Totem and Taboo (Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought)

Some thoughts on Talking vs. Speaking via a Nigerian Folktale and the structure of the Honeycomb:

A hunter goes into the bush. He finds an old human skull. The hunter says: “What brought you here?” The skull answers: “Talking brought me here.” The hunter runs off. He runs to the king. He tells the king: “I found a dry human skull in the bush. It asks you how its father and mother are.”

The king says: “Never since my mother bore me have I heard that a dead skull can speak.” The king summons the Alkali, the Saba, and the Degi and asks them if they have ever heard the like. None of the wise men has heard the like, and they decide to send guards out with the hunter into the bush to find out if his story is true and, if so, to learn the reason for it. The guards accompany the hunter into the bush with the order to kill him on the spot should he have lied.

The guards and the hunter come to the skull. The hunter addresses the skull: “Skull, speak.” The skull is silent. The hunter asks as before: “What brought you here?” The skull does not answer. The whole day long the hunter begs the skull to speak, but it does not answer. In the evening the guards tell the hunter to make the skull speak, and when he cannot, the guards kill the hunter in accordance with the king’s command.

When the guards are gone, the skull opens its jaws and asks the dead hunter’s head: “What brought you here?” The dead hunter’s head replies: “Talking brought me here!”

In other words my tribe is scattered but the hive's in order, or words are things and thoughts are things. Objects. Assassins. Healers. Herders. Critiques of pure reason. Summertime and the living is,knowing. To present someone as he sees himself is another thing like/Other/thing. It's mean. A scheme in the discussion, so hush, let it show up like naked eyes behind a mask. A fake catatonia. Swallowing honey till the sweet sting of its maker radiates from the throat this dirge, this dirge in reverse

Balloon Animals

Exile and the Kingdom

If you left out,
The Adulterous Woman
The Renegade or Confused Spirit
The Silent Men (Les Muets)
The Guest (L'Hote)
Jonas or the Artist at Work
The Growing Stone
The Loneliest Camera
The Quotidian
The Damsel In
The Manhattan Cycles
The Jungle/Skyscraper
The Supernatural Being
Straight Outta
Les Incompetents
Lakeshore Drive
Everyday I Wanna Fly My Kite
The Duende
The Duende
Then one day
The fable shakes
Trembles

Solving my mule dreams for when
you let them out

You exist because you have an opposite
So the book was written at a breathless carnival
All spirit and cotton candy afro mouthed
You had one ticket to ride the gleaming carousel
and instead you ran alongside it in the opposite direction
waving like a piece of chess, beckoning
Re-enacting the chapters as they blew away in chimes

What was unusual
The time you wore a blindfold or
the time you looked me in the eye

Sight/Seeing

Rain/sun
ransom
It rained some
I ran some

Just as rain relieves atmospheric tension making all the buds burst open : :

The Futurists were staging World War Infinity in Carnegie Hall. Packed the place, and got great reviews.

The Mythscience was in Egypt and Italy: Silence, looser silence and most sins aren't crimes

Soldiers woke from comas and thought they were in the theater, not knowing weather to play the heroine or kill the heroine

General mayhem, generic confusion, a sharpness but inconclusive

forgetting protects the memory but we can't

or is it the imagination it protects or does remembering happen in the body

The neat, neat bundling together of nerve :: drums

on your feet or on your knees but we can't

keep from flying now that the mines exist Yes, I'm coming back, Black Dada Nihilismus, I always was

showing you where the edge is not quite

Silence, the only propaganda relentless enough for maggots, and dense motherfuckers, look up, the airplane overhead, the ice machine, the

slicing of bus breaks

loveless sex, falling buildings, listen ::: things you thought were sensual are just sensational, over-disclosed like the numb logo on your t-shirt, either you don't care or you do, but either way you're wearing it which isn't very demure, to remember

that's not silence, I can hear you listening barefoot in the sterile mud of your mind

Silence is a kind of time, a rhythmic aria

from between edges and bridges, tourniquet for the double hipness of the sun is that it ran with me, and the same for returning

