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        Qarlotta's quince squished with joy,

        And improved upon the stenciled boy.

        "You are you," it said.  "And that

        Is where you must start."

        Now the horehound sand's at mid calf

        And I hear you laugh and laugh and laugh.

        Veronica bursts her sun-fed hair

        With creamy smoke to spare.




        Over out looking I from here.

        Sees I more of my life than is me.

        To you, to me, to it, to wit:

        The rhythmic or random flow

        Is here and going there

        Is there and going here.

        The musical dance of life

        Is Beings, being.

        The present goal of us

        Is to assist life,

        To help Beings be more able

        To help Beings become more able

        To assist life

        To be alive.




        The Lost Beginning
               or
        Impotence Personified
               or
        The Home made Inner Sandwich
               or
        The Corporal's Yearly Breadcrumbs
               or
        Summer Friendly Grin
               or
        Ode to a Line By Tennyson On a Television Commercial Tombstone
               or
        Patents Pending Raga Noise
               or
        Original Single-file Theater
               or
        Animal Cracker Boomerang
               or
        Five Thousand Two Hundred and Forty Nine Abstract Balloons
               or
        The Undelivered Thank You Note Tacked To My Wall
               or
        The Longing Of The Former Beard Of Paradise
               or
        Bloody Nose From Zealous Picking
               or
        Stop The Forever Clock Now Society
               or
        Albert Albright's Moon Dance
               or
        Sonnet: I Wash My Balls In Your Honor
               or
        Chocolate Steak Riot Answer
               or
        Favorite Cookie Crumb Typist
               or
        London Artichoke Welcome Wagon Blues


                   -   -   -   -   -   -

        No later times will seem worth counting with neck in noose now.

        Build future power splashes with Mocked-up dynamite from home.

        Finish the first reach to grow Vishnu arms.




        If you smile, your face will break,

        And cascade to the floor

        In purple rivulets of truth.




        It's here!  The door is here.  Come.  It's here.  Now!

        Beyond the door is the bridge.  Come!  Cross it.

        Your long search and wait is over.  Come.

        Brush off those cobwebs.  Move the creaking joints.

        Come!  Into now the door is unlocked.

        Together we sweep away dark eons.  Come.

        Here it is!  The door.  Swing it wide to the bridge beyond.

        The bridge out of the swamp and through the void and out!

        Come!  You are not alone in tears and fears and hope.

        Now!  This is it.  Come along and soar.

        Come!  The answers have been found.




        Over in the elder clums of wrenched chance

        Where withered tunes, boasting, odor the chants,

        Stands a willow sweeping the provincial walls

        Of an ancient estate with taste for marble halls.

        Elegant wheat-straw drapes stand guarding

        From dusters potential windows, light rations rewarding

        Shrunken red eyes stupid after weep - ing.

        As for the rest, they urgently are keeping

        One sergeant festooned in compleat agony,

        Black witch devouring bloody white phony.

        He told us his favorite kick of Indian seas,

        Of pale or billowed contingencies

        That neither man nor hideous serpent sees,

        How the major clown expires in rubber wheeze,

        And in trench deep and crawling our loyal fellows

        Weave guilt with patriotic climax in weeping bellows.

        Her the dusky mind flaps its final quaver,

        Head on vest and twitching body nodding braver,

        Thus we triumph (!) through time into time

        Gravely ending with prayerful French rhyme.

        Far we look, friends to retrieve and reprieve.

        Over lost ground still we battle to achieve

        Some tiny semblance of the whoop-de-do of old.

        Thick, flavorful stew drips off callous hands cold

        And hot, drowned gurgling meager thought.




        Am I not attempting,

        By supreme quality and purity of communication,

        By struggle and manipulation of symbols,

        By spinning and lunging this way and that,

        By majestic delicacy and dainty power,

        By acrobatic syntax and daredevil metaphor,

        By double-entendre and triple nonsense,

        By guts and tears,

        Fist-pounding and propitiation,

        Endless and repetitive lists,

        By vast hope and dream and despair,

        To create simultaneously with each communication,

        Myself and the terminal to which it goes?




