The Myth of Arcady

A shepherd tried to ruin for me
The eloquent myth of Arcady;
That breathing couplet of antiqued joy.

A feeling I had since I was a boy—
An idea that Greece was a song
That I, cataclysmically wrong,
Sensed the tune that I was fed
Of pastoral beauty somewhere read
Was but a dream of wrathful Rood
Whose salvation, misleading and good,
Stood alone in its mournful place
For my imagination to trace
The warring words of a blitheful ditty,
Of a red-head perched, so true and pretty.

And I gave that shepherd a frightful stare
As a boy grown old with Aesop’s mare.

The solstice revolved around a setting sun
And my stammering desire rolled undone
In the tearfully drenched aftermath,
And desire swayed from my immanent path.

© 24II09 Le Même War Press

When Money is God

When money is god
people will dismiss notions of god
and repeat the verifiable
mantra of money

and fashion will replace beauty
since beauty does not discriminate
based on class
and fashion is a cycle
which spirals away from
beauty’s lazy truth

and opinion will be
the knowledge used to hurry
wisdom.

© 2009 Le Même War Press

The Magic Within

Jean-Paul followed Magic
to the end of his world
but stopped short
a fool’s length from
the horizon.

On his left was the Demon
he first met in bruises
of his father’s fear.

And it was this Demon
for whom he swore lust
as she smiled
the interrupting orgasm
of death.

He turned to the right
hoping to see an Angel
but all he saw was distance
to his mother’s tears.

And he looked long last
into the mirrored eyes
of his beloved Magic
and the Sun rose
in tendril pink
and voluptuous orange
blinding Jean-Paul
to the Magic within.

© 2009 Le Même War Press

Thinking Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman is a barrel-bellied man with thick, unstarched flannel shirt maybe tucked in to thick, unwashed denim jeans, and calloused white toes crammed into the sturdy white boots of a democracy brawl.

No one imagines his thick, unkempt pelvis rollicking side to side and back and forth in the legato-lazy act of lovemaking, because while he may dream of laying freely over bent grass with the isolation of a warm doll-like body straddling him, he does not hold in reserve his libidinous body in its entirety against the chaste world.

He does not fill her womb with seed, he lies with the soul of the world and impregnates passions untapped and sets fire to the icy stasis of the democracy mind.

When the gestation has followed traditional cycles of want, he belly laughs and names his first and only born child, Poesy.

© 2009 Le Même War Press

Chasing Black Rainbows– Book Review

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Chasing Black Rainbows
(A novel about Antonin Artaud by Jeremy Reed)

Black rainbows are what Artaud sees coming from the lips of the Poet. Which Poet possesses this physical anomaly is never mentioned, though he is written to speak at other places in the text of Blake, Poe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, etc. Perhaps the discoloration of blackness stems from the ink the Poet of Artaud’s experience uses to marry his words to the page in textual hieroglyphs.
What does this blackness really represent when bolder statements of Poetry are written with the threatening chemistry of blood?
Black is the color of all color. All colors mix in any combination to form black, just as any combination of life and choices results in the inevitability of death. White is the absence of all color. Perhaps this is semantically incorrect from the viewpoint of physics, but that is of no consequence to me, or to the intent of this writing. Black, the color of the common ink used by Poets and publishers to immortalize words and ideas, is the transmutation of mental idea into physical process through text. All ideas from the beginning of written history through the present time and beyond are captured by the blackness of the text. The blackness of rainbows formulated by Reed through the character of Artaud is not the death of rainbows as would be commonly assumed, for this would indicate the death of Poetry, and Poetry is nowhere more alive than in the ideas and actions of the Poet who breathes the trace of black rainbows. The blackness of these rainbows, rather, is the annihilation of categorical knowledge which is isolated through spectrums as the fault of man’s search for certain wisdom. The voice of the Poet in speaking the terms employed of Poetry is the authentic search for absolute wisdom and the abandonment of knowledge as a bastardized substitute for wisdom.

