metaphor shyku

the road is one long shyku,
too, you tell me what else

r.i.p. shyku

here lies the last
digital dissolution of my
flesh from one
Exeter New Hampshire

oracle photographer shyku

as Sadie & Bella riot from the
minivan in matching cherry tree
dresses Thursday cannot tell the
lie to not chop them down

shyku of waxing disinterest

what concern should I have
for ineptness to succeed for
myself
secretly on their behalf

shyku of waning disinterest

sophia comes into my office and shows me a painting called
"The Transylvanians" and I think how much funnier this life
is than the last one

living dead shyku

like a match buried in
wet cotton
I mourn the distance
from stasis
to ecstasis

hampton beach shyku

la mer
like you I've been
shedding myself
inland

Untitled Southern Hunger [working draft]

Anna and I made that oath beneath trees. Pinnacle
of July, 7th year, cicadas. Ousting everyone's memory of them
to hike root and bark, fuck, then drip twitching in

a fluency, a sound I could hear beyond the clatch
and hum, and almost follow. “Osteoblast,” my friend
said, “a blooming nothing,” and it would take a while to settle.

Afraid to point to the problem that functions
like a mutual mind, I let it think. And it did.
And my courage became a climb from soon to past

and my marriage became a kind of ruined glass
shivering whatever was beyond it, whatever it
could not hush down into embers.

Beating the Sky Way out of Johannesburg, I headed
where my wife wasn't. Straight towards her.
One shade. Erratum. The great American arboretum.

And then, for me, transience stopped. I hung on
like rock, like time itself. The day’s light opined
a place where numbers failed me. No addition. No subtraction.

This was in Peoria, not Pretoria, so the blooms, though
alien, were Midwestern. Hidden in the science of
each was a generative grammar, Latin. Mimosifolia. Always

when pitching for humility, for grace,
they told me
hold [______________] in your deepest pocket,

so when they put out my
eyes I'll see
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/BlueJacarandaFlowers.jpg

shyku [tuesday, may 29]

when the bad smell came
I put my head out the window,
then my whole body

shyku [tuesday, may 29]

across water st.
comes Charlie Pratt
waving

Untitled Southern Hunger

Anna and I made that oath beneath trees. Pinnacle
of July, 7th year, cicadas. Ousting everyone's memory of them
to hike root and bark, fuck, then drip twitching in

a fluency, a sound I could hear beyond the clatch
and hum, and almost follow. “Osteoblast,” my friend
said, “a blooming nothing,” and it would take a while to settle.

Afraid to point to the problem that functions
like a mutual mind, I let it think. And it did.
And my courage became a climb from soon to past

and my marriage became a kind of ruined glass
shivering whatever was beyond it, whatever it
could not hush down into embers.

Beating the Sky Way out of Johannesburg, I headed
where my wife wasn't. Straight towards her.
One shade. Erratum. The great American arboretum.

And then, for me, transience stopped. I hung on
like rock, like time itself. The day’s light opined
a place where numbers failed me. No addition. No subtraction.

This was in Peoria, not Pretoria, so the blooms, though
alien, were Midwestern. Hidden in the science of
each was a generative grammar, Latin. Mimosifolia. Always

when pitching for humility, for grace,
they told me
hold [______________] in your deepest pocket,

so when they put out my
eyes I'll see
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a4/BlueJacarandaFlowers.jpg

These Of The Soft Pitch And Maybe Too Random

What's irksome about these collaborations,
though welcome, is how little land they make be.

Beyond that, a sea, and entr'acte, a millennium of
whispered stances. Gathered strum of horsewhipped

Exeter is a town of two million. Faces, that is, his
betters turn against themselves. With vocabulary and

with pulchritude he wept at gallows he could not
be hung enough in. His brood too thin to seed an ending.

The auto-da-fe, a classic Inquisitional solution. It
knows a stray when it seeks one. Fan, stoke, scream

forget to bequest a breathing lesson unto the inanimate
is to sequin wonder blessed with hands and fire.

Who Is This Jennifer Wren?

I was happier. Which means: I came from less.
Slight as an excess of past mixed with

slow winded and crop dusted consciousness
grist in the must bed and more dream as [ ]

per usual the second person unwinds in apparition
a muse-tool, a knowingness I rehearse to

slow your world for mending that
hourly knows no comfort, o my homeless,

my head where information goes to die
slighted before it can fake a kingdom

to know nothing moored is the only
human timbres go on in. Vaguely now, gently.

Duo Portraiture (5)

makes fleeing calm sign of believing
nourishment’s being and long crave et tu

to heal their own heat in disparagement
of too real a rumor as a person















..

Folk Seeing at Birling

Tending one's animal, one's malleable, one's matchless
bending (which is breathing, which may be bleating) is [ ]

a form of hovering, a fern for gathering, and also
way for wind and cousin silence to be skeined.

Unknowable unless dressed in soundly seeing;
unkowtowable when naked, they seek a closer clothing.

Request For Tete-A-Tete

A collaborative effort this time. In anti-heroic couplets.

