Tuesday, October 19, 2010

menses n. pl. monthly discharge of blood, etc., from womb.
mesode n. part of ode between strophe and antistrophe.
meralgia n. neuralgia of thigh.
mephitis n. foul exhalation from earth; stink.


(Slang and Hard Talk)

Chicago lightning-gunfire
Dip the bill-take a drink
Grape-liquor
Cough yourself off-beat it
Eel juice-liquor
Creased, bent- knocked off, also stolen
Circulation drops-drinks
Lip-lawyer
Squibbed off-shot
New sweet-new girl
Giver her hello-say hello to her
Kick the joint-break in
Under glass-in prison, caught

- R.Chandler

‘As far as I am concerned, a mind’s arrangement with regard to certain objects is even more important than its regard for certain arrangements of objects, these two kinds of arrangement controlling between them all forms of sensibility.’

- A.Breton

Saturday, October 9, 2010

‘Everything is and is new. Only the imagination is undeceived.’

‘Has life its tail in its mouth or its mouth in its tail?’

‘Tradition! The solidarity of life!’

‘Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible, to keep beside growing understanding.’

‘In my life the furniture eats me

the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion-
they which alone know everything

and snitched on us in the morning’

‘Life’s processes are very simple. One or two moves are made and that is the end. The rest is repetitious.’

- W.C.Williams

Wednesday, September 15, 2010


‘It is in such supreme moments that growth is the greatest.  It comes as with a vast surge, this feeling of strength and sufficiency. We may still tremble, the fear of doing wretchedly may linger, but we grow. Flashes of inspiration come to guide the soul. In nature there is no outside. When we are cast from a group or a condition we have still the companionship of all that is. Nature is not ungenerous. Its winds and stars are fellows with you. Let the soul be but gentle and receptive, and this vast truth will come home- not in set phrases, perhaps, but as a feeling, a comfort, which, after all, is the last essence of knowledge.’

- T.Dreiser


Wednesday, September 8, 2010

‘It is true, we suffer less from love, and I deplore it. I never forget those fine lines which Byron puts into the mouth of one of his heroes, making him say that god would be wretched in his place, since a god could not suffer or die for the woman he loved.’

- A.France

liaise v.i.  establish and maintain contact; co-operate.  Liaison, n.  communication, contact and co-operation; illicit sexual relationship; thickening agent for soups and sauces; pronunciation of normally silent final consonant before word beginning with a vowel.
delectus n. chrestomathy.
peduncle n. flower stalk; stem.
sculpsit (Latin) ‘carved (it)’; engraved (it)’.
"In a world like this one, it's difficult to devote oneself to art body and soul. To get published, to get exhibited, to get produced often requires ten or twenty years of patient, intense labor. I spent half my life at it! And how do you survive during all that time? Beg? Live off other people until you're successful? What a dog's life! I know something about that! You're always recognized too late. And today, it's no longer enough to have talent, originality, to write a good or beautiful book. One must be inspired! Not only touch the public but create one's own public. Otherwise, you're headed straight for suicide."

- H. Miller
‘If we were expected to love all the people we find attractive, life would be pretty ghastly, wouldn’t it?’

- M.Proust.
I grew heavy with breath beneath the valance of her breast,
Heavy and wide, unburdened of a shore I became full.
On a dead and dying July foul and coarse
The distant dissonance of a young moon mixed
With puerile thoughts upon the ménage of soft hands,
The coarse coat of her furless fur distends,
And land is land, died and dying land…

Over how many tables did our conversation grow stale?

Upon mendacious eyes and unbalanced hallways
As unheard footsteps littered clothes littered with riposte
To turn and to ask if only you would have
As I sat and watched drywall mold
Times when silence was not enough
When this autumn oak held together an uniformed frown
And the children of now are awake in a dream
I would never want to be awake in…
Days of wonder to wonder unafraid of the morning
As fall tongues fall and meet over flakes of gold and cream
And dust is just an idea of a morning, afternoon, or night
Burdened by the weight of it are we not infallible
Under silk sheets have we not as thighs met hands
And hands met chests said and spared of disparity
Under the weather of a day which unwithered hours hung
As sepals in bloom waiting to be plucked
And I knew not of disappointment but made the appointment
To say for once it might have left
Yet disappoint is salient and even under lovelier days will it bloom.

