CURSE
I The Art Of The Fugue Mangled cuttlefish and fundamentalist angst. Putty in the hands of rheumatics, and putty knives. Romantics and nose rings. Joseph Mengele and The Scuttlebutts, industrial rockers who can cut it in any key. Caulking guns when caulks are out of season. A pretty kettle of fish, a kettle bulged with potatoes. Over-Romantics and pierced nipples. The art of the left-handed blow-job. The Beach Boys doing Gustav. The highest divorce rate in the world. Soiled blue-jeans exposing the need for butt- crack caulking-compound. Boiled blackcod. (Ask any Norwegian.) An infinite series with unprovable convergence. Mahler and rancid heroin. Pragmatists as apologists for pierced labia. The pneumatic palm hammer. Sperm banks' advertised interest rates. Circuits completed in the harmonics of hang nails. A pretty kettle of cod-pieces, a gillnet heavy with potatoes. Kettle drums boiling a symphony till tender. Joseph, the lead guitar player, in over her head, pierced penis, sinking in the gene pool's deep end, slurping up cuttlefish.
II Agnus Dei
When the worm builds with the gold straws of venom my nest of mercies in the rude, red tree. Dylan Thomas, ALTAR-WISE BY OWL-LIGHT Beat it till it bleats. Singing wind, crying beast. Abraxas, hope as sweet as a milk-heavy breast. Servant. Cock-crow. The reddened crest that combs out light, the increased- by-increment weight of light like cleats glinting from a boot-sole. What completes gestures scribed by two fingers on a priest. Hung from the sky where the sky pressed. Hung from the sky when the sky praised. Who sucked mutton, hooves rendered to paste commodities brokers' toupees on shiny pates. Like a girl, with silky thighs who rates loves, who entered into denial and raced around three cock-crows from the roost, child of stars, give me a boost up this fabled mansion. Fable me blessed to this line so I lay down my bets that the slowly growing holy dawn begets shepherds and brokers flocking and fucking like goats who can't tell whence comes wind or Holy Ghost. Nor can I. Hence servant, tyrant, grist for no book, a page fluttered by the Holy Gust who enters low and proceeds up the guts. Who was born in a cluster of cold huts. Who was born twice, clustered cold hates sharp as well-tooled steel. The haste blood pounds to breach arteries unlaced to wind, unpray the milling and muttering lost who, deflocked, who, casting themselves as lots to be drawn until the last red clots, who, into the girl with silky thighs, spurt the cost of unfaith: mercies of lips kissed four points for wind blown through an undone wrist. Fuck you and fuck mercy! Let hope rust a long drawn agony the rude bread ruts at the unhumble poor, faked joy of sluts I present on knee and elbow. Mouth open to sluiced fire falling, washed clean by pentecostal lust pent in my tongue like milk swelling a breast, I enter the lair of my beast and beat the fucker till he bleats. III Decompressing After A Near Drowning 55.54 Atmospheres Deep In An S-Plus 3.2 Infinite Loop (coal sacks like Lascaux, where Raven on a pole spills night across another simulation) Richard Kenney, THE INVENTION OF THE ZERO hyperbole of electrons cursor cursory curse fucker computer and the hyperbolically curving ivory in the jaw for news good news o death where is thy sting goddamnit i want to feel something anything slavery the hyperbaric chamber that is the lap top the modem the plasma driven screen portable as three hundred fathoms five hundred fifty-eight meters cocksucker depth chambered hyperbaric creaking up the pressure following a hyperbolic curve dive fucker dive dive computer dive all hands to battle stations all hands agitate your battle stations passive bastards dome sky surface depth deep dome great pressure she is great with pressure agnus dei ms dei prefers not to be addressed as agnes even when swelling toward birth sweet lamb the shallow end of the gene pool believes The Government rays direct to brains of those who survived somehow denies all knowledge i have it on good authority a federally funded research scientist dr dei her idea gestates disgusting gestalt rate reboot she is nearing finally the solution IV Bug In A Loop (statistician's lament) Ablutions done, I turn away. Will my iterations compute? approach convergence? I cannot say. Interpreted code I weave betrays my object, locks up, and I reboot, bug-raveled, done. I turn away from oracles, help files, my display disabled. My function, struck mute, converged on what? I cannot say, having smashed my RAM to disarray as with a bullet to the head, brute comma lost. Undone, I turn away from parameters I have assayed badly, busted IF syntax, wrecked root. Snail-paced divergence won't let me say my assumption or let me array data so ruptured. I cannot impute articles of faith. I turn away from the uncoverged I will not say. V The Art Of The Fugue, reprise I wring my hands down fish hooks and gillnets burdened by my harvest of kisses. Release. Infrastructure of bone. Muscle. Bowel. Sinew. Pancreas. The mountain I tell it from was very hard to climb. Head wounds and hand maids will not stay my tongue, loud in the long oral tradition, pure sex, bestowed at birth. Deepest dives of a hooked fish, the silent tons weighing down, wringing the last bubbles of gas from the blood, halibut and head wounds and a struck jaw, oral tradition. Some of us will do anything to keep alive. Gnawed fragment: Scraping the skull-edge: I used to be sparkly. I have a picture. I carry this picture with me everywhere. I have earned the right to speak of love. Fuck the feet of them who pimped the little girl, the Good News not withstanding. The right to speak of love is bestowed at birth, can be won only at terrible cost and effortlessness. Fist fuck them who pimped the little girl, unkindly. Others simply die, give up the ghost, as it were, though, personally, I believe the Ghost has some choice in the matter. The least tongue, the tongue of a whore, I wring my tongue down the deepest jaw-broken dives, the least, my tongue, the tongue of a whore is best to bear such a burden, to harvest such a burden. I kept alive somehow. Kisses and head wounds. I used to be sparkly. I will speak: Four years old. A chain of orange and green snap- together plastic toys around my neck was my mane. My lion's mane. I was Leonardo the Lion in this picture and I had a smile, even, and I used to sparkle. I will speak of love if I want! God damn it! I used to sparkle once and I had a mane and now I will not be still. I will shine out loud my roar and carry on. I am big. I have a beard. My voice is big and I speak with the tongue of a whore of love. "You stupid fuck!" I used to lash at myself. Shut up and listen. I have something good to say: If I turn my back on this shadow I turn my back on this life. My life. I will not do that. I will speak of love: I want some. VI Unbreaking Bread Confession There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies; and the splendour of the heavenly bodies is one thing, the splendour of the earthly another. I Corinthians 15:40 NEB My tongue is physical. Taste is my speech, cayenne, molasses, sesame oil. Simple truths. Touch, my harvest of kisses. Out of a brine I was a body once. I still am. The garlic roots of my swimmings, the divings, the thundered red sinnings in my ear, are flesh. Spread before my fingers are crusts to roughen the hunger, pepper and sugar, razors, food for a whore. When I pimped the little girl dill weed, milk, honey. The tongue knows, body of my body. Thus, above all else, butter. I rage my way into body. It took ten years to bleat loose of the tang I had married to near my molars like bouquet or curse: I am alive. How that came to pass I am not sure I hate for. Anymore, my kisses harvest clover for the lost lamb, a smaller work in grace.
Peter Munro
If you've any comments on his poem, Peter Munro would be pleased to hear from you.