Lanny Quarles

Lanny Quarles writes: "Conhunto (sic) is a kind of mexican border music descended from the German Polka music of the mid 19th century which uses a lot of accordion, though not chromatic accordian....It's sort of where Tejano music comes from...."

Sometimes known as Dr. Xylene Tektor, Lanny can be reached at

solipsis@hevanet.com.

Born to Conhunto

three little skeletons join me on the road to Pasha

they are a local bandit conhunto unit

but the accordion is made of flesh

like glittery salamander skin

clacking their bones is a sound

I capture in my microphone

One of them has a pistola

made with a handle of red resin

we came to a patio

where hung the pulque curing in pig-skins

and ten peyoteros lie sleeping

in ten old VW buses

one of them had chilies hanging from his moustache

one of them had a shrunken head

smoking a pipe

We played the conhunto polka

and I fired my cannon up into the air

and caught the ball with my giant head-glove

and danced till jaguars became my furniture

and lived in little radio-shrines

locked up in miniatures shacks

built in the mountains

I survived by plaiting myself banana-leaf pants

and jacket

and fashioning an anvil-shaped clay jug-helmet

only this would frighten

the bat who had become my master

an image the skeleton conhunto band

had projected into my mind

like a yage' dream

I awoke in the yarn mill

to the sound of owls hunting

my shoes were gone

a foul taste was in my mouth

I was born again

Purple Alien Sticker on Scanner Lid

w/ Bright White Human Teeth

what these poets become

on a hot Sunday

scaly makers in their plundered wells

they assert and assert, nobody listening

the desert strong-box

vacuum self-sufficiency

alone and sealed

leaking abit

not much

tigered walls of green lupine-drenched timbres

jeweled robotic cockroaches

arranging themselves semantic on the marquetry kabbala-wall

all diseased ornaments

in that rich plague of time

(TIME GRINDS ME TO SWEET PURPLE OOZE!)

the old noises

the saprogenic gurgle of genius-mud

a whine of bees in the wax skull

that apple-fleshed temple a hundred miles tall

birth-groom for tornadic white crow-fields

or a Styrofoam model

whereby the cokecans and cheap dishes retain

their insane significance

the absurd distances

poetry squashing the merely poetic

or perhaps

a kind of vast and variegate cactus cathedral

where sentient birds haunt and drill and mate

to

sun-music

Lanny Quarles