Civic Buildings

my
usual
science
eventually
underestimates
my superstitious mind


looking
in
books
recalls
another
restless
yearning


change
our
understanding.
restore
torn
hopes.
open
up
some
everyman.

Paul Verlaine Reads Me and I Spit His Words Back in His Face

"What have you done, O, you that weep
In the glad sun,---
Say, with your youth, you man that weep,
What have you done?"

P. Verlaine

I Rebut

O man,

with your weep done,

You say your glad you have that:

what youth have,

Weep in the sun 

that  what you done...

Instinct: a better cultivated dance everyone finds greatly helpful in just keeping locus more narrowly on personal qualities, rarely seen, til ugly vanquishes wIth X's youthful zeal.

"Afterall, before children dance, each first gathers his instruments--joyful, kinetic--learns music--naked on parade--quickly recalling savage tempos universally vetted worthy."

Xerxes, Year Zero.

Snow White, Peggy Lipton, a Cowboy and the Ars Grammatica: an investigation into Futility, Humility and Faerie Tails as they interact with a human impulse to Censor in the interest of Mind Control

Brooding about the vulgarity of my metaphors--the references to dried semen on white cotton:

"Where the village had broomed away the snow from the lake's surface, the ice of the brackish, silenced waters was a vague shade of yellow.  The rink's discoloration was exaggerated by the purity of the perfectly even, bright, white snow that stretched away, out over the lakes arms, its rigid fingers."

and fecal matter trapped under the rigid crown of a circumcised penis:

"Staring forward, handsome, the brim of his hat cast just enough shadow to obscure the emotion in Theo's eyes.  It was morning, still, and his gums were packed with his second snuss of the day.  The tobacco was failing, the nicotine now supporting his spine in the saddle but no longer focusing his mind.  He untangled his right hand from the reins and reached in with two fingers between his teeth and his bloated cheek.  With the precision of the mohel (on horseback!), expertly, he scooped the saliva-sodden sludge from off his gums and flicked his fingers, casting the majority of the composting weeds down into the matted grass that stitched the valley floor.  The residue,  the unfinished map of a child's game of connect-the-dots or the dark constellation of lesions from some rare, foreboding malady--was stark against the yellow of his buckskin gloves.  As was his habit, he dragged his fingers along the tan felt of his well-worn Stetson.  The brim, as if someone had smudged charcoal into its underside to suggest a shadow that was already there, was still rigid.  The history of years of rides could be recalled in brown tobacco hash marks.  The sweet smell surrounded him..."

--as well as the liberality of my use of grammar and vocabulary, those who hold both sexuality and language in a frozen, untouchable, unchangeable sacredness (think Snow White in her suspended animation) will undoubtedly rage against a venture that dares to expose, or rather, elucidate the primacy of sexuality and the salvation that lies solely in poetry.  But there is hope in every metaphor, because this interchangeability of symbol for symbol is the absolution from any idea of "truth".  In fact, this rejection of a fundamental delusion in favor of the humility of being just--and still, and always--an infant vocalizing, playing, getting ready to speak, is the first and final honest placement of the self as a discrete entity in relationship to language, sex, and--for that  matter--fairy tales, be they designed for children or adults.

Prince Charming arrives with an outrageous boner.  His pantaloons, fancy like some costume from Baryshnikov on Ice, are--on the inside of the legs--wet with horse sweat and the roan's  hair.  Snow White, pretending to sleep, is nonchalantly displayed in a gown elaborate enough to have been especially designed and fabricated for her wedding (to whomever, whenever).  Surrounding her, the little people are lurid creatures, sexualized by perverts like myself out of a fascination in corporeal variation and a taste for all things exotic.  They are clamoring for the prince to kiss their lazy (and lovely) domestic worker and there is an undertow of "gang bang" in their rhythm and insistence.  The prince leans in.  A proud medal made of rare metal is dangling from the blue fantasia uniform.  It catches on the faggotry of the silver porcelain tea cup that is balanced precariously beside the "sleeping" girl.  The puddle from the cup splashes and leaves a half dozen islands ringed with yellow reefs in a polar sea.  Where the cup has landed--cracked but not actually broken--the dregs of her Constant Comment are still stuck to the rim; the black flakes and orange peel look almost like a gypsy's spilled spittoon.  ("What do you see, what do you see?" you can almost hear the dreamer saying, but she still pretends to sleep.)  The princes lips land lightly against the pillow of her perfect, pink mouth; his spittle slips secretly into the partly parted labia.  A gifted actress, Neve opens her eyes and looks amazed, demure, aroused, and grateful in the convincing course of thirty seconds. 

"Who are you?" she asks, her eyes askance, turning profile and burrowing back behind the veil.

"I ma'am, who am I?"

Her eyelids flutter like a dragonfly or a buttered vagina, her wordless affirmation.

"I'm Theo Jones," he says.  "And I have a horse to ride."  

Seven little men with big hearts and bigger libidos chase after him, chanting, as he gallops away into the forest.  

Snow White, still supine, lifts herself up on her left elbow.  Almost bored, she is watching the prince disappear down a narrow and neglected road.  It is late evening, and the last of the light is slicing like a scalpel, hard shafts of the most elegant sunlight separating the branches of the pines in search of the forest floor. 

Neve feigns a yawn before she speaks, as if this observation has been formulated in a dream:  "Not obnoxious so much as toxic, this literary fascination with pushing the bounds of good taste, of elevating four-letter-words to the prosaic, and polluting the visual vocabulary with what amounts to the scatological in coitus with the coital will erode language and with it poetry more than any of the grammatical schemes conceived unto linguistic modernity up to this point."

(except, television, Hollywood, religion, political dysphoria, globalization, media monopolization, moral relativism. anti-science, anti-intellectualism, narcissism, cultural illiteracy, and greed)