Neither Reed nor Artaud dismiss the beauty of colors such as red, green, yellow, blue, orange, purple, black or even white. The Poet without such an arsenal of beauty at his disposal would hardly be able to approach the epochs of wisdom. The idea of blackness should be seen as a metaphysic rather than a conglomeration of individual meanings. To define blackness, especially with regard to rainbows, as a metaphysic is to allow the distinction between fundamental and assumed. The words and text employed by the Poet are fundamental in the sense that meaning does not reach out to individual categories of correspondence. To assume words or text is to apply a meaning separated from the entirety of human experience and to further isolate thoughts in time as significant only to that assumption of signification. Words such as orange, green, or purple retain their individualistic correspondence to the colors as related, but also apply to a fundamental sense of transcendence and are thereby options for further discourses of meaning.

Sex is also explicated through the historical context of formulated fantasy throughout the text of this book. I would highly recommend that you read it whether you like me or not.

© 2008 Le Meme War

The Fantasy of Fast

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The Fantasy of Fast

A few days ago I had the unexpected pleasure of witnessing an event I had previously thought to exist only in movies and sensationalist media coverage: The high speed chase. I was driving south on I-75 and had just left the city limits of Atlanta when I heard the spiral-gurgling whine of a crotch-rocket motorcycle behind me. I looked in my rearview mirror, then in my passenger side mirror and saw a man on a motorcycle through the glass of my windshield traveling at what I guessed to be 150mph, double my speed. He leaned heavy to the left and to the right and passed through nearly invisible gaps between cars that I wouldn’t have dared walk through had they been packed so closely in a crowded parking lot. As envy began to formulate a familiar substance in my imagination, I saw flashing blue lights speed next to me and beyond me at the pace of an elevated heartbeat, but not nearly as fast as the motorcycle which had passed merely seconds before. Only by the color scheme did I identify the car to be the Georgia State Patrol. Blue, silver, and orange are more accessible to recognition than the blurred words stenciled on the side of a rapidly moving vehicle.

Instantly I cheered for the man on the motorcycle. I can’t attribute my excitement to the archetype of the common man rooting for the underdog, no matter how powerful the connection. My first rationalization was that the speedster on the crotch rocket likely engaged in an action that caught the attentive eye of the State Patrolman. This action could have been as simple as the speeding which he was currently engaged, or perhaps involved some sort of theft or violent action towards another individual. Maybe he hurt someone, I reasoned. People who tend to root for Law Enforcement use that idea to justify their appearance of heightened morality. The same argument can be used to jeer the bullying State Patrolman– How many people has he hurt “under the guise of duty?” That’s probably an unfair question as those who dream of being perceived as having a heightened sense of morality will assert, with a whine, that the ends justify the means. If the State Patrolman hurt someone, or many people, it is because he, or she, acted in accordance with what we as a society need for law and order to be maintained. If the motor biker hurt someone, or even displayed the potential for hurting someone, then it was for selfish reasons since he does not stand for anything other than himself, as evidenced by his individuality in clothing, in opposition to the cop who wears a uniform to indicate the higher purpose of law which is served by his presence and actions.

Bullshit. On both counts. The truth is that there is no verification that what I witnessed was even a high speed pursuit. Considering the timing of circumstances, what I have described is the most likely scenario, but not the only potentiality. One scenario allows that the man on the motorcycle happened to be speeding by and the State Patrolman happened to be chasing someone else. The adrenaline junky on the motorbike may be a friend of the State Patrolman, or perhaps an off-duty State Patrolman. This is unlikely because of the irresponsibility of what their course of action could entail, but even this unlikelihood does not render it impossible. The possibilities can continue on this strain, but the key to keep in mind is that their inevitable absurdity does not render them impossible.

I cheered for the crotch-rocket-o-naut because he approached a freedom that I complain to be unattainable. The movie and news versions of this event are a reflection of what I seek, tarnished through the imagination of another. To witness such an event in a movie is to accept the understanding that the outcome has already been determined by the logic of the script and the desire of the Director. Even on the news, such an event is determined by the inevitable fact that the law must eventually reclaim its dominance, or the justification of failure of the law must result in death which is then belittled to a cosmic extension of the justice principle. My experience of what I witnessed, regardless of how I choose to define it, is not narrowed by either of these expectancies. For a brief moment I was exposed to the elements of limitless potentiality, regulated only by my imagination. I can choose to never learn or accept what the outcome proposed on the face of reality. There are no closing credits, no follow up news story. At the farthest reaches of my imagination another fantasy begins and the dream of being the man capable of projecting myself through reality at such an endangering clip is saved for the next time I feel the slow grp of reality squeezing my soul from my aging body. As far as I am concerned, the man on the motorcycle transcends my hesitancy of time and the State Patrolman represents the inevitability of my fate , not the fate of the man on the speed-bike.

