Some Devastating Truth-Dealing

here.

Every Day is Like Doomsday (Morrissey Cover)

Trudging slowly by the thousands

Back to the town where our rights were stolen

This is the swampy town

That they forgot to close down

Armageddon, come Armageddon!

Come, Armageddon! Come!

Every day is like Doomsday

Every day is Trumpy and grey

Read on the Twitterverse

Etch a reply :

“How I Dearly Wish You Were Not Here”

In this swampy town

That the Chinese will soon bomb

Bigly nuclear bomb

Every day is like Doomsday

Every day is Fox News and grey

Turn back time with a Muslim ban

And conflicts of interest on your hands

(And on your face)

(On your face)

(On your face)

(On your face)

Every day is like Doomsday

“And soon Impeachment Day”

Share your taxes with me

Every day is Bannon and grey

Could Someone (or Morrissey) Please Record

a cover of "Every Day is Like Sunday" revamped as "Every Day is Like Doomsday" with new lyrics to match the Trump administration's daily abuses of power?

"Your cooperation will ensure that peace and democracy are restored in the near future"

Grenada recording, 1983.

Should be playing over all loudspeakers in America, January, 2017.

Just so people realize that this is an invasion.

(some computer-generated monoku)

seaweed green clock




*




cat broken hands




*




eat lunch     in cell of hospital        tangle seaweed green         feel curtain


*


a see nothing        a sea moving


*


end river dusk           aura towed


     *




towards love move to branch drooping flowering


*


best use-by date         vultures R.S.V.P.







*






I remember to tell spite






*






3 river dusk tree










*






cat a half-okay god










*






cry behind the head taking you useless river










*






fine by me though we lilacs will seek revenge






*






the broken river dusk political










*





a president on conscience      oh star      the privacy










*






a cat cry behind the head taking you useless river










*






flowering playpen






*






an edgelessness of elevators






*






that is some horse-out poetry










*






a see nothing night people saunter along our river










*






abusing the not really light






*






before dawn burping bubbles










*






will body yellow mine with scent










*






went to see if lilacs in a cat cemetery are home










*






flea restaurant the off-night goodbye









*






mistakenly a ring of aura is it myself










*






your abandoned baseball self went into not really a sensuality






*






stay before dawn burping bubbles










*






sleeping maps










*






lit in my back life










*






a cat quite believing










*






down old crazy lamb










*






I graph you in a useless window














*






see nothing       the world closed






*






good carpet of path        horse open ocean










*






cat's never met nor lilacs will cat shutting space out










*






lonesome grey restaurant      the violin no difference










*






wild mayapples       broken        called










*






the bright cat problem














*






reflection of Mary's and we tangle seaweed green










*






here is night my senses










*






maps for windows










*






face of love read plants










*






it ran felt unwanted      by my fish










*






dawn kiss       a 3 hospital problem










*






magic in glass       broken neck of dark










*






good cat cry behind the river night














*






behind the t.v.      each wild meaningless door














*






here towed river head a cemetery






*






live way had blue tree sea betrothal












*










unforetold riches under a blue sea a half-okay god










*






the lonesome grey towards correctness of a scour










*






lover the ocean and concrete










*






through kisses you adopted an army










*






no love      morning in the water














*










I kiss my adopted army sensually














*










cloud banks felt unwanted by move to blue sea














*






in maps for flirtation   often mistakenly       a tag for night










*






a show for witches in massachusetts














*






see nothing       molten be










*






Susquehanna late cloud banks of hospitals     some knees









*






bright drawer       lonesome grey branches    










*






R.S.V.P. by tangles seaweed green














*






I saw a hand            because its world closed










*






tingles in vultures     I know that kind of feel










*






even mine with flowers that have a factory










*






adults hemming witches a coming out space














*






cat setting out at evening through abandoned baseball cemetery






*






I waited so long     tangled seaweed       green spin










*












some hands in pitbulls equally popular useful hard














*






a poor so dark it called out ravens














*










down old crazy words     embody you       dark woods










*






spoiler alert a beach just keeps coming back alive



         *


ocean's       flowering physician

After Marginalia (Frank Samperi)

curtain

pulled back

life

________________________

spigot

drip

answer

me

___________________________

sleeping tree

waking tree

touching

it

_____________________________________________

end 

date

no one

can read

______________________________________

plant

against window

the aureole

a next

best thing

____________________________________________

abandoned mall

the gulls

circle over

not quite

believing

_____________________________

read

some words

some space

out

_____________________________________________

I need

some lamb

someone

thinks

sadly

_________________________________________________

motherless

tree

pity

yourself

__________________________________________________

in 3 mo.

