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Volume 4

June 2008

Number 1

The Twenty-First Century

by John Ryskamp

Nothing feebler does earth nurture than man,

of all things that on earth breathe and move.

For he thinks that he will never suffer evil in time to come

so long as the gods give him success and his knees are quick;

but when again the blessed gods decree him misfortune,

this too he bears in sorrow with such patience as he can,

for the spirit of men upon the earth is just such as the day

which the father of gods and men brings upon them.

-Odyssey, 18, 130-137

I

Fraud most displeases God.  Of what use is humanity?

Calm down, myself, and be still.  Between the

Torments and the Scaean gate,

Surviving in the valley of your speaking,

Each word a copy,

Wall before the watcher

(with burning sorrow, you beat upon that wall

til truth obeys your call

and soon tire of three enchanted fires of “the” Lower Empire,

never the contemporary of your own desires)

Atmospheric parting of the frieze

Sections of arcadian strata—

Dream intense, swift—

   Year to year and crag to crag, procuring,

Find, as if by design, this talking night book of signs

In a hell sans hooks

(only writing is thought, talking its book),

And tread—like a broken chariot,

Enfranchised, from the three worlds—

That path of humility which leads to reality, going forth,

No lodging for you but a cold hard confiding stone—

And shout an evil secret to the agora stone—

The air filled with covered water

and stone, in a bitter blue death light.

Eating the legumen of the algoraba,

Thin from eating flies, circumcising the indefinite.

Fulfilling your destiny,

Shadow-bearing lord of weak remembrance,

Dissembled, proffered, recovered, withdrawn—

Speaking radio silence—

(Why not just say, disheveled?)

Infernal hurricane in your breast,

Have a little drop of nothingness, rest on Hera’s breast,

perturbed spirit, from your friendquest—and no fingerpointing!

Confusion is the beginning of the philosophical quest.

Here, in the adminisphere, are some Iambic jests

and little straws to put in your nest.

I’m blown up!  Xook.

Impatient for night?  Vade mecum.  Every lazy postwoman is. 

Very well then, here it is,

Let’s have a dekko, conversate:

All men are whores,

Some named Therefore.

   In obedience to other laws,

Fog cruises everyone and mobs embattled Seraphim to war,

Only exaggeration moves them,

Their will bondsman to the obliterate dark,

They set sail in a black, enigmatic

vain and helmless raft or barque, scarf upon scarf

Baudelaire sprawled on the poop

Of that craft, mumbling epigraphs.  Gesunde Volkskraft.

Started—a thoughtwreck that.  Ships set sail on time.

   Then press at blue midnight beneath love’s cornice

(Draped by bunches of acorns, unsightly moss, mimicking

orchids, poplar, and grapevine tendrils)

In Porto Pozzo, live lips upon a plummet-measured face.

Welcome to the machine/poem.  I’ll language your efforting.

   Let me open the door for you:

   Night snores over the earth and wallows in wild dreams;

wishes take shape as deadly swallows and steal

into the silent house of dreams;

this is the curative oft-limned pure zero hour

of [the relationship of] the will to power:

an inarticulate red right hand transmitted

from a bookish iron famine tower

bringing back a white celestial flower.

Twentysomethings

all ready in cock rings

awash in their fluids

and tonsured by Druids,

powdered white, dressed in black

black-collar workers walking in the steps of Kerouac

shorn like an ox’s balls, with horse’s horns

a tattoo

of a warbler born from wishful bamboo.

They seem to undress

looking as if falling to earth

but are merely repeating forms in infinite regress.

Where are they?  Swear.

With ear-kissing arguments, hints and guesses

Nibbles and caresses

Hugo’s hide rope, dragon, present identical abyss

Severed heads kiss

In mourning eclipse

Under the assin between two apolinere enameled obelisks

(and their laurel wreaths slip)

In a garden without names, rapt in flames

Another old fat man, fat like a strange terrestrial cypress tree,

Daisy? or buttercup?

or just a rotten old fuckup?

