Maria Damon with mIEKAL aND
Maria Damon teaches poetry and poetics at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry, and co-author (with Betsy Franco) of The Secret Life of Words and (with mIEKAL aND) of Literature Nation.
mIEKAL aND is a longtime DIY cultural anarchist & the creator of an infoplex worth of visual-verbal lit, audio-art, performance ritual & hypermedia for the Macintosh, all distributed by Xexoxial Editions (http://cla.umn.edu/joglars/xe/index.html). His hypermedia works reside at JOGLARS Crossmedia Broadcast
(http://cla.umn.edu/joglars/multidex.php). Recent work has focused on activating online collaborative workspaces where writers & media artists can create collective digital works in a real time environment. Since 1991, he has made his home at Dreamtime Village
(http://www.dreamtimevillage.org), a hypermedia / permaculture village project, located in the driftless bioregion of southwestern Wisconsin. And devotes much time to creating edible wilderness indoors & out, growing such things as figs, citrus, cherries, grapes & chestnuts. 1998 marked the creation of THE DRIFTLESS GROTTO OF WEST LIMA
(http://www.dreamtimevillage.org/grotto/index.html), a permanent public grotto/park/installation which when finished will feature a bird-operated time machine in a 25 ft blue glass tower.
potion: injesture
capsoul over-
sized
feed me
eat me
drink me
thirst me
bloodcurrent
garnet rupturee
for a ruby grab draught
from the crystal
gobbelin
--archaic arachne dance--
jewel conjecture
insist on
envelopmental funk
deluxely
thrustway
I now want a
flower trough
cinnamon canal
orated
a lyric maelstrom
never small precious memento
shuddering and
going
down
free
a
n
i
m
a
l
vessel
cleft horizon gold/blue, a vague fishing boat spocks the seam of the sea. Cosma Monda prostrates in the snow in tattered garments, a windlash sidewinds. Heaven lyricist broken & clad. Drifts on the shoreline, white shadows drink a briny bloodstorm, closing out the month. Looking for what in all directions. Rif/t as you wish, cleave as you go through me, accumulate breakup and sorrow be a verdure hymn. Suspicious content mustered a swagger of credibility.
stab-sun, likkle boat-rock flicckkers enn roario... orchestral reflections summon a moonless aurora... a torn sky swallowed up my mother dragon. Sample the fragrance of live-long herb. A grand design edges nearer, then coys on its way, flinging opportunity windlicked a thousand ways but here in Monda's lands. Unawake, overstanding a splintered wilderness. A tuft thru snow pocking here and there, a heat report and an old boulder shorn of its comfort underbrush. The sound of rock in a chain of events. Exposure, enclosure, injesture. The radio broadcast growing old as she speaks.
A bleak horn, a plenty nothing none, a word of no worlds, a sword-plane glimmerglow inner peirce horizon. No glimpsing dance, no deft thrumming, just a hapless swirl in houndstooth rags.
pearly low-pangs glistening to what music, sequestered in glass. any desire will alight on the flametip of a beeswax candle. it's hard to be back in a snowbox, let me howl "bruult" until sunsweat. Only about the words she repeats to herself, & their order. i enter the fourth front, a ledger to fall off of, and nestle down into a thread of alphabets. countless invisibilities. the teachable moment appears in a clown outfit, hovering at the classroom door.
a thief of poesy leaves the scene, quiet as glass, notwithstanding the uproar of the decades between, leaving behind his trademark journals in scribble. wavering above the flat icy land, his yearning lets go only slowly. who wanted to live any way, hooked or crooked, held on and enloved, in botherfree isolation. evanesce with dignity, melt from our senses into a mirage paradise of abounding joy. villanelles and catacombs, shells and shofars observe the passing. when last did she sample the yet-to-be?
sour licking, roughened knee, scratching from the next room. everything buzzes with news of his death. the apartment seems permanently cooler. steering the conversation away from collaboration. The yet-to-be appears in dream-snippets, quickly melted into the fabric of the day, retrieved, if at all, in these tracings. it is nonstop marvel, roundelay of liquid color, pastures of pretty. so there. on the. scene-swept surround. blackened, inverse. seam-stopped fashion ware. upon the. time-off rectify. villanella, from her village. "home for now / shapen alternately/ know something somehow / no time to sleep"
hoodwinked brightly, wined ever so silkenslippaged and hounded had in eluctable waves, after all & aside from, it is delicious itself, vinal heaven and all, vernal despair, I as my tangent, so deep interred will it ever comfort again. again tightly wound bandage of experience. words dredged from the frozen river, barely bare barren, can you hear the quiet there? can they be counted on to live again. remove the fatal clasp and let the falcon sword. swoon as if architecture becomes 2 dimensional.