Some evenings, the data monkey and the dada money break even
the hearts of black cops just about to raise a baton to cheerlead for the team that pays them, and they just start to weep, and sob, and weep

Short Speech To My Friends

All you say you want to do to yourself, you do to someone else as yourself

This mostly relates to denial
You must not know, you hate yourself
Until you notice my eyes, fluttering, flushing you out
You must not know you're fascinating unless everything scatter
And I stay about

The sound is fading out
It's more like now sounds
FREEDOM
The sound is really fading out
You're more like free sounds

For the Cool Ruler

Courage to the traveler

You are not those selfish travelers
Happiest on foreign streets
Insomuch as we are not travelers
We are not afraid to speak

Father Bear, send word, he's having a hard time
Send word far, I'm having to break time from my heart
Hide it from your complacent futures
It isn't safe to say that life is elsewhere unless you go there
And give it a name

Solar Return/Open Secret

Je m'en fou
J'aime un fool

As if between brackets with scarlet knee-caps, I let it happen
The barren hunting silence of my Sicilian side

When we've been in the jungle five days, and we still haven't found any honey, any honey nectar, turn up the cathedral,
louder

Immutable earth

Mystery is an intellectual process like in a who-done-it,
but suspense is an emotion reached by giving information, but not all of it

The water was swiftly moving, and blue in the channel

[What water, which azure, were ashes short of wish, or shame, or no, no

Holding fast the difference between facts and truth. Body and soul. Jaguar and guardian. Spinning is intelligent. The facts are static, the truth exactly moves, circles around them (swiftly, and blue in the channel), they only co-exist in language. The water moved its languid blues I walked from you, and you mean the water, a fact verb, a guard verb, the clean before a baptism, in which you had to breathe like a match above paper. Has been carbon, has been carved thin by fire, turn off the cathedral, better

Truth hurls itself out from the pact, suspended in its regal brackets, on scarlet knee caps, navigating the acrid ground for nectar,
you let it happen
The disorientation of sweet violence
That this stencil of the moon in blackface--man, untraceable and vivid, treats love like suspense, for money

He seemed wrong for the crowd even as a performer, these people want someone to blow up, nuclear rehearsal, or someone to take a bow before his curtain, oblique strategy
To leave the cathedral, to ravel, to the traveler

sing a mending moan
a song to bring him home

If you're trapped in an auction room and you can't get out except by bidding, wildly bidding, getting yourself kicked out into freedom, bid highest on something you hope not to win,
that's discipline,
stay that price

Studies for Voice

Alchemy

Message from the Lucky Country

Wherever electricity goes
Don't fall asleep inside someone else's dream
We hear things
We see things
Every sigh
Every plea
Everything

Narrative (for Wurlitzer)

I didn't agree with the moral predicament of Huckleberry Finn concerning Nigger Jim

Why was not a question

Why ride on a white horse if you're not a liar

(never a question)

Or a boxcar if you have a heart or an apocalypse-- the softest lips in the army band are still ordered to blow about rebel saints who came east to make the world safe for money and
sadness

Why grieve a liar, all his horses war white and stuffed their ears with gin picked cotton, know not what they do, know why it was not a question

Full moon rising, purple in the evening sun, try, yourself, to tell those actions backwards, in fun english, all you get are innuendos and yin then on the night of the purple moon a dash-----shhhh, the alphabet is a puppet show and your hands taste like strawberries in the dark

When Angels Speak of Love

You arrive at sky. No, no, that's not good enough. Give up the kite. Give it a crisis. Give it its psychology, viscous clarity. Let it disappear there. Don't abide the idea that abrupt and gradual are opposite. There's also always. And if, on the cliff of yourself. I'll wait, with a homonym. Same moan for love as for its absence. Air so still and invisible that time is afraid of it. This sky appears in a crisis. Hyper-minimal, ice-wet. The calm in it should frighten you. It means occupation. Don't give it a wire. It can't hold a wire. It isn't a suburb or a desert or suffering, you can't rationalize its emptiness this way. This is the rope testimony climbs into fate. The stray robes of syncretism, Oxum, crowbar, axiom for when your machines are still, empty, naked and late in the night they give up resemblance, beg you to steal them or at least know. This doesn't have to be like anything else. This slide, thick sky, don't dial, don't yield as in the lamb hasn't the lion as in mon ame (my soul in romance languages, my sol, incandescent, doesn't, flinch) my one, my name, my ion, my noble land, you are the man, you are my other country, lend him the sky while you hide in his hand there come spiral shapes, real highs, real lows, real destinations can ruin them, so go nowhere, but be on your way

