The Art of the Day

“Watering Hole” part 7 (The Lid)

This technique is for a hole in the world.

It’ll kick us off fine as long as I flip my light light lid.

Lid on my head is face; ask someone strong to open it for you.

My heart is jam for your sammiches. Let’s go, as long as I let go.

Stick my hands under your suspenders and play telefone with your nipples.

The signal turns from my sticky, grubby nuts-stinking fingers,

Around the circle of your leathern dancer’s calves, your minuet ass,

To Licky, my dog’s tongue in my mouth, which I offer up for sacrifice and

Which they eat, that your teeth do eat as a delicacy at night

And a functional language by morning in the shitter.

There are no delicacies for breakfast in my book; in this town,

We regret every moment we are not going down, down, down on each other…

Thankfully, porn comes before sleep to sap our eyes, lid lid, sleepy.

I dream about work all night.

Hi, love, I’m flipping my lid. My life is not over as we speak, but over here and

Over there, I said. Take my legs for example. The legs of Nathan lying as we speak,

Like, on the grass. My blood flows as reek, ever as it has. Muck is my gut, mixed with

Mud is my eyes, mashed to dirt by where tanks fear to tread. Not a tractor tire, not a

Shingle tread… no, no single-eye stare is so full o’ dread as now I, to poop in the word

“All”, move to this:

Dear tanks, our spirits are weak,

Please fuck all our bones into soils

And make them all come flowers.

Dear fire, fuck our mind to a cloud

To make it come screaming showers.

Dear mud, I hate saving quarters

For to wash my dirty powers.

Down town, going to town, I’ve been let go, lid on my life is overrail.

I, can I flip, can I flip my light light lid? Can, I can do. Do I kiss? Kick my asskiss ass.

Flip my lid. Flip my flapjack. Jack me off. Off my brother.

If I blow my top would you still, still my heart,

Blow me, blow me off?

Say if I lose, lose my say…

Or if I lose control would you still,

Still my heart, mark my way?

Let’s go from here as backward fast as we have to,

To remember how we love, how high we live;

How light we kiss, when we love.

“Watering Hole” part 6 (Twin Billions)

Close all the windows, nail them closed.

Friendly, though we be, we can kill on command.

Though we be friendly, we can kill the commander at the drop of a hat.

We can drop the commander off at daycare.

Wrapped in black taffeta (to temporarily blind us with our warm reflections)

The baby man is fevered beyond a popular grove,

To where a clearing comes to rest his bones.

There we are gathered here today, next to him and beside ourselves,

Beyond all the sadness we’ve ever known.

I, 17 in strapless dress and pushup bra, pair my eyes

(Through the steam that pours out of them), to see you,

On high pumps and in love with some sticks and stones, singing:

Sunshine, on my shoulders, gives me cancer.

Sunshine, in my eyes, can make me blind.

Constructed for war, your playhouse crumbles

Under the weight of its unity. A wholeness for breaking bones.

Your screams are ignored, can never hurt me.

“Bake me a cake as fast as you can,” we chanted around your body.

We got what we ordered, and withered.

Soon, you were just quaint, but hadn’t had enough movement to solidify.

You moved in a lump. When we sat you straight to read to you,

Your back would break like an icicle falling four stories.

Rather than take the risk, you plummeted sideways into our favorite fantasy:

Mark my words, Sunday will surprise you, and after that, doom.

Of course if you watch all that footage, its happening will

Take up in your head and play house with your finest china.

So I’m told, and to act as a self-censor I must cook for myself.

Baked for the freezer, however, our muffins taste burnt.

With some frosting, they become carbon cupcakes.

So I washed my saucer, it was on fire.

I pierced my pancake gut with a steeple spire.

Sunday loving brought me toast and brandy,

While the lonely chef directory warmed the fireplace to an empty room.

We reached the limits of the sun.

Now fire burning in a chamber underground pulls

Its oxygen from the telephone, singing “Phone tag, phone tag.”

Welcome to the beginning of the rest and all that.

“Watering Hole” part 5

Five minutes behind the final day,

You see, of a new silo opening its roof,

The now-blind guests baled in hay on the first floor

Meet their maker, in the market.

