The Buddha beholds the coalescence of thought, halo-like, light years in diameter, in anthropomorphic duplication and reduplication, an ever-expanding cloud, glowing pink, magenta, soft purple wisps emanating golden spires, effervescing silver auras, shape-shifting spirit; waxing and waning light … waning and waxing revelation Hive ⇌ Mind revolution conspiring curving explosion swarming points DNA particles convexed as curved mirrors through infinite realization, infinite replication a billion billion billion times over simultaneously entangling disentanglement in a billion billion billion interactive positions thriving swarming mentality genius greater than the sum of its parts storm of Will materializing psyche governing invisible hand hurricane eyes event horizon reflection burst sharded holographic quadrillions sonic horde lotus centerless roaric drone continuum repelling dissolution infinity erupting from single point inhaling exhaling inhaling exhaling billowing orgiastic shimmer i and I and I and I

∞

NOTES: 1 MSN, science article 2

Adam Roufberg

3

Michael Annis, Hinge response to Adam Roufberg1:

4

Claude Simon, “Conducting Bodies”

5

Rudolf Steiner, “Nine Lectures on Bees”

6

Buck Jump

7

St. John the Divine

8

Michael Annis, Hinge response to St. John the Divine

… end part I, “from hive this mind”; part II commences in OMEGA 8 …

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from brave new world order: Shooting photo-ops for neo-condoms, he lands Dick-first on the flight deck, “Mission Accomplished, pahdners, we done fucked-up the whor’a Babylon!”

B-movie bombers thrumming thunder through backdrop’s maelstrom, pounding enemy munitions factories, schools, museums of antherapology strafing rabidly the War on Poverty, the War on Homelessness, the War on Drugs, the War on Sex & Violence, the War on Middle Class Sosolists & Pergressive Subversives, the War on the Devil & the Axis of Evil, the War on War . . .

Calf-ropin’ into the GW Corral his coalition of the willing, yodels drunkenly hoots n hollers his threats, spuring our hurling Brave New Movement …

Mein Kampf on trading cards, patriotic anthems & dashboard pantheons, I dun’t care ifit rains or freezes longs I have my plastic Jeezus ridin on the dash … jingoistic jingles in the dugouts, gay ribbonettes & champagne showers partying down for righteousness pink bubblys bursting on & outward . . . nationalistic slogans roaring over the airways, DJ’s rapping prayers in the parking lots, lost bible codes on the Holy Hosts of the sacrament, take this my Brother Monadnock, as you liberate the imprisoned Holy Land: storm forth, drink blood, & eat this in remembrance of Him—our Prince of Peace —whose belated Second Coming returns on the point of your patient bayonet no getting through the pearly gates without yer passport; no sir, no wings, no flight glasses, no halos, no robes, no harps, no eye-candy, no excuses Comrade Herr cowboy . . . —or forfeit those spurs & crowns, no unlatching der Büstenhalter, no impassioned fiddling with the Holy Meat, no jacking off in the trenches, my Brother, no sperma on the ground, no human tadpoles wriggling in the mud, mein Bruder, clean chaps only there are no atheists in foxholes! mein Braut: no renegade evildoers; Bemühen Sie sich nicht! The north-40 killscape belongs to the Almighty!

Take my word for it, no atheists, no banditos storm the holy land, Bible beltin’, hymn singin’ crusaders liberate the little brown children, teensy souls winging toward the clouds, little heads on bayonets! we have nothing to fear but God himself . . . O Lord Vengeance Almighty! we have champagne toasts . . . clinking spurs & crystal glasses tinkling love, GET DOWN and GET WITH yr MANHOOD !! make love through war… sloshing petroleum’s partitioned peace over her painriddled rims, here look run your finger around the Empire’s rim, a high pitched tone, a squeal a droning hum make such pretty music, the likker-loving rock and roll of . . . OIL

WAR

an excerpt

. . . the music of WAR . . . war’s melodic seduction, oil’s throbbing epiphany derricks ejaculating love across the leering face of God’s little acre the heavy petting of peace, gung ho humping, tongues entwined in Empire the music of champagne love . . . the latest final conquest buy and through love the music of . . . gold . . . black gold . . . golden . . . love Das Kapital sparkles, effervesces upon streets paved with gold . . . with golden icons and golden bowls, all gold, golden as capitalism gold everywhere, for all fools everywhere, fooled and gutted by gold . . . our school colors are black gold, crude black and toasted old gold . . . our little tykes’ shoes, plated with gold, golden as . . . democracy gold teeth and gold eyelashes, the glitter of gold on the cheeks and . . . aborted gold fetuses are our business—our only business . . . our benefactors piss in the mouths of the hopelessly human dying of thirst — it’s liquid gold, a golden fountain, an oozy black shower of . . . 3rd World humility be damned; run your finger around the rim, sweetheart . . .

Auschwitz fairyland, bombed out ghettoes of the Terran nightmare . . . so fraught with controversy . . . so fraught with . . . Love . . .

So fraught with God’s anti-atheists anteing up for Empire, The Empire of God’s Love, the foot soldiers of amore, unwitting stooges, goons, hitmen in the name of God and country, their colorful kerchiefs lynching dissenters, revolutionaries, and the unemployed from heaven’s wincing flagpoles, their scimitars lopping off heads in the name of the higher good, the summon bonum . . .

Switching the channel did not dam up the blood on the block … did not cork up whirlpools of decadent political indecency churning within living rivers of routine lies and propaganda … rivers from the punctured palms of Homo Christos … from 52 channels broadcasting God’s eternal love, His eternal need for cash and fundraising … mistrust overflowing scenarios of terror’s codependency … we have nothing to fear but fear itself … be afraid, terribly afraid, while you shop … random violence flash floods the landscape … make sure it’s on heathen turf … don’t you want to be able to drive that cute car of yours, mein Schwester Zucker, mein Fräulein? . . . mein Cute Girl … mein Miss Amerika …

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black smoke billowing from the derricks, environmental holocaust spans the horizon, mental holocaust mesmerizes dreams buried deep within the captivated skulls of children . . . in time, it will wear off— 20/30 year down the road, yer gonna be fine— no more shrieking yersef tuh wake at night— no sir, no more shrieking tuhwake . . . it’s about freedom, it’s about decency, it’s about the will of the people, it’s about the universal rights of Man . . . it’s about love loving the rights of children to be loved, and the rights of . . . love . . . do you understand, love . . . multinational corporate love . . . the love of bankers and stockholders … sporadic aggression, the shock and awe of gestapo raids, U . . . S . . . A . . . U . . . S . . . A . . .

United by Shock and Awe, assassinations, coups, reincarnated crusades, reinstated inquisitions . . . that eagle sharpening his love talons . . . for the love feast a million Christians are praying all over the face of the earth . . . about love . . . a million Muslims are praying all over the face of the earth— about hate, obviously . . . and one ignorant man’s tirade of self indulgent and vengeful . . . love . . . his soulful definition of universal . . . love … bursting like meteors over the skies of Baghdad to the delight of children deafening and scorching on the desert sands and some are left to be found later, bursting in a child’s severed hand . . . the burst of . . . love … couldn’t God’s will possibly be in it ?. . . it’s love . . .

God is love . . . God’s blitzkrieg in the wee dark hours . . . fulfilling our humanly notion of love is about . . . divine love . . . His bickering love of false prophets & fake christs … God’s shock and awe of love . . . God’s love . . . redemptive … intolerant … merciful … talking out of both sides of its mouth . . . “We couldn’t defend ourselves against anyone right now … but, love conquers all … We can fight a war on two fronts if we have to … Talking out of both sides of its mouth … about love … four fronts … 6 fronts … 8 fronts … a dollar: it’s all a front about … love … about military readiness … for Love conquers all … about threatening affronts to corporate … love … about the loving … liberation of God’s chosen people … the corporate … benefactors of … love … what part of ‘liberate’ don’t you understand?… no time to fret about little folks whose love babies are aborted in trashcans and wheelbarrows behind the bars in the back alleys of the American corporate nightmare … because THEIR … love … is incomplete; ergo, they have no health insurance … can’t afford to see a doctor or fill a prescription … when they learn to love, God’s American Mercy will provide for them … yet, this is about global . . . love . . . global security . . .

the global village vagrants of . . . love . . . pitch black magic daylight strobelights God’s heavens . . . no place for a young terrorist to be out at night … love … will find him … for the sake of … love … it’s about peace & love … love … maketh the world spin ‘round … the nuclear nucleus of … love … ontological horror, internal vacancy, great chaotic vortices consuming them from the inside-out . . . peace spinning around . . . love . . . centered in the nuclear center of … love … the dark insatiable vortices of peace ‘n love . . . if you hear it enough, it is so . . . war is peace and peace begets love … peace ‘n’ love, peace ‘n’ love, peace ’n’ love, peace ’n’ love, peace . . . rotting and poisoning them, as the airwaves bled with upbeat nonsense to bury the national memory . . . a glomerulate memory fed by sportscasters & beauty pageants before . . .

9 . . . 1 . . . 1. . . U . . . S . . . A . . . 9 . . . 1 . . . 1. . . U . . . S . . . A . . .

9 . . . 1 . . . 1. . . U . . . S . . . A . . . 9 . . . 0 . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 0 . . . lest we ever forget . . . 9th inning, 3 balls, 2 strikes, 2 outs, bases loaded with pain… the contraverted skeletal cell, membrane without brain . . .

Here she comes, Miss A-MER-ICK-A … blue eyes crying in the rain . . . it’s about love . . . it’s about God’s love . . . surpassing all understanding … it’s God’s way to peace and love . . . God’s way … not our way it’s about everybody having enough, and then some, and a little more it’s about human decency, the decay of decency, ergo, human decay it’s about the long hard holy road to . . . love . . . divine love … the bloody road of loving, the road to bloody loving road paved by divine war and the inadequacies of human truth in relation to … love it’s not about human beings twisting God’s love with their self-serving pretzel logic it’s not about that …. it’s about love being viciously apprehended . . . by infidels and sinners, scapegoats kissing the hands of corporate gangsters . . . throwing sand in the eyes of the national dignity . . . under fire from peanut gallery protests of atrocities, as decisive & empowered as parrot farts scribbling profound lines of socially-conscious poetry, poets’ cutesy shape-poems on Facebook lamenting bungs in fenders of Audis and Chevys, and the universal rights of women’s bungholes . . . oui oui!! give the guys a stiffy! poets against the war . . . against hate . . . against the opposite of . . . love . . . canned laughter and tears ricocheting around a pinball universe of 2-dimensional love . . . realization of self- . . . love . . . embellished with buzzers, bells, and UFOs . . . and little canned jazz riffs

MICHAEL ANNIS

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that refused to go away and proclaim . . . love . . .

“Aye lads, aye, an aye for an aye. Glory praise to Father Fusion by the PTL, the people that . . . love . . . & the PLO, the people . . . loving . . . others . . . praying for you and aye; He has brought us all together now in dread of Him, in dread of . . . love . . . the failure to . . . love . . . Him in one human bondage, with one magic wand . . . a veritable wand of pixie . . . love . . . Let us sup the cup of suicide in common, there’s enough love for everyone / there’s enough purple koolaid for every chalice, for each set of lips, for each gut puking up . . . love . . .

God’s love moistening every set of lips . . . God’s love . . . whetting the tongue in absolute corporate truth whether we lift hand to poison or gun, awaiting through . . . love . . . and radioactive third-eyes, befriended by tumors, and befriending them in . . . love . . . we cheer on the tidy bomb; cheer on the love of human beings loving others . . . and loved, so very loved, so omnipotently omnisciently … loved

by God’s chosen people—NO, not the Jews— the HAVES . . . who simply extend their Empire, the Empire of … love the HAVES in their love war against the unruly HAVE NOTS, smote by poverty for their questioning the war on unappreciativeness

by God’s CEOs of . . . love… for unruliness has its consequences… ” erratic leaders with coke-bottle visions of peace and prosperity, riding the range of righteous indignant . . . love . . . mendin’ fence in the 10/40 window of opportunity, para six-guns magnifying glaring paradoxens— is that the word—is that the way you spell it?; little wiener dogs snorting up the Gross National Product to turn the crank of their limos . . . taking turns snorting crank in luxury entertained by grassroots rebellions of little poor folk teabaggers hoisting billionaires upon their shoulders . . . the posses, the good old boys, the people’s people, the saved, the chosen ones, the loved of the earth trickling down their love to others less fortunately loved . . . to chart or not to chart, that is the question . . . to analyze, to compile, to spiritize, to revile, to override and overthrow, to underestimate and overcharge

overgrown laws and principles—what IS that silly little shrieking?… ooooooOOooo, oui know . . . that ripply cheerleader squeal . . . in front of the love cameras . . . it’s the cry of the cute girls, the love call of the gold-plated twat— overzealously guarding the underguarded gates of undergirded CEOs . . . what part of “liberate” don’t you understand! . . . what part of LOVE eludes you!? . . . what part of cute are you not familiar with? . . . we’re throwing a love party here . . . we’re cheering on our big, burly skinhead privates . . . our conquistadores headbanging in agreement with their playstations rockin’ hard ridin’ free with the government of right and might . . . we’re pampering and powdering our little privates . . . with the cry of the cute girls . . . ooooo . . . . ooo—they’re just taking orders—ooooo . . . oooooooo . . .

