"Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry!" --Mark Strand
DISCLAIMER: This issue of Calliope contains adult language.
Calliope Nerve Part VIII: Why Go? featuring Michigan's own Shawn Misener is free of charge and available now.
the little god in the yellow hat
The Booming Voice From Above:
You can either be the dying crab on the beach, or the jankety satellite that barely holds orbit. Your choice! You can either be the rotten discarded love kiwi, Or the two way speaker at Rally's that never works.
You will forever be having to pull up to the window to order. You will forever be having to correct the order. You will forever be having to hear my dreadful voice.
You will forever be having to be, and that's a raw deal. My voice has shook even the steeliest of balls. My bounty has crumpled even the ironiest of knees. You will forever be having to be my kinda bitch.
You can know death, though. Would you like to know death? You can know death then.
(recess)
Pleasant, no? A real no-brainer. You will forever be having NOT that again. I am in control, see?
You can either be the dried merlot in your toilet, Or the hi tech plastic head to a nuclear projectile.
Get it? You can be the last palm standing after the next tsunami, Or a broken support beam setting off to sea.
You will forever be having to make these great decisions. Hooray for my questions! Would you prefer fries with that, Or the more sensible choice of a fruit cup?
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he sounds relieved he is not crying his compensatory girth invented to rescue his interior from how he used to look with his children he plays simple he plays easy g. his wife meanwhile says jocose things about her having married him she could have had a doctor and she still has trouble figuring what made her marry him
she still repeats the mantra that anointed her in someone's eyes someone fictitious and someone she paralyzed with blatantly inaccurate imposing factlets she might make up as she went along inventing prior hemlines he's the kind of prince her light footprints might have confined to tower longings
he's the kind of a projection she might hurt if/when confronted by the way she feels to see this big man looking straight across beyond himself into the standing weeds that welcome someone to a pseudo home communicating that the hurt one feels is very much contagious and the hurt one does not speak invents the other selves
clavichord by suicide bomb: televised hubris only smiles rotten dreams: wired to the hour's Asiatic: sand peeled charlatans from what is known of the array with their ordinary fur: engorged ringlets of an animus: stolen ounces chime: black bones this pool of tomorrow's gate: bushels of praxis tender reason's cusped ruin: grey soldiers flay at egos fallen adrift in icy passion mistakes: braids betray amber's everything and punch tundra right in the phonetic:
while common people swallow the sound blue has already forgotten
Will “clamp” bail “clump” out in T- urmoil City where vulture is to table upon leg of a she- ath as structure is to fierce upon pl- ains of existence?
II.
Boy is to hunger as a dye vat is to Obi One Kimono.
A gull / a gulf swam.
Wan & clever is Aizen Shin. Snap- shots bespeak him a coin / a violin.
III.
Stagnant Willow Scripted Lenses Flows. I Investi- Gate By Circular Precincts Of Lan- Guage Like News Of Olde Dogs. Oxen Follow E- Poxy Ogles A Gaol Is A Rift In Space / Altered By Usage / A Cl- Aw To What Elu- Des Significance.
IV.
The Aloha inched an errant, strutted into dangerous liq- uor/amphetamine mail-slot foyers.
Discursive / possible.
A particular lambda within purview of august behind green screen doors plotted like holy roly-poly sympatico porticos.
& if not deeded asking the buttered dead for robert dinero.
V.
Now it freaks me: br- oken s_p_aced >>>>[ up serpentine stairwells sublime bay orange-yellow nimble as angst-monster. What is written du jour is good not a seizure?
The ave. is sleet here.
At its base arrives miles en route. ******I took the wr- ong book along. It’s your widgets I adore.
Inside mine is hunger.
VI.
