‘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.

'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 moi, le 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.

'...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

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

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)

‘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

'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.

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)

'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

-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.

-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.

'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

'It is only when you are torn from your mooring,

when you drift like a rudderless ship,

that I am able to come near you.'

-S.Anderson

'O world, strangled and collapsed, where are the strong white teeth?
O world, sinking with the silver balls and the corks and the life-preservers,
where are the rosy scalps? O glab and glairy, O glabrous world now chewed
to a frazzle, under what dead moon do you lie cold and gleaming?'

-H.Miller

‘(10.) A handsome face is the finest of all sights,

And the sweetest music is the sound of the voice

Of the woman we love.’

-La Bruyere

-Mrs Lawrence R. Stickler, and what a fine pickler she was!

I was pickled in her womb atop the pale earth's dying crust of wilted tooths.

-Of languid lambent tongues to be swallowed in the sea of many mouths

but never swallowed whole.

-My little Emily with a ripe belly my was she a wonderful whore

and I loved her over a cup of tea and after that to love her folds of fat

which each morning asked if I was hungry and at night read me pages of Bartleby.

-I once knew a librarian whose shelves where shelved with empty books

and I laughed and I asked, 'Have you read that one yet?'

-Toes between toes plucking stems of brooding toes

in a warren of abundant throws.

-As the blanch ambrosia of my foveola heart.

-G.

8/2/10

And China is a country not a plate, nor cup, or map.

-G.

'But then a queen steps so lightly,
even when crushing a louse.'

-H.Miller