NO—like this . . . ooooooOOoooooooOOOOOOoooooooooo . . . it takes just the right twist of inflection midway through the squealy noise . . . velvet gloves handling delicate diplomacies . . . suede gloves removed to reveal the iron fist, the honed hook . . . burly leg chaps ride through the brambles of myopic criticism . . . through the prahrie brambles of dissenting rhetoric defying the straight shooter of truth, we will smoke you out of yer filthy nests and spider holes, we will huntcha down, and we will per-see-cute you! . . . [begging for your prayers, for your support, as he goes it alone down the dim trail of God’s … love … for the oppressed of the earth . . .

Goin’ it alone, surrounded by his coalition: Hoss n Little Joe, ma, pa, auntie em, eminem, little dorothy and her pup toto . . . the Whizzerd of Crawford and his Stagecoach coalition of Disneyfied love’n’justice, This hyar One Faithful Man … love’s justice rides long and hard, erect and hard, tall, n thick, hard’n’gorged with . . . love . . . throbbin’ ‘n’ spurtin love … up the bullseye of that little scamp Toto, ‘n’ up Dorothy’s sweet young booty for all of Oz, his nose in the sand, her ass in the air, cheeks to the sheets, sniffin’ yonder fer WMD—thar ever-whar yuhknow, even hide’em up thar purdy pink rectums . . .

Show yer hand, whatchyuh got up yer asshole DottieMae, open yorn kinky bunghole whatchyuh buried in yer hindquarters, Missy— Whuppins a Mass Destructin’? See muh handcuff trick? Muh card trick—Got a full house: Two kings—king of heaven, king of earth—two kings, three queens—the Queen of Hearts, the Queen of Heaven, ’n squeezin’ down on muh sphincter the Queen of the silver dollar, but we still defend her

MICHAEL ANNIS

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honor — Yuh lying cheat! AIN’T NO QUEEN IN HEAVEN!! . . . ’at’sa saloon run by the boys …

Hank Williams on the juke box, Hank Snow up the nose, Patsy Cline from behind, bellied up, snortin’ shots, spurs ‘n’ six-guns polished to a high chrome finish, blindin’ them wiley coyotes … makin’ ’em squirm in the saddle, fixin’ a burr under thar butts; repentance long oeuvre due for the axis of Evil— add France and Germany to the list— Il est fils de ses oeuvres!. . . meanin’ Yuh got til sundown tuh GIT out of th Holy Land . . . or … yuh done bought the farm; badge polished in the high noon sun, reflective of machiavellian wanted posters . . . he offers his brand of Western diplomacy: I don’t think yuh know who yer dealin’ with hombre— this hyar’s the Four Horsemen of the A-cockalypse: Rogers, Wayne, Aurterey, and me … Marshall G.W. Bush … [Of the Dallas Cowboys!!??!!] One ’n’ th’ same, ma’am, one’un’th’same; un’ this hyar’s Deppity Dick.

He’ll shoot’cher lights out, an’ I ain’ta joshin’ an’ I ain’ta pullin’ yer purty leg, neither we’uns huntin’ down peckerwoods, skeerty-cats, commies, hippies, A-rabs, and sosolists: —the Burnin’ Bush of God’s Justice—stetson drawn down over mah eyes, bandana up over mah mouth and nose, squintin’ Eastwood style through perturbed little slits at the podium, lightenin thangs up with a joke or two, bravin’ a hailstorm of rhetoric, bullets, tuhmaters, sneakers, talkin’ slow ‘n’ useful-like, bravin’ Helen Thomas (she din’t sneak intuh th front row agin, did she?), and her goddamn unrehearsed questions; bravin’ past convictions, past philanderin’, past A-holes, ho’s, past awol’s, & class ditchin’s, past fibs & past addictions, bravin’ fixed votin’ machines, scoured voter registries, and chad . . . that DANG loco chad It’s time to settle the score—Saddam, yuh lyin’ dirty varmint, yuh tried tuh kill mah Pa— now me an Hoss an Little Joe . . . we’re settelin’ the score (Whut IS th’ score, Deppity Dick?) clear back to Adam, chosen progen-ator of the House of David, the Avengin’ Christ speakin’ His peace in one syllable words, ain’ta Muslin, the langorage of the people, the langorage the people cun unnerstand . . . the plain straight folksy talk of capitalism the talk of winners vs. losers, the talk of the scoreboard, us a hunnert, you a big fat zerer but fer now, pray fer me, don’t just love ’n’ idolize me, pray fer me . . . each night at bed . . . down on yore knees . . . while yer’a next to God . . . pray fer me . . . pray fer God’s love fer me . . . and fer this land I love . . . this land is yore land . . . this land is my land . . . from the New York . . . uh . . . (I caint read that THAR Little Joe . . . it’s fuzzy . . . fuzzy logic … ’sides New York’sa helluva pain in the ass) . . . tuh . . . tuh . . . tuh the great plains of . . . home … TEXAS! … home on the range? . . . Thet’s Texas fer shore … got it … “homeland security”— that thar’s too mess’uh sylbabbles all strung’a’gether Hoss, I shore ain’ta wanna

lose ’em scratchin’ thar heads ’n’ hind ends down thar … so jes make’it a … uh … uhhhhhhh … Dept. Uh HomeontheRange, un I’ll take it from thar. prophylactic explodes with the snout of the eel, jaws of the hyena … to chart or not to chart, that is the question … stormtroopers hustling them off in the night … found in improbable sitcheeashuns of illicit amor covering up murders and suicides of the forsaken … enticed to sell out for a share of the skank-ho’s thighs … hot rocking tail winds whispering cum ons, wake through alleys, public restrooms, & avenues… to serve and protect the best interests of Mankind in equal proportion to an entity’s wealth, power & influence … as represented by your betters and guardians and overlords . . . you know, Congressional interns — hotties … the cute girls . . . OoooooOOooo . . . OoooooooOOooo violent WAR!s must await all those born in critical time slots who are likely to cause social unrest, political upheaval, economic turmoil, religious heresies—we shall finger them for “promiscuity” and unpatriotic “degeneracy” . . .

The handicapped, the insane, the retarded— but we don’t say that word anymore … we people of love—with unloaded, rusting guns stuck in their hands … cannon, tank & smartmissile fodder … the nameless, faceless, voiceless, useless, of the earth … ever poorer, despairing, chaotic … WAR! made them feel worthwhile, defined who they were as a nation, deluded a species … WAR! sent their children over the borders, out from the cities, into the jungles & oceans & deserts, to cook and be cooked with other children in tanks, planes & ships, in boats, jeeps & trains, to slice their playmates throats … it was a crime of passion … great unbridled passion … posing as … love: you see, they have the love to lop off heads; we to bugger & hack off testicles & nipples & carry them around in our mouths like small stones, to stave off thirst, to make mighty magic against the ENEMY . . .

MICHAEL ANNIS

richer, more powerful nations brutalizing weaker, poorer ones … fighting only on their turf . . . on their turf so that OUR TURF—our corporate parking lots and executive mansions— would not be violated … innocent populations of the meek became the bloody harvest . . . as sweat-soaked knees drug through fields like plows … children sprawled about the ground in broken heaps . . . why, it’s a virtual wrecking yard of old, wornout car bodies and children! . . . the children starved, without muscle, rib bones poking through skin; legs and arms like windlestraw, blowing away in the wind, the answer my friend is blowing away in the wind, crying, weeping, sobbing . . . if a child dies in the forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a noise . . . if a child dies in Afghanistan, and no one ~

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is around to hear it, did it make a noise . . .

It’s about . . . love . . . and . . . peace. It’s about a little bit of death, then love and peace. It’s a death about love and peace. Its death is about love, its death . . . is about peace. It’s a piece about the love of death. What part of liberate don’t you understand? . . . If a child dies nameless upon the sands of Iraq, is it a child, or is it an . . . IT . . . until . . . toe-tagged, bagged up & … loved thinking about cute and clever ways to describe body counts … that a cheerleader could cheer about … OoooooOOooo … OooooooooOOooo … to generate statistical evidence that death only partook of the enemy … to chart or not to chart, that is the question … to bury their war dead, to erect great phallusies to heroism … jes like thar commander-in-chief, standin’ tall and erect, thick and proud … rit har in th name a Jeeezzzsus … Lord uh th War fer Love … thermonuclear-equipped park rangers throbbed … their hearts throbbed, patrolling the wilderness of foreign countries, mini-nukes in their bazookas, faces like apocalyptic insects, short vermin-trunks hanging from their snouts, between their legs … their big units of … LOVE … their appendages of … LOVE … love-stingers on their tails; loving thoughts they thought, they LOVE us we are LOVED they LOVE our units of … love … our stiff thrusting stingers of … God’s holy love … with God hogtied as a doting string around our members, lest we ever ferget … love … of WAR! … of 9-1-1 … birthed new incarceration economies in foreign lands … small-scale psychopathic WAR!s over who shall warm his hands over trashcans afire in the alleys at night … domestic compounds filled with the sprayed & spayed remains of potential wildness … while our love, true love, God’s love, stands erect, unwavering, throbbing mightily … a pulsing paradoxen of love … if a child dies as a dismembered chunk of … love … to establish peace … for all mankind . . . and no one is around to hear it … did it make a noise … and was it the noisy revelation of … love …

—sooner than you think, for all Christians and Christian converts—for the cross itself, the mighty cross of love . . . fighting a war on twenty-four fronts if they had to, 24/7 . . . for 50 years . . . angry obnoxious jazz riffs shrieked by old Black smack burnouts played everything but . . . love . . . slip a little of that purple koolaid on that mouthpiece . . . it won’t take much love to imbue peace into that horn . . . it’s not about schools, it’s not about health care, it’s not about Medicaid, it’s not about conservation, it’s not about riding in the back of the bus, it’s not about global warming or climate catastrophe … it’s about … riding . . . fence . . . the brutal fence of . . . love . . . It’s about high prices & bounty hunting … about the price of liberty, the price of gas, the price of the cute girls, the price of prayer, the price of re-election, the price of love on your head, the price Christ paid for your soul . . . the price you paid for your sanity, when your sanity was compromised by … love. … God’s love … God’s love that remained silent through the holocaust, the plagues, through the million children starving every day of every month of every year; it’s about love that tests your … sanity; modern nations had advanced weapons technologies . . . it’s about terrorism . . . about wanted posters and good lookin’ hunks of men ridin John Law into the sunset . . . modern nations had peacekeeping agendas . . . about buildings collapsing under the price of liberty … it’s about the terrorism of … love … terrorism of … corporate … love … the black, as in blackness, blackness gold, river of love … the oil of love … the warming, sensual body oil of love … the high octane fuel of love … modern nations developed and devoted their national debts to the stocked and overstocked Merciless-yet-Just arsenals of … love … Children collapsing under the weight of love … in clandestine love economies, shrouded in layers and layers of loving wars … for the people that love … for the people … loving others … even after … 9 . . . 1 . . . 1 … even after a modern nation no longer had the responsibility to love if it so chose not to … they chose love—not hate … they chose peace—not war … they chose the war for love which is not war, but peace … Tex won the war for love, won the war for freedom … it has nothing to do with oil … it’s only love … God’s will, God’s peace, God’s love … God’s justice, God’s natural resources, God’s black gold, God’s avenging love … if you want to do your part, pray for me—it’s about everybody joining hands and singing along to an old-timey hymn of the love of Jehovah … Summon Nebuchadnezzar, My servant, for he shall torment My people for 10 generations . . . summon the peace of God that passes all understanding . . . passes all sanity . . . What part of liberate don’t you understand … bring out your dying … bring out your dead … bring out your love … the internal combusting cart of compassion careens mankind across the desert of desolation …

[—so when was the last time you felt so beloved by the great white Father?] modern nations, like the great nations of old . . . gave and took . . . Divine LOVE . . . and took no shit no how from no-one. . . .