Blind of a nerve be- gat MAN. (Wo)man begat: hooped out & starved. ******Entire gauges. Gad-flies. Manet-Ortiz-Platz are gad- gets I accrue. ******Gadgets brush off is the colonel’s regret. The col- onel’s regret, so blue, pauses at one room. ******When art- iculate, a singing is a pose. Pho- nemes meander upwards. If I aggravate how ship- ped I a book? ******Less as bo- nes. Bling! Bling! Bling! Less as mph. Lessons on skirl amps. Formidable dis- tortions enter lambda at both ends / usurp Edenic amphorae bushwhacked at Bathe. I investigate by looms & by stropt. I'm cured is the cure of language. A new dog is a dangerous read. & to quote: “He means nothing to you & you don’t know why.”
the body is encumbrance (how I work) this is to say (original peace amounts to letting in) when I was born to him and all that spirit lights had planned (one reminisces even the forgotten prior to this life) was almost removed but then emerged what did it mean to have two spirits already enmeshed assigned to new roles what did it mean to recognize as time proceeded darkness to be erased in sequential line here he was today behind a quiet light I listened here he was I had to know and knew I heard his language fit inside my spirit (he used the word wise) every time I think I know I'm joined and every symphony embedded in the smallest wingspan is alive with my decision to accept the chance to be entire
to savage this day. breasts and beats your aura beneath cashmere. razed pink glades a sweating evisceral. bolts from a jawbone enigma. tributaries oozing a sister's fetish. the world's trembling oh-so cleanly. diamonds cannot hallucinate away another. simulation glints paint cancer on the floor. oil that bleeds in cruel arcs like known catacombs falling from a rose's sad jubilee. paradigms minus radiation laugh after punishment's red warp and glare.
This day made whole embarrasses one of the nest. This day made conscious takes away some of the midnight. This day made incomplete reverses the charge. This day made yellow drains the supply of yellow paint.
All the world returns the serve. All the world unplans the world. All the world confers about the world. All the world vociferously disagrees about the world.
In time there are sweet cul-de-sac In time refreshing winter In time failure to injure In time things available at cost
When are you coming to stay When are you speaking as my heart When are you brave enough to become both our hearts When are you remade into this time of night
Of political dissemblance outfit her words in gold lamè. Stars hover in space between her & faux-languages. The lingo between a he and a she is never settled into but a powerful drug. Money exchanged hands in one scene. Down the rabbit hole designated her part in the script. She disposed of every image but her own, enhancing what she said was the truth. She’d mentioned she’d believed she’d read or heard someone repeat lines. Was a book in a restaurant like the key to the abortion clinic downtown? Downtown she gave blood into a beaker without advertising it. Once her apple like an apple from the infamous bough of a fixed phenomenon. She’d taken her friends to the cleaners. A harp solely is an actress “in a curio shop window.” The British mercantile system stretched reality beyond the boundless. Living and speaking became plastic throughout the western world of Hollywood. She repeated washing her hair IN THE SINK. She was transformed by her new look as a blonde bombshell by mistake. Fixed forms of government acknowledged her. Her system collapsed. Then collapsed again. Take after cinematic take. A party was not held in common. A “tour de force” meant sublimely handcuffed by errant dimensionality. The design was overall a flash in the desert. Meta-narratives like all big ideas shrink inhumanely. Hers was a position romanced by words, backed up by bills. Bill was her unconsciously dreamy dream-boy. She found her dubbed-over voice echoed again & again in the dark of his office. Her past is briefer than 600 years. She’d named herself a new name upon arrival. That’s what she remembers being, an upstart from that moment forward. From that moment to this is another trip to her silver screen.
Mixed up in the hub was volatile springtime. A song ready-made as a look through a hedge seemed volatile springtime. Upon the ledge I danced in volatile springtime. Query your rhymes before shifting gears on the open highway in volatile springtime. And so mustangs & palominos & appaloosas raged across three states Of matter out on the plains in volatile springtime. Diffidence constructed sublime pleasures from careless hearts in volatile springtime. We rode each loveable cloud into restaurants in search of ourselves in volatile springtime. We coped in volatile springtime. Instead of comprehending in volatile springtime. We comprehended nothing in volatile springtime. Anticipation opened our emails in volatile springtime. Thus you arrived looking back in volatile springtime. The spirit of elision wandered in drunk and cursing his girl in volatile springtime. The look upon your sunburned face while surf blasted the shore in volatile springtime. Your eyes budding with loose-strife in volatile springtime. For no one said “No” in volatile springtime. The demons we harbored, glutted with hope, usurped the conversation in volatile springtime.