Excalivere, the sword-queen, Upright & Elfen invented, jitterbugging on the poet's ashes. The ashes nestle in the hollowed stone in the uncleft crystal in the unfissioned molecule of. the stone sings under the marble floor. the marble floor's sheen reflects the ceiling's vaulted underdome, lit with stars. Alleve the beliefs of, the queen jigs wildly and a bit clumsily, flashing her vermilion leggings. the bindlestiff circus, clownish waif or high-spiked she-tasm waits outside to perform its nomadic sprawlcrawl in tune to the brutal season. Where once mystery becomes unmagicked.
Fiery transposed to faery transposed to flurry. A fluid trance went a-seeking its mission my heart. An imp of the possible tittered offstage, quite adept at the mental artistry, between heavy velvet curtains. Margot Lunaire crooned a dipsomatic tune, treading awhile in search of a breather. Operatic proportions within a miniscule perspective. What potion are you, who enters heavy and patina'd, with silken nap and luxus hand? O you go down slow, aweary & enticed, an amber buzz in full-throated neon. Wavering an easy day's ride from betrayal,
Pressurge from below, a pregnant straining. Fulsomely, the flower presses open, the buds apprehensible at twig-tips even in the dread of winter, how do they do that? a swirl of light on bricks, a glance of hollow panes, we move in language only. the tongue feels fatly comforted, raked by its own guardrails --who hasn't played "tongue-in-the-mirror" when grownups weren't looking?
round perversions lead to mazed blissfill. brassy bitch braggart? strident siren sass? mina bird is loy loy too loud. a fall thru the chute holds her attention always, but the nod is dreaming on. ignore this if. head on desk. sad instrument of drama.
unreined it pours, the blackstrap snake out of the heart in meting ribbons, the intensification of unchecked wordflow from a jejeune filly, she cradles her emotion --such as it is --in her arms like the old moon holding her back. Severed mothercords all over, flailing and leaving her flailing, the traction removed, the limbs unlocked, whereto the surge of the thick potion running down the street, in public for all to see?
vorticle movement, energy swathe, swordbroad agin the noggin, malapropped all over the sidewalk in bytes and slitherines. nomad e-links mesh our names, if you're willing, or ink-monde, or modal ink almost does it, the world of liquid print, the cosmos of expanded tracery, the chinoiserie of yonderyear blooming on the skin of her back, all bitten tintypes for dioramas in our molten dreams.
A flat black light in the warm cafe, the ice descends from the west. A day breaks up and melts, floats off bit by bit into floodtime past forgetting. Involuntarily the memoirs unwrite themselves, the words on the page unraveling, untwisting from their innate marvelous grotesquerie into dimensionless grace, and then, altogether spun off into invisibility.
The naked clown has fallen through the cables, disappeared into the fluid electricity we call aborted communication, and can only be salvaged thru reference. so be summoned, ravaged fool, wasted daredevil, singer under arrest in your hospital bed, and take on the presence of plenitude. let your wishes be known and blown into fullness, that the small rain down may rain, and i be with you again.
a reverential kissing, a peaked kneading, and the fur flies. odor of gingerbread and heat clicking. why should clarity be either avoided or sought. a dreamless sleep is worth the wake. In exile from her bandmates, she contemplates the injestibles: which will absorb the most toxicity? Hurled and brawled, the poison shimmers in the vial as she takes up the veil.
a breathless day, colorlust lost in the freeze, only the stamping and blowing. a pair of fur-trimmed rabittskin mittens makes milady a delicate smoothing, and a few words from last fall intervene as a pick-me-up. sunken prayers don't bring the ship back, but another kind of reverence might just. an ideal day to stew up a broth of fragrant essentials, as the wind bites the corners of the house and the gutterpipes flack against the brick walls. outside, sordid; inside, aglow with earth-curves.
the crave, the craven, the blackstrap longing. the mind is doubled over, the face contorted like a jack-in-the-box in a duel-to-the-death. a molten interior begets begotten, no taste for the weary. long me to your lash, cleft to your slide, engendered from your side. a word esapes sideways, lightning-bolted to somewhere else.
concatenated out of sight, molly cool's dancing and near ones breathing, a tome opens at just the right stoop, where I read illegibility material, gap practice, death hands. blank blurt of freedom, extending from here out to the multiple window frames, the harsh sun and shadowed winter. Making the tricks so interesting that they are not tricks at all, but meaning. A cutting waist, a cumulative mollification, a healthy pleasure-daze. To make you have this experience with me, with him, to fold you into it so you can't look past me.
In a hothouse dream the bodies of many relatives jostle and stumble me. To say to the boy next door, "You're nice, but you're nothing special" just to see what would happen ... as he spoke of certain "needs" that faded him beyond ardor. Yolanda Yasmin came into an oasis of azure blue babyhood, just as the final letter of the alphabet wavered into water, the highest aspiration of her tainted dreams, those creams and drachmas cluttered on the shelves, her hands fumble at the loom, she says his name.
a swathe of words lost forever, the caravan of syllables lost in the duststorm, she has said his name the highest aspiration of her highest aspiration, and it was for nothing for a whispered wraith that writhed away into the desert night. the letter bloomed blue like regular punctuation on a blood-field, like a lake in a mirage of loneliness, like an idea masqued as a simile, like a light or a lock or a lotus, forgetting to take the dreamless sleeping injesture potion.