MICHAEL ANNIS

NEVER AGAIN WAR! NEVER AGAIN THE CAMPS! . . . to chart or not to chart, by the glee club of … love … that is the question . . . never again & again . . . in the straightjacket of time the silent face of Eternity. . . if a child dies in the straightjacket of Eternity, and no one is around to hear it, did it have a name … a face … and did it cry out its desolation …

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Like silos brimming with millet, Modern Nations had stocked arsenals . . . they couldn’t defend themselves from anyone . . . without stocked arsenals . . . our Stealth bombers are for the elderly, for the little old derelict stumbling along homeless in the alleys at night, no matter how insane, no matter how grimy & repulsive, no matter what a maggoty leech; our arsenals are for all Americans, and for all Americans-to-be in all foreign lands everywhere, one day soon ~

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through the slits of Orlando’s eyelids “Suddenly he raises his arms as though he were about to speak. But he falls backward without a word, shot straight through the heart. The attack has begun. Through the slits of Orlando’s eyelids, his eyes are no more than a black thread, burning with fever and terror. Suddenly, from the wall of foliage, bright flashes of light begin to appear everywhere: firearms being discharged. The first to fall beneath the volley of gunfire is Torino, our second guide. He had been trying to go to his comrade’s rescue. Two more of our men are wounded. They crawl back on their hands and knees toward the rest of the column as we fire our weapons to give them cover. There is a lull then, the quiet disturbed only by the rattle of the firearms as they are reloaded. In the silence the speaker with the head of a proconsul slowly articulates each word in a deep bass voice, slightly distorted by the metallic crackling of the loudspeaker. Es por eso (That is why, the interpreter whispers) que propongo para el párrafo cuatro (I propose for paragraph four) la siguiente redaccion (the following wording): el escritor se define politicamente (the writer defines himself politically) por su particapicion active, tanto spiritual como fisica, a la lucha revolucionaria (by his active participation, both spiritual and physical, in the revolutionary struggle). A slight murmur of protest runs the length of the two rows of bodies on either side of the green table”….

—Claude Simon; above quote and quotes following from “Conducting Bodies”

That a nation of citizens-in-common should be defined by a bastard entity’s Empire is singularly the greatest act of tyranny, simultaneously for the exploiter and the exploited why then, has the United States abandoned its sovereignty to National Corporatism?

I condemn “Kleptocracy” exposing its cunning contempt lorded over the working class.

Propose, rather, common purpose scribed cooperatively with beneficent goals for all mankind for all humanity, all races, are entitled to the wealth of the planet, not just a privileged few.

Paragraph 3, Article 21, of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states four precepts establishing right & authority of the governed to be free from corporate Empire: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government …” [precept 1] Therefore, following, if the will of the people is dissolved, the government retains no legitimacy—sober wording unambiguously stating that those who govern are servants of the poorest governed; “the will of the people shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections...” [precept 2] (I interject, writer of resistance, writer of justice, who rewrote your protests to render them spineless?) defines the terms by which those who govern ascend to positions of authority—not by one himself using monetary influence to purchase a throne of tyranny from which he burglarizes, politically and socially, the democratic opportunities and life savings of 98% of our citizens by lobbying a government for bailouts and corporate favors, by stealthily stealing through his constituents’ misunderstanding of derivatives and ponzi schemes, claiming immunity—an active defiance!—from the laws of economics, the laws of a nation, by being “too large to fail.”

Participation in government is not theoretical rhetoric, rather, requires sweat and blood— both shed courageously, eyes firmly fixed upon a future hammered out by virtue; ergo, spiritual refinement, not excess; rule of law framed for the greatest good, for the greatest and most inclusive number of citizens. Laws not created to supplicate an indistinct God— physical laws in a physical universe, understood via human emotional and mental challenges, in context of human suffering & struggle, human pain, human trials, human hopes & dreams.

The quest is not to defend & justify God, rather shield justice wrought for all human beings.

Revolutionary sisters & brothers, take up the arms of empathy, experience, ethics & intellect!

Struggle alongside the least members of society, awarding dignity to them—not to bankers.

“El ideal que, en cuanto escritores independientes (The ideal which, as independent writers), proponemos a la humanidad enferma (we propose to suffering mankind) es una comunidad (is a community) que termine de una vez por todas con toda especie de explotacion, ya sea fiscal o spiritual (which will put an end, once and for all, to every sort of exploitation, be it physical or spiritual) de la criatura humana y (of each and every human being )” …

The Constitution dismantled by talk show hosts, insurance tycoons, bankers, and oil goons; ideal document, once sacred–now erasable, shredded in favor of glib media entertainment; which translates to immense bailouts giving immeasurable power to corporate mobsters; for as power brokers strategized, market pseudo-freedom through premeditated mass ignorance.

Independent thinkers ostracized by unscrupulous calls for patriotism by modern neo-Nazis.

Writers of resistance, writers of human justice, who threw your tongues into a prison cell?!

We were not conceived a nation of aristocratic politicians corrupting all that they touch. I propose that our Founding Fathers saw clearly that freedom and a lasting democracy came to the people, from the people by the people –not rationed out by a wealthy aristocracy– their suffering made tolerable through self-governance, the rule of law, and rights instead of duty; mankind finding liberation through the formal implementation of “all men created equal.”

Is this principle to be found in Corporate Capitalism, or is it dominance of the many by few, a dissolution of liberty, equality, opportunity, and justice by modern slavemakers who rape community, state and nation, pillaging our common treasuries to fatten Wall Street coffers; “which shall be by universal and equal suffrage [precept 3] (be it questions of principle, justice, will, policy, or character) “held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.” [prcpt 4] Put an end to the fraud of democracy that rigs elections, handing authority to oil lobbyists– an empowerment of thugs serving Empire, installing mercenaries where once sat Justice.

End the war upon Iraq, the war in Afghanistan; end the war of Capitalism upon the Masses!

MICHAEL ANNIS

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Once bankers ⇌ corporations are made aware they do not own the people, or the earth and are forced to do the will of the nation, Earth summarily treated as Habitat, not Empire, for the good of mankind, in benevolence toward the biosphere and its rightful inhabitants, all wars of aggression waged for profit (greed’s insatiable devouring of life) will forever cease to convert innocence and empathy into brutality and blood-lust, and true evil—evil born by every corrupt social/political system, regardless of nation, nationality, ethnicity, or religion.

Sort through your conscience and find the nameless ones–can you name them? Generations of Third World poor–poor children–warehoused in dumps, dumpsters, and on reservations, exploitation underwritten by scheming socialites, harvesting their organs for wallets & belts.

Be proud of your nation that converts every sacred thing into the Gross National Product.

It is your patriotic duty to uphold an economic system, Capitalism, that quantifies worth, be it physical, intellectual, or spiritual, by profits generated which leave 98% wallowing in poverty.

Or do you believe the lie that if you support this corruption, one day you will rise above spiritual bankruptcy to generously share your amassed fortunes with the downtrodden? Lies of commission & omission are lethal, perpetuating a system that inherently exploits the poor each time a bailout banker, industrialist, oil baron, pharmaceutical tycoon, insurance mogul, and /or any Wall Street whoremonger increases his profits. Victimized children perish as every horror from hell stalks them, devoured by vultures selling them into prostitution; like human garbage, Earth’s children discarded by society, concentrated in grim border camps being cast aside, enslaved, abused, driven into alcoholism and drug slums by war profiteers.

“El deber del escritor (The duty of the writer) es de hablar (is to speak) en nombre de (in the name of ) las masas trabajadoras y oprimidas (the proletariat and the oppressed masses), dando testimonio (bearing witness) de sus condiciones de vida (to the conditions in which they live) y dando una voz a (and giving voice to) sus legítimas aspiraciones (their legitimate aspirations)”….

The government that decimates the majority of its citizens to fatten the few is illegal!Ω The duty of the people is to bring it down, executing the tyrants & mobsters, replacing each one of their ilk with ethical, moral, just, and visionary citizens who will uphold the Constitution.

The Swine devise plots against “undesirable populations” existing hand to mouth in dumps.

Writer of revolution, you’re sneaking behind dead words, winking along with the gangsters.

Is that you selling out poor children floating in unmarked graves in lagoons of trash and shit?

To whom do you answer, from whose tit do you suck the money of treacherous betrayal; speak your words glibly, coyly watching bankers foreclose hearts & souls of the disinherited?

In your poems you’ll find yourself, slyly hiding, while front lines of Revolution bathe in blood!

The virtue of your high moral calling decayed into worthlessness by your lust for notoriety.

Name the dispossessed of Earth, reveal in illuminative terms their raped humanity. Speak out

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of their struggle & hopelessness, become their champion, lawyer, and voice of protest!

The International Wall Street Mobsters chain our children hostage to their schemes, (proletariat again exploited by bourgeoisie, are you blinded, turning history’s cheek?) and their greedy whims are carrots leading donkeys; as they pilfer nations’ sovereignty the disinherited reel under joblessness, economic plunder, elongated prison terms— oppressed, repressed, suppressed, repossessed, they cringe in darkness and cry out!

Masses standing on one leg under a broiling sun, weeping, fractured thoughts rambling by in their memories, try to recall just how they were scammed out of a cup of water.

Bearing the burden of nutrient-dead food, blooming degenerative diseases & cancers, witness their last dime going for pharmaceuticals that produce nothing but side-effects to create more fertile conditions in which a more horrific death can be acquired. Soon the boss gets rid of them for taking sick time off work; the health insurer “pre-existing conditions have cancelled your policy,” he sneers. The car is repossessed, the house in which they have lived for 20 years is foreclosed on, the credit card companies to which they have become enslaved demand payment, astronomically raise their rates.

They’ve never asked more than their fair share, a fair shake, even in their Union days, Live honorably, their credo, yet when their needy time has come, they find their bailout and that of their neighbors have been given to a bank CEO making $200,000,000/year, giving him the idea that his desires take precedence over their need, & peons have no voice legitimately when they cry out their demands for equal treatment under the law.

To him & his progeny, social class equates to human/subhuman, thus underlings serve, their suffering to be smugly pitied, not rectified, their children are his cannon fodder.

Legitimate candidates of the people are silenced or otherwise disposed of, their lofty aspirations hijacked into illegitimate wars and police actions, their noble hearts razed. “… el escritor se define políticamente, en la medida que tiene existencia social, también lo hace por medio de silencio o su ambigüedad. (… the writer may choose to define himself politically, insofar as he has a social existence, by his silence or by his ambiguity.)

The nation fries under the flame of financial malfeasance. The Haves gamble US away.

Writer of poems, do you toy with the safe little nuances in each word disguising you?

May your cute, but cowardly, sensibilities be damned in malediction by hard laborers.

Choose courage over convention & compliance; boldly assert words by actions taken to reinforce the tenet “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”ΩΩ Define slavery to include fiscal enslavement to Corporatocracy; he who emancipates himself as a writer and citizen by refusing to pay taxes to a government supporting it, politically & artistically establishes a beachhead in the war against aristocratic tyranny.

Insofar as your work is to be respected, shall it be by those who sweat and toil for bread?

As far as your poems might travel, they find them vapidly meaningless, devoid of blood.

He who has watched his children die in labor camps has no use for sophisticated foolery.

Has it crossed your mind that your children are lab rats for monsters injecting them with a disease designed to increase profits for pharmaceutical companies & insurance agencies?

Social pandemics are lucrative for investors slyly producing false ‘cures’ critical to billions.

Existence in Auschwitz carried a certain logic; for if one premeditated human destruction by methodical procedures on a mass scale, then exterminating “undesirables” was logical.

His or her fate was of no importance as long as the State ruled by despots was perpetual.

Silence is affirmation of the status quo. When aristocracy is unchallenged (whether tyrants by the thousands coursing bleak human history, or one ranch-style Nazi simpleton playing his ace up his sleeve in Texas Hold’em cheats the country and dissolves the Bill of Rights), ambiguity feigned of the heinous crimes against mankind is a charade copped in cowardice. “...el escritor afirma su existencia y cumple su misión social poniendo su persona, sus escritos y sus palabras al servicio de las masas y de los pueblos oprimidos… (the writer affirms his existence and fulfills his social mission by placing himself, his writings, and his spoken word in the service of the masses and oppressed peoples…)”

M I C H A E L

The final collapse of the world’s financial system will imprison our children in death camps.

Writer, your silence is complicit, your “reportage” entertainment preceding the hurricane, affirms liquidation of impoverished children, whose fathers can’t shield them. Each witnesses his kids standing on the front porches of their ramshackle crypts, temporarily serving their existence as jail-houses; the secret mutilation soon escalating to open warfare. Democrats and Republicans sell their souls and the nation to capitalist powermongers, as neither party fulfills its obligation of representation for the people, while making false pretenses thereof.

His own children protected from war, sent to Ivy League schools, the politician reneges his social and political contracts of service to those who elected him. He defines his corrupted mission as one of making the wealthy wealthier, thus ensuring that he’ll have future funds by which he is re-elected to preserve the interests of the rich, while disowning the poor.

Placing himself as a middle-man lobbyist in the occlusion of democratic process, he fattens himself on carcasses of children once begging in the streets, saying, “It’s a pity,” forgetting his campaign promises to end poverty, stop global warming, provide health care for all; his writings, deceit-filled as his speeches, commemorate his long hard struggle to pull himself and his neighborhood constituents up by their bootstraps, never mentioning disavowal of his ideals once he won the election, securing his office. All the while this story resonates, spoken of as the Great American odyssey of success in the face of overwhelming odds, the word on the streets is that he stepped over the bodies of the poor in his quest for power,

A N N I S

in his undermining of the Constitution, raking in wheelbarrows of money from Wall Street.