course correct the litmus derivation to advance the light capstone (experience) belies symmetrical indifference unless you gather wholeness to the template and tap forehead to taste
The radio announcer claims moments just ahead of midnight that the broadcast is more intimate at night, and you and I look at each other and agree that this remark itself takes liberties with the language and the airwaves. Now as if to prove his point, the hands connected to the voice have placed on the machine a sheet of vinyl where the needle can get at it, and we hear undue plucking with a filament too much vibrato, plus a modicum of jubilance beyond what's de rigeur. Schubert is threatened, and I remember now the DJ's boss once telling me that the announcers have collectively an ego the size of several counties pressed into a vise. We then transist into violins en masse. The music, far from hurting now, appears to match our atmosphere as we settle into smoother strings less hand-picked sounding. Here comes Mr. Majesty again, delivering post-vocalcade a gypsy-esque endeavor kindred to my mother's very own interpretation of la vie, despite an admitted preference for piano-gracious ornaments.
Confraternity of treble clef, chatter of trumpets at commercial time, desire for whispers
A fashionably late sky, as if we'd spent the entire millennium sipping brass-knuckle music, lightweight lingo alone. Of course, these things had a way of becoming completely kerosene-soaked, with astral links to funeral ships that anchored in desolate harbours, sprinkling their ooze in hungry, waiting mouths. From the xerox to gongs of fortune tittering at the riots to come, last rites patiently awaited the exquisite in dawn, savouring the quixotic to pass the time.
Violence and filth all that remains of the cosmopolitan imagination, bestial fours shattered in my mouth, snarling at red balloons overhead. Porno on the radio, buy a nubile for rallies designed to accentuate fear in rusted unison. Nothing more threatening than a moment of divine inspiration, I'm afraid. We failed to even notice the balding, middle-aged gentleman purchasing a chocolate-bar at the counter ahead of us, time-zones slipping slowly, inexorably from his jacket pocket. Retinal blasts emanating from screens placed strategically throughout the store did their job. He quietly walked away with several mint copies of our genetic code stored safely away in what was left of his penis.
Blood and synaptical degeneration written into billions of podcasts around the globe that night, the digital left blurred, chattering.
Lunar air-conditioning. Human shields doodle on the bus. the brave reemergence of electric guitars from beneath the concrete. All-night orgies promised to the radiant masses. Atomic television frozen, passively rounded up by the authorities and beaten with swaths of good morning.
We stumbled out together into the sweltering density of late-night traffic, bundles of pink clawing after our every step. Dogma still rules the chimps whispered in my ear. Your face illuminated by brief flashes chromatically, breathy, beautiful currency. Lavender impregnated, brilliant matches of biology and eye-shadowed geo-politics, symmetries left open in the pages of the city. My identity curled into ejaculate recycled from industrial strains of mercury. A howl of pain and loneliness struggling to stay put behind my warped teeth, winding up alongside the edge of noise.
Ideas dependent on absence for their substance.
Off the main boulevard, hollow steps never once engaging directly with the sixties of hyper-leisure. A bio-engineered madness left to fend for its life under the auspices of intricately-wired surveillance domes drunk and insane. Elvis could be seen bumming cigarettes on every street-corner, as if each individual musician in the orchestra was playing a different piece simultaneously as his eternal corpus. The pock-marks in that bartender's face were teeming mediations attempting to mutate into full, heavy breasts. The scent was overpowerig at times. No wonder most of the people drinking alone at the bar headed home before midnight to masturbate after furtively stuffing any and all floating data up the ass of passing network brunettes. Rowdy, drunken mechanical cobras swallowed our trail, grinning pure hate at our passing.