        What, then, if we come to realize or decide

                That the old gods are dead,

                        And can no longer serve to fall back on;

        And that the old heroes are rocking alone

                In front of their fireplaces,

                        Gnawing a pipe and twitching in their slippers;

        And that our bridges are burned;

        And that no one is going to do it if it isn't <me>?


        Do we then pitch in and carry our load and a little more?

        Perhaps.

        At least it becomes possible at that point where we no longer
                      <assume> that "someone will take responsibility
                                     for it."

        As for me, that realization brings me close to total overwhelm.

           I cling to slim hope.




        I am a waiter, waiting for my tug-of-war to be revealed to me.

        I wait for my number to be drawn, for the two ends of my days,

                for my life to begin.

        And I am waiting for the magic word, the ultimate gesture,

                the perfect attitude,

        Which dreams as the finally recovered long lost skeleton key

                to an infinity of locked doors.

        I am half a duality and to that degree a problem.

        When I withdraw my neck it sticks out under the

                accelerating axe.

        When I must stick my neck out, it withdraws, the

                risk being too great.

        My vast bin of data I cannot apply, its brilliant

                structure elusive amongst my thumbs.

        I wait for that other one to speak and my response

                is in wise desperate squiggle of symbol-sounds,

                quickly regretted.

        I wait to move.  I wait for I to animate me and for me

                to motivate I.

        Cause is always the other side.

        I wait and sometimes watch for that next great

                cognition that will burst the dam that I keep myself

                waiting with.  I wait for the dam to burst.  I wait to

                burst the dam that keeps me waiting.  For what?

        There is the agony: The self-self struggle unknown.




        From triumph to triumph marching

        The great Snow Leopard stirs

        The dense ochre sand of Antares' swinging debris.

        A toppling red symbol punctuates the last of a vast chain

                                               of terror forms,

        Stretched-out hand wheedling in abject humility

        Commingles and confuses the moments of winning

        So that this is there and front is back to where the:

        Slunking orange hyena-baboon grovels in my back yard and

        From defeat to defeat drags the corpse.




        Notorious in-criminal lax

                Wax office bridge comer

        Easy weight cross handily

                Puerile Polynesia home pure

        Mine?  Evil 20 order filled

                Squeak by tenderness foretold

        Yesterdays was that special squat

                Thought ought to be in salt ice

        Pages smeary litmus cum Latvia

                Tone hope for wander decay

        Bank-wrought squandry




        Yesterday I peeled back the shell of the glowing galaxy and saw the
       
        weeping serpents there, writhing, frightened in some unmentioned

        despair.  And I looked for a time at them and asked myself and them

        what all the anxiety was about but received no answer.  So, foolishly,

        I closed up the star system, patted the scar back in place and gently

        let it drift on its uncertain way, while I lay back in the soft dark

        to dream another dream.  It was a wheeling, soaring downdrift for a

        few seconds of galactic ticks.  Here and there I scooped up handfuls

        of time, molding and stretching it to accommodate long and short

        events, turning it backwards and sideways and upside down.  Lonely

        space I pushed and hurried and welded, flashed full of energy and

        matter in or out of space as time.  Through here marched golden

        haired sunshine with shining young girl vaporously moving, now here,

        now when.  Startled clean breezes blew her hair her smile her dress,

        she walking smiling upside down in tall waving grasses reaching

        down to the sky's curved bowl.  In the warm white glow the child of

        growing nevertheless distanced its counterpart for being well-fed,

        well-housed; a living watery grave; a garaged aggregation of cells

        (material and structure) laid out neat row by neat row interlaced,

        patterned by life itself.  The silent spaceless timeless hands, the

        virtuoso swiftly, thoroughly puttering together his works, adding

        or subtracting.  Oh, I had a delight, a fantastic delight!  And I

        run it back reel by reel, meal by meal.  Here it is right away in all

        leisure an all-out assault of the many against one cell, from many

        to two and two to many after a staggering implosion spreading to

        the earlier unmelting of two polarized bodies by two beings.




        Who'd want to live forever,

                Were he not happy enough?


        The milling crowds constantly die

        Straining their grasp for formless visions of happiness,

        Missing life, dying in puzzlement and frustration.