The UCA, United Corporations of Aristocracy, richer than all royalty throughout history service the rich & powerful with propaganda and lobbies. Who, then, is the real “enemy” of the people of every nation, every ethnic group—a nation of geographical borders, or the nation comprised solely of the richest 1% of the world’s aristocrats, who plunder the masses daily? Each & every nation should nationalize the banks, incarcerating their royalty— and until political, economic & social revolution liberates us, the nations shall go on strike, oppressed citizens shall not work, pay taxes, buy, sell, serve, choosing to emancipate all peoples from oppressive clandestine rule of the corporate-financial shadow government. “… el primer deber del escritor es de habler en nobre de las masas trabajadoras y. (… the prime duty of the writer is to speak in the name of the working masses.) …

The cancer is corporate capitalism, the collective consciousness of a madhouse. Anarchy’s prime function is to create havoc that disrupts illegitimate power over common people.

Duty toward a government is not mandatory, but elective; if government isn’t comprised of the people instead of ‘God’s chosen elite’, then political anarchy comes from the top down; the rich destroy all progressive cultural revolutions to preserve their wealth & affluence.

Writer, if the time isn’t now to be courageous, then validity flees your professed relevance.

Is not cowardice the foundation of your lines of self-absorption? Your meek sensibility is to avoid confrontation with those roasting little children, feeding them to their hounds.

Speak boldly of despotism gripping the face of the Earth, maggots devouring our freedoms; in truth and justice, call for the people to wage rebellion through a mass general strike, for the duty of a writer is not different from the miner, the carpenter, the farmer, the artist: Name those thieves stealing billions from the poor, hand them justice up against the wall.

Of the people, by the people, for the people, our Constitution states; now, raped by greed the list of crimes rolls out through the generations, as social stratification exacerbates it: Working people enslaved by capitalist thugs, genocide of “undesirables,” holocaust of the masses, atrocities against the poor, all seen clearly through the slits of Orlando’s eyelids.

—To the memory of Dylan Annis, my firstborn son, April 5, 1982 — February 28, 2001, and David Sisneros, beloved nephew, April 13, 1973 — June 13, 2009 Ω. Everyone

has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. —Article 25, paragraph 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights ΩΩ.

Article 1, sentence 1, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

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dis integrat ion GINNETTA CORRELI ~

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ART: HENRY AVIGNON ][ GINNETTA CORRELI CONTINUES TO PG 237

DONATE TO OMEGA

We drive a seahorse in on the left. I hide the needle on my right.

A tunnel near the end. As we enter my captain finally sees her light.

Captain Jack I love it when you kiss me till wet.

“Yeah baby yeah” It’s the truth Jack. Can’t you see the truth even with your eyes sewn shut?

“I’m only the seaman or maybe a passerine” Captain what about your index probe?

How can you feel a womb with a hook for a hand?

She flips Jack Sparrow my middle finger.

Tell me Jack. How do you speak with your lips burned? Puncture weave pull repeat.

Tell me Jack. How do you speak with your lips burned? Merkata bleed smile.

I repeat. Tell me Jack. How do you speak with your lips burned?

Tell me Jack. How can I speak with my lips burned? Puncture weave pull repeat.

CLICK TO WATCH THE VIDEO: http://www.vimeo.com/6992252 OR http://www.break.com/usercontent/2009/9/disintegration-ginnetta-correli-last-night-of-paris-1254855.html Each graphic frame on this page is taken from the video.

[Soundtrack by David Eng: “The Last Night of Paris.”]

GINNETTA CORRELI GINNETTA CORRELI ][ CONTINUES NEXT PAGE

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vuMU7yCM7E

his name is bullet

With a boulder under the woman's belly and her ear pressed to the rock, the cowpokes guide him with venison on their breath. s a hard working buck who can focus.

He “Don't worry” Haas tells the female. The strong bronco eager to please.

Hoss strokes the buck's backside with his hand. Excited and maybe scared Little Joe's index finger probes inside girl. Warm and damp. Her body makes fart sounds.

“Easy now. Gonna feel real good. Just gotta trust him to take you slow.”

Hoss kisses her forehead. The male horse breathes hard. His middle swells with sweat.

“That a boy” Stiff and tight. The bronco blankets the woman's body as the girl licks little Joe's finger with her tongue. She is so beautiful Hoss guides the horse steady to her tightness.

“Easy now.” The horse mounts then slides inside. Oh my God “You are such a beautiful girl” Haas unbuckles his belt. The stud punctures the woman. Jerking his tool inside her with a slow arduous squeeze to the mountain breeze. The bronco locks up and becomes stuck. His rod rock hard. Their adrenalin high. Once it is time. The stud shoots his chunk flurry breathing hard over the woman's neck.

She lifts her bottom high above the rock allowing the animal’s seed to travel deep inside while her milky boobs shake.

Hoss slaps his balls on her cheek and squirts in her hair, while Little Joe whispers to himself how much he loves her. “God I love you” The sleepy horse is led to a tree and tied down for what is left of the night.

The wranglers make a cool bed on the pine needle ground. The doll hot yet still naked. Sandwiched in between them on blankets.

In the early morning Hoss and Little Joe take turns making love to her. Discrete as to not disturb one another. The three of them pretend to sleep until they can hold it no more. Moaning like lions. One at a time blizzard balling inside her.

Later the men carry the naked young girl down a hill. Both lather her and scrub themselves clean. With hugs they kiss the doll with affection in the cool wetness of the Ponderosa spring. ~

sonny’s goodbye A milk skin seed was once stuck in a mother’s death grip.

As the weed grew the mother controlled his taste buds. “Sonny chew all your broccoli then you can suck on ice cream.

Son your body is too thin come on now hurry up.

Eat it. Now drink it.”

The scene plays again in my mind.

Numb the woman can only stare at her son’s final exit.

Click. Shot. Bowl cut and happy.

A sprout pose grins outside the pain window.

Sonny's virgin eyes two hazel drops curled long lashed and thick.

Smiling at me when he was three.

Sonny picks her ripe dandelions.

Savior the moment a mother’s battle cry.

Dresden bouquets landing on tombs. *This man a tragedy * Love of her every bosom move. Supple in a temple worshiped inside and outside the womb.

Sonny rocks to sleep. Flying fights. Army green fatigues.

Her soldier boy trapped inside a small plastic airplane.

An inflicted wound shadow.

“No you listen to me. Your divine mother knows best. Sonny ya better listen to me... Damn it! Don’t you dare stick your tongue at your mother.”

The moon steals the sun. Gone for good.

Sonny chokes on the past. His body burned and dies of thirst.

“Goodbye old woman and cold world. I fly at last.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLL67CN2hnw

GINNETTA CORRELI – DAVID ENG – LAST NIGHTS OF PARIS: “HIPPODROME MIME” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URoQuSiLV8I&feature=related

the baby pool

http://www.vimeo.com/7677644 [COLLABORATION]

I want to fly like a snail.

Yes, snails fly in their minds, so does the brain of the ocean.

Does a man want to drown in the ersatz desire?

You must understand me. I know you and I swam together.

They call it escape velocity. You were the expatriate, calling yourself “Moondoggie.” All the Roxie girls on the beach desired you. Me, a strange expatriate. No, not a blonde GINNETTA CORRELI: “WHO IS JOHN GALT” [CREATED FOR THE BAND, “THE END OF SCIENCE”] girl named Gidget.

The sea was black that day and the sky a mass of condensed vapor. Yet, somehttp://www.vimeo.com/7434299 how I pulled a boy to a deep, forming swell and I spoke to him: “Hold your breath and GINNETTA CORRELI — HENRY AVIGNON: go under the wave.”

“I don't swim with black fish.”

“SUNDAY AT THE HOSPITAL” The boy lied, smiling to his friends, waving with one wrist like a windshield wiper http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE1gKLnpjsQ moves in the rain. He kept trying to move back to the drunk dots on the sand.

The boy was afraid. I could tell. I kept a firm grip on his foot.

The next dark envelope started to fold.

“Watch me.” I told him.

I pushed my head under the ocean disguise, pulling him close. Deep we went.

I could feel a man trust me below a vigorous excavating waterspout … our bodies together as one in our minds.

Grabbing his middle with my lips, I blew as best I could with what short time I had. I knew the man craved nourishment and liked my milk.

I could tell by the way he closed his eyes. Thrusting under my warm blanket until a kernel popped. A wet push for us to a cream foam, surface release.

The boys watching from the shore jealous of our wave. Tossing together as plugs on a solarium, hydrated platform for all to see. No, I was not ashamed. The man belonged to me. The sea.

Yet, phlebitis is inevitable for the weak of heart. The boy pretended to choke and came too soon, spitting water from his teeth. He grabbed his slip-and-slide and ran http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BL2e1CdLMaw Confession Jingle to his buddies on the dirt. http://www.youtube.com/user/ginafritz52#play/all/uploads-all/2/0Bdd-6dTnFk I played the piano for you Moondoggie-babe, you still have not learned how to fool Mother Nature. Thank http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3FD108yIYI&feature=related Mary Jane Go Round God you're still alive … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBy6YsCtvQw&feature=related the Echelon Effect ~ ~

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contributors ~

HENRY AVIGNON: [OMEGA 7’s featured visual artist and a literary contributor]. An artist of language, Henry Avignon finds poetry and photography in everything. He believes “God Force” is an accumulation of sentences and chains of symbolic code; information inspired by sedimentary layers of unanswerable questions, nothingness, & primal curiosities. He considers God Force to be language, a universal system of sustenance and creation. Living matter and intellectual/ideological constructs of thought are a manifestation of language/information. Ergo, God Force is the evolution of this cosmic-biologic information. Information is the everything-evolving. The Genome is a Deep Song: pitch and wail of the duende of God Force. Humanity is a poetic tool of exploration and discovery in a vast infinity of interrelated creations divulged cosmically, simultaneously. The Human species supports a nexus-expanding creativity (sub-strata of a universal meta-pathos)—a critical aspect of God Force. Fast approaching a synthesis of biology and technology, the capacity to process and utilize information will enable spirit energy to transcend base-pathos.

This union with God Force is formal technique transfiguring informal content. Movement, progression, transgression, circumvention and interpretation: all lie in musicality; a poetic construct reflecting the Nature of cohesion innate to its organic self-process. Henry Avignon’s art and poetics move toward the absolution and realization of these principles, a fluidity of formal translucence in transcendence. His book, Dirty Poem, and an asyet-to-be-titled anthology of Holocaust literature for which he will be co-editor, are both forthcoming from Howling Dog Press.

BENJAMIN BALTHASER's poems in OMEGA 7 are part of a longer manuscript entitled Dedication, chronicling the lives of several Jewish Communist Party members who suffered persecution during the McCarthy era. His critical and creative work have appeared in American Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Pemmican, Poetry International, Left Curve and elsewhere. He is a former labor organizer for the UAW and received his MFA in poetry from UMass-Amherst in 2003.

TOM BRADLEY's latest books are Even the Dog Won't Touch Me (http://www.ahadadabooks.com/; Ahadada Press), Vital Fluid (http:// www.crossingchaos.com/catalogue.html; Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink), and Hemorrhaging Slave of an Obese Eunuch (http:// www.doghornpublishing.com/; Dog Horn Publishing), all coming out this year. Further curiosity can be indulged at http://www.tombradley.org.

Tom has been a frequent contributor to, and advocate of, Howling Dog Press / OMEGA.

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CHARLES BUKOWSKI, one of America’s greatest literary masters, is possibly the most imitated and influential writer of the last 50 years.

Early in his career, he published in several small literary magazines where his notoriety spread among underground circuits. He met John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, from where his international fame was launched, and his literary genius flourished. Among his greatest works of the 45+ books of poetry and prose he published during his lifetime are The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills, Burning in Water Drowning in Flame, Post Office, Factotum,Women, Fire Station, At Terror Street and Agony Way, Erections Ejaculations & Tales of Ordinary Madness, Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and Love Is a Dog from Hell. “Buk” died on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three. Posthumously, his work continues to be published by Ecco Press.