My fantasy notion of freedom is the capability to go really fucking fast through life and not worrying about that abrupt stop at the end. This does not happen in movies, nor does it happen in the news. Only in the openness of my imagination is this freedom possible, and I will live there as long as possible.

© 2008 Le Meme War

Genius and Heroin

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Genius and Heroin

Today I received a very special e-mail, one that reached through the microcosmic world of the internet and grabbed me tightly, following up with a big, salivating kiss. At the moment, I can’t even recall who sent the e-mail. Maybe it was A Cappella Books, a great bookstore in Atlanta, despite one employee’s vociferous disdain for anything written by Kerouac (the Beat shelves are right in front of the register, and most people, like me, who just stop in to look, often without buying anything, like me, probably annoy him and deprive his growing paunched hunger pangs much needed money for food) but the shop is still a great place to find the harder to find gems of the literary world which don’t receive much love in the bigger chain stores. Now that I’ve plugged this fantastic bookseller, I should return to the lovely letter they may or may not have sent to my inbox today.
The e-mail was certainly about books, maybe even about authors and their public appearances in the area. I receive a bulk of these e-mails. Not because I’m in any way “in the know” but because I’m an excitable nerd for all things literature and Poetry and despite my hesitancy towards the internet, I did find that it is a great place to sign up for e-mail updates and lo’ and behold, Bookstores and Book Publishers LOVE to have newsletters concerning upcoming events. Maybe it’s a Capitalist thing, but since I’m not a fan of Capitalism (so to speak) ((nor am I a fan of ANY economic system for that matter—all breed greed and class contempt, but since I do sometimes make purchases, I’ll go with Capitalism as preferred opiate)) and I am a fan of bookstores and book publishers, I will declare that the genesis of these newsletters is a desire for a sense of community. Writers tend to work most prolifically alone, so why wouldn’t one encourage a sense of community? (I can be cynical about those things I love!)
A new book is forthcoming and the book concerns two of my favorite topics, and is aptly titled— Genius and Heroin. I was captivated a few years ago, inside one of those mammoth chain stores I recently spoke ill of, after reaching the top of the escalator and having my attention and imagination captured by a small little book titled—On Hashish, by some guy named Walter Benjamin. I quickly discovered that this Jewish-German Metaphysicist was a very unlikely candidate to write about the effect of such a well known potent drug, but Benjamin’s scholarly acumen added more to this gem than subtracted. I also learned later, and am still learning, of his involvement with some of my other favorite writers. That’s another story, so I’ll return to Genius and Heroin.
Maybe the guy’s name is Michael Largo, maybe it isn’t. I don’t have a mind for such detail. I remember ideas. One of my favorite ideas is to get good and wasted on some substance and rip your fingers away on a stilted, heavy clicking typewriter all night and publishing your sweat the next day. It works, sometimes, for Rock & Roll, and it works, sometimes, for Poetry and literature. I’ve written some of my best work, so far, on the mildly lame substance of beer. (I’ve also written some of my worst . . .) I’m not knocking the elixir of my muse, but even I have to admit that beer is rather tame compared to the legendary effects of Absinth, Heroin, Opium, or LSD. (Dicky Barrett of the Mighty Mighty Bosstones does proclaim, the world’s greatest writers are all drunks and fighters and I want desperately to believe him.)
Anyway, Michael Largo wrote, published and is most likely supporting a new book called Genius and Heroin which deals with some of the most legendary people in the history of Rock, Poetry, and Literature and their self destructive lifestyles with regard to the plethora of genius they were able to perpetuate. Genius isn’t a static event which happens to few people, it is a dynamic occurrence which inflicts us all at one time or another, and the trick is learning how to harness that genius into something that gets you off and might just help someone else find their jollies. Creation is a marvelous activity, no matter how you define it, but it can be very lonely and sometimes the only cure for the intense, fiery pain of loneliness is a good beer, a shot in the arm, or a drop of something on the tongue. I can’t say that it’s right for everyone, but the history of substance abuse and its marriage with the creative impulse is undeniably attractive and just damn entertaining. I excitedly anticipate reading this book, and what I look forward to more than the actual reading is NO HANGOVER!

© 2008 Le Meme War