Epicurus amongst the Stars - an Orzel Project collaboration

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(able but unwilling to stop evil?)

Epicurus has seen all this before
emptiness coiling-arching-ejaculating
little wriggling radio-sparks
(atoms, he calls them: the Indivisible Ones)
of spirit—the battle
between Ugh ice and Ugh fire
—he is prudish about such extremes

(through all of this
the submarine looms grey in the deep)

Now all aboard for everlasting frolic!
he giggles a little into his goblet
what is that down there in the sea-dark wine?
no it is nothing, only disturbance

see how I push against resistance
only so far
how I am directed towards vitality
towards love?
a wise man does not write his own poetry,
but lives it in the flux of himself

Now he writes future words:
intergalactic coitus that devolves
into satellite areola for weary Apollo

liquid fire—placenta folding upon itself
into life—O I have seen dust
scurry helpless, entropy

(the submarine ceases all sound
waits, settles, listens—something...)

in the mind's widening eye
it reaches/arches/st r et c h e s—stops—retracts.
—shards drawn each inexorably back
to the source where the fabric tore op...e...n
—to seal)(shut
to watch it all again just as be/before... these
are his future words

(the submarine slowly rises in the dark: hoist the One-eyed Lady
we are blowing our damn tubes down here)

with this my meditations are complete
—now where
do I get a blowjob
and a rare haunch around here?

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Homunculus - notes for a poem

I'm sharing
giving him the passwords
the codes and ciphers
the salutes and signs
the shibboleths
even the redundancy, the vital

nuancial redundancy of pause
repetition, inarticulation
stammer that emotes
micro-language

and the breathing, the required
facial arrangement
the analogues
the postures
and poses

the whole bundle

inviting him to join in
become like us
clothed in magic
welcome
accomplished and present

arriving, incarnate in language
in motion and process
all of it transferring
uploading

this transfer, this ongoing
play of bestowal
and ushering

now
call it

love

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Emily

Emily walks on Sun Street
lifting her hems like wings
over the buried setts
her sinking couch far off, velvet and haze,
her scratching panes
her ghost moors
at last resolved
in a late mist
all tourists
laid low by the vastness, the heath
purple Emily
forever
mist in the pathways
quiet in the kissing gate
blooming
at the last

fragile as wind
on a flower's
black bridge

you, Li Po

you Li Po
twelve hundred years later
kill all dolphins
in the Yangtse
with your poems' potent yells
you Li Po lunatic

you, Li Po
are drowning
in your own face

cubird-camera

>red<(0) ...

...[_]-<
..../\shift

où, Li Po?

Où maintenant, Li Po?
chez Li Bai?
chez Du Fu?
Dites moi vite
et fort
en lettres de fumée sainte
où?

Kenosis 9/11

World in which he hangs

empty of everything
but wind
and light

this falling one
will never now hit the ground,
slide pins into holes,
complete the circuit

invisible above him
the rent through which he dropped

a dream that crept
at night
over the sky

behold the man
caught halfway from heaven
forever digitized, unknowable:

close up he vanishes
in pixel and light

the sacrificial anode
crackles blue with stasis
all the long night
a dying bird
a conscientious objector
in wartime
on the wire

a frozen prayer
pinned to the sky's mouth

unanswered
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longing - draft

a stranger who has died comes to the door
invisible as wind
the door opens, closes, nothing

you wonder
as you turn away

who was that who scratched outside
in the night
who was that outside
and how

did he die
in wet Spring
under trumpets
or lonely as dead

trees
in a distant winter
and outside the owls all

turning their heads, outside
he shrinks back
gathering his mist about
him, moving off

along hillsides
thick with longing
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O' Keefe's Slide

fingerbells in a house fire
on a neck tuned to fourths

a long-ago Christmas
wakes at midnight
shifty on a bar stool
as a cat reeling on ice

too fast too fast
the bells swell out
tearing the Atlantic fabric
thin bones busting through
the night swoons
yellow-orange
lamplight though beer
pumpkin teeth this O'Keefe
-- his fingers
wresting a stiff neck
watching it slide, slide

into the Morning Star
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Interview with the Ahmadinejad

Mahmoud is on fire tonight
spinning like the monkey god
won't stop dancing for long enough
for you to get near
pin him up against the wall
go through his pockets

look for lies, sinister things
trouble bedded deep
rape-dreams of bonneted church-wives
from Middle England
in his blackbeard heart

all his answers impossible

wily and glitter-eyed, laughing
poison phials, curved daggers
secreted in his djinn-jumping
his cackling desert gimmicks

are your American bombs not dangerous?
he's flipping like dust devils
are your bombs full of flowers?
full of perfumes?

with all his answers-impossible
doesn't understand here
Mr Snowy don't approve
of grinning tooth-baring
weaving whirling whistling wild
hokey-faced afreet monkeys
want to have your wife and daughter

in reefer-mad Persian hareems
reeling perfumed with eunuch bombs
in suits teetering upright


like King Louie on hind legs
in the blind dance of all fire:
pumping his Cheshire-cat beard
up the tube

(for whose side unlaid?
—his Ground Zero flowers vanish
like lost holocausts
from the pages of time)

1492

1492 was a bad year for the postmoderns
Taino didn't see the Columbine Weaver coming down
with a quadrant and cross-staff
from Cadiz and Rome
writing them in as subplot
never had a Cortezcoatl to warn
of impending context-fiction
(mere poetry of space they are now)
in their nakedness/decorousness/praiseworthiness/