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GINNETTA CORRELI is the author of a novella called The Lost Episodes of Beatie Scareli. Her writing can be found in print and online jour-

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MICHAEL ANNIS, founder/editor of Howling Dog Press, has published some of the world’s greatest writers & artists, while personally being cited as “the most dangerous poet on the planet” (http://nzpoetsonline.homestead.com/MA7.html). He dreams a world where war, poverty, slavery, and the exploitation of human society and the ecology of planet Earth by money-worshiping renegade humans has been outlawed and banished, and believes that this dream must be what makes him “dangerous” —a “rogue nation of one.” Toward this quest, he’s authored a screenplay, 10,000 Jewels in the Sky, a novel, Basileia, and a graphic novella, Messenger of the Covenant. With passion, … he advocates Heller Levinson’s Hinge Theory to which he has contributed greatly in its development by authoring “The Hinge Manual” (a user’s guide for sojourning in the Hinge Univers), and by the creation and expansion of new applications evolving Hinge Theory concepts. He posits, “Revolution is > change; revolution first in Language, all else will follow. When we have the language right, we won’t need speeches about change. The dynamic of correct Language will wipe out poverty and provide universal Health Care, redistributing wealth so that none will suffer; Language will reposition us in a universe devoid of prisons and reservations. Language evolves the Human species, expanding Human spirit. Language is the intrinsic architect & correlative mirror of our DNA. ‘Change’ is external by nature; authentic ‘Revolution’ only occurs within genetic construct.” Michael Annis has won awards/fellowships for collaborative arts, design & literature in both interstitial creative non-fiction & poetry; he has adapted his works musically for performance, fronting such alternative bands as The Disinherited, AtMassFear, and The Sex Against Hunger Chorale. Most recently, he has performed with Nick “Cat Burglar” Vangel, Wordwulf (Tom Sterner), and the alternative mega-metal band Illicit Sects. Michael and his dangerous ancestors trace back in chaotic paths to the Isle of Man, and deep within Lascaux, France.

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JANE CROWN has a chapbook from Polymer Grove entitled Her Delicate Shoe, which she got to read with Jack Hirschman, John Bennett and Sharon Doubiago this past January at Luna's Cafe in Sacramento. She is working on her second chap-to-be with Lummox Press in “The Little Red Book” series this winter of 2009 entitled A Love Letter to Darwin. Jane dreams big and in colour, but works small. She spends “an awful lot of time” archiving interviews of the American poet's voice, which reaches a global audience at janecrown.com and working on her journal collective as the publishing editor of “Heavy Bear Journal” http://www.heavybear.janecrown.com/%20 ; http://www.heavybear.janecrown.com/ . Jane is well published as a freelance writer and poet both in print and online.

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nals such as Diet Soap, Sein Und Werden, Ink Sweat and Tears, Poesy Planet and Insolent Rudder among others. A spoken word project is to be released soon. You can visit her here: http://lambchop2.wordpress.com/ and http://www.myspace.com/ginnettacorreli

NABINA DAS lives two lives, shuttling between the USA and India. Her poetry and short stories have been published in literary journals and anthologies in North America and India, and her most recent poems appear in Mascara Literary Journal from Australia. A 2nd prize winner of the 2008 all-India Poetry Contest organized by HarperCollins-India and Open Space, Nabina is a 2007 Joan Jakobson fiction scholar from Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, and a 2007 Julio Lobo fiction scholar from Lesley Writers’ Conference. Having worked as Assistant Metro Editor with The Ithaca Journal, Ithaca, NY, and a journalist and media person in India for about 10 years, she now freelances. An M.A. in Linguistics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, her other interests are theater and music. Formally trained in India’s classical music, she has performed in radio and TV programs and acted in street theater productions in India. She blogs at www.fleuve-souterrain.blogspot.com when not writing. Currently, Nabina is working on her novel Footprints in the Bajra to be published by Cedar Books, India, by the year end.

TATJANA DEBELJAČKI, born on April 23,1967 in Užice. Member of Association of Writers of Serbia UKS since 2004, and Haiku Society of Serbia HDS Montenegro-HUSCG&HDPR,Croatia. Up to now, I have published three collections of poetry: A House Made of Glass, published by ART–Užice; Yours, published by NARODNA KNJIGA Belgrade and Vulcano by Haiku Lotos, Valjevo.CD-BOOK, A House Made of Glass.

ART+ Uzice. “Ah-Eh-Eeh-Oh-Ooh,” published by Poeta Belgrade, 2008.

JARED DEMICK will not comment upon rumors that there have been Jared Demick sightings recently in Northeastern Connecticut. Witnesses have mentioned that he usually has a book in hand and is mumbling something incoherent about the Wobblies. He is the editor of the online magazine The Jivin' Ladybug: A Skewered Journal of the Arts.

DUBBLEX has been writing & playing music his entire life. He has been published by Street Literature Review Magazine (paper) The Cartier Street Review, the Nov. 3rd Club, Polarity, Mad Swirl, readerjack.com, and wheelhouse magazine. DubbleX teaches special education and writes & plays music to stay sane.

RENEE DWYER has offered a quote: “Tragedy has moved into the world. This is the moment of the lonely self's ascendance. We are present at the place of our absence, lost in the stars, watching each other, waiting for each other to return from nowhere.” [from Loneliness as a Way of Life by Thomas Dumm].

STEVIE LEE EDWARDS graduated from Albion College in May of 2009, where she studied English and economics. Her poems have been published in SNReview, The November 3rd Club and The Cartier Street Review, and she also has poems forthcoming publication in PANK Magazine, Poets Against the War, and The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle. She now works in Chicago for a nonprofit organization and plans to pursue graduate school in creative writing, eventually.

ANNMARIE ELDON , an identical twin, evolved from cryptophasic origins in once densely industrialised Birmingham, England. She was taught by her gypsy grandmother to say the alphabet backwards before the age of three. Juggling various personae interiorae, children and hormones and practicing counter-cultural reclusiveness, she achieves adult differentiation and spiritual equanimity within the mediocrity of a picturesque Oxfordshire market town. She is a former contributor in the OMEGA Literary Series. A small portion of her work can be found at the fol-

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lowing websites: http://is.gd/tbn2 ; http://protestpoemsdotorg.blogspot.com/2009/04/annmarie-eldon.html ; http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php? name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=287 ; http://www.zafusy.org/poetry/annmarieeldon ; http:// intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/09/annmarie-eldon.html ; http://www.notellmotel.org/poem_single.php?id=770_0_1_0.

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JOE GIGLIO Jazz guitarist; also-funk/blues; vocalist—when I’m moved; composes music & poems; draws pictures & breath; live(s) in nyc; joegiglio.com for cds; gigs please; vid feeds; philosophy; b.a; m.f.a – so say… played w/night shift jazz greats – it’s fate can’t act: joe@joegiglio.com GREGORY GREYHAWK, award-winning author of Wailing in Heaven, Whistling in Hell (Howling Dog Press, 1996) and Orenda (HDP, 1995), and contributor to Cost of Freedom: The Anthology of Peace & Activism (HDP 2007), was formerly a US Marine in Vietnam, pro hockey player, rail-jumper, journalist, advertising executive, and a mate on ships on the Great Lakes and the high seas. A multi-linguist speaking/writing English, French, Latin, and Huron, his other books include Destination for Margaret and Six Guns. He is the definitive presenter of the oral tradition of poetry, having performed his works solo and accompanied by musicians at numerous venues, including both academic and street audiences. In 1993, working together with Jimmy Santiago Baca, Charlotte DeClue, Miguel Algarin, and Michael Annis’s Disinherited & The Sex Against Hunger Chorale, Greyhawk was primary in the series of readings throughout the Rocky Mountain area that, among other things, launched the Smithsonian Traveling Exhibition. These readings set an early standard for literary performance. Greyhawk’s works have been published and translated internationally.

LEIGH HERRICK is a poet, writer and collaborator whose poems, essays, music, and reviews have appeared in a variety of print and electronic journals, including, most recently, Jacket, The Jivin' Ladybug, and Unlikely Stories. Her spoken word CDs Monocle Man (2009) and Just War (2004) are available through CD Baby. For additional information, please visit her site at www.mnartists.org/Leigh_Herrick Leigh is a frequent contributor to Howling Dog Publications, including OMEGA and 2007’s Cost of Freedom: The Anthology of Peace & Activism that featured two of her outstanding political poems. She also led, arranged and spearheaded the “Cost of Freedom” publication parties in Minneapolis/St. Paul that were not only celebratory, but also designed as public protests against the Bush Administration’s illegal actions including it’s war upon Iraq. A collection of her poetry is slated to be published in 2010 by Howling Dog Press.

SANDRA HUNTER’s work has appeared in New York Stories, Zyzzyva, Glimmer Train, Talking River Review, the South Dakota Quarterly and others. She is currently working on a novel titled Waiting to Come Home.

MOLLY KAT is studying Creative Writing at Binghamton University. She has attended SUNY Purchase, WCC, and Cambridge University in England. She has had work published in "Ragazine" and college journals and newspapers. Currently a member of Binghamton University's slam team, Grey City Slam, she attended college Nationals for the first time, and last year went to the regionals on the Bowery Poetry Club's Intercollegiate Slam Team. Although slams have their place, she'd rather just sit around with good poets and listen … she's not big on scoring art with numbers … numbers ruin everything. Right now, all she wants to do is drop out of school and follow Sister Spit around until they tell her to get inside the van.

JILLIAN ROSE KRUPP Words carried me from the pages of "Smile HON, Baltimore" zine to Boulder, Colorado and they'll carry me farther still. As an active member of Students for Peace and Justice, you can find me with a sign in hand at local protests. Come join me!

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SUN YUNG LEE, a Korean-American poet and writer, spends her time helping fellow inmates learn and understand that they still have rights guaranteed by law and the US Constitution, even while incarcerated, backing up this assertion through extensive research in law libraries. Her work in OMEGA 7 was written while serving as poet-in-residence in Denver Women’s Correctional Institution. She continues to be a personal assistant to Michael Annis at Howling Dog Press.

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VICTORIA GANIM is a Movement Therapist living in Los Angeles. She is a dedicated ballet dancer who during her formative years studied and danced in Europe. She is currently working on a project entitled The Dance Postulates from which "with plie" is selected and published in OMEGA 7. This Hinge application illuminates the art of dancing.

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contributors

contributors

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JOY LEFTOW calls writing her first love. She says, “Writing is breathing, I need it to survive – it’s my water, my air, my first love.” Joy’s honesty and openness may astonish you or embarrass you, but she promises not to bore you. Her work “can be relished” at http:// joyleftowsblog.blogspot.com. She is editor of The Cartier Street Review. Leftow is a double alumna at Columbia University and has her second Masters from CCNY in Creative Writing. She’s been featured on Rockland Internet Radio, Indie Feed, Jazz Poetry Café, and Everything Goes. Her publications are too numerous to list here. Her book, A Spot of Bleach and Other Poems & Prose was published by Big Foot Press in 2006 and is available at Amazon.com.

HELLER LEVINSON, father and creator of the linguistic literary form HINGE and HINGE THEORY, lives in New York City where he studies animal behavior. A prolific and intensely original writer, his work has been published in a myriad of independent literary magazines, most recently in Skidrow Penthouse, alligatorzine, Cartier Street Review, Jivin’ Ladybug,Ygdrassil, and Jacket. He is the author of two full-length collections from Howling Dog Press: ToxiCity, Poems of the Coconut Vulva (poems, 2005) and Smelling Mary (Hinge applications, 2008). Heller has been a longstanding contributor to the OMEGA literary series, and two of his Hinge applications were featured prominently in Howling Dog’s Cost of Freedom:The Anthology of Peace & Activism (2007; co-edited by Michael Annis, Mike Palecek, and Whitney Trettien). Heller is the consummate inventor and boundary pusher of language and profound literary form, exhibiting an ever-evolving genius whether in poetics, fiction, or non-fiction. His next collection of Hinge applications, from stone this running, is scheduled for publication in 2010 (Black Widow Press). He has performed with many musicians, most recently jazz guitarist and impresario Joe Giglio, and world-renowned jazz saxophonist Jimmy Halperin. http://www.howlingdogpress.com/SmellingMary/ smellingmary.html; http://mysite.verizon.net/vze8911e/jivinladybug/id91.html; http://homepage.mac.com/miguel_cervantes/OMEGA06/index_files/ Page320.htm; http://jacketmagazine.com/38/r-levinson-rb-herrick.shtml OSWALD LE WINTER is called “the John Milton of our age,” and Saul Bellow said, “he is an American Rimbaud.” Among other distinguished prizes, he is an International Rilke Prize winner—one of the most prestigious awards in poetry, and has won the coveted New American Library Poetry Prize. His latest books are Ages of Chaos & Fury (Ravenna Press) and More Atoms of Memory (Howling Dog Press). Le Winter was born in Vienna, Austria in 1931, being one of only 1,000 Jewish emigrant children allowed into the United States during the Holocaust. Educated at Berkeley, San Francisco State University, Columbia University, and the University of Tubingen, he is considered an authority on the works of Shakespeare, having edited Shakespeare in Europe, and written countless essays on the History of Ideas and Comparative Literature. www.poetryfromchaos.com ELENOR LITTLE Elenor “Ele-Beth” Little is a recently qualified Philosophy Lecturer and avid journal writer. She spent her early years in Portugal, but currently resides in England. She’s obsessed with the isolated nature of consciousness, spontaneous discussion with strangers, sexual abjection, red wine and past-charms.

ADRIAN C . LOUIS is a Professor of English in the Minnesota State University system. His 2006 book of poems, Logorrhea (Northwestern University Press), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Adrian is a frequent contributor to OMEGA. More info can be found at www.Adrian-C-Louis.com.