   It’s the way I’ve always been treated,

a creepazoid baron, an occasional transvestite, an Uncle William,

with a wicked pack of franks

A banished old tightwad claiming to be

limited God, in imagination

   Bent on the wisdom of fisting deformed solar God

who shows you his open citron hand

(yet their heart’s covered waters

spill no baleful word abroad)

ulcerated scrotum à la Coleridge

replaced haunch and trailing paunch, consults

the threefold whorl of a

conch (the center of which cannot hold),

lives in the capsule of a cell phone

waits in a cassia tree munching the fungus of immortality,

not suffering very low food security,

plies and anoints with split nitrogen,

confiding, in a motionless sliding,

draws near, sweetly questioning in artificial English

If you lack anything:

A little usury up the mula bandha

While you’re in crow?

Fastens on your buttonhole

More subtle than a weaver’s shuttle

Ponete mente almen com’io son bella!

Si tu voulais seulement

M’approfondir ensuite un peu!—

the nineteenth autumn has come upon me

since I made my last count!  Ohno-second

Behind the unity of a hundred masks he asks:

Is there anything else you don’t like? what makes you weep?—

Hey, he gets off on that, OK?

   Tells tales (through halitosis) of a moral apotheosis,

Through barely-parted lips,

a muted half-pentameter apocalypse.

Pumpkin, when do you shed deconflicted diamond tears? 

when another sun appears?

Wiggle your unfathomed, unholy, burning Sanskrit ears and

Don’t look** so forlorn, baby,

was ever innocence in beauty born?

Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;

Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch’ich Gewalt.

What’s up with your antithetical deformed arm?

Your watch must be fast.  Show me your eggplant.

Thought is free: what’s your metaphor?

Bo-peep, what’s in the hibiscus basket?

Why are your fingers caressing my neck, you ignorant…

melting boy?

Non vis ut sim sollicitus: you parent killer!

Taking suggestion as a cat laps mouse milk,

in each other’s grill, about to throw down,

   A bouquet of blossoming vulvae, c’est du sang en fleur

Let a thousand humble hollow pelvises blossom

Get down this way often? 

Are you up for grabs?

Christ I’ve got monetized eyes for your peacock.

Some are anxious crossed out spineless

angels pulled away by an arm,

Some undone, in the unattended moment,

Approached in the sacred porch with consuming heat

from the speaking,

sulphurous torch (to let the warm love in!),

Ponete mente almen com’io son bella!

Si tu voulais seulement

M’approfondir ensuite un peu:

He fucked my ass off

while coalesced syllabic onyx nails scratched the rails.

men che drama di sangue m’è rimaso che non tremi

sed faciles Nymphae risere

Elated chatter among the leaves.

Nothing outside; nothing inside.

Nothing inside and outside.

Your dying slave,

Lost eyes uplifted speckled knees bowed down,

In the distinct concessional,

In Urso Major, under the dragon’s tail,

Under the very nose of Jesus [death],

Nurse, the basting syringe

(Fill it with Grey Poupon),

Unwilled of heaven in mankind, in a

Childbirth of the mind

You, with your Spenglerian brownish hue

see the point which has passed beyond you

(outdo what you have undone)

at midnight in Byzantium

XX XX

primary master, secondary slave,

the bow is bent and drawn, make from the shaft,

lance his piles,

give a masked antithetical neutering tincture

to his sphincter: all is beauty,

ecstatic concentration, and extinction

a new race of Longobardi, earth’s litter

speculators in derivatives

thoroughbreds and chickenheads

a sword fight

Some struggle—

torrid though torpid towards 3 PM (sundown)—

With a bottle

Up a millionaire’s ass,

Your idol and your tyrant—

Once a kindly Zephyros, now a

blustering Boreas

(and I mean that in a non-“windy” way)

a buster, stifled

Titan, going at it with Santa claws

out by the long home hidden by the almond tree

working burdensome gleaning grasshopper jaws

la lippe me fait le mouvement de paître

giving you a philoctetes with his everyday missile

by a divine thrusting on

and on a ratty couch in the vestibule,

in your hammock a whore!

   The blemished tiger springs from his fallen God, the dog

backs down before the bull.

Yacking, you eat the copper hair

on the eyes of his chest,

you blow menos in his wordhole,

potency gaining existence by form,

in the felly and the nave

breathing each other’s life, exchanging colors,

living each other’s smoky breath, blowing out:

thought, absence, language=pulsating death.