-G.
‘It leaves out the great romance of construction…It leaves out all the affirmative and life sustaining force that in the greatest modernists is always interwoven with assault and revolt: the erotic joy, natural beauty and human tenderness in D.H. Lawrence, always locked in mortal embrace with his nihilistic rage and despair; the figures in Picasso’s Guernica, struggling to keep life itself alive even as they shriek their death; the triumphant last choruses of Coltrane’s A Love Supreme; Alyosha Karamazov, in the midst of chaos and anguish, kissing and embracing the earth; Molly Bloom bringing the archetypal modernist book to an end with “yes I said yes I will Yes.”’

- M.Berman

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

‘My fancy is a wall between myself and truth.  There is a world of the fancy into which I constantly plunge and out of which I seldom completely emerge.  I want every day to be absorbingly interesting and exciting to me and if it will not, I, with my fancy, try to make it so.  If you, a stranger, come into my presence there is a chance that for a moment I shall see you as you are but in another moment you will be lost.  You say something that starts my fancy working and I am off.  To-night perhaps I shall dream of you.  We will have fancied conversations.  My fancy will throw you into strange, noble- or perhaps even mean situations.  Now I have no scruples.  You are my rabbit and I am a hound pursuing you.  Even your physical being changes under the driving lash of my fancy.’

- S.Anderson


‘-A bed witnesses our birth and it witnesses our death; it is the ever-changing theater where the human species enacts, by turns, engaging dramas, ridiculous farces, and horrible tragedies.- It is a cradle decked with flowers;- it is love’s throne;- it is a sepulcher.’

- X.Maistre


‘Come now, my dear Celeste, surely it must be dull to live only at night, with an invalid.’

- C.Albaret

Friday, September 3, 2010


   ‘Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice’

- T.S.Eliot



Tuesday, August 31, 2010

‘People in general attach too much importance to words.  They are under the illusion that talking effects great results.  As a matter of fact, words are, as a rule, the shallowest portion of all the argument.  They but dimly represent the great surging feelings and desires which lie behind.  When the distraction of the tongue is removed, the heart listens.’

- T.Dreiser
We lay and we laid well.
We laid with legs lazy of farewells.
Kissed and hugged the sun and toes;
How our toes and dripping noses
Dropped atop the tussis of our hearts.
Over tea and shared toast.
Over coffee with cigarette smoke.
Of littered steps atop a litterless floor,
Her ankles like wine anklets I adore;
Toes to toe, salient and infallible,
With a beat to beat as beats meet
With the plucking of each plume
How ever could I have said ever better never a goodbye?

-G.

Monday, August 30, 2010







'I am little subject to such violent emotions.  My sensitiveness [i]is naturally not keen, and I harden and deaden it every day intentionally [ii].'

- Montaigne



[i] Apprehension.  Montaigne uses this word frequently in the sense of “the action of feeling anything emotionally”- an obsolete sense of the similar English word.
[ii] Je l’ encrouste et espessis … par discours.



- George B. Ives(Notes)

-Civilizations’ have wept; if only to have gazed
Within you supple amber eyes,
To watch as words separate from thoughts,
Would we become voluptuous.
 -And in the vigil of a summer night I fell asleep within you
Upon the auburn scented casket of your song and I wept;
Not a lovelier fork could have lifted my tongue
As you chewed the fat off my feet.
-As we swallowed each other’s tongues,
With tongues we sang of breath, glorious breath,
Drowned in the nape of your neck,
With my hands wrapped atop your amber locks,
I held your hand within mine and I bit your lip,
And smudged your nose palpitating in silence
As words turned to water and you said,
Après moile déluge…’

-If only to have awoken next to you, fresh as a vase of lilacs,
Would I roll over, with arms I would wrap you in a sweet embrace,
Feeling the warmth of your breath against my own,
The beat of your chest in the axilla of my arm;
To taste your morning tongue would be bliss as we wither in silent discourse.
-Obsequious beneath the moon I’ll sing a song
Of Evelyn sitting in a room.  As the smoke from the inn lifts
At the foot of the hill, such dreadful men compose.
 -A seraph she sings amidst the mizzle
As though a leaf against the backdrop of fall,
Ebbs at a distance beneath a light which is not a light at all. 
She approaches as a gale to the sound of such pettifog. 
I am struck with a sudden pensiveness, pallor;
Like chalk dust seated next to a stick of chalk I am docile,
As a stranger he asks, ‘But one more?’