MICHAEL D. MAIN is a 53-year-old career poet and Senior Technical Writer, educated at Indiana University-Bloomington. He is a past recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Indiana Arts Commission. Main’s pioneering work in electronic book publishing culminated in an e-novella with OverDrive Press in1998. In 1996, he was among the first writers in the U.S. to mount a literary web studio offering electronic multi-media text/graphic presentations (Star Thrower Publishing www.star-thrower.com). Main has been deeply influenced by Heller Levinson's Hinge Theory. His study of Michael Annis' Hinge Theory Manual convinced him that his most vital contribution might be to produce new Hinge Applications to empower and further explore the dynamics which Levinson had revealed in Smelling Mary (HDP 2007). Similarly, Henry Avignon's application of Hinge concepts to the practice of “Extractionist” photography pulled Main toward unanticipated far-reaching emotional and psycho/ cerebral directions. Main believes these elements embody a realistic prospect for cultivating adept levels of revolutionary linguistic practice. Main's early experience with the form suggests to him that Hinge is fully capable of bringing writers and readers to levels of linguistic energy, intellectual discovery, and emotional joy that must be critical to the survival of any advancement of adept and alert culture in the early 21st Century.

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EDWARD MYCUE, a San Francisco poet and writer, was born in Niagara Falls, New York, and raised in Texas from age 11, having degrees from Arlington State University and North Texas State University. He has been a Lowell Fellow at Boston University, a WGBH-TV Boston intern, Macdowell Colony Fellow, Peace Corps teacher in Ghana, and taught American Literature at International Peoples College (Elsinore, Denmark). “Spent three wanderyears in Europe doing grunge jobs like shipyard in Rotterdam, wine and vegetable and chestnut harvest in southern France and ended up on this coast where I found love was a pausing place and after 32 years am still here. During that time I met George Oppen, Lawrence Fixel, Jim Watson-Gove, Carol Schneck, Carl Rakosi, Andrea Rubin and many more poets honed true." Some of Ed’s books are Damage Within the Community, Root Route & Range the Song Returns, The Singing Man My Father Gave Me, and Because We Speak the Same Language. In 2000 came Nightboats, and most recently Mindwalking: New & Selected Poems 1937-2007.

MARY NEWELL, Ph. D., is an Assistant Professor and Director of Writing at Centenary College of New Jersey, where she teaches literature and writing, including poetry and poetics. She has published a few poems, as well as critical work on ecocriticism, contemporary poetics, and pedagogies of place and encyclopedia entries on Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman for the FOF Ecocritical Encyclopedia (forthcoming).

VALERY OISTEANU is a writer and artist with international flavor. Born in Russia (1943) and educated in Romania and France, he adopted Dada and Surrealism as a philosophy of art and life. Immigrating to New York City in 1972, he has been writing in English for the past 37 years. He is the author of 10 books of poetry, a book of short fiction and a book of essays, The AVANT-GODS. A new collection of poetry, Perks in Purgatory, is coming out in “Fly by Night Press” 2009 a subsidiary of “A Gathering of the Tribes” New York. For the past 10 years, he has been a columnist at NY Arts magazine and art critic for Brooklyn Rail and www.artnet.com. He is also a contributing editor at ART.ES, and contributing writer for French & Romanian art and literary magazines (La Page Blanche, Viata Romaneasca, Obsrvatorul Cultural, Contemporanul etc.) As a performer, Valery Oisteanu is well known to downtown NYC audiences. He is always well received in theaters and clubs specializing in poetry and music where he presents original Zen Dada multi-media shows in his unmistakable style of “Jazzoetry."

JOHN OLSON's most recent publication is Backscatter: New And Selected Poems, from Black Widow Press in 2008. He has recently completed another collection of prose poetry for Black Widow called Larynx Galaxy. Souls of Wind, his novel about Arthur Rimbaud and Billy the Kid, was published by Quale Press in 2008 and was short-listed for a Believer Book Award. The Nothing That Is, an autobiographical novel, is forthcoming from Ravenna Press. He is currently at work on a novel about the Cubist painter Georges Braque. “Strange Matter,” an essay about the quest for the Higgs Boson, or God Particle, at CERN is forthcoming in The American Scholar.

LAURA OREM is a writer, artist, and teacher. Her work has appeared in such places as Nimrod, heART (Human Equity Through Art), Poets Against the War, OCHO, and many others. She is a featured blogger for The Best American Poetry. She is senior editor for a new online journal, Praxilla, and is on the editorial board for Toad Hall Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Bennington College and is a Writing Fellow at Goucher College in Baltimore. She lives in Red Lion, PA on a small farm with her husband and one of her two grown sons, along with assorted farm and other animals.

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DAVID RAY, whose landmark book of anti-war, anti-Empire poetry, The Death of Sardanapalus & Other Poems of the Iraq Wars, was published

by Howling Dog Press in 2004, is one of the world’s most prolific and respected writers. He is a poet of deep political and social justice, consistently choosing conscience over career or favor among the writing establishment. Chinua Achebe said recently, “David Ray remains among the best half-dozen poets in the English Language today.” Richard Wilbur stated, “It is fitting that David Ray has twice been given an award named for William Carlos Williams. Though Ray is quite capable of a sestina or a long haiku-sequence, his poems are not conspicuously technical … poem after poem is a truly fresh occasion, and some of that variety is owing, I think, to an admirable honesty and recklessness of feeling.” In 2007, he

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STACY MUSZYNSKI Before Stacy Muszynski snagged her MFA in fiction from Texas State University she wrote and edited ad copy, book and movie reviews, corporate newsletters, travel articles, and features for newspapers both in print and online in Detroit and Austin. The former frontporchjournal.com book reviews editor now reads for American Short Fiction, edits copy for identitytheory.com, edits the “fact”s at anderbo.com and co-hosts Five Things Austin. She’s at work on a collection of short stories and a book of Italian-to-English poetry translations. She’s won enough small prizes for her writing to remain encouraged. Get a tiny taste at www.tiny-lights.com.

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PAUL CORMAN-ROBERTS is the author of two collections of prose and poetry. He hopes to author a few more before the whole shit-house goes up in flames. He is a frequent contributor to OMEGA, and sundry HDP projects including 2007's Cost of Freedom: the Anthology of Peace and Activism, and his own Coming WorldGone World published by Howling Dog Press in 2006.

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published When (Howling Dog) and Music of Time: Selected and New Poems was published by The Backwaters Press in 2006. David is a frequent contributor to OMEGA, and his work was featured prominently in Cost of Freedom: The Anthology of Peace & Activism (HDP, 2007). www.davidraypoet.com;

KENNETH ROSEN has published three books in this millennium, The Origins of Tragedy, which locates social resistance in the writings of Sophocles (CavanKerry Press, Fort Lee, New Jersey), and during a pedagogical sojourn in Greek Cyprus, Homo Politico and Cyprus's Bad Period, latter in conjunction with poems about the Crimean Tatar diaspora by a second-generation descendent of the Tatar expulsion conducted by Stalin and his successors, violently privileging Soviet Russian “settlers” over claims of the virtually aboriginal Tatars, a pattern of murderous displacement that blights every national tree, the dispersal of the Firbolgs by the Woads, American Indians by the Europeans, and to this day in the Middle East, Arabs by Jews, written by the Turkish-American poet, Adnan Adam Onart, The Passport You Ask For, with the Aeolian Press of Nicosia, Cyprus and Portland, Maine, created for the purpose of these two books, Portland, Maine being where Kenneth lives; where he attempts to advance the second draft of his novel, The Goat's Mirror; The Goat's Mirror ponders the epistemological enigma posed by the male and female differential propensity to detect erotic invitation and significance where consciously unwanted and unintended, a cryptology Kenneth explores in a poem collection to be published sometime before the next millennium by Michael Annis and Howling Dog Press, AMERICAN LOVE MANIFESTO, though Senior Editor Annis promises to publish sometime before then Kenneth's account of rolling the erotic marble up the hill, nose to the ground, GOMORRAH, with pictures by Kenneth's friend—the artist Richard Wilson.

ADAM ROUFBERG is a Natural Philosopher [MA Physics] who spends his time promoting the arts and the human spirit. He is a mentor to youth on the verge of solo flight, occasionally picks up a gig at a college lecturing on Newton's Laws, Mutual Induction, or the distance from that thing mounted on his shoulder girdle to Uranus. If you find yourself wandering amidst the flora and fauna of the Shawangunk Mountains, you'll likely run into him. Adam is the producer and host of the live music/ human rights/ animal rights based socio-political satirical commentary radio program - www.RadioActiveLunch.com - on the community based independent radio station out of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie NY. ALBERT SALINAS A winner of La Palabra, La Pasion Poetry Slam Competition, Albert has performed his work in nine states including New York and California (San Francisco/Los Angeles). His work has been published in literary journals and chapbooks. He is currently working on a novel titled The Pinché Piñata.

LILVIA SOTO, poet, translator, and literary critic, lives in Casas Grandes, Chihuahua, Mexico, has a Ph.D. in Spanish American literature from Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, has taught at Harvard and other American universities, writes in both English and Spanish, and has published poetry, short fiction, literary criticism, and literary translations in Spain, Canada, the United States, Mexico, and several other Latin American countries. She has completed two English-language poetry collections about the American Iraq Wars. Lilvia has been a consistent contributor to various HDP publications including translations from English into Spanish of several poems in The Death of Sardanapalus & Other Poems of the Iraq Wars by David Ray, and many of her own poems in both Cost of Freedom: The Anthology of Peace & Activism and the OMEGA online series.

THOMAS [WORDWULF] STERNER, a native of Colorado, lives in Arvada, Colorado with his wife, Kathy, her daughter, Kelsey, and his son, Zedidiah. He writes poetry, novels, and creates original music with son, Tommy. You can check out their work at (http://www.reverbnation.com/wordwulf?popup_render=%2Fcontroller%2Fartist%2Fadd_photo%2F274166%3Ffrom_activate%3Dtrue). He has two novels published, Madman Chronicles: The Warrior (ISBN 1-59286-793-6) and American Camp: Frail Monsters/Wounded Souls: Momma’s Rain (ISBN 09544846-9-X). In 2003, he edited the English translation of Hameed Al-Qaed’s Noise of Whisper (ISBN 9953-36-100-2) and in 2006 edited and wrote the forward to Pearl, Dreams of Shell (ISBN 978-1-882863-79-2; Howling Dog Press), an anthology of contemporary poets of Bahrain. He has been extensively published in independent literary magazines and on the internet, including HDP/Omega, Skyline Literary Review,The Storyteller, and Flashquake. Winner of the Marija Cerjak Award for Avant-Garde/Experimental Writing, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2006 and 2008.

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ROSS VASSILEV was born in Bulgaria and now lives in Ohio. He is the editor of the webzine Opium Poetry (_http://opiumpoetry.blogspot.com/_ ).

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FRANK WINTERS is a poet, painter, sculptor, tattoo artist, and former roadie for Philip Glass, who presently lives and works in Denver.

His association with Howling Dog Press goes back to 1981-1982 when his book Northeast of Globeville (In Seasons Once Removed) was published, and summarily banned from libraries for being too “inflammatory” by exposing the corrupt politics that created tremendous hardships for Globeville’s eastern European immigrants. The book includes a portrait of Winters drawn by Leon Redbone at a bar in Boulder. Winters and Michael Annis spent many months collaborating on the creation of some of the Rocky Mountains’ most unusual and exhilarating literary and artistic events including the April Fools Festival at the Slovenian Gardens; a three-day public reading of the entire works of John Fante at Phil Bender’s Pirate Art Oasis in Denver involving many area poets (a posthumous tribute after Fante’s death); an all night poetry festival behind Sneakin’ Deacon’s Tattoo Shop featuring Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Winters, Annis, and others reading from the bed of an 18-wheeler flatbed truck to beats and biker gangs that rode in from as far away as Phoenix, Az; and Howling at Ringside at the Denver VFW that featured poets, writers, boxers, man/woman tag-team wrestlers, and jazz musicians all performing from within Champ Thomas’s regulation professional boxing ring. They also executed a series of limestone pillar sculptures in homage to the Partisan Poets of Yugoslavia who fought and died at the hands of the Nazi invaders in World War II. JEFFREY CYPHERS WRIGHT, aka Mr. Underground, published 80 issues of Cover Magazine, the Underground National from 1986 to 2001. A New Romantic, his poems have recently been in Vanitas, Tribes Magazine, Big Hammer, The Bicycle Review, OMEGA and Hanging Loose. Author of eleven books of poetry, he also writes art criticism which has appeared in Artnews, Art and Antiques and Artnexus. He contributes a regular column of poetry reviews called “Rapid Transit” to The Brooklyn Rail. Since 2006, he has published Live Mag! and is hosting events at La Mama and The Bowery Poetry Club. http://www.livemagnyc.com Wright studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church. He also studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and received an MFA in poetry. He started Hard Press in 1978 and published 100 postcards and three books, including the anthology 3-Zero, Turning Thirty with a foreword by Andrei Codrescu. Wright lives in the East Village in New York City where he is also an impresario who has hosted scores of poetry readings and performances at various venues, from libraries and cafes to clubs, galleries and community gardens. He taught poetry and writing for Teachers and Writers Collaborative, Brooklyn College and The Poetry Project. He was awarded two grants from Poets and Writers. Recent writings can be found on the following websites: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/06/books/rapid-transit-jun-09 http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x2941536 http://thebicyclereview.weebly.com/current-issue.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nB6mrqRdU0U (courtesy Farfalla Press) www.toolamagazine.com

~

To purchase Henry Avignon Limited Edition Fine Prints of his works featured in OMEGA 7, see pg 247. To purchase Howling Dog Press books; see pages 248-250.

contributors

JACK WILER was the editor of the late, great, Long Shot Magazine for six years. He is the author of two books, I Have No Clue (Long Shot Productions, 1996) and Fun Being Me (Cavankerry Press, 2006). His third book, tentatively titled We Monsters, is due out in the fall of 2010 from Cavankerry. His work has been anthologized in Aloud, the anthology of the Nuyorican Poets Café, the Outlaw Poetry Anthology from Thundersmouth Press, and Bum Rush the Page. He appeared in a one-man play based on his two books in the spring of 2008. Jack was also a contributor to Stiletto2: The Disinherited (HDP, 1992) and to past OMEGAs. Jack died while OMEGA 7 was in production. He is, and always will be, deeply missed.