the lilacs

will scour

your conscience

oh threat

of scent

________________________________________

cat food

in sunlight

open

invitation

turkey vultures

R.S.V.P.

by staring

___________________________________

                       in the hospital

flashlight tag

night

for adults

_______________________________________

                        shaft

I love you

I went

into a mine

with you

______________________

                              in my bathroom

the reflection

of an unreal house

in real

tile

_______________________________

horse horse

run

be horse

ash

liquor

you are fine

by yourself

____________________________________

the president

on the t.v.

each morning

in a playpen

the adults

hemming him in

_________________________________________

good night

I tell the cat

shutting the door

on star maps

__________________________________

I feel love

like old Hollywood

star maps

for you

useless brochure

kept in a drawer

___________________________________________

                                dawn

kiss

the night

goodnight

_______________________________

he towed the dark

he was in love

________________________________________

a tree's branch

drooping

flowering

how something

real dangles

feels

a flirtation

often

mistakenly

a world's fruit

even its flowers

have a

simple

means

of

gravity

_________________________________________

banks of

hospital windows

be molten

be the face

of river

dusk Susquehanna

late
clouds

banks of

_________________________________

Tithonus

at morning

what a loser

______________________________

lover

loser

dawn

_____________________________

fermez

la bouche

I hear

in my dead father's

kindest

voice

________________________________

piece of blue

sea glass

on a window sill

what's your problem?

__________________________________________

"here in my branches"

I show

my lover

_________________________

unforetold

riches

under

a rock

sarcasm

_________________________________

I remember

we came upon

a magic carpet

of wild

mayapples

in the woods

behind

its abandoned

baseball field

where it

postured

___________________________________

glass Avon

parrot

blue body

yellow head

taking the light

of a poor window

Egyptian 

flea market

bah

____________________________

a cat's 

cry

a violin

no

difference

no

human

difference

___________________________________

oh photo-
graph

I too 

love

edgelessness

of phenomena

______________________

                                 night river

head 

asleep

headless

asleep

this in

water

________________________________

these words

embody

you

________________________________________

a mild river

abusing

the night

____________________________________

high

and low

meet

where our dent

desire

lives

__________________________________

I put my hands

in wild water

you 

had better

not

be lying

________________________________________

words 

let out

words

let in

poetry

_________________________________

the meaningless

is what 

tingles

in love

_____________________________

he said

bumptiously

sexily

I live

way out

way off

the beaten path

I must

beat it

myself

_________________________

bright tangle

seaweed

green 

lonesome

grey beach

just before

dawn

burping

bubbles

________________________________

to go

to the open

ocean

we drive

through

the Amish

___________________________________

guilt in

guilt out

let's eat

lunch

in a cemetery

_________________________________

how long

can 

the cat

cry

behind

the door

before I come

to my

senses

_________________________

we come to senses

they come

to us

no privacy

in sensuality

________________________

stay married

to me

though

we never

met

nor will

if there is

even a
half-okay
god

_____________________________________

the president

in his playpen

starts up

again

such

lungs

__________________________________

we are

all spiritual

in elevators

___________________________

where I live

yard Marys

and pitbulls

equally

popular

useful

hard

___________________________________

once

as a child

I adopted

an unwanted cat

we already

had one

so it felt

unwanted
by spite

so it

ran away

we looked

and called out
we pasted

and phoned

but she

never came

back

she

now

I think

about her

more 

and more

thirty-five

years 

later

she

surely

got home

_______________________________

a hunk

of broken concrete

where we sat

hanging

over the river

I meant

to say

"cantilevered"

no

it was

hanging

___________________________________________

I believe

in love

and I

believe

in knees

_____________________________

                                     kids 

a ring

of glass

broken

neck

of a bottle

sparkling

placed on limb

branch

of a tree

betrothal

_______________________________

I saw

a u.f.o.