Of course an anti-heroic couplet will avoid iambic pentameter--so let's toss that--and will equally avoid end rhyme. Instead each line should begin with a word that rhymes with the first word of the line that precedes it.

You lead off. And again, refrain from letting the rhymes lead too predictably towards silliness.

It might be more of a challenge to attempt a measure of thematic continuity. That said, flow as you will.

Note: Refrain
from titling these.
That way the
lines might see
each other
more clearly.

Slow Human Numbers

Made misreading a marriage. That was how it started.
Stilled the deepening—
didn’t matter if it was mystery
or fact, it was all
mystery scaffolding
metacognition. When I worked
in the Traveling Monastery (“envisionment building”)
each day was hard prayer. My supervisors told me
spark each word off the flint
of the last. I fought
with the analogy until
endless wish untangled. I was first again, my head unspent.
Retirement followed. Distance obliterated. But still locked in a method
I couldn’t erase. Of course life tried,
life tried. In walked so many, so much
that had forgotten me. I introduced myself
to old ones. Apparently I had earned the look
of too much loss, and I got it. Boy did I get it. So many
had lost me. I used to live there, there, in the eye, in the billions,
in the slow human numbers, how they haunt me.

The Astonishment Apparatus

"To question what seems so much a matter of course that we’ve forgotten its origins. To rediscover something of THE ASTONISHMENT that Jules Verne or his readers may have felt faced with an APPARATUS capable of reproducing and transporting sounds. For that astonishment existed, along with thousands of others, and it’s they which have moulded us."

Duo Portraiture (4)

Scholastics and The Jacarada

"Pretoria in South Africa is popularly known as The Jacaranda City due to the enormous number of Jacaranda trees planted as street trees and in parks and gardens. In flowering time the city appears blue/purple in colour when seen from the nearby hills because of all the Jacaranda trees. The time of year the Jacarandas bloom in Pretoria, coincide with the year-end exams at the University of Pretoria and legend has it that if a flower from the Jacaranda tree drops on your head, you will pass all your exams. Other towns and cities in South Africa have Jacaranda trees, but none produce such a show as that of Pretoria.

The city of Brisbane in Australia has a local reputation of having a significant population of Jacaranda trees. The University of Queensland in the city's inner west has a very high concentration of the tree, and due to the impressive display of purple flowers in mid-Spring, which wind up littering vast sections of the suburbs, local folklore claims that "one won't start studying for exams until the jacarandas have molted". This has led to the slang name "exam tree" being attached to the plant. At Sydney University there exists a similar expression "by the time the jacaranda in the main quadrangle flowers, it's too late to start studying for exams"."

Your Enduringness, That Sometimes

Your enduringness, that sometimes
shudders several sleepers at once
but continues to remove itself
imperiously to cortex corners
has nothing to return to
though having navigated trysts
successfully is a rumor
even the waking skeptic
is excluded from

We are now on a willow islet
Hammock and honey
eighty years later

We are now on a willow islet
amidst the quietest like
murder from expressed emotion

Impregnable and myriad
without a single allusion

stranded in the billions
outside a forehead plus window

ovations of accidents becoming
obvious unto yourself
to know me

Challenge - Titles found in a poem by Laura Riding

"Slow Human Numbers"

"A Common Air and Eating"

"The Necessary Quorum of Suspicions"

"The Trial of Looks"

"How Foreign Was Our Flesh"

"An Arbiter to Sample"

"Of Freak Terrain"

"Your Enduringness, That Sometimes"

_____________________________________________

20 lines.

2 lines must be generated by a chance operation, explained in a footnote or comment box.

Quechua For 'Navel Of The World'

Nothing more absolute and undreamt
than the conqueror’s right
to with pressed lips force the tongues
of natives to split what the law
so resolutely purses
which is the word in all its variable
correctness meaning radiating
the truth back second-hand
to its one unlocatable source
that flourishes from the historical
mulch one Francisco Pizarro
the bodkin sweetness of the mountain
ruined air expressing itself
in breezes through his standing
unalterably still as if sculpted
by superstition and its people
one of whom departs with both
halves of himself laden with
diseases

I Have Named Them

larches[,]
“some things that leave
doormat’s bondage
between each secret

footfall.” Underside the reverse
of conversion,
a what-pump:
no marrow in a vacancy

whose lectern[‘]s disarray [is]
entombment’s twin
confusion. Technically[,]
transient eyes parachute

as if driven
toward dead lands of scorched arcades,
toward fouled fare instead of
Sunday afternoon Americana.

Duo Portraiture (3)

Request To Wrestle

Choose one:

'Splitting Down The Middle Their Worth'

'Exeter Aubade'

'On Exaggeration As A Means Of Avoidance'

'I Have Named Them'

'Quechua For Navel Of The World'

'To Socrasphinx, From His Lessers'

_________________________________
18 lines.

Hecatomb For Comfort

Quiet. And then: aspens. Crepitations
of new something leaves untwisting
from dormant bondage like Houdini
en masse. Between each in its secret

gasp for an underside the reverse
of oxygen, where bronchial translation
mimics conversion like a Christian
evangelical from contraction, what

pumps bleats, circulates to ensure
no vacancy in marrow whose height
lectures from a busybody disarray
of entombment. Thinness collects

silhouette confusion. Technically
skinny and below, sans thought. Sketching
transient ripcords. And what. The eyes
screaming up, no parachute.