His family said of him, “Jack Wiler was a man for all seasons who marched to his own drumbeat. He read everything he could get his hands on and then settled in to enjoy a good argument. It wasn't about winning or losing, it was about the intellectual and social engagement. Jack worked as a salesman for Acme Exterminating in New York City. He was recently interviewed about subway rodents for The History Channel series, Monster Quest. Jack's real love of life and what brought him alive was poetry. Jack worked with the Geraldine Dodge Foundation in New Jersey as a visiting poet in schools. His poetry has been read throughout New York and New Jersey. Jack's website, www.jackwiler.com is a peek into the world that he loved. Jack was supremely talented, an irascible soul and he dearly loved the bright lights of the big city.”

DONATE TO OMEGA

donations HELP ENSURE ONGOING LITERARY EXCELLENCE — DONATE TO OMEGA Although you may download OMEGA free of charge through ISSUU, or through the Howling Dog Press website as a PDF (printable), by donating to OMEGA/HDP, you will be helping to ensure that Howling Dog Press can continue publishing revolutionary works of literature and art, online and in print. OMEGA is not created by hobbyists. We make our living right here. Everything that “swarms” from the Howling Dog website represents hours, weeks, months of dedication to showcase our contributors’ work appropriately in the highest quality format & design.

Donations are strongly encouraged, however, we respect those who do not have the financial means to contribute by allowing everyone to download free of charge—it’s a matter of cultural integrity for us to provide in this manner so that all readers can partake. Similarly, donating to cultural integrity when one’s financial situation allows it preserves the ideal: one is giving so that others who do not have the means to give can receive. Donating is always a matter of free will/free choice. We are not in business to build a capitalist empire, but it is a simple equation: publication of great writers & artists requires finances.

DONATE THROUGH PAY PAL and/or CREDIT CARD. HERE ARE SUGGESTED DONATIONS: INDIVIDUALS: $2.00 (or more, thank you) LIBRARIES (ACADEMIC, BUSINESS, or PUBLIC): $5.00 (or more, thank you) [if the spirit moves you, you can donate more than the suggested amount; “or more” donations show a genuine appreciation of our efforts over the last 5 years to make OMEGA a superior venue and vehicle for literary and artistic expression.]

YOU MAY ALSO DONATE BY CASH, CHECK, OR MONEY ORDER TO THE FOLLOWING ADDRESS (CHECKS & MOs MADE OUT TO HOWLING DOG PRESS): HDP/ Michael Annis, P.O. Box 853, Berthoud, Colorado USA 80513-0853 THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONTRIBUTION TOWARD PRESERVING ALTERNATIVE LITERARY EXCELLENCE DURING TIMES OF PANDEMIC CONFORMITY/UNIFORMITY

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D O N A T E SUPPORT INDEPENDENT VOICES & VISIONS NOW.

submissions LITERATURE: NO SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS ACCEPTED. DO NOT SUBMIT WORK TO OMEGA THAT IS ALSO BEING SUBMITTED ELSEWHERE. SUBMISSION TO OMEGA IMPLIES THAT OMEGA HAS FIRST RIGHTS TO ITS PUBLICATION. WHETHER SUBMITTING WORK BY ELECTRONIC MAIL OR POSTAL MAIL, USE STANDARD MANUSCRIPT FORMAT (DOUBLE SPACE LINES FOR FICTION, CREATIVE NON-FICTION, ARTICLES, PROSE, ETC.; FOR POETRY, DO NOT DOUBLE SPACE UNLESS IT IS NECESSARY AND APPROPRIATE TO THE WORK) INCLUDE TITLE/S, AUTHOR’S NAME, ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER, AND E-MAIL ADDRESS IF APPLICABLE. HARD COPY MANUSCRIPTS BY REGULAR POSTAL SERVICE TO: HDP/MICHAEL ANNIS, SENIOR EDITOR; P.O. BOX 853, BERTHOUD, COLORADO, USA, 80513-0853. INCLUDE SASE FOR MANUSCRIPT RETURN & SEPARATE SASE FOR PUBLISHER’S NOTICE OF DECISION TO PUBLISH OR NOT PUBLISH. IF YOU DO NOT WANT MANUSCRIPTS RETURNED, INCLUDE A STATEMENT TO THAT FACT. E-MAIL SUBMISSIONS TO: WRITINGDANGEROUSLY@HOWLINGDOGPRESS.COM OR WRITINGDANGEROUSLY@MSN.COM. SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPT IN EITHER HARD COPY OR ELECTRONICALLY DOES NOT GUARANTEE PUBLICATION IN OMEGA. ARTISTS/PHOTOGRAPHERS: SUBMIT JPEG, GIF, OR PRINTS & PHOTOS ONLY. NO SLIDES. MUST BE SCANNABLE, PREVIOUSLY SCANNED ONTO DISK, OR ATTACHED TO AN E-MAIL. SUBMISSION DOES NOT GUARANTEE PUBLICATION. ENTIRE CONTENTS OF ALL OMEGA ONLINE MAGAZINES ARE COPYRIGHT © 2003—2009 BY INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTORS THROUGH HOWLING DOG PRESS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. DUPLICATION OR REPUBLICATION WITHOUT THE EXPRESS WRITTEN CONSENT OF OMEGA AND/OR ITS CONTRIBUTORS IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. PRIOR CONSENT IS GIVEN TO REPRODUCE SHORT EXCERPTS IN BLOGS OR REVIEWS, ACCOMPANIED BY FULL CITATIONS FOR AUTHOR, OMEGA ISSUE #, AND CREDIT TO HOWLING DOG PRESS AS PUBLISHER.

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The Art of HENRY AVIGNON featured in OMEGA 7 … is NOW AVAILABLE for purchase!

SUPERB, LIMITED EDITION PRINTS of all the artwork by HENRY AVIGNON featured in OMEGA 7 are now available through a joint collaboration between the ARTIST and HOWLING DOG PRESS. For serious inquiries only: direct your e-mail to AvignonArt@howlingdogpress.com Each of the artworks in OMEGA 7 by Henry Avignon is now being professionally rendered into custom, gallery-quality prints through the highest archival method available. The extraordinarily fine prints of these images would sell in any reputable art gallery for $500-$800 each. However, for a limited time, through the collaboration between the artist and HDP toward a vision of artistic and literary autonomy, these prints are now being offered for $225 each (of any Avignon Image in OMEGA 7). In the future, similar prints will be selling in galleries, and/or hanging in museums or the homes of collectors who have paid $500 or more per print. Only 10 prints of each Avignon/OMEGA image will be commercially processed through the LEP Giclee Printing method.

Only 5 prints of each image [LEP Giclee Printing] will be made available through Howling Dog Press.

These large LEP Giclee Prints are on 100% cotton canvas, stretched in gallery wrap format (no white border —image to the edge of the canvas) and print processed with the highest quality superior printing materials. Each print is UV treated to prevent damage from light or other sources. These one-time edition prints come with Certificate of Edition and Title Authentication signed by Henry Avignon. [For prints

autographed and hand numbered by Avignon, the cost per print will be $275 each, free shipping included to US addresses.] Only a Limited Edition of the Avignon/OMEGA art prints are available, and through commission only: they will not be reissued or reprinted again. This is to establish a policy of genuine fine art production and validation of fine art rarity.

Typically, a limited edition Giclee Printing is comprised of between 50 to 100 prints, then the master is destroyed, so that no further prints can be made.

As stated, the Avignon/OMEGA Giclee Editions will be comprised of ONLY 10 prints per image, with ONLY the first 5 printed being offered as authentic OMEGA prints; thus is created an even rarer edition within the Limited Edition. There are approximately 50 Henry Avignon Images in OMEGA 7. Therefore, the low price of $225—$275 each should be considered an investment, and will in the future quite likely be worth many times the small investor’s cost.

ORDERS for the first 5 prints per image will be taken on a first come, first serve basis, and when demand for any particular image has reached a total of 5, no more orders for that piece will be accepted through OMEGA/Howling Dog Press. Reservations

must be made by requesting each image according to the page number of OMEGA 7 on which it appears.

This collaboration (through which a generous discount off the gallery price is being offered) has been made to help raise funds for Howling Dog Press— including the production of OMEGA 8 and future books— and likewise, to raise funds needed by Henry Avignon to purchase much needed studio equipment to further increase the quality & quantity of his artistic production. Funds from the sale of the Avignon/OMEGA Giclee Editions prints will also be used for Henry Avignon’s First American Shows.

BECOME an INVESTOR in this legendary collaboration between artist and independent publisher. Peruse the Avignon Images page by page in OMEGA 7, decide what image or images you desire to purchase, then contact artist Henry Avignon directly through e-mail at AvignonArt@howlingdogpress.com. Send your name, contact information, and the page number or numbers for the pages on which the Images appear.

Henry Avignon or his representative will reply promptly. Each image requested requires a deposit to hold a print in your name. Payment in full is required before LED print is processed. All sales are final.~ ~ —Michael Annis, HDP, & Henry Avignon, artist

247

New Howls

from

HOWLING DOG PRESS

SPACECAKE AMSTERDAM by YUYUTSU R.D. SHARMA

ISBN 978-1-882863-95-2) Poems. 6"x9", OMEGA Editions; 110 pages, softbound w/double covers —color outer, black inner. Cover art by Michael Annis and Henry Avignon. With three color illustrations by Henry Avignon. Designed & edited by Michael Annis. Employing a surrealistic persona blended of Asian mystic and worldly Beat sojourner —worthy of a Ginsberg, a McClure, or a Tom Wolfe— Yuyutsu RD Sharma invades the lowlands of Amsterdam with its concentric circles of SpaceCake consciousness, then travels through Europe and back to the United States, romping like a Hindu gargoyle spreading poetry and passion wherever he alights. Endowed with a profound presence, Sharma’s gripping poems celebrate the spirit of mind altering perspectives on politics, social consciousness, riotous living and the duty of a shaman living life towards its ubiquitous overflow. “Sharma brings the bracing air of the Himalayas to any city. His vigorous, expansive and elemental poems leave Yeti tracks on the streets and mule trails on the Tube. They are packed with rapturous couplings of the urban and the feral.” —Pascale Petit, “Poetry London”. RETAIL, $19.95; Buy through OMEGA at discount ….

ONLY $14.95: SPACECAKE AMSTERDAM: BUY NOW

THE BONE TRAIN by KATHERINE WEST

ISBN 978-1-882863-70-9) Poems. 6"x9", OMEGA Editions; 112 pages, softbound w/double covers --color outer, black inner. Cover art by Michael Bergt. Designed & edited by Michael Annis. The Bone Train transports 61 bones, passionately fleshed, filleted by the delicacies of death, the dread within desperation, abandonment, the tone & ritual mar of struggle. As desire calls out to the melodic bones of nightmare, quietude lurks like dead flowers on the shared grave of lovers. Hunted down and plucked like a ripe fig, a romantic heart in remission wades through quarantined cities of love and war and snow. Katherine West's ascending and descending stanzas resonate with rage and existential alienation. The poems in The Bone Train were written during a period of re-entry into US culture, between her witness of civil war in Guatemala and the beginning of the war upon Iraq, and reflect all the love, compassion, disappointment and horror attendant upon such a homecoming.

