Other places of interest
- VoodooToaster - Undead kitchen appliances of America united to make a better world
- WhyGodWhy - Blog-god kfan's legend perpetuated for future generations
- Signalstation - Beaming comics and commentary into the eye at baudspeed
- Daniel Rehn - The neural trigger for bliss only a mouseclick away
DISCLAIMER: MoonLemon contains your entire USDAF allowance of typas typos. Be aware of the resultant health risks involved in perusing mutliple entries at once.
2003-11-12 - 8:18 p.m. I am sure I’d have hated it too, My sweet martyr Of the fascists’ hasty grave Cut like a deep red stone From the road’s shank, Your lloras and their thousand Cast flowers, the brutal efficiency Of their tears. In that white-wormed beard of city They’d be bruised From their honest pale By some sweeper's unseeing brush Left to wander pollution and sloth Of the gray East River by morning, To find no common cause with oceans Or lines of chanting maidens At the tombs of bullfighters. O, how those toreadors Hallucinated themselves Against the steamless rush of the But was your thirties Spain Any truer to the pastoral? Were the ballad constellations Concealed amid five-column headlines And the angry type of listing The raw young dead? Did Ignacio’s mourning fall From clouds pregnant with the diesel Of war, or from the eyes Of those few callow Americans So romanced later beside The very glutted-rat rivers You decried, as they told Their own stories Amid the mere rubble Of typewriter sheets And cigarette butts, empty bottles? How unlike the wreckage of life You must have sadly avoided Memorizing in vibrant detail: Dusty coats of retreating Loyalists And rust-marks on the road Where some fell; The ladies in tatters, Lone animal stock – a dying cow, Bewildered by its wounds – wandering With a few confused bleats Past their splintered mangers; The broken San Lorenzo of glass, His subtle and leaden azures, Mercuric reds, And secret pearl-
Garcia Lorca in New York
Natural.
Now bejeweling just the alley
By the iglesia. And in its place
The lurid general’s poster
All in simple color.
These pictures hung along the rows
Of uncalled saints (like you,
O how like you) make hollow laughter
Of the narcissus, break the bells
Of each already-cracked moon
you drew over undeserving
Landscapes,
Or the black walls
Of the city of machines
And the mass coughing black
Onto the roofs of cathedrals,
Making a broken bottle of sky.
Its weight which pressed too hard,
And always against.
So shout, bitter at the back
Of cursing’s one-stroke tongue
Against the rise of concrete
And soot. Tell us about ruin
With the hot, sour breath
Of obscenity, of last gasp.
2003-11-11 - 9:54 p.m.
Afteraccident
They've installed the apparatus
in your body, just below
the right hip. No readings
were taken, not yet. They'll wait.
In the next seven months,
you're expected to rebuild
and correct your memories
suture by suture,
their searing renewal
pale and harsh like gin
or developing fluid's
bright, stinging smell.
Your first camera
bought you with guile
in the drugstore glass case
when you were thirteen.
You'd just seen in livid orange
and impossible green the rocketfire
rescripting Peru, dying
the Shining Path camp in jungle
an incandescent sunset.
Time, April 1993. Click,
then wheeze of autowinder
filled your first beach summer,
your college debut,
the sixth girlfriend's request
that shocked forth
your acquiescent laughter.
Try to recapture those old moments
first. They will help
most of all.
2003-11-10 - 9:50 p.m.
Without Needles
My grandmother’s
stitch-marked fingers
did not work gold into thread,
nor straw to bread,
nor excavated bowls from wet clay
the way warm breath scoops out space
in winter cold. No, her fingers
finely tipped with rock angled
and broken in the Indus
only pointed out dimples,
stray hairs on her daughter’s head
and then ticked away
the many reasons a husband
could only be invented,
never won or bought.
She knew the art of commerce.
At seventeen, she tells it,
she was folded
into marriage silk, wound in incense
and ritually daubed by sausage-plump
hands of servants
and doting relatives.
Such a good husband.
They etched his name
into the concrete sides of dead men
and steel of important bridges,
and forty years of rust later
you could almost still make that out
if you scratched and squinted a bit.
Naturally, he died mostly unmourned.
So she put her best clothes
and asked to be sailed
and stayed and fed
because this is what’s done,
and done without frowning.
She has grown very thin
until her shoulders and chin are one
angle with those sharp, ivory
She demonstrates to me that a needle
cannot penetrate the callus
she has built in superannuated
projects now to keep busy.
Hemmed by the names of twenty kings
in fine auric, the sari drapes
on her carved-out frame
like Absalom hung from the tree
by his strong, unshorn tresses.
2003-11-09 - 9:28 p.m.