We loosen the leashed Dogs, they are small

And fetid after tea with the Pigs,

And O the wrenches we have to toss

To get them off our legs.

For their humping is another, purer song,

Which if we listened would seem not unlike

One-upmanship. They have it down,

So to speak, and innovate wildly through the air.

Were we following the same orders, were our possession complete,

Were our occupation over, when we saw each other again

Would we disregard what hadn’t happened and commence with the making so?

In pre-occupation France, wasn’t it grand how father occupied father, baroness

possessed baroness? Even an approving signal from the top that our smoke

breaks in half hours before dawn seemed long enough was too quiet.

We were busy baking sooty loaves, sheets of butter cusps, you see,

And ill apostrophized to thee.

Some tumble, others grace, but most plod visibly neverward.

That’s a ship I’ve never been on, but one I’m all too familiar with.

I wrote the plans. I printed my name, then signed your life away.

And what a deal. Get me your femme, I’d like to have words with her.

But not to sing all day.

“Watering Hole” part 4

Tearing up the atmosphere, laying low in the endpoint place,

We watch if and only if it comes to rest here,

If and only if the size is light enough to heft.

We worry, together and openly, what if the weather breaks?

Outside, albino berries grow from the back of a rooted tree.

Six fine crevices work down its wide sides,

Where we put our fingers to grip the lame being, mutely free,

From its wind-dried shakes. Apples litter other grounds,

But here no refuse yet prefaces a turn of tides.

I’d like to split it down the middle.

I’d take my rough-hewn static axe,

And break that weakling’s skin, skinny arms, and muck

Up its face with tar, black over the worms.

We talk like we don’t, but it’s what we want,

And in warm strains of storms, talking is effective as

Any other lightning. Get these words out! you quiver,

Under umbrella. (Fun to see how the shaking irritates

The skin against it’s shells, how it speeds up

Under pressure to be a shallow blur, wiped scarified

By the count of 3) We haven’t even started before

Something, the white-berried hulk, sheds its skin in

Shafts, which drift empty upward (we’re upside now, downhung

From our feet from a rope from his branches)

And mingle with the grassy mud above.

Look, the summer storm is black;

Tornado’s coming back.

Deep staring down with synthetic gasp,

A mere cloud uproots our unholy worm.

The trunk is shuddered by applausing air.

Thunder’s all, my eyes are so far gongs,

And to the final, sweet crack of its lasting branch,

My hanger, “In the air,” I sigh, up there.

With a tightening sigh, a bereaved compliance

To the bereft song of order, I swing low in the storm.

With you by, the fruiting albino upends itself.

Only, this time, some windows are broken.

“Watering Hole” part 3

I wake and my bound mind is a vegetable. On its own: cold.

Later at mass, otherwise, but like a sun-dried skull in a buzzard’s belly,

It shivers under its warm coat of mold,

Even as we conspire in our prayers the prospect of cooking it anyway.

The possibility that it can’t make it through to spring

Without some new knife skinning it of its hide

Is hard to bear, even for a seedpod drying and yet unscattering,

For some reason too hard to not cut gem fruit love.

I remember when you picked it up anyway and brushed off half its slough,

Said, “This one’s tired today,”

And found a brewer who’d take the pomace.

This was when things really turned around for us.

We crafted a practical nozzle, and with the new distillation

Blasted our limbs free of eschar. “Sand down my hipbones,” I said.

“Scientists will cast the powder into a cheekbone for you.”

Now, as your mouth narrows to a purse, the tube of your throat extends.

You sing higher; the audience giggles. You make a funny sound forever; the audience

And you can choke together. We dip in a narrow vat of chewed and spat merriment.

Together, at least, we’ll keep it warm for another hour, until you draw the bath again.

Pay attention, though, you’re not really done learning from this drunk.

Where once only possibility shone, the limning force pulls away

And boxes of sandbags for weighing up the flying monks

Become the centerfold, the business end, and the money shot.

“Watering Hole” part 2

That sounds about right, how I felt you vindicated.