-How I yearn for the skin of dawn as a vase of roses to not be alone.



-G.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

'...it is only by sacrificing everything to sensual delight that the miserable individual known as "man" and tossed reluctantly into this dismal universe can manage to sow a few roses amid the brambles of life.'

- M.De Sade

Sunday, August 15, 2010

epopt- n. a person initiated into mysteries. epoptic, adj.
vagitus- n. new-born child’s cry.
in flagrante- (Latin) ‘in blazing crime’; in the act of committing a crime or offense; in the act of having illicit sexual intercourse.
bise- n. cold, dry north wind of Switzerland, Italy and S France.

‘…and I can well see her as he talks, a woman whom daylight cannot touch.’

- A.Nin

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Unsent Letter

l.f.

when you get married and have twins
don't come to my house for safety pins.

g.b.
43

Salve, nec minimo puella naso
nec bello pede nec nigris ocellis
nec longis digitis nec ore sicco
nec sane nimis elegante lingua,
decoctoris amica Formiani.
ten prouincia narrat esse bellam ?
tecum Lesbia nostra comparator ?
o saeclum insapiens et infacetum !

- G.V.Catullus



43

Hi there, girl with a nose by no mean tiny,
non-dark eyes and two most undainty ankles,
not-long fingers and undry lips, besides a
tongue that’s far from overly refined-you
bankrupt from Formiae’s mistress! Does the Province
spread the word that you’re attractive? Do men
pick on you to compare my Lesbia with now?
Oh this tasteless age, ill bred and witless!

- P.Green(Translator)

Thursday, August 12, 2010

‘Poets of the decadent school-the decadents-are reproached for their obscurity.  This is not a valid criticism.  What is there to understand in a line of verse? Absolutely nothing.  Poetry is not an exercise from Latin. I love Lamartine, but the music of his verse satisfies me. One does not gain much by peering under words.  There is little enough to find there. And one cannot demand of music that it have meaning, much meaning.  Lamartine and the decadents make a little more fuss about it, that is all.’

- J.Renard
Atop a bashful mirror abashed of little lost Vachel lost within a troika filled with Russian girls
In a colliery of stern haunches overflowing glasses flow within the syntax of the heart
An aria of the decomposed as thoughts caress and I try to dress them yet where are all the clothes
Of all of those of before atop this headless bed with its astringent head and musty palms
Of the hard labor of cheap wetless sex dry fucks fucked dryly with come to come and be sat atop again
In the labor of reproach as appellation ceases names are incomplete as thoughts
Serve not a purpose no not a purpose at all while the spavin swells to be swell
What will we ask when it swells no longer but no longer can we swallow our tongues
But only the tongues of those grown large within small walls to form an indecisive question
As the dirge drum drums  and a man is no longer a man and a woman is just a catalectic whore.


- G.
To have passed the day in the folds of your skin,
To have sat and thought that thought was all we have,
Upon endless nights in which our entire lives stood still
Within the auburn scented casket of your song;
Not a lovelier fork could have lifted my tongue
As you chewed the fat off my feet.

Like that of a forgotten flower,
I watched as the world withered in the arms of an empty vase,
And I did nothing.


-G.

Unsent Letter

l.f.

I love you little,
I love you big,
I love you like a little pig.

g.b.
- And a tap tap dead and died tap not a pirouette
Of middle aged legs uncrossed and undressed
As a leaf with hearty veins.


-G.

calvities- n. baldness. calvous, adj.
piciform- adj. like a woodpecker.
astrakhan- n. closely-curled black or grey fur from fleece of karakul lambs: cloth resembling this.

A collective noun is one that names a group of two or more people, animal, or things.  Such groups have a dual existence, as both a single entity and as a aggregate of several individuals and this is reflected in the grammar of the nouns that name them, particularly in British English. (i.e. an exaltation of larks, a murder of crows, a murmuration of starlings- QPB Dictionary of Difficult Words)

‘To such an extent does passion manifest itself in us as a temporary and distinct character which not only takes the place of our normal character but obliterates the invariable signs by which it has hitherto been discernible!’