with you

when it

was so

dark

could see

nothing else

you took

my hand

because

it was early

______________________________

we will  move

to the ocean

and both

be witches

massachusetts

switches

_______________________

a tree 

managing

its aura

is not

really

a poem

__________________________________

lit      towards the dark

a fish swims

___________________________

lover

the blinds

go

sensually

_______________________

a restaurant

the world

closed

________________________________

I pass

an apartment building

where you

were crazy

young

I'm walking

slow down

old

crazy people

saunter out

____________________________________

poetry

mostly

off the clock

_________________________

the political correctness

of water

__________________________

I waited

so long

to tell you

this

over there

that's the factory

there

they make doorknobs

Morning

a bird's cry
through the window
inquisitive
I don't know
this particular bird
the particular cry

can you re-enact it
Wait
let me stand
on the other side

of a pretend window

now be the bird
be the cry

and I will be

The Other Side

Live Then Die

lastly love
I woke up saying
this morning
not knowing
but the curtains
shifting

laughter      an adieu

Imagine
in a drawer
singing

a cat repairing
the morning
from a sill

did you know
there is knowing
and not knowing

a clock

in the world

a serendipity

endangered thing

less light       adieu

or a hello

to hot knowing

lastly love

Rain

rain
packed up
put away
the roofs
turn off
their microphones

you are very tiny
and decor

also very decorous

and very tiny

as a seahorse
I kept     once

there is a rip
in the fabric
of the sky

let's talk
about that

repetition

through the rain

it moved
an apartment

tea, coffee

sky, selfie

here's one unmoved

looks out

you know

Irish asphalt

it's sad

then the rain ran away

Trump's War on the Poor (We're Back to 1981)

Here is a good summation of the horror to come.

Trump/Ryan will almost certainly attempt to repeat what Reagan (disastrously) did in 1981: wage a war on the poor, the elderly and the disabled. It is virtually certain there will be widespread denial of coverage and people will be bankrupted.

When Reagan did this, there were many suicides nationwide.

The government reversed its course (belatedly) after many lawsuits were brought. American citizens will need to do this again. They will need to litigate against their government.

Health is no longer a concern in Trump's America. Protection of the vulnerable is no longer a concern in Trump's America. The only concern is that we subsidize and protect the rich. We can expect oversea wars to distract from what is happening at home. We already see the beginning of this with Trump's statement about seizing oil through future military action and his threatening military intervention in the South China Sea.

It's unbelievable, the degree to which this American election is going to destabilize the entire planet and turn us all back to darker days.

Work in Current Issue of Unarmed

I have poems in the current issue of Unarmed.

Great company here. Some U.K. poets including Rod Mengham, Kathleen Bell, Drew Milne. Nice to see Jim Leftwich, David Baptiste-Chirot, Kim Lyons and many other repeat defenders.

Editor Michael Mann: Thank You muchly for the two little books you included. Thirty percent of what I'm reading right now is haiku of all periods, so it was serendipity to find Amanda Earl's I Owe Saint Hildegard the Light. Don't know whether she considers those poems haiku, but I do. Also, Phone-in-Masterpieces by Brett Evans will move onto the nearest ziggurat of "to be read"s.

Lovely visual art everywhere in this packet. Buoyant thing to arrive on a dour day that's doing its best not to be presentable. These pages are all very presentable.

Seventy issues, Michael! You are going the distance. You really owe it to yourself and the mag to do an anthology one of these days. I bet it would be as interesting as reading the cullings of, say,  Cid Corman's Origin.
,
xo

If you'd like to get in the Unarmed loop, you'll need to send to 1405 Fairmount Avenue, Saint Paul, MN, 55105. I think it's an open reading period if you are sending submissions of poetry or visual art or some amalgamation thereof. But wait, there is email for queries: unarmedjournal@comcast. net.

Peter Yovu

(Widgiemooltha, Australia)

Interesting how much of Western Australia looks like aboriginal art when seen in satellite photos.

Well, it makes sense when you consider that the colors and pigments would come from that environment. And it also shows you how attuned the aboriginals were/are to the environmental forms. Geophysical features (esp. rivers and watering holes) remained important in a practical and a spiritual sense.