Which one is that? A fox.

I had written it down again, written down the line to put me in last place.

No more do I get to try. No more will I try.

Not like I caught it from you, womb cauldron.

Fun to cross that off the cross.

Thanks a lot, says womb cauldron, sarcastically.

Piping in hot sounds of love to the unadorned,

By a warm pool on a wide white plain of dust mostly,

Odd hills make way for a predator—the birds are in office overhead.

I palm the oily insides of my thighs,

God, how long have I had to pee?

The answer would be relief enough to let me die.

While I’m only an outlaw—this pain in my eyes is ripping,

Yes ripping—you may not injure my sensitive injured boy.

I’m only protecting my son, in a way,

Even if he’s no less a murderer than I.

What’s that they say about how fine you must be,

To be a man? I look down, it’s starting to stink in steam colors;

I’m not getting any better,

But I’m in the sun; what goddamn use is it crying?

Watch where you pass, hue shaped sparks.

Watch where the oil burn scars. You suck.

Watchfires light my oily thighs.

Why stop there, guys?

Don’t you want to gut my sinus cavities?

That stalactite of my nose is dribbling softwhiskey.

The loam—sand, silt, clay—on your sandals,

Calves, and where they ripped open your finger nails is a warm salve,

But excuse me; I’ve made it to the watering hole.

I’m gushing blood by this desert bottleneck, head of the lion line.

Coughs rattle my soon bleaching bones.

“Watering Hole” part 1

An old long poem by N. Rosquist

Then, my grandfather says in a soft, kind voice,

Odd genitals marked the surface of the earth,

A piping hot mucus plain. I had sucked out

My own brother’s vocal cords, and wiped them dry with a dry towelette.

Today, in this year, we break the neck of sound before we wipe wipe wipe.

A cage door flaps open and closed, again, but the buzz horn always fades.

You tramp! says the smallest of us.

Somewhere else, the old man continues, I wouldn’t be here,

But here I am! Our gasps are penetrable only some months, you know?

As if to underline his point,

Hot air pushes out a hole in the neighbor,

And we clap as the dying sigh overwhelms our wee ears.

The new wind pushes the bushes, and rattles a few seeds

In my eyes where they might make root

But my ducts are dry and drainage poor tonight.

I’m just a child, but I have a family man’s pride.

Why haven’t you been dead yet, it’s a gas, says the eldest child.

I’m the kind of guy that dies in the watering hole, spoiling it for

Everybeast. Picked clean doesn’t even begin to describe

How I must appear to birds like these. And senses

Wash clean my weakling dream. You say this is Egypt,

But I can’t see beyond the idea of my lard ass.

The antique hacks his last. A cough lickering on his lips, his daughters line

His eyes in pylons. I bake his lipcakes in cough ovens, while doughy

Chocolate smokestacks trail out to inform the others of his intention to pass.

We take turns poking his raw softwhiskey nose—

His shanterns are dry with flies—and see what the crotched

Blind ol’ stopgapherd can do about it. Nothing.

Swouncing the dilligentsia away with his battering ram of a hand,

He pukes out his last lines in his old tongues: Pulp, I trapped sound, I

Coaxed sin out. O my dirty woundery. Face me. Me ply. Me feud for!

I caught the drift of what was his whirring rattle, and lit the saint’s body.

When I turned, I saw lines of men, in jackets cut from canvas.

One turned his eyes on me, and there I saw what I wanted—delirium.

Proudly embraced, our fingers crossed for more.

What I hear, that I have a spirit, and that it’s dark and makes men fear,

Is that the stuff you’ve been saying? It makes you small, signs you off the list.

It’s not that I don’t feel castrated, honey pies,

But another greater gash is higher, and begins to smell if you let it.

Signal diffusion

Something about:

The light of every being at once everywhere.

It’s not that the signal dies out. It’s that Pockets of difference arise & the noise absorbs and adapts to it (the signal)

Something about smoke

“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space,  were it not that I have bad dreams.” - Hamlet

dreamt: horizontal ladder of spider webs

dreamt: ben h was dying… wondered whether I should hang around him.