Black Arc

For nothing would enter and nothing would leave this state of perpetual siege. Then came the word Ra and its obscene permutations. Aurora watching her rocketlove explode in the tropical temperament, hot water, hot wind, a confession, it's not paradise we lost it's the other dice, the kind in your hand, not the parody of life we call eden. The parachutes we call men.

It's Been a Honeymoon

And you are eternity and you are the mirrors

Here there's always room for one more; town, island, or kingdom. Are you dumb, man, aren't you the junk adam.

Cannibal at a red banner, bull, scampering toreador. There was blood everywhere, there was memory. Wind,

you'll have a terrible time smothering my clarity. He took me of the supper club, we ate like lucky cards look up when the other suits us, spade, heart,

straight face as you save true circles for a round two. Sluiceway. He lifted the proof axe out of cake batter, brought it so near to me but couldn't complete the sacrifice. Something about how two forces infinitely approaching one another is rite-erotic, the talking reich. God against God, again. Who's vigil is it. The one with the father. The one with his free, spirit. Could be, couldn't it. Sleepy axe, so sleek, so spatula as the cubic sugar that led us up the free trade to pluck the rubble from each triangle at a time. Delta, deal us of us. We're all such sluts and then we find enough language to call you mine. There was love everywhere, there was memory

certain emperors
certain ballads
less and less subtle
affairs we had with the attitude of fairies comes the bare wand or wanderer, disorder on a tv monitor-- there was us, everywhere, there was hymn
feral spin, c'mon feet, come-in, run. This is common. There was memory everywhere we were coming from the future to spare ourselves your tournament or torment we went around some thin rhyme like town and our- town up and down the hours on our far-out referential; spindle, in walked bud, and so forth with the force of nothingness inherited as a shore. Greet us like strangers, that would be kinder than the kind we are

Remember, members, your showmanship, your shango, can't go no farther, can't go no farther and onward, and on the blood of bull swans, and on the want we want and want and want until the pond is slim and haunted and hunted and under it with flashlights and fleshlight we look as bright as math, and happy-- that half backwards papa word was the last pop song he plays me up and down these charts. That way I'm in more places, cumulative as a lapdance is a last dance unless you get a whistle stuck in your wheel and it's real, so loud it loosens your will into awe. I don't know what else. I am eternity and I am the mirrors. The difference between an offering and a sacrifice is self-evident and imperceptible hold on my people, hold on until you're felt like flying

Clues into a Sanctuary

Name the music of certain emperors, "The Complete Argo Sessions"

Casual omen, old jazzmen in fancy vests to better test the completeness of this oblivion. And to trust it you'll need a woman's silence. You can buy that in leather, silk, or diamond, hope is a thing with feathers. Hope is final. It will cost you your effects, especially the feedback, to get back to that ghetto I guess you already know

You in trouble/ you in trouble/you in treble though/tremolo/broken terms, no muse no most of you in so much of the undelt Rubaiyat very be careful, or you wouldn't be asking how when you already know, you-in/you-out

At the end of the blackivory railroad there's a phone submerged in its own low ring that keeps lowering; the back-up graphic to suggest the stoics were here and never left. The griots too, hope crying, leveeing the sun toward morning

L'Ecluse

Even the book of changes suffers translation. Coming slowly, slowly, confined in a bronze chariot, turns out to mean he'll miss your call cause he's out in the car. It all slopes downward towards your exclusive, symmetrical ignorance, plus or minus the translucent trojan quartz, generous and prosaic in its fiction, fending for everyone but the one you want is out in the chariot, he'll miss your car, call him bronze, call him a zombie, anything but artist, con, (like with) azure lane after lane is one lane really, the only line there is