"Just Give Him a Chance"

So You Voted for Trump and On His Second Day as President He Says

Trump tells CIA "maybe we’ll have another chance" to take Iraq's oil

Mad Props and Pride

to and for all the women marching in D.C. and everywhere else today and the past few days.

We are all awake under the launch of this new attempt to abridge basic human rights. So the tyrants may find they don't have such an easy time of it.

Now is the time for creative thinking to legally defeat this despotism before it even begins to get its ugly talons into all of us.

(smiling: info from the author Peter Yovu on orders of his book)

If you live in Canada, please add one dollar. Anywhere else on the planet, please add two dollars and a prayer for my sad country. Just prior to taking it to the post office,I will place your copy of the book somewhere near my stereo as it plays Brian Eno and Harold Budd’s The Pearl. If you prefer, I will play Alina, by Arvo Part.

Just let me know.

All the best,
Peter Yovu

John Bodnar on Peter C. Blackwell's Influence on the African-American Communities of Steelton, Pennsylvania (1880-1920)

This is a really interesting essay on Steelton history.

It surprised me to learn that black Americans at that historical juncture fomented social change through the Republican party. Or at least that was what happened locally, in this town and in our nearby state capital. Maybe the partisan nature of the struggle varied from region to region.

Postcard: Office F. S. & S. Dept., Pennsylvania Steel Co., Steelton PA, Dauphin (circa 1907)

Age-Progressing Fox Mulder?

I was watching some X-Files reruns this morning. In a 1997 episode, "Demons," the young Fox Mulder is played by child actor Alex Haythorne.

This young actor was fortuitous casting. The resemblance (particularly the eyes) was strong. I found myself wondering if the actor grew up to look anything like Fox, erm, David Duchovny.

I think this adult with the same name is the child actor of the nineties. Unless I'm fooling myself with thinking I see the clinching similarities. The nose seems the real clincher. And the ears. And, oh duh, the mole on the nose.

Check Out Bill Dane's Website

Bill Dane, c. 1970

If the lights are on, he's there in spirit even when he's not in body, moving other's minds and spirits around with the ideas implicit in his photographs, which quite often do not actually look like photographs. Often they look like paintings or drawings or collages or readymades. You tend not to want to call Bill Dane a photographer, because he seems much more of a "visual artist." Photography is supposed to be a subset of the "visual arts" and not the other way around. But Bill sort of turns that set theory on its head. He makes no bones about the fact that he considers himself a street photographer foremost, and more is our wonder at the results.

He's recently launched his new website,, and if you visit I think I can guarantee you'll have fun.

Bill's never hidden his age on his Flickr profile or anywhere else and I found that refreshing and encouraging, because I love seeing artists up there in years (Bill was born in 1938) who are still working, who still clearly "have it" and whose work might be confused with the work of someone very young, not because of any lack of competency, but because of the freshness of ideas and the ability of the work to keep stride with the contemporary--to be the contemporary.

I had no idea of Bill Dane's ridiculously impressive pedigree, and pedigrees don't usually impress me much, because I know so many world-class talents working out there who don't have any pedigree. Bill never felt the need to post any of that on his Flickr profile. He just appeared on the site one day and began interacting in a very generous manner with photographers and other visual artists. What I never did forget from the first time I read his profile was the close to his greeting, which reads, "Good luck for all of us."

That's the sort of thing which stays with one. When you only have a few words to speak to a stranger, those are a pretty choice few words.

And he enables sharing of his work, which is a pretty generous thing to do. I can't count the number of times I've used his work over at The Visual Virgin and on previous incarnations of this blog.

His site is also a sales gallery and there is a sale on. You aren't going to beat the prices he's offering there, a flat rate (no editions). So if you'd like the sort of art that's not just going to be a great investment, but is also going to be sure to jazz and confuse (in a good way) those folks you allow into your inner sancta, then you're sure to find something great for this or that sanctum in the ole compound. So feel free to make inquiries there about any prints that catch your eye. The work is organized by decade. 

I was just looking for stuff for the Tumblr today by Garry Winogrand and here Winogrand comes up in Bill Dane's C.V., right alongside Diane Arbus, who also spoke some nice words about Mr. Dane's work back in the day. He didn't just get a Guggenheim. He's received two. And then match that with a double-scoop of N.E.A. and you can see he maxed out there (that's the new lifetime limit, unless they revised the policy when the Dems got back in).