- M.Proust

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

'15. And therefore, first of all, I tell you, earnestly and authoritatively (I know I am right in this,) you must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable - nay, letter by letter. For though it is only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function of signs, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of books is called "literature," and that a man versed in it is called, by the consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books, or of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclature this real fact: - that you might read all the books in the British Museum (if you could live long enough) and remain an utterly "illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of a good book, letter by letter, - that is to say, with real accuracy, - you are forevermore in some measure an educated person. The entire difference between education and non-education (as regards the merely intellectual part of it) consists in this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages, - may not be able to speak any but his own, - may have read very few books. But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their inter-marriages, distant relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at any time, and in any country. But an uneducated person may know, by memory, many languages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not a word of any, - not a word even of his own. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to make his way ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence of any language to be known for an illiterate person: so also the accent, or turn of expression of a single sentence, will at once mark a scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclusively admitted by educated persons, that a false accent or a mistaken syllable is enough, in the parliament of any civilized nation, to assign to a man a certain degree of inferior standing forever. '

- J.Ruskin



quean- n. virago; lewd woman; (Scottish) unmarried woman or girl.
quenelle- n. fish or meat forcemeat ball.
tittup- v.i. prance.
battue- n.  driving of game towards guns; shooting party of that kind; massacre of helpless persons.





Tuesday, August 10, 2010




La Mort des Amants

Nous aurons des lits pleins d'odeurs légères,
Des divans profonds comme des tombeaux,
Et d'étranges fleurs sur des étagères,
Ecloses pour nous sous des cieux plus beaux.

Usant à l'envi leurs chaleurs dernières,
Nos deux coeurs seront deux vastes flambeaux,
Qui réfléchiront leurs doubles lumières
Dans nos deux esprits, ces miroirs jumeaux.

Un soir fait de rose et de bleu mystique,
Nous échangerons un éclair unique,
Comme un long sanglot, tout chargé d'adieux;

Et plus tard un Ange, entr'ouvrant les portes,
Viendra ranimer, fidèle et joyeux,
Les miroirs ternis et les flammes mortes.

- C. Baudelaire




The Death of Lovers

We shall have richly scented beds –
couches deep as graves, and rare
flowers on the shelves will bloom
for us beneath a lovelier sky.

Emulously spending their last
warmth, our hearts will be as two
torches reflecting their double fires
in the twin mirrors of our minds.

One evening, rose and mystic blue,
we shall exchange a single glance,
a long sigh heavy with farewells;

And then an angel, unlocking doors,
will come, loyal and gay, to bring
the tarnished mirrors back to life.

- R.Howard (Translator)

Saturday, August 7, 2010



'There is a story about a dog and an ape that came to love each other. The dog finally died trying to keep the ape from returning to the jungle where he should have been all along and where none but another ape could follow. And one becomes the dog, the ape, no matter how clumsily the story is told. One is the hapless lover.'

- M.F.K. Fisher

Friday, August 6, 2010

-Prelude

The entente of your skin like embers,
The silk of your skin uncut;
You wore a dress, how you always wore a dress,
Of concordance with your pensive curves,
When I was bound within your arms the earth became superfluous
And I turned water into words;

Love is not mechanical, it is a song.

And I brushed what was left upon your lush lips
As we rolled in oysters and flakes of skin,
As the silent earth grew silent once more
For the stress of the stressed pressed upon your open mouth,
The indent of pressed skin pressed upon gallantly,
The labor of your cunt pressed with the force
To force the pulse of the earth to a crisis with a loud fuck.


And love is not mechanical, it is a song.






- Garrett Michael Ball
haematuria- n. presence of blood in urine.
gynaecic- adj. female.
paravane- n. knife-bearing torpedo-like device for cutting mines adrift.

Thursday, August 5, 2010



-An alewife up the road I have come to know
tells stories with glasses in the bottomless well of her chest
when to touch with a touch is not just a touch
she says that all will be said and all will end.
-And I sucked her skin and asked of her dress 
if she was trying with her dress to impress me
and she said no she was just trying to dress.
-But Joey the fagot always smells so nice
of cigarette smoke liquor and little boys thighs
as I lay within his arms and touched his humble soul
to sink as grout and bury my toes.
-Yet on flimsy lips she read me a letter
of word which she dressed of a dress I could not have dressed them better.