Vis-à-vis lesbian Picassoid tongues by teeth are torn

impaled on rhinocerous horn or Glastonbury thorn

(not until humanity composed itself could Christ be born)

terror and oblivion

   Your spirit overkissed—your young zeros! breath

scarce knows the way!  w00t!

Rubens Moreau

Balthus Corot

Destroys with the brightness of his coming.

O, O, O, O.  In life we are in death.

Au secours M. Kosygin!

You spill air;

it gathers in covered Rhone pools, psychic puddles

which whisper: “Call 647-8262,”

whisper The Solution:

“All crime is unsuccessful revolution.”

Laboring under the erotic, cinema

(let’s give baby an enema)

Narcotic Kairotic juju of his succubus-like spell

and balls as big as church bells

Bite, and with ardent eyes and brite,

In a lonely impulse of delight,

Draw back to watch the imprint of that bight.

Discharging starlight, I feel like a prerequisite Job tonite.

Il s’agit a shrine of melancholy in a temple of delight,

Synopsized, personalized hobby: exteriorized rite.

Unpack your heart with words:

Zoit!  A sillie worm: O do not bruise me!

quia amore langueo

The master struck him with three mirrors and a candle,

stole his yams and mandals.

Before you realize in the region of unlikeness

This Colonel you do not recognize

Tes yeux dans ces yeux-là!

You have changed blue eyes and have the throat of relanguaged late birds.

Soon.

In the Nd-Yag drishti of the stance

you have changed black eyes

and in intellectual sweetness pissed crosswise

so a menstruating Jew will die

(and the images of your mind are changed).

Qui s’en vont dans l’air pur

À l’aventure

I want to know what fat day this is.  What day is this?

Reproduce all marvels of classical architecture

In a distended platitude

Et puis? 

Well, in the dixit

of a contemporary critic

what follows radiates the sort of pathologic corona

of a pestilent Prufrockian persona:

in short, an herbal installation (a scanslation)

an asana in the assana (without straps)

of an aerie of little eyases

with most miraculous organ,

one great fact of interpenetrative causation,

four positions of the host and guest

whistle belly thumps

You send a meatloaf:

suave vulnus charitatis

gladius amoris

me vulnera

Behold the nadir:

Tension resolved at noon,

you show your O face without a

figure from the lips of your eye,

an unhorrified evacuation (full of sound and fury!)

against an art nouveau wall, de-

flowering indifference of liberation (a wonder to behold),

the separate substances: you produce a large unimpeachable

radish, ridenti colocasia, a rotted potato and la cookie

a chocolate kiss on a drop of hammered blood (a puddle

of frozen piss in the Pure Land—

and valor and luxury in a lonely place)

A little one is separated from the body—

la goutte d’encre apparantée à la nuit sublime—

and produces an author.

And why not?  Refrigerator art can change too!

huc ades; quis est nam ludus in undis?

sinister filaments in a thick, gelatinous substance

outraging two enameled shady serpents

which part the bears—

frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis

yes, divine justice like a sex poemmmm,

a combustion from below to make

Christian hell smell like a sweet sachet

and your back crack, knees freeze and

needled, observed liver quiver.

It raised the wall, and houses too

(and silenced the Sybil).

Perchè sei tu sì smarrito?

   And then a green apple quick step

Stouty lobby lizard stampede to the hereafter!

Fear of compelling interfaces and forms from this place:

Austerity of virgins, sobriety of slaves,

Outmoded shadows, children’s laughter.

I drank, from the clear milky juice allaying

Thirst, and refreshed—heads without name

Then made covered water at great need

Clutching seven unequal marsh reeds

Bio break: one thrill sweet grass, one pulse in bitter weed

Fue una vaga congoja de dejarte

Lo que me hizo saber que to quería.

et durae quercus subadunt roscida mella

Reader, can you help observe

that some things are like big, long words?

Who then devised the torment? 

Love, reinvented in perfect measure.

Io no lo intendo, sì parla settile.

Love took my hand, and smiling replied,

Who made eyes but I?  You were born in the sky.

A part of labor and a part of pain

(then reduced, somewhat, by wind).

The young in one another’s arms.

send out words and blood together from a tear

(there is no flying hence or tarrying here).