Check out where all he's collected and the MOMA and SFMOMA connection.

But what comes through Dane's art, first and foremost, is not its ability to attach to or "fit in" to this or that cultural institution. It's the sense that we are looking at a soul constantly on the move, constantly on the open road, and constantly spotting the unreal arrangement amid the the real things (or the real arrangement in the unreal things, if you're a mystic). 

In a strange way, I think the majority of the work I know by the artist (and I know the more recent Dane, which is probably a smattering of the whole lens trip) seems to almost present images as aquariums. There's a constant theme of voyeurism. Even with the material goods and shop displays and vintage advertising which probably constitute the majority of his favored subject matter, there's often a confusing sense of what's truly domestic and what's on display, what's for real shelter and what's only play shelter, what's truly vintage and what's anachronism playing vintage. The concept of the simulacrum dominates Dane's recent work. And there's a strong componenent of self-referentiality in the photographs of photographs or of images created with earlier methods of photography or printing methods which have fallen into desuetude. Yet for all of this, the work is never nostalgic. The photographer manages to keep the compositions on point. Nostalgia is rendered meaningless in light of the ability of these symbols, even the discarded ones, to marshal new aesthetic force and to create new disturbances and new pleasure in the mind of the beholder. That many, if not most, of these images have their roots in commercialism lends a strange quality of aesthetic recycling to many of the pieces. Aesthetic recycling is not nostalgia. Dane's aesthetic strategy of restylizing the visual past and finessing new composition out of received composition is closer to Mannerism, but it doesn't quite feel like that either. I want to say his recent work feels more like a phenomenological analysis of the process of image-making.

For me, the big paradigm shift in the avant-garde (in photography and elsewhere) was the shift away from surrealism and towards irrealism. And Bill Dane is definitely an irrealist. It was precisely this deconstruction-through-foregrounding-of-illusion which drew me to his photography when I first encountered it.

Well, visit his Flickr and his website and see for yourself. Form your own views.

(Note: This is a slightly edited version of a 2013 post which I migrated from a blog which is no longer public.)

                  secret


     all
    objects
   are
   small

   even
   the sun

A man warned me to read books. 

The spirit of a tree is there. 

Its dark arms reaching 

through night and me. 

I listened. 

Let the dead dream a still place. 

I thank god for their loneliness.

Two Gestures

                                                                 1.

Someone is burying a butterfly in the earth. Her small eyes and hands have found this lying on the ground, two windowpanes of orange and black-veined pollen which could have reached another continent. Except they didn't.

                                                                2.

Someone is performing open heart surgery. It is winter and the operating room is filled with warm bodies. The gift lies open before this gathering of distantly related beings. The sense of family might emerge in human crisis. This might happen between people who are all, every single body on earth, sixteenth cousins.The ribs have a sort of symmetry that might remind someone of butterfly wings.

                                                              3.

It's a child who buries the butterfly in cold earth. It's not a child whose gloved hand closes around the surfaced human heart. We are told that one gesture is science and the other is what, mythology? Religion? The child's hands digging a hole and placing the winged thing into what is believed to be a pocket of sleep. Restorative sleep. One covers. One opens. The human essentials of healing.

                                                             4.

Both these gestures have mysteries in their origins. We will never know who was the first to bury a butterfly in the earth. We will never know who was first to open the human body to remove the heart. These are both sacred gestures now, but in the beginning they were some sort of stumbling, strange instinct, a clumsiness of the heart. Ideas of salvation began in divine stumbling. One, we are told, is science. And the other is darker,  more hopeless.  But equally beautiful. A horror is discovered to protect us from a greater horror. It is called art or science. They both wing it like the butterfly.


                                                           5.

It is not a surgeon burying the butterfly in the earth, covering it up with comforting fragments of brown and black, granules with tiny sparks flashing through them. But the child may do this with the warm precision of a surgeon. It's not a child breaking the petals of human ribs to reach the red human flower that hides in its membrane from the unliving air. But the surgeon may feel like a child kneeling on the cold earth, digging with her mother's spoon in something that might as well be winter earth like frozen coffee crystals. The sense of the intractable is the divine sense. Some fix the broken thing with stents. Some do it with the hopeless glue of metaphor. The important thing is to touch the intractable. The impossible is the only thing worth our time and the one thing we all have in common. Divine stumbling gives us a sense that an accident might occur which will be salvation. That there is a word salvation. That it flies like a butterfly which can cross continents and, possibly, interstellar spaces. This is why the small child is a surgeon. This is why the best heart surgeon is a priest of hopeless butterflies.