( - )

As if driven by dread of obvliousness (into
hints and lands of scotch arcana), we
clung to the stinging and byzantine rhetoric of
Mets fans, bounteously heckling
that which would go fair instead
of foul, foul instead of fair,
advancing the much hoped for
plot line of a Sunday afternoon
in the bleachers, in the sun, and, yes,
in America but not
the "triumph of Americana."

Request For Duel

Choose one:

"Hecatomb For Comfort"

"This Is Not Where Women Come From"

"Treemonisha"

"Fleece For Voice and Ear, To Be Repeated"

"As If Driven By Dread of Obviousness Into Hinterlands of Scholarly Arcana"

___________________________________________________________
A poem. 16 lines. Avoid temptation to overcook with silliness, if and when possible.

Duo Portraiture (2)

On Pain Extroverted Into Giddiness, Misinterpreted As Saintly Innocence

5/ On leaving Cambridge to settle in London in 1752, Christopher Smart began writing under the pseudonyms Mary Midnight and Ebenezer Pentweazle. Working closely together (in the confines of religious mania) these were married by their presiding minister in 1756 in the asylum of St. Luke's Hospital. Their first child they named "David". Their second, "Jubilate". Only much later and after the death of everyone involved photographs of the latter were reproduced to popular but more often than not glib acclaim. The most memorable of these: a prison kitty basking in a sunbeam.

4/ This, Mary and Eb's photogenic third child, was named "Geoffrey".

3/ Whom they later drowned in a bucket. Amen.

2/ All so water within this bucket might later be taken as holy, not by Smart's handlers but by himself.

1/ Which is to say, Recite these joys while looking in a mirror. Or don't.

I recently found a bag behind my apartment.

In it:

1. One copy of the Gotham Writer's Workshop (GWW) catalogue, folded.
2. One copy of FOLK, a catalogue of "An exhibition of photographs, artifacts, film and music recordings from the Alan Lomax Archive."
3. One plaster sculpture showing a man deeply pondering a book while another man looks over his shoulder. The signature on the base reads, "(TZFAT) ZAFED June '88”
4. One bottle of Fiji water, half full (empty?).
5. One hammer and peg toy. When I removed the toy from its beer-tarnished box, I found a piece of white (cheddar?) cheese appended to the plastic. Failure to discover this cheese would have led to a terrible, unidentified smell within three days, possibly leading to the destruction of the toy or the abandoning of the apartment wherein the toy is currently lodged.
6. One wine list from an Afghani Restaurant.
7. An advertisement for $250 dollar headshots. Five of the phone number tags have been removed. It was posted in a place called "Holiday Bar," which, I can tell you, is no holiday.
8. A sign advertising PAINTING for 85.00 per room. No phone number tickets have been removed.
9. A badly soiled Heineken coaster.
10. A menu from Joe’s Pub with the inside page forcibly removed.
11. Purple wrapping paper filled with sawdust, mustard, and other unmentionables.
12. A small card that says, “DON’T LOSE ME.”
13. The inside page from a menu from Joe’s Pub.
14. A sign that says CPR KIT IS AVALABLE UNDER THE COUNTER. (My spelling is accurate).
15. One roll of toilet paper. Thankfully, it has not been soiled.
16. Two torn tickets to a musical performance by Hazel Dickens / Bonny Billy & Captain Anomoanon
17. A card that says HOOKAH: APPLE, STRAWBERRY, DOUBLE APPLE, MANGO, SWEET MELON, APRICOT, CHERRY, MINT, JESSAMINE, PEACH, COCONUT

Conclusions and Questions for Further Inquiry

The Afghani restaurant seems to have been hit hardest during this night of small-time pillaging. Does this reveal a subconscious bias or the damaging effects of Turkish coffee and hookah smoke?

Given the location and condition of the bar wherein the pillagers found the advertisement for headshots, it can be concluded that the state of modeling in NYC is in rough shape. At what point in the evening does one of the toothless, speech slurring, hookering inhabitants of Holiday Bar look up from his/her drink and decide that it’s a good time to secure a headshot at 250 bucks a pop?

And at what point does this same inhabitant decide that he/she would pay 250 dollars for a headshot rather than 85 dollars to have a room painted? In fact, for the price of one headshot, said inhabitant could paint almost three rooms in his/her house. Considering that most apartments in New York City contain only a small bedroom and a small living room / kitchen (if that), the following conclusion can be reached: New York City is filled with delusional people whose priorities need serious adjustment.

Speaking of which, the petty thieves responsible for this bag of shit should be ashamed of themselves.

"After playing Chopin,

I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild, romantic loves, or great renunciations. And so tell me this story, Ernest. I want to be amused."

Oscar Wilde, as Gilbert, in The Critic As Artist