        Like the warmth from a wood stove,

        Happiness radiates from life more fully lived.


        Sought alone and for itself,

        It vanishes like the reflection or the mist.

       
        Who'd want to die ever,

                Were he only happy enough?




        What of one more life with me?

        What if one more life with me?

        Who could not say that I dug the grave of our love,

        Which waits stamping like a waiting horse, graveside,

        Never buried, never raised up again.

        What I want to say to you bluntly without metaphor

        Is: I still still love you and want a real marriage with you.

        But you could not hear so bold a volley.

        So I must clothe the same in gentle slow yet clear metaphor & symbol.

        Let it sink & soak in (rain on the earth),

        Softly stir your hair (mist curls at mountain's feet)

        Until it is safe to confront.




        Flee the fleecy white dream-pelt

        By exhilarated confrontation of

        What makes it seem necessary.

        Twitch and flinch is the slow train

        To hidebound, harebrained anemic agony

        Of blandly embalmed comfort in a jar.

        And, my friends, saith the cook, when-if

        Earths do fall, companionate orbicules

        Descend in the wildness as magic food

        For semitic hordes on a ritual walk-out.

        Nothing should result in bringing this to mean

        Anything other than what it says.

        Major read-outs penitentially blanketing

        These nether regions with super-data

        The end result of, being a solder-compacted computer.

        Blazing in the skies like the fly swatter

        From the point of view of one of the atoms

        On the left middle foot of the fly;

        An extra-galactic invasion triggered by a

        Psychopathic poet's embroidered inversion of a vision,

        Thus:




        The white house nailed against the stone sky

                Hard and grey, flat and erect

        Flat as usual....

                Roof black outlined

        My eye picking out the passionate angles

                And mind probing the probable anguish,

                        The latent lamentations,

        A curious cavalcade of speculation,

        A dry run in future tense;

        My attention fades into the next turning

        Which might be the text burning

        Or the hex sign on the Ohio barn

        The smell off the Hudson

        The thundrous sheets of Montana rain

        Tiny flowerlet wiggled by air puffs;

        Before the time of the drooling pup....

        After the discovery of assistant emotions....

        During the lingering latter days of treachery.




        Nominal quails do defend the night,

        The black hole of no-seeing death.

        Knowing treeleaves topple thoughtlessly

        Into... while seeming joy overtakes tiny travail

        Thundering toadhoppers shyly plunder a

        Painstaking November apple:

        Whose

        Seeds balloon over the dynastic Memphis

        Outracing stellar vehicles.

        This oddity can penwhack periwinkles,

        Almost.

        Twin Siamese Mongoloid afoot ran ahead

        To signal the final masked empty ceremony.

        ------passing parade of dumbdrums

        Possessing pride in home sense

        Presently rushed the ground of their fathers.

        Eating.

        Sleeping.

        Waiting.  Tomorrow we reach the horrible.

                  Tomorrow we reach the utterly repulsive.

                  Tomorrow              the beautiful.
                 
                                        the beauty.

        There duty awaits.

        With jaded breadth the cheery birdbrains

        Peck and nod amid copious droppings.

                                    pulling.

                                  strutting.

        Faded for neither generation nor generations.

        Tabled for the next session:

        Cruciform ceramic pheasant under glass.




        Ringing frowning angry sweeping laughter

        Risen on Easter hills of Punjab

        Nasties my noises in blaze taste of ridicule

        Pass‚ for educative ministrations

        "One false stoop and you're agonna DIE, baby!"

        "Watch yor fucking stop!"

        Oval all bright moon's recompense

        We'll see fantasy dancers coming at us,

        Missing and pass us, invented ago ages

        By "Mom" and "Dad" again again

        By no accidental intention,

        No new version perversion

        Persevering in enforcing the basic goodness.

        Flaming arrows tenderly caress

        Heart, liver and gizzard:

        "Are you washed in the blood of your own limb?"

        Surrounded image of black/white photos

        Of crowded rainy streets in blasted cities

        And statuesque echoes are calling us backward.