(beautiful in the snow)

Photo by Scott Lynch.

Chris Botti

makes every day better.

The concert features Lucia Micarelli.

Mikachu Fans: Were You Aware

she scored Jackie?

Really fabu.

She also scored another movie I loved, Under the Skin.

Talk about a perfect match. Total musical concinnity for that creepy, very Liquid Sky type movie.

(As Was Saw)

Richie West, "As Was Saw."

One of those songs that's obscure, but not to me.

I always smile when this starts playing in my head.

Jarvis Cocker Goes Outside

This is episode two in a series.



About the Watts Towers:

The Towers were built using no bolts, rivets, or welded steel, Rodia and his 4’ll 110lb body bent steel bars into desired shapes and wrapped the bars with wire mesh, then covered them with his special blend of concrete. Rodia would work on his Towers late at night and would climb them and carry cement either on his back or using pulley systems. Rodia used the same 9 tools which he later embedded into one of the walls.

Artist Erina Yamashita

If you're a cat lover and looking for some great original art, check out Erina Yamashita's sales gallery.

The artist was diagnosed with autism at a young age.

I've been looking at at work by artists either self-classified as "outsider artists" or given that designation by others. I'm finding such gorgeous work.

I found Erina's work on Instagram.

I think her best work is magical. Her drawing, brushwork and sense of composition remind me of the magical pen of B. Kliban sometimes. There's a real sense of attunement with the cat spirit. It's clear her art comes out of a deep bond with and love for cats and their quirky personalities.

I hope her work gets the much wider audience it deserves.

An Intense Appreciation of the Work of Frank Stanford

Maybe you will enjoy reading this appreciation and "in petto" biography of poet Frank Stanford as much as I did.

Ansel Elkins is the author and you can read a few of her poems here.

Balloon Ascension, Steelton (circa 1910)

(some haiku)

I may have trouble
getting there on time
said the rain



winter comb
black hairs grey hairs
says Goody





kid's rubber bullet
in park grasses
the gun far away





tennis court
rife with fissures
erotic realm






mouth of snow
around dry leaf
at my feet






old couple
running a day
on the church grounds






didn't talk to the stranger
but to his dog
in a lonely place






weeds frozen
in the artificial lake
a telephone book





miniature christmas tree
in the hospital room
the nurse's youth




water pretend sleeping
until a breeze finds it
in the mood




qwertyui
asdfgh
zxcvbn





turkey vultures in trash
redecorate the backyard
neighbor's christmas





ice means it
you mean it
you're not ice




magnetic hope
geese know a way
over even cold





a church consoles me
at night, empty
its missing belfry




the little spider
the thing I tried to give it
a pretend name

My Gawsh, Kiyoshi Yamashita

Like, Wow.

1922-71.

Autistic savant and wanderer.

Painter. Also, he employed "the Chigiri-e method of sticking torn pieces of coloured paper together" to render scenes he recalled with eidetic precision (the savant part).

Actually, his Wiki bio doesn't even mention autism. It's clear there was some sort of disability and his I.Q was given as 68. But who knows with tests and people's inclinations or disinclinations to care about them.

If

                 


If you understand that most things that exist do not have names. If you understand that the unbounded is not susceptible to names. Some believe it is worthless to say "most things that exist" because they believe that things only exist if named, if partitioned. If they are ascribed existence. Ascribed.  This word means that they are written into existence. But they, the things, exist in the field of potentiality. Unspoken things are still things. Unenacted things are still things.

If we think about the weight of the dark mouth. The dark mouth is the things you almost said but did not. I do not mean the things you spoke to yourself but did not allow into the world. I mean the things, the dark matter of thought, you did not speak or act because fate did not allow you to speak or enact it. Much of your life will be in opposition to the dark mouth. Much of your life will dwell on the dark mouth and the dark hand. Nobody can tell you why this is so.