A deft kick to the minimal, chilled bottles of morass, lithe and muscular, retained the sound of a hastily unlocked door. Dreadlocks plastered liberally throughout our shared diaspora made us mad with lust. No more archery to clean up after our obsession with deranged senses, the facility of jazz inbibing millions from swift adolescent brown and brawn. I bought into your cross just for cheap thrills that were capable of persuading psychedelia to kill the sun. The way you make me feel, baby. Thick shards of ego unable to close the gap, leaving us both forever wanting something we could never articulate fully. Try to picture butter-flies strapped to electric-chairs, day-dreaming their ascent. Starlight straight from the ineffable. Our erotic luddism contrasted nicely with the steady rhythm of urban-warfare outside. Our pounding became particularly meaningful in that context., although when a dwarf emerged from the intermezzo of your third eye, I began to have my doubts. The clamour and confusion, the outlawed coordinates talking softly to the dry husk of ambiguity, all made for the joy of creation. Entwined surface-to-air tumours drowned out the persistent hum of infomercials on the television that promised to make us all wealthier, thinner and drop-dead sexy. I blithely tuned it all out because everything I could ever dream of was working my stub with reams of a violent talent. Thanks, but no thanks. Her tongue was a meandering improvisation on the complexities of life, sex and curdled geographies of the mind, an ulterior act reception that rattled high-stemmed glasses and rolled in my river all night long. Maya could never bury its swirl in my lap with such aplomb after that, I assured you afterwards.
Later, we decided to record the still-shimmering sonics of our union and felt just like Robinson Crusoe.
Lollygag's for me to say about my resume, not you. Imagine a balanced whiffle ball, a net, a sky to match infinity of chances. Now let me be your referree in all conditions. Don't dare rescue the least of me. This is spring's resilience come to play against the newly minted enemies we've thought were half-siblings within us. Telepathic forms of empathy don't hold liquids, even gases anymore. It would be better to adapt to these conditions. Watch my renegade deployment of shrill blades that technically overdraft better and worse by way of useful boundaries. What does a concept cost? Levitation, not to be confused with meditation, concentration, ventillation.
Knowing what we know and being what we are, one gesture and another
She asks things that require me to break open the moment, things that remove whatever spark (if it were going to be) between us (that would need to be immediate), as if to go deeper apart from any probability of going any deeper in.
There is a type of kindness that is burdensome, sometimes I have it. I let her ask, and I respod. Her understanding of my answer seems to preclude her ability to have understood, based upon her need to ask. But she has asked, and I have answered.
I feel as though I need a directory of the planets to consult before proceeding, then recall that I have been proceeding all along, getting to know myself outside myself.
Here I am, learning nothing that is everything. There she is, picking up something among my guesses.
Wenn aus den Weltenweiten once called chaos you’ll hear: 'es medianoche...minuit', here are other black human clouds of a world alone again, et toute chose est un coeur vide that can t be off From the rain will pour down des floraisons d etoiles Sternen Blutezeit Y el canto will raise
Nice, Sheila. It is different than your other poems in tone & style. I was surprised to see you had written it. But then thought: good quality, precise diction, who else could've penned it?
where delirium implodes: aside pieces of dirt city's parole: its first and only terrestrial buttock hates semen clutched by night's departing stutter: moribund flickering in hand-bags made of sand: dull light: smallness smiles: married by the moon's benign coils of grace: choke nomenclatures: falling cups of spring prove sorrow a system: dirt clones disturbed reels of film: a painful genesis agrees: down to solvent's lonely truculence drinking high in public without getting caught: white conceals somewhere between mysticism and distant viral grunts
ticket, the predilection of Xs and Os calling template modesty away from paradox-->chimeras
ooze memory's intent
pursuit black wavelets holiday: salute dim clusters: please affix each scrutiny to aeroplane lined foreheads
[protean fluid piles amongst pretense. civility acting as threads of separation amnesia. a noon strata neither motley nor the tropical valorized. just add hashish to the outskirts of asexual]
against this dream: wiser lip-synch fangs grab every metaphor: fluid drones supine lungs: decorated angles thirty-three arrests: drink optical metrics: bent liturgy an ozone coldness:
I Soliloquy’s Odessa’n beneficial broken out of Subway sometimes / every time ran up magnetic comforts Stationed there And people have me / had me Is running away from my own body odd? Disjoint armatures border irony its vicious parentheticals Obsessed with March’s unlikely spools demanding Ornamentals Warped stalks burnish dot coms chiseled by all out Sequence effects aloha affects translation slowly Boned hints stropt to metallic nuisances tumble down Eventually a tooled mentation notes / observes / arranges “fleurs” to flitted men / women / texts / contexts / eyes Their kingdom flown against earth its offering of outrage A ranting too calculated too homey for spice traders And yet it’s “fleurs” they optimize at forces Tens of thousands of bodies Lit in normal-Dutch-zero-machined-largesse Intimating x-rays opined by harbors’ sundry cods Pseudo-ministers posed on fence posts It’s as fantastic-science-waiting-on-tables that they wait Seven wonders of bras traced in reversals Elements’ as yet unspecified whirlpools of dictates Accords’ diminished various ars poetica Silent in notational cul-de-sacs Houses narrow jut like jutting distant hearts Equatorial It was not a good day the eleventh But roomed beneath the correct lives were new spaces The right knives with the same fork and spoon
II Verticality groped by “fleurs’” occasional condescension Retroactive telephones heightened to plausible outcomes Ring blunter blue guitars robbed at curbside decided “Let's do the monkey” Angled widths / breadths mistakenly golden It has a singleness singing like dollarfish in church But glee & who fled them expect to be fed Ransomed for no whistle Stranger linens iris entre nous above sea level Shuttered heart-vials bomb-tomb’d ritual crucifixions Each limned beforehand a counterfeit driven ballistic Matters of shells is what we’re looking for, she explained & went on “the daub of pallor” “torque of slender feelers” My beliefs? Simple things, yes? Quarried voices outdraw oddly all giddy abstraction Tableaux’ inch worth of String Theory toppled by Rubbled terrible defeats humanity & I am living thru The one course slopes off At frame’s edge a point of seven tangents seems elliptical Jet-shaped as angst now deeper frgmnts due to meaning Our canards’ estrangement in bistros The ordeal is beautiful typography yes? & yes, he coped ideally at first Learned how not to unknot himself psychologically Before rejecting himself scientifically He altered himself pasted giant-hero labels upon himself Reinvented by followers he missed them by minutes When he died he changed is a fact it’s true Articles unhinged his vision / revision of halos’ auroras Still claim men in America love beautiful dogs? Brown boxes in attics Four horses shotgun us awfully negative in splendor Barber shops map his masculinity’s dog-fetish for digging Distant as wind cyber-masked by ZEROs
10 results of 54900, Sunday, March 4, 2007, 1:12:33 pm EST
November 28, 2006 7:30 PM Unpublished endorsement: "In a body of work at once droll and immensely moving, Leevi Lehto 'gets things right side upside down' ...
"...funny as all get-out, in a droll, self-deprecating way." ... "A deeply intelligent work?heroically unsentimental and thereby immensely moving. ...
"[BALD is] funny as all get-out, in a droll, self-deprecating way. ... A deeply intelligent work?heroically unsentimental and thereby immensely moving. ...
Things progress nicely, and Tolyan, at a droll communal meal, invites the motley ... body, voice, and demeanor, and immensely moving in her performance. ...
Things progress nicely, and Tolyan, at a droll communal meal, invites the motley ... body, voice, and demeanor, and immensely moving in her performance. ...
Other cast standouts are Cox, savoring every droll syllable as the alternately benign and threatening ... Her final scene with Augusten is immensely moving. ...
It _moves_ and, for sheer emotional import, immensely moving, neither evolving ... essays, droll expositions on indefatigable catch-all topics that actually ...
Boasting a deliciously droll melancholy wit (think Keaton); ... 'Superlatives are entirely warranted for immensely assured Turkish arthouse drama UZAK' ...
Yellow swish volition. A held blue symptom galvanizes the city, reality crashes in barbed-wire brilliance.
Concocted from the stars sipping on rumour and innuendo. Kiss the knife with electric zeal.
Talking parasol hiss. A sick border parlays battered DNA rouge, charred bhangra at the point of fat, not flat.
Manifold kisses. The air hallelujahs all the same. Wisps of a special offer seduced by pure gnosis of flutes riding open sky, straight-up and molecular.
Honest trickles bear recycled clay disguised as sperm. Experience gleams in archangel trails of dream, language recuperated from a jaundice that never ends. Crackle void blisters this bridge of busy-signals, pharmaceutical in their intent.
Witness the sneak-attack of serial chaos.
Burnt fantasy scampers away from the clit of jumping up to get beat down, stoic verbiage as theatre of noble frogs.
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