-And why brood over such a brooding earth.


-G.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

'Because of Uranus which crosses my longitudinal
I am inordinately found of cunt, hot chitterlings, and water bottles.'

-H.Miller

'rari nantes in gurgite vasto'

-Vergil
In drunken dream my Elsa’s tongue like lemonade is with her long valise;
Long with thoughts she says I am a lime and lime and lemons and all this time
To arrive without her feet in a coat of fur, a crinoline trunk and remarkable knees
With a knock, knock, knock, and a knock once more,
As I lift my weary head of shoveled hair to ask, ‘Who is it?’
Elsa says to wait and hands me her orange suitcase; an ana of antipodes:

And bread and butter and the oil of olives still an oily inclement of odium breaths
Spread turned sentimental even a seashell; the esophagus of a nymph meretriciously selling loafs
Of silver wine bread crumbs and feathers which she licks calls a plume puissant she says
Turns my white shoes into fur and leather convivial tendons chew and tense
Beneath the weight of ermine pets placed atop fecund pages fecundly multiplying into eggs
Anon for the short dress of your tongue dainty and demure you’re a boat a sail a lovely fine weather chemise Crapulous crapulous plead matutinal Easter thighs for Christ has risen she says she said
Posy pose for me your equine face of vases red flowers
The zeal of your nose for my nose would only be clever to nose one another’s noses together
In absence of an antipodean sunset nose for nose
And a knock, knock, knock, and a knock once more sings the sonorous door;
Elsa says its fine and to go and see who is it and not to have a worry as she has plans to stay awhile.


*              *              *

My Margit is absurd and has asked to be raped
Atop a yellow bed in a drunken hotel room grown drunk with age.
I say, ‘Not today, no not tonight,’ and I wonder of her mother’s thighs.

In the backseat of a car I fell from my mother’s womb
Into carpenter hands and sawdust sweat
Of a man unsure of what it was for a man to be a father.

And I try to comfort her with kisses and the taste of wine but she becomes upset
As a knock atop the door quiets her she says that I should answer,
To extend the offer in a liquor polonaise, to ask,

‘Really was it nothing, was it not a thing at all?’

But the mouth between Margit’s thighs curses naked her harridan mother
Searching for prandial pricks to please.

And I with mice and warm drinks to have lost my wrist watch and socks
And all my sensible faculties in the song of a drunken hotel grown drunk with age;
‘My prepuce is jejune having refused to take its coat and heavy shoes,
For in the summer weather how many lovely Heathers will tickle a man dressed for cold weather?’
Yet under warm weather are thoughts were fair and warm,
But even warmth cannot soften the coarseness of the indecisive question;

‘Elsa really was it nothing, was it not a thing at all?

In a tub of water rested furled between my thighs
I had a verdigris child named Vachel and as his little utter uttered bubbles
He drowned in shallow water while the diaphone sounded from the bay.
But upon my arrival the ship had already left the harbor,
And never was I ever a sailor and if ever I was, never would I ever have sailed.

In the hotel room I brood over Elsa with paper cups and cream,
Under a chatoyant light I wet my gullet dancing under sallow sheets
Of wonder and whys and well why nots and if Elsa’s song will hold me in sway
Within the walls and wine in the jowl of this foul hotel which I can no longer see but smell,
And in a musty prattle I see that Elsa has a heart, has her long valise long with thoughts,
And deserves more than the moiety man I moistly am unburdened of her soundless song,
Of mortar dust woman muttering the same soliloquy;

‘Really was it nothing, was it not a thing at all?’

And a knock, knock, knock, and a knock once more,
Of an obelisk girl edified quite nicely who I have met once before.
She asks for a drink, asks, but really she does not ask at all,
And I pour my lips atop her and slowly eat her breasts,
‘Do not come in me, do not please come not yet,’
But treading in her mire I grew to be pragmatic
As I rolled into a furl Elsa knocked atop my door,
With a knock, knock, knock, and a knock once more.

It is Margit absurd found not one prandial prick please,
And begs to be raped atop a yellow bed in a drunken hotel grown drunk with age.
I say ‘Not today, no not tonight, but come, let me hold you my Margit,
In the thick of this dreary night.’


- Garrett Michael Ball