Radiantly sit down, love, and taste my meat.

Give me a gash, put me to present pain—

Beauty ripped by a boar.

Quick now, here, now, always—it’s Zen

Now and now

Teldeath I am coming.

He made time.

As men more like gluttinous swine

No checkypoo?

Wan wu sheng yu?

Yu sheng wu.

You who are a copy,

what is your name?

What is your name?

An sich?

Für sich.

Yanwai ngoh hai yat goh

Centing buck why-foo biby

Bit Hat.  No Cattle.

O—mm—okay?

Todestelle

Work my loom and visit my bed,

Leave me in peace and go.

Love is the wind

Frühling, der liebliche Knabe

Erring, erring

Under the lash of a lust

Which drives them—

Mongrels of the summer

(their life so pressing

but one undressing—

steady aiming at the tomb),

Taking enlightenment in the end,

Noisy sausage party of clerics, men of letters and neoterics,

nulli certa domus

Loud sky and silent sea,

Butterflies struggling in a vacuum,

Grief pouring out through their eyes—nurse

(conceived in the false cow,

with secret traces a concave womb re-worded—

they would have been lucky if they

had never been given cattle!—to devour entire! raw!)

grief in a gutter and give the world to chance,

Come here, boo boo, come give me dein Hand.  Sit here:

Cattywompus from there.  Did you ring?  Give me a pearl.

Stop sneezing and cool your spleen. 

Shake it off.  Bounce.  Call 647-8262.

Cheese.  Cancel past that.  Wake up.

Climb out of your K-hole and suck a slaughtered pig’s ass.

Thus gone, suckle Diana’s green breasts.

Snap on a feed-bag—or eat yourself to lessen pain.

Such an unlucky hand!  Symbolized

by five stars.  Your guest star is Karuna.

Mr. Netsuke, a mekiki with a Buddha-hand citron.

Observe your faults

Observe you.  In drag of regret.  Wahrheit und Richtigkeit.

Leering like the screensucking sun from the clouds. 

Real sun.  Don’t be too brazen!

A hooded monk, and toilet bowl soup.

Do you have a Pinto for sale?  Sell the Buick—

and put a Cadillac in a Ford!

Gaffle some skrill.  Gank now from then. 

Scarf Round Robin.  Sorrow,

sorrow.  Numbers are never spoken;

bodies by Cézanne or Dr. Seuss

Hope never comes that comes to all

Violence is done to one of three

From such soulful amberlight nothing can give shade,

and heaven is out of view. 

Anglican einfühlung is not appealed to.

   Your doom is in this sky

(the point of the infinite is sharp!),

Wherein you behold, in the délices

de Kermoune (the truth cannot be told without prejudice),

A bossy Hebraic homily in colloidal borrowed gold—

Clashing words in the air suspended,

unequal language in the agitated air—

Wherein perfection lives on in some Cartesian void

Raining points, even after its life has been destroyed,

Ideals unrealized so adformation unjustified.

The center thrice to the utmost pole.

Soleil, soleil, faute éclatante!  Job and Sophocles.

Offers no relief, and does not share in the banks of Ocean.

Remorse smiles up from the Bay. 

Fishes quiver in the seiche tone

on the unjust horizon.  Upward man and downward fish.

La cité d’Ys, la Sodome noyée.  Leman.

BHAG.  Ding-dong, bell.

In the circus of fixed destinies

Da ist kein “humanity”—

Only time devils, The Ape’s Problem and profanity.

The medical specialist and the painter,

The death light collector and the headlight child,

A nightingale named Ruth, the Green Man,

The gris-gris and the bochio, buoi and giogo,

The guey professor and the Negro twin

Brothers who are the only child of two mothers

(they perch like swallows and like swallows go),

Louis, Sir Sinister Palindrome in the sex act,

his two-faced silent echo sister;

Prince Fondle, OMO in encaustic emerging

from an acrostic on pride,

Hu Nu in a porkpie hat (McNamara with

a mouthful of bad teeth),

Hector with his stutter, phantom Helen

(her fair face) with her beauty spot,

Aeneas short and fat, that Greek chap Clitoris,

   And circus animals and animulae:

A veiled Maya, secret moonshine shopper, voluptuous fox,