If I could believe in the structuralism of paragraphs. If I could believe in the sequencing of the DNA of prose. If one believes in this simple islanding of thought in a sea of hidden, "greater" intent. Then one believes in a book. The paragraphs are real, concrete entities. But the book itself is something more. The book is the gestalt of all the pages. It includes the invisible threads you must spin between paragraphs and then the way the ocean itself lies on the earth. The river of reading is the river Meander. There is no true, direct path through any book on earth. Only liars say that. The promise of the book is the promise of wandering.

If you enter the room or I enter the room. Doesn't it make a difference? Depending on our mood. Depending on love. Depending on skill. Who enters the room first? With what intent?  Some tiresome people enter rooms constantly. They are assailers of rooms. Some tiresome people are reticent about entering any room. They hang back. They need exhausting coaxing. The idea of the room itself is exhausting! Who is in the room presently? We can't always be sure. The room might be beyond our capabilities to visualize or represent it correctly. We might have to ask others in the room if a certain personage is actually in the room or not. They might be able to see and say with certainty that the person is indeed in the room, whereas you doubted. But then you might insist that some particular person is in the room and several others might vociferously argue with you, correct you, au contraire, that person is not in the room.  Then what did you see? A phantom? You saw an actual body. He or she was there. Obviously, this means you do not know the room's true boundaries. Or the room's boundaries have shifted since you last reckoned them. The room is much more phantasmal than the people who may or may not occupy it at any given moment. While you may not acknowledge this fact to yourself, you almost certainly spend many hours of your day focusing on this problem of The Room. Possibly humans are categorical creatures even more than they are emotional creatures. It may very well be that emotions are all, at bottom, issues of categories. A recategorization can often correct even a very horrible emotion.

If the Room of People Whom I Love Who Love Me Back has a door to enter and exit does that make me a healthier person? But what if there is no door? No exit. No entrance. Does that thought scare you? Or does it weirdly comfort you, the way that tyrants may be easily comforted?

If the dark hand slips around your throat when you sleep, when you're dreaming, then you are like everybody else. If the dark mouth sings to you then, how lucky you are. Because there are lost people on this earth whose dark mouth can reach them even in waking hours. They go about the earth strangled by the dark hand. Their real hands cannot pull it away from their throat.

If you can understand that the dark mouth, the dark hand, do not exist in the sense of good or evil. They are capable of either. Their existence points to the provisionality of all existence. Time surely passes differently in their universe. Time may be arrested in the dark mouth, in the dark hand.

If the space of this sentence was sufficient to itself.

If color enters a window in a pronounced way, you are called upon to respond. The window frames something, a sky, which seems to possess a sort of self-knowledge in the form of color. This is an emotional construct. Windows are emotional constructs.

If the dark hand slips around your throat when you sleep, you do not exist in the sense of good or evil. Something is recycling you inside you. That is one way to understand it. There must be a door for even the worst emotions to enter and exit. Even your throat has a door, admittedly a pitiful one. When have you ever seen a truly well-defended mouth?  This is why so many resort to dropping the portculis of silence.

If we consider what the dark mouth and the dark hand do when they are not engaging us from that great distance of theirs, a distance which can close instantly to zero, what answer can we give? It is an answer given in the mystical tense. It is the mystical tense of the otherness of being which is not present, past or future tense, nor any of the variations of those tenses.

If we do not understand that we are creating a dark matter self throughout all the days of our existence, we do not acknowledge what it is to be human.

If someone would be temerarious enough to write an autobiography of his or her dark matter-self rather than the one that lived out its days in ordinary matter, what would this sound like? Impossible you say? If justice were done, would it not be nearly infinite in length? The only acts subtracted would be those of the biography proper.

(just sayin')

1. Hospitality On Parade 0:00
2. Happy Hunting Ground 3:59
3. Without Using Hands 7:43
4. Get In The Swing 11:04
5. Under The Table With Her 15:12
6. How Are You Getting Home? 17:32
7. Pineapple 20:29
8. Tits 23:14
9. It Ain't 1918 28:11
10. Lady Is Lingering 30:18
11. In The Future 33:59
12. Looks, Looks, Looks 36:12
13. Miss The Start, Miss The End 38:47