Move, Members, Move

Seraphic light and lightness
Genuflect to its rapture
licking ice into star patterns
and the monolinguism of the other
and the abandonment of personal volition
And I'm moving forward with my Myth

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed

Reves douces
reves douces
nigga this is not a drill, get ready
they think you bullshitting (please and thank you)
For the sweet brutality of the mediocre cult prone Blueblooded I loved through and threw
By letting him remain a stranger, by keeping him at a coiled distance
Does music have to be pretty or true or close to brace
yourselves. Assuming you've held on this long
For folkways, not every premonition makes it into dreams yet they're all coming
true

Distribution (d-i-s-t-r-i-b-u-t-i-o-n)

For Cool Men
Ace boon coon
Ace boon coon
Ace boon coon
Stay-soon as you are
swoon units
starts in dull rumor about
doundounba, the collision of
opposite feelings we call
ambivalence and are busy
refusing to dance
in--stead we eat soggy take-out
together in our circular bed, a hand-me-down from my selective
memory
of when my parents were together: red-velvet drapes and the aroundtheway genetics of the 8Os
and we invent privileges to give ourselves:
Hairspray, lightbright...Is this it, the sheltered life
It feels so safe And dangerous - Ace
boon, the phrase lands, dice falling from a lantern
coon, no room in my light left. Crooners, brighter noises than worry or glee assuming we speak by accident and listen on purpose and the third is the first and the first is the last--
Next time can't we just take over the invisible ghettos in outer space
and evacuate them and then go back and then evacuate again until the real estate is expensive enough and safe and dangerous. The end of suffering, and of private property, and contract-husbands, and we fuck with the windows open, we fight with the cabinets open, we open and open and smudged and open, and all the lucky vowels rub together as a breeze when we jump into these chasm

Other From a Brother Planet

The bulky feeling of his hands pressing the imaginary elephant in order to be moved himself is unlike falling but there's tilt to it as if the walls are backing away from their shadows in a half stagger half waltz unsure weather they are lovers approaching, or predators or each time freedom was rebuked, called a refuge for incompetence and the good life blamed for evil, at least we accomplished refuge

"Tout se résume dans l’Ésthetique et l’Economie politique"

"I venture to suggest that our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery and training in the meaning of the 'simplest' acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading--"

Coup de Foudre

When recognition and estrangement become the same (thing?, or place/feeling)
accusations are forms of forgiveness. Stories come down to one phrase repeating
rippling, ripping itself from itself. When something obscene is happening in public do you stand there and watch, or walk fast away from it...I knew this one woman who every time she passed an ambulance, would find a partner and begin tangoing in the street to the rhythm of the sirens. Nothing to see here. Nothing to see here. Abject serenity. Insignificance, and then all of a sudden an affinity to freedom. Milonga, means a thousand heels and no stampede. If fear and dread are the only things that move us we must manufacture them too. Opportunitists, spot an emergency and tune their instruments to its reach. Appropriation is something different. So-what, so- what. I wanted it thus. Midway between intensity and ridiculousness there's someone I recognize, can't remember why. He's in this loud vehicle choking on his own heart, but at the same time he's watching it go by like spectacle goers watch a float and feel calm while they aren't the one on it

Live and direct

Fast

When his palsied hand was exactly between the catatonic brass cymbals (babbling about pause and other roses) I looked for gold.

A Thief who stole my sad days is finally in his cage again, eyes rolling back into his head without dominion or a madam, he's a madman

amid goddamned mississippi. The protest songs ruined my career, the love songs groom me for a double life, amphitheatres and hot clubs, I meant

(every word) saved, they saved my cures in secrets, the true songs did-- nothing--- but distract you, demonstrating their traction until the time comes to slip out into the night at long, at longing, look at longing, look it in its tragic eye there's laughter