Buy through OMEGA: ONLY $14.95: THE BONE TRAIN: BUY NOW

PEARL, DREAMS OF SHELL edited by HAMEED AL QAED

Anthology of Contemporary Bahrain Poetry, compiled & translated by Hameed Al Qaed (ISBN 978-1-882863-79-2) 6"x9",192 pgs. / 31 poets. HARDBOUND w/ dust jacket; retail $24.95; Perfect for Middle Eastern Studies programs. "My senses have been bombarded by incredible lusts for life, spirituality and eternity, a continuum of that which is beautiful and good for all Peoples, forbearance for that which is not. It is clear through the words of these pages that we cannot embrace one without acknowledgement of the other. These Bohemian voices cry out with love of country, family, and life…. strong and loyal, firmly rooted in a civilization thousands of years old. They are undaunted, possessed of gargantuan spirit."—Thomas Sterner. RETAIL, $29.95 Buy through OMEGA, and save $10: ONLY $19.95: PEARL DREAMS OF SHELL: BUY NOW Visit the special Bahrain issue of OMEGA Online ...

PERPETUAL REVOLT by JEFF NALL (ISBN 978-1-882863-92-1) Non-fiction. 6"x9", OMEGA Editions; 250 pages, softbound w/double covers --color outer, black inner. Edited & designed by Michael Annis. Perpetual Revolt champions causes of pluralism, compassion, peace and justice. Comprised of essays, interviews, photos, speeches, and art, it also features interviews with Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now!" and Jesse Colin Young, musician and activist. Nall's primary purpose is to call for spiritual, religious, & secular progressives to unite against war, intolerance, and fundamentalism of all stripes. “In PERPETUAL REVOLT, Jeff Nall asks us to ‘take deep breaths, long strides, and bold actions.’ to change the world in which we live. He challenges us to be ‘suspicious of passivity, of final responses, of ultimate goals and hints at utopias of any kind.’ And he warns us that all of this is likely to make us uncomfortable, even while we build a better world. Nall accomplishes these difficult tasks through strong, forceful writing and great insight and, most importantly, without embracing a cynical outlook. He blends a clarion call for social justice with a heartfelt desire to build a bridge between religious and secular prograssives. PERPETUAL REVOLT incites us to think big thoughts and will, I surmise, move many to take meaningful action.”—Michael Zimmerman, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Butler University. "While leaders in Washington prepare to wage perpetual war, Jeff Nall's eloquent and inspiring book calls for waging perpetual revolt: revolt against war, corporate greed, narrow-mindedness, and apathy."--Benjamin Dangl, author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia. RETAIL, $22.95; Buy through OMEGA at a discount: For information: www.jeffnall.com ONLY $15.95: PERPETUAL REVOLT: BUY NOW

SMELLING MARY by HELLER LEVINSON

The great first book of introduction to Hinge theory and Hinge Poetics; 6"x9", 206 pages, premium softbound w/double covers—color outer, black inner.

Featuring 9 color pages of Hinge Art illustrated, designed & edited by Michael Annis. Includes discussion on Levinson’s Hinge Theory by Mary Newell and André Spears. "Heller Levinson has created an archaeological dictionary of poetic implications which are the source for Smelling Mary. These are encyclopedic visionary allusions to a literary state fighting for its democratically creative independence. A wonderful, fun book, full of notions of abstraction, word rearrangements, on the road insinuations & kneecap hinges of flexible connections."– Jayne Cortez. "With 'Hinge Theory,' Heller Levinson presents us with a gift, the magnitude of which will become evident with the passage of time. He is to poetry as Thelonious Monk is to jazz: a master of thoughtful composition and spontaneous invention." –Joe Giglio, jazz guitarist. “Take a line like ‘light analyzed as supine’ and you will find delicacy of image and syllable. Take a line like ‘paradigmatic breakdancing’ and you will find nerve and boulevard in intellectual headspin. There is a generosity of spirit at the core of Heller Levinson’s poetry that urges a science of convergence and passion. Words smelt, melt, unite, and explode. Fuse, flow, flirt, and flip. This is anti-poetry at its best. Petruchio on steroids. Heisenberg at the bowling lanes. Wild in its discipline and certain of its uncertainty.” –John Olson. RETAIL, $29.95; Buy through OMEGA at a discount... ONLY $17.95: SMELLING MARY: BUY NOW

TOXICITY: POEMS OF THE COCONUT VULVA by HELLER LEVINSON The foreshadowing of SMELLING MARY … Poetry; 6"x9", 136 pages, softbound w/double covers. Designed & edited by Michael Annis. Cover art by Margo Kren; frontis by Ed Paschke. This collection has been derived from Levinson's best formerly published in magazines and chapbooks, with new poems included. Rabelaisian in wit and the sheer breadth of its pop vision vs. historical knowledge; heady, satirical, sad, serpentine, ejaculative and sexually wrangling, it will be marveled at by generations to come. Levinson writes as a man whose I.Q. has been hardwired into a 220 v. circuit. "The unremitting roll of apocalyptic language continues throughout the book. There's brawl and confusion aplenty, history & geology, & war & commerce, & biology & religions aplenty, all blazoned forth in language explosive and expressive..."–Philip Appleman. "Heller Levinson has emitted an Alien Sensibility, not in terms of Saturn or the 10th object around the sun, but as regards imaginal radiance and fervour..." --Will Alexander. RETAIL, $14.95; ONLY $11.95: TOXICITY: BUY NOW Buy through OMEGA for a discount:

WHEN by DAVID RAY

ISBN 978-1-882863-80-8) Poems. 6"x9", OMEGA Editions; 108 pages, softbound w/double covers —color outer, black inner. Cover by Judy Ray and Michael Annis from a painting by Isabel Koprowicz. WHEN is David Ray’s twenty-first book. Gathered here are poems that express concern for the earth and humanity; poems that explore connections through biography; and poems that haunt with grief and love. “It is fitting that David Ray has twice been given an award named for William Carlos Willliams. Though Ray is quite capable of a sestina or a long haiku-sequence, his poems are not conspicuously technical … poem after poem is a truly fresh occasion, and some of that variety is owing, I think, to an admirable honesty and recklessness of feeling.” — Richard Wilbur. “David Ray remains among the best half-dozen poets in the English language today.”—Chinua Achebe. “David Ray’s poetry has always been radiant even though personal tragedy has suffused it.”—Studs Terkel. RETAIL, $15; Buy through OMEGA at a discount…

ONLY $11.95: WHEN: BUY NOW

THE DEATH OF SARDANAPALUS & OTHER POEMS OF THE IRAQ WARS by DAVID RAY

(The single greatest collection against the Iraq War…)

(ISBN 1-882863-55-0) Poems. 6"x9", Brave New World Order Books; 240 pages, softbound. Designed & edited by Michael Annis. When most other poets, writers, and journalists were either too intimidated, too duped and gullible, or too complicit to challenge the lies, deceits, and plotting of George W. Bush and his neo-Cons, David Ray wrote and published incessantly on the crimes of the 43rd president and his henchmen, as they tore down international relations while shredding the US Constitution. From 2001 through 2004, he chronicled in poetry the methodical rape of the Land of Liberty through the Bushian/Rovian war upon the people of Iraq and the citizens of the United States.

These poems speak an unwavering truth to corrupted power, illuminating the demise of nations when the wealthy who have no loyalty to anything but more riches commandeer a democracy and imprison the republic in the chains of their aristocratic ideology, under the false pretense of 'end times' theology. "There's nothing like this book in American poetry today, for it is the skilled work of the craftsman whose fine ear and deft control distinguish every poem, all of which cry out against the barbarism of war and the stupid cruelties of those who make it. From the clever metaphoric transition of The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the deeply moving elegy to Wilfred Owen, this collection of intense lyrics shines with intelligence and passion." --F.D. Reeve.. RETAIL,$21.95; Buy through OMEGA at a huge discount... ONLY $12.95: SARDANAPALUS: BUY NOW

COMING WORLD GONE WORLD (THE ABOMUNAUTS

ARE COMING TO PISS ON YOUR LAWN)

by PAUL CORMAN-ROBERTS (ISBN 1-882863-72-0) Poems. 6"x9", Brave New World Order Books; 122 pages, softbound w/double covers, black inner/color outer. Designed & edited by Michael Annis. Art by Margo Kren and Anna Knox. From Iraq to Katrina to the Sri Lanka tsunami, Corman-Roberts' poetic vision of governmental social ills and corporate greed is herded full bore into the barbed wire fence of political resistance.

Humorous, ironic, passionate, intelligent, defiant and visionary, these poems swirl and churn through the reader's mind, challenging every pre-conception and pre-supposition of equilateral equanimity on the earth. "Paul Corman-Roberts soars through the beatitudes with a keen mind, a good ear, and a full heart. Poetry can ask for nothing better. Still young, he has a lot of good words already, and has shaped them into poems that matter. Readers who follow him now will be rewarded even more in the years to come." --Neeli Cherkovski, poet and author of Hank, Bukowski: A Life, Whitman's Wild Children, Elegy for Bob Kaufman. RETAIL, $14.95; Buy through OMEGA: ONLY $12.95: COMING WORLD GONE WORLD: BUY NOW

MORE ATOMS OF MEMORY by OSWALD LE WINTER

(ISBN 1-882863-67-4) Poetry. 6"x9", 154 pages, softbound w/double covers. Designed & edited by Michael Annis. A rare collection from one of the true masters of modern poetry, first published in Germany, then reprinted by HDP in an expanded edition with more poems. Le Winter is that rare poet, like Rilke, Yvan Goll and Yehuda Amichai, whose poetic sensibility is at home in two languages with equal skill and clarity. He follows, in that tradition, such distinguished previous recipients of this prize as the great Italian poet, Guiseppe Ungaretti, and the Russian poet, Joseph Brodsky.”–Jury statement, the International Rilke Prize. “Le Winter is an American Rimbaud…” –Saul Bellow. “Oswald Le Winter's poetry is elegiac. In the best tradition of poets like Yeats and Thomas Hardy, Le Winter mourns the loss of a very private world in a clear and compelling language that makes both the world and his loss accessible to the reader.” – Hans Sahl, German poet and critic. “A poetry that brings together the richness of European philosophical poetry, I am thinking of Goethe, Holderin, and Dante, with the muscularity of the American idiom more successfully than any poet of this generation.” –Robert Lowell. “RETAIL, $14.95; Buy through OMEGA at discount: ONLY $11.95: MORE ATOMS OF MEMORY: BUY NOW

I READ YOU GREEN, MOTHER

by WILL INMAN (ISBN 978-1-882863-81-5) Poems. 6"x9", 64 pages, softbound. Cover art by David Chorlton. Edited by David Ray and Judy Ray. Designed by Judy Ray. I Read You Green, Mother brings together poems dictated in recent months with others written over the decades. As Will Inman describes the process of writing poetry, "... you dive with a black stone into the abyss, you risk all ... you create a living tapestry, a whole soul.... Taking the total surrender of blind dive ... is a hell of a truer, deeper risk than doing it in a drugs or drink destructive plunge...whole galaxies can explode and still be part of the larger universal harmony.... you're like Whitman: you contain multitudes, they're great dynamic forces, but your kind of awareness also carries whole futures in its unfolding. This has nothing to do with 'being great' or getting credit for genius or any of that, it is organic with hurricanes, earthquakes, the great cries of human pain, the tornadic leaps of hope and fury working in each other."... RETAIL, $14.95; Buy through OMEGA at a discount: ONLY $10.95: I READ YOU GREEN, MOTHER: BUY NOW

SURFINGS : SELECTED POEMS OF WILL INMAN

Selected Poems of Will Inman by Will Inman. (ISBN 978-1-882863-69-0) Poems. 6"x9", 136 pages, softbound. Edited by David Ray and Michael Rattee.

Cover art by David Chorlton. Designed by Michael Annis. A TRUE CLASSIC: Will Inman's first volume of selected works compiled from over a half-century of persistent excellence and loving devotion to the art of poetry. “The editors of this collection have performed a vital service… [from Inman’s] all-inclusive spiritual outlook and reverence for life, like Whitman, he embraces the world: ‘Not because I am everything/but because I am of everything.’” – Richard Shelton. “Will and I corresponded for years, and his verse had a passionate love of life and unrivaled originality, an outrage against injustice and oppression, and was more powerfully expressed than anyone else's poetry of his generation. He went off on his own to write poetry that remains an untamed indictment against this age of greed and mass imprisonment--its level of intellectual depth strong enough to guarantee it will be read for a very long time. I'm glad a definitive collection of Will's works is now out from Howling Dog Press, one of the best presses around…”–Jimmy Santiago Baca. “Will Inman's poetry is informed by a lifetime of compassionate social engagement--from the War Resisters League to working with the homeless--and composed with an educated ear for natural idiom, cadence and image that W.C. Williams or Denise Levertov would admire. This is poetry that is earned, a rich vein in Whitman's grand tradition…” – Sam Hamill. RETAIL, $14.95; Buy through OMEGA at a discount: ONLY $12.95: SURFINGS: BUY NOW