angels in the architecture

 "I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe."

- Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be a Verb, 1970

and possibly i like the thrill

my eyes  (your eyes, for all they

seek and find 

is you - and eyes or marrow or whatever else is part of me 

I gladly onthedottedlined away to you 

that once - and it only took a once - that I knew you)

knowing no better shall orbit you

(you central sun, you extraultrasupernova)

a trillion billion light and never heavy years

steady on your periphery

till all of hollow time collapses

exquisite fucking boredom

This is an excerpt from a postcard I received from a friend recently.  It is reproduced here with zero permission from the author. I just had to share it.

I hired 82, 083 private detectives.  One for every leaf on the tree outside my flat. I receive updates twice a day.  All absurdly poetic.  Schmaltzy mystical elation.  I've asked them to report just the facts, nothing more. Please - just the key details.  The specific particulars.  They can't help themselves though.  They weep with joy every night because their particular leaf did this or that.  82, 083 people sobbing, in loud love.   Sweet, but unendurable.  I've bought earplugs for the whole neighbourhood.  They know it's only until Autumn, and then the detectives will drift off, one by one, in heart, honeyed, hot pursuit.

crown street haiku

sometimes i feel like

the only  person who did 

not go to art school

on the day of the forty-four sunsets

Exotica is the art of ruins, the ruined world of enchantment laid waste in fervid imagination, the paradox of an imperial paradise liberated from colonial intervention, a golden age recreated through the lurid colours of a cocktail glass, illusory and remote zones of pleasure and peace dreamed after the bomb.  Nothing is left, except for beaches, palm trees, tourist sites with their moss-covered monuments, shops stocked with native art made for the invaders, beachcomber bars and an absurd perception of what may have once been.

Just ruins and a spell, repeated endlessly to provoke fading memories: lust and terror, chainsaw bikers, sultry tropical airs, Aztec spells, x-ray eyes and hot pants, sunken cities, lost cities, singing sea shells, electric frogs, bustin' bongos, wild stuffed bikinis, jungle jazz, sacred idols, space escapades, switchblade sisters, pits and pendulums, tabu, taboo, tabuh, tamboo, taboo, tabuh, tamboo, tabuh-tabuhan.

- David Toop, Exotica: Fabricated Soundscapes in a Real World, 1999

bathed in filth from monday to saturday

The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum--
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie
voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

- William Carlos Williams, To Elsie, 1923