(though it is *true*)
made to like us act wake up all-dead quiet
silent/soundless/muted/dumbfound/voiceless
tacit in archipelagic echo
of coral emptiness resound
never saw the jackboot bestseller
descending forever and ever

(rolling surf on shale—
never felt the polynesiac swells lift
in their southsea orchidectomies
of wolf semen, of navigant creole)

on a human face of narrative real estate
never saw themselves textual unfacted
loaned out to the future web address-
squatters of thread-plane-hijack
but they are the last great sane problem

in 'american' history
before all connection was severed
by right whales
with Mothership Essex
and the arqebusiers just forgot
to look again
where they left it crying out so tricoteuse

nothing sane will come out of 'america' not ever
until Osama bin Laden is made honorary
Coyotanansie Doctorate of Hashishim-Alamout-Reflexives
at UC Irvine

until TRUE is REALLY
N=O=T=H=I=N=G
knitting hats by guillotine light

chewing dead potatabac
Jacques de Holy Molay thus thou art
finally fully resolutely
unavengèd and all
baphometed ever out
along shores of silent ash

Saint Ives Estate

Canada geese float on light

Wind in Scotch pines

Clouds amongst the lilies

Arrows shivering in warm air

Lady Blantyre reads
the wooden pages of the seasons
through rain and sun
with eyes of far-off Autumn

in the Goblin Wood
we lay our hands on warm rock
breathe scents of lichen

teals and mallards move
as swans sail in for bread

the rainbow lake shatters
into dancing fragments

rain mists the forest

carp drift like shadows
beneath ripples
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Iron Age Palimpsest

Walk in invisible ruins
hands outstretched like dowsers
sensing with fingers
the sharp tinge, the chill
of ghosts, rise in the mind

from the air there are tracks
clear across the hill
familiar to the dead
slack-grids and contours
whorls and ridges aligned

beside the dry stream bed;
bone-delineations of a world
that imprinted its dreams
beneath the creeping bracken
and the dry-stone walls

the same sounds of the hidden
water quicken underground
the same scents teem on the air
though middens are grassy mounds
cooking-fires, gleaming furze

stand on a threshold
that reeled through days
of wedding and birth
bearing of the long-wrapped
to bedding in rough earth — look out at morning

into the same soft haze winding
along the clough — the same dawn
light that blinded the last men stepping
forlorn-furled from turf-dark
of a fast-flickering limestone night

to see silhouettes out on the stark hillsides
shouting the end of one bright green world.

Some heavily-accented thoughts on transtextual (Orzel) poetry

In the appropriation of fragments of text from their initial context, Orzel poetry allows those fragments to live again, to be reread outside of their original political, social, historic constraints; orzel exploits the innate reflexivity of language events.

Transtext is the pure randomly reflexive postmodern activity, the re-deploying of text as construction material -- as meta-text, as discovery, as skeletal matter, as cross-correspondence, as fossil, as seance, as sediment, as sphynx, as birdsong, as windchimes, as EVP, as the riding of the Loa, as bumps in the night, as handfuls of life-in-dust in the shadow of a red rock -- with no spurious acknowledgement of authorship.

These original texts are no more to be considered 'owned' creations than is a handful of dirt baked into a brick. The completed transtexts are similarly handfuls of dirt to be plundered by anyone who reels with possession and desire. They are only owned at the moment of assembly. Subsequently they are dancing dust in the air.

Orzel-fragments are the chaos-desire sigils of AOS. They exist only until they can be subsumed into the greater unconscious of the resurrected text that never existed, where they begin to work unseen. The act of transtexting is the act of burning sigils, of letting desire metastasize. Orzel is the forgotten never-work of the Zos-Kia Cultus.

Never mind any of that shite, though. Orzel is a shortcut to stark dynamism. Some people have to work very hard to achieve that authenticity of voice.
Orzel delivers it readymade.

Fermat 1

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[this] sinking ship's bilgewash scubmarean
pelagiene sparkledown anglerfishtonic bedsheen
starryvene curvenacht moonin-choristatomene
angelarclist celestian beta-articetachristomine

ballad of the Lamper at the Paros gab

(and the Lamper will venture out of his air-conditioned idyll)
it's writ in the Paros gab
.........some people just that sort of people
with a plan (the myth of pet overpopulation and flooding patterns)
a thing like suicide/midnight at the crossroads/a bank job
or just blowing one black night
..........................in the rain

..........................and you know
how much easier wartime
you remember (amid this idyll are hints of certain deadness)
those snowed-in days the other kids free from school
..........................ran across white fields
stood steaming, excited
..........................in the grace and novelty
(the refugee capering idyll
..................of a safe disaster)

..............everyone (reinscription
of the iconography of peasant innocence)
saved.........................gathered up
..........loved at last (here with his family is the Lamper's
one hope for new life)
this crew has a flair for the dramatic

heading down with heavy blankets into the tubes
first night under sirens
the same ripple and chatter
kids clatter out of school --
into this fantastic idyll come Baal, Cronos, Herod...
(now this crew has a flair for the dramatic)

fire alarms sounding
beginning of a world
(main focus of the Paros gab)

(el trabajo es el refugio de aquellos que tienen todo para hacer)

(just as soon as it starts to smile real hard)
this Lamper crew
has a flair for the dramatic idyll --

O, tha most tragickle tragedie
than ivver wus crogledizled
flarfle-ized and summerisled!

the Lamper hit damp dawn
and start shamblin scrawn

Uh, he think, Uh Idol Cru
haz uh fleur forlorn
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