        No dice in your struggle as the sun

        Of your own wise follies in ashland tomorrows

        Capable of self decimation or sham illumination.

        Feet scramble madly at silver cypress invoked

        Seventeen spoked wheeler-dealer in a sky crapped with UFO's

        Lay low the looney menders on slender benders and penny bennies

        Will you superimpose those that froze on your nose?

        Pedro, the wagon is coming.




        Close to ten; yes it is

        Feel my way through the night

        Wonder of wonders there is time:

        I am here, then I am here, then here.

        On going eventualities like colliding dominoes

        Trail on ahead to form a bridge

        To a future growing more perfect

        And I see that I put it there

        To play tomorrow's games.




                Nursing Day Rose Art

       
        Around stuffing we were never strong

        The rolled answers: now tell Leander's wood

        His lunar recession; now it makes space

        Smile one thing ails or meeting an opening,

        A widow or lass leaving duty alone.

        So, in the age over retirement is so bad

        Or some strenuous girth, always used it to be

        Chilled in where death especially pants into vapor,

        Stating oh no wand on the ids for the food:

        We always were not

        When even a headfull dreadful doom just spun its curse

        Plentiful for a coroner, swim unruly sport

        Stare at hogs, show off where foggy dew and Mortimer's hearse

        Flashes the incident reminded to thee.



        In regal innocence an instant: now each wing burns astray

        White clarity numb with plaster; for now man may

        Have word with trash, or in action try,

        What for them was not an impotent sailor.  To one moan

        Past Timbuktu on the right phase alluring with a sheen.

        Matter, one too defensive medical trip that just had been

        Tumbling amusing, calling a toy from the sky,

        Mad near Waterloo and the mail wanly gone.




        On some other world than this

        We will meet again,

        There is no blank sorrow

        In the lowering black cloud;

        For when you pop out

        And see just who you are,

        You can start the game anew

        And surely make it go right.

        Another evening long ago now

        We undiscovered this law of games

        Just for the sake of adventure,

        And each adventurous game was and had its trap.

        Here we are at the (might-as-well-be)

        End of a (might-as-well-be) vicious game;

        And we, lumbering, slumbering giant

        See the name: GAME, and: LOSE.

        And looking in on it, start to turn our gaze

        Out, outward toward home, toward ME,

        Beginning the long step home

        Across the bridge of learning the game of games.




        "Martha!" says Yolanda the parrot

        In response to Rommel the dog

        As he says "Youf, youf, whine, moan, howl!"




        Liver moiling in parentality extra-super-paralysis

           mercenary necessary we make our trudgery

              into passionate conversation with parrots.

                 Built over or over and future intend

                    open heart fudgery

        Cancel out two tweezers, three backs to two tobaccos

                 we tend to our mortar, carry our crying to

                       the twitching basement of sympathy

                 and not miss our audience with

                              the grimacing patriarch

                       or the performance with rotten eggs.

                 Which reminds the local yokels of the

                       juggler of dreams

                 prancing on a tightrope of screams.

        It takes a fool to train the rain

                a fowl to  brain the train

                a file to grain the brain

                a feel to cane the grain

                a fail to stain the cane.

        Youth is sage to savor the drain of life,

                the piles of calcification and

           eagerly gobble the most gravitas and poisonous compounds

        With impunity until they agree

                 that they

                       are being killed.




        Scramble thy scallions, thou penetrated lover,

        Apparition so keen in addled eye and head.

        Over thy tender passionless gyrations

        I ride in a cosmic rodeo the lost bull.




        Antiquated asp in aspect extraneous

        See my blue eye under brimful plumes

        Brown to spill into my uninspected universe

        All the Saints and the Holy Father traverse

        The sticky parathion, crew socks drooping,

        Rushing through the unconfrontable in wasteful pursuit

        Cannons ablaze at their own red herrings.

        Friday it is, or fast day - hurry, hurry!

        Overlay, my analytic parka,

        Inlay your powdery teeth,

        With extra data fed unilaterally forward

        Over the onerous tracks ominously relaid

        In the opulent bed of nomenclature

        Sufficient mentor for crowds of worshippers

        Sufficient monitor for mobs of commandoes.