Demon and gnosis, dream upon dream of celebrity visitations, the Great Black Poet at the guitar (which he'd never play in "real life"), mishaps in hotel rooms aux Freres Marx with topsy-turned fluffy pinks all over the beds and twisted stairwells and elevators that lead to each other but not to serviceable floors you can walk on. And how about that dream in the fake medieval village which is really a ghost-occasion, so there's a horror to the comedy, when you miss the plane to Denmark and end up inbetween Switzerland and Austria, some fake place where German is spoken and the money can't be changed and the chocolate shops are really hideouts for war criminals.
torn bits falling out of the white heaven-above, randomly. glass-angled planes invade on the right, where before was a space for the sun to rise. vision crowds in on itself. don't say "my," don't say "i." in a white heat the power is thirst. in a red hot the temptation is burning. in a deep sleep the learned invisibles are conspiring in honeyed breaths, what are they up to?
round about later, dig and dig again, the rounds of skull-drudgery, built to groove. Break the music in half, and it gains an octave. Tenacious tentative, built on a rock of sand slowly eroded, sank and billowed inward, the words escaped the silk implosion, the paratroped gyrosole blossom, perforated floragram, the invisible writing of flowers. What is the etymology of gibberish; it is echoic and next to gruesomeness.
A folly ardor stages its own nemesis --it is to be hoped, when others are roped in. A folly ardor bathes in purple drivel, it wants to be more than it is and moves into a power vacuum in the workplace. A folly ardor is bad karma, mark my words in dumbled ink. A turtle says so most incontrovertibly.
erase and repass, a magic zesting, a laying-over of text on text in brocade grandeur, a semblance of gold, a burnish to wear, a djambala twist and all comes about harmony-threnody one-two-three. ease me, plotinus and longinus, a fat attitude will best be beauty beset in tiara encrusted, beryls topaz and roseate mumblings. in the cracks, the reaves inside the jewels' interiors, are the unthreading whispers, the gaudy transmissions, estuaries of meanings. thus spake Meander and Menander.
high
intelligenceThe free domain of the pleasure-hand permits: awakening under pressure, under leisure, under miragic miracle, under water, under fire.
After an extended contortion w/ you ... plotion injexture addddiction desperanto wavers into the foreground. The pretense of collaboration, my precious fiction, whirls into unrave, unravel, unravelment. Call on my tomorry, you'll find me a groove man a grieve man a grave man, a man.
at the adenauer cafe, hurts rankled, pouted confection bequisted. overall, a dominion effervescent, quaff a legitimacy with literature cum literacy. ubu all a y'all, nothin on me. eliotic strains miss by a feather-length, hit the rites of sparkle instead.
after a period comes a two-step dance, in which i cannot find my way. some poets can do some things with words, bend and swoon them, twist and cry out them, i'm thinking of one from philadelphia who made water talk silent, the waves lapped at our uprightness, eroded our apprehensions. erase this later. so grateful that you cited oblivion, maieusis, any of several perfumes, and myrmidons thereof.
at the androgyne cafe, alimentary bliss lipslicks haunting corners. after a pernod comes a quickening, and then the lust longed for flickers and evanesces. blue flame special, one word after the other tugged out of mind, perhaps the thought-fairy will leave a brilliant aperçu under the pillow tonight.
eros of collabriative plunder, don't fail me now. heroes of tactile sabotage, make off with everything. a vision of justice stands to be fractured in the water by a stone's-throw anyway. a nemesis is as good as a simile.
heavy fluid matrix, blue wedding of sorrow with sorrow's tomorrow? myself with my next-day tasks, unasked for at that. a rise of day early and early, a greater pleasure graver. not to be misuderstood, how could. an irksome burden, a word salad, give me a proust i can hold onto, a snake that takes a journey to the center of the tale-told heart, unvelopes its centrifolds and opens the rose-pour outsward. Sore tendered, a heartfelt absence, cold to the bone, the family crux, roseate we'd wish, but how unso these months and years.
but i will keep that to myself: poets and visionaries might be jealous. enumerations of hallucinatory palliatives --if only, if only. we do indeed want to further our chatterie, if only to make friends with the abyss right behind it. fultime futility plant, fire me up.
a sentence made of salvages, crippled words and glorious jetsam, colibrious featherwords and stained glass vowels, ornate wrought meta-things leaned into shapes just beyond the grasp of description, tall luminaries aglow with o's and i's, cracked detritus baubled and pampered and gathered into syntax cornucopia.
stained with the goddess on my lips imperfection makes a berry grunt, a tease of dehissence as she parts my lips, threatens to, open those lips, you, taste, smeared with fuschia goddess-stain, ma deesse, so many different way to say your syllables, the need to part the lips to utter, most compliantly, to fuse a new language world all crimson and crystal, a metaphysical cooing, a larynx explosion coming soon.