Well Bottom Blues

Oh my God...it's full of stars

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Sea Monkeys

Copper bracelets are back along with copper tankards and crystals and tinctures and everything just as the almanacs all quit publishing. Tin foil Silver beanies against all the negative waves, man. I take a mushroom brew against forgetting science swears by with a long list of first name testimonials. I’m waiting for the Hadacol comeback; better yet that Bayer cough syrup with cannabis and…

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Venus  v.  the Barbarians

I’m reading Bill Lavender’s book of poems, City of God, which combines commentary on our modern world and his thoughts on Augustine’s old book. at the same time I have found a blog, Via Negative, which frequently speaks to or shares images of the ancient Venuses whichever on my own mind of late. And somehow out of that, this poem came out. The Barbarians The barbarians (a plunderedconquest word)…

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Pan and Venus — Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel Such polite pudenda in Baroque art.Barely a hair to suggest that Venus can be, deep inside, as wild as Pan.Does the Great Goat look unimpressedby this demure and listless goddessagainst the avid pursuit of Dionysiancreatures through the wild wood;nymphs who, if caught, will not wiltinto a chaste, retiring flower but opentheir blossoms to perfume the…

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Otherly Love

Love. Lust. Limerance.  Not adolescent or transient infatuation. The word I want is hiding from me. The ancient Greeks had a long list. Not Agape, the word for familial affection or loving kindness appropriated by the Greco-Romanized Christians; Philia is closer, that strong attraction of mind and heart as among best friends, which Plato thought the best when it was the affectionate opening to…

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Everette* Would've

If you catch yourself Googling Picasso’s young lover (Françoise Gilot) just because some lush young woman enthused about some pretty-good, give-away poem posted online for #napowrimo put down the tablet and go write in your notebook in some no-bars bar where nobody knows your name beneath a television baseball game you pathetic old coot of a practically married poet. * Everette Maddox

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Carry Water

The sagging pink salvia at far left and the showy Peruvian lily on the other end with its brown limbs struggle as our new to us monsoon washes away remembering to water in the morning. I must take care now the gastly heat’s arrived.I must take care of them if  they would prosper in this pocket yard beside the noisy, public interstate, behind this rickety privacy fence, guardian of quiet, private…

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Entropy

Death is never too soon among us,said the forest.— Jessica Morey-Collins I.If the universe is continuous expansionhow will the entropy of old age play out?Will it be Slothrop’s temporal bandwidthapproaching zero, or a slow dissolution into an ever-expanding aurora of star stuff.A tiny nova perhaps, a final prayerof light out towards whatever is hoveringin the clouds on the other side of…

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Not a Demon-Haunted World

Not a demon-haunted worldof the astronomer’s warningbut one spirit informed,knowing we are the consciousuniverse looking at ourselves in the mystery of a tree unmediated by machines

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His Toy, His Dream, His Rest

You’re upsetting Henry, said Mr. Bones, but in a good way. No it is not from the longer book from which I stole the title. The post title just fits the stolen stanzas. My lady partner (not my wife)  is not “a complete nothing”  although the image of another woman entering the scene, which I take to be the theme of the overall poem, is apt. I have always taken the last lines to suggest that the…

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Stop Reading Berryman's Sonnets, Dammit

(10)     Writing poetry is an unnatural act      — Elizabeth BishopNothing kinky. Think cuddles: the collapseof two into one, of that one into comfort:the innocent–the long hug, the movie couch–and the afterwards, coming back from blisswhere union is fully consummated by touchskin to skin, hands measuring from shoulder to hip the full depth of desire, while the eyes meet in stillness, faces in…

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Blazing

Is it wise to give away some of my poetry on META?  The act and art of poetry is inherently wise:  discerning, crafty in every sense; if the reconstructionists are correct, emergent from a deep, proto-IndoEuropean root meaning seen. It is a visionary act at once as cloistered and as public as the Delphic oracle. The old book’s prophets did not hide their lamp but swung it noisily in the street.It…

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Living in an AI Hallucination

I woke up from a disturbing Epic Dream and in the immediate manic aftermatth this occurred to me: by using social media are we voluntarily becoming entangled in AI hallucinations? I watch Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Startalk a good bit and interviews featuring particle physicist Richard Pembroke. I heard Pembroke last night in an interview talking about social media and how it became unreliable because…

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My Friendly Corner Conglomerate

I went online in the Walgreens app and asked to refill the prescription which, the bottle on my bedside said, had one refill remaining. The app promised it would be ready by 1:00 p.m. day after next. I call them one day after the day promised to find out that, according to their computer, it has no refills. This is the same computer that generated the label that said one refill remaining. A…

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On e (Again) in a Lifetime

Talking Heads “Once in a Lifetime” live I’m days away from turning 69 and this song pops up on a feed and I listen and I realize that this song never ends; it goes on and on and on and on and you’re still asking and even when you leave it will go on and on and on. It is the human condition.

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Another Anecdote of a Jar

You were never meant to hold that much without breaking, the ad for some tincture promising happiness said. Don’t buy it.There are flowers and leaves and mushroomsenough in the forest. The only bottle you needis one for cool water so you can remain quietly with the unmolested medicine still rooted in the earth, both you and theyrooted to the Earth. That's the natural healingyou need.…

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I’m almost 69 and so still listening to ‘70  synthesizer glam folk. I love the new primitivist, drum pounding, guttural throat singing stuff but Clannad echoes with Welsh Hiraeth, German Fernweh, words American English lacks for want of imagination, that nostalgia for a place that never existed and I would drift there for an afternoon before I once again calculate how to pay the bills soon coming…

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There is a light somewhere

“There is a light somewhere.”Charles Bukowski, “The Laughing Heart*How to write or paint the dark from the bottom of the tar pit of anthropocene extinction without resorting to the calling bottle of Poe-etics?  When you remember spirits as disparate as Bukowski and Lenoard Cohen can see that glint of light like a star seen from the bottom of a well you know there is a spark to illuminate the…