The House Is Built Like an Old Swiss Clock
How precisely, every winter,
the kobold would march
in its creak-tread,
its old army boots,
and inhabit me. I could hear
its footsteps fade into my ears
the heartbeat sound of dull marching
as the world irised out.
Its many children, too,
kept up the outer noise all night,
every night snow in the sky
sparked down to Earth, reminding me
that the moon was on fire
and the world was chiming
to its merry end.
This was why children got gifts
at Christmas as consolation,
why the parents stayed up late
at New Year's, planning
how to break the news
the next morning,
which somehow still came.
And in spring and summer,
all the old spirits would move out,
carrying the collected fire
of another cold season,
taking also the gift
of easily slipping asleep
and allowing their precise timing
to go astray, the days and the house
left to stretch and sag together.
I haven't lived there in years,
it's a locked-shut case now,
a clock with wheels turned by ghosts
and an unseen pendulum still,
I assume, swung steadily
behind its closed wood panels.
2003-11-08 - 9:47 p.m.
The Prophecy of Cuts
A line is bisected by edge
of blade on skin while cutting cabbage;
this was the aftermath
of the high school crush
that paled to pewter and broke
with his one-word reply.
See now how the incision and scar
it will make lay foreordained
along the heart line,
a shadow branch in coarse
and yellowed tone?
And by the life line,
from callus-tip finger to pit of wrist,
see all those lesser notches
age has adzed you with,
scoring you like pine
you spent two fortnights carving
for that boat you never finished?
These are the parallel days
you spent instead learning Chinese,
the other body that tried escargot,
the hands that held some other child
by some exotic other father.
This is the value of wounds,
their worthless kind of divining.
2003-11-08 - 12:52 a.m.
The Origin of the Octopus
By a red-clay riverbank two gnarled
together a skull of wood and iron.
It was placed atop eight fresh-cut
the willow having been constructed
two nights earlier, amid dancing --
and carved with runes in
The artisans fed the skull
five jugs of pitch, which ran
down the ashe-barked limbs,
leaving them with the stick
of a winter evening's regrets.
This done, the words were spoken
and it sprang to life, only to flee
into the ungainly grey
of the still-unfinished sea.
The crafters wept awhile after this;
they'd dreamed of setting it
to crawl and feed among the tops
of their proudest work,
a little horror to bring out
It was that afternoon they settled
to draw up plans for the wasp.
2003-11-07 - 12:25 a.m.
Fuck
Fuck is a magical sigil.
In the end, Grace Slick was right:
say a short word for lovin’
and Dad you wind up doing time.
Lenny paces the cell
In his legendary joke,
a woman wears a sign
that screams this word
yet never says it.
The sheets will kick
from slumber's feet
and the body unbuild castles,
but this cannot be said
before mom and dad.
Bear with me, beyond thoughts
of trite conjuration, multiple use
and meaning. Look only
and breath as you say it,
the force of whole being disgorging
in that single blunt syllable;
at the effect of it, gossamer and
the breaking and the sliding
as it’s spoken or heard.
The face that laughs
or implodes in disapproval
at its sound is proof of magic.
The sound of every century
beginning and ending
is not this, but close enough.
2003-11-06 - 12:36 a.m.
After the Day
No one sleeps at night. Nor do they
As though dream feet wore dreaming
dream calluses from all that desert
No, twilight’s when the body goes to
the slide of fluid sweat, the
of skin reworking skin, inventing
But do any of us really sleep at
No, we’re making use of the night,
the tones of day against our painted
and daubed-up posters, rebuilding the
of planks and carpet with our slow
to bathroom, kitchen, bed, before real
Yeah, night’s the time the muscles let
their disconcerted architecture
of cord and rod, when hair shed
its tonsured shape and embraces
its quiddity. Tangled locks
qua tangled locks.
appropriate to this hour, as the
reinterpret every chime and creak and
of stove or unclosed fridge into
So it is we dream. Cars rush
the absolute locked sill of
the soil tucks in and ‘crawlers fit
for fishing take its taste,
and your breath falls in sheets
voluminous enough to tent a house.
A Note I’d Write Were I to Leave for
I’ve been gathering departure’s
At the windowsill, the way an iron
Must slowly, rigidly force itself to
And dancing on those fine points,
The whirl and triumph of the Horae
Whose voices clatter over one
In the speech of cobblestone and
I’ll miss their chatter. Sidewalks
Scaled with stuck fine leaves of
Making a dragon’s slither-mark
While across the street, patiently,
In the guise of tin gutterspouts
In the slower, steadier tongues of
Its lulls and heights bearing a little
Away each time. Look, there –-
The rake tilting so the wind
Will make it fall; best stand,
To carefully put it away before
It gouges something hidden
from autumn mud.
