Thursday, January 28, 2010

Automatic Ballad (or not) for Jean Arp

Teller of found immensities:
abandoned bulb, abandoned bone
marble-lip, sound throat-less, free
great chunks of plastic: saxophone

Herder of cloudy Coquille thirst
or splintered wood, improbable blue
an accidental           automatic ego-quill
of unmeasured orange gutty stew

Star lust reeks in plastered blanc
unnoticed thumbtack    winking toad
crystal umbrage orbits thick
within otherwise worlds untold

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

[they are....]

they are stopping to consider the trees
how a shopping trolley
to roll the wind track like a trail
yes, Timothy was nice

only eat drink sleep
or once in a while
presently smelling so new
all blown to hell gone out
another happens, or is happening
so sporting like cricket the seabirds

there is formica there are robots
to be scared of an absence
as I to be bookish
and unending a fillet
summers day or
toothy grinning man

a street corner or elevator
buried as iconoclast
over stopping foppish radio
and department stores
a loop that is dependent
contextually the dew
floating over bridges
brittle to support breakage
a jawbone

Monday, January 25, 2010

unexpected evidence of a yellow poppy about to bloom

The flapless dip of a buff thrush in sudden flight
is a frozen snap of broadcast joy obliquely snatched-

in that moment certain moment just the same

you are the cirrus cloud you see you are
breathing at sunset into sure dissolve
leaving nothing but of breath behind
except the exhaled trails of atoms clashing,

when one jagged node through the gnarled pines
delaying darkness with yet more darkness still

egresses into sudden light:

a death that seeks to conquer death
with pebbles tossed to distant curbs;

the opposite of myopia is a tremolo just dissipated
into dusky assignations on the boulevard of minor keys,

a fillip without cream or sugar
that takes its black and proper place
in the azure pantheon of ceramic doubt,
the bloody hole of a glazed donut
drizzled back upon itself
on a disk of princely Doulton.

Entwined with the discipline Etrusca
a headlock of four syllables for the cursus velox
slams the lettered mat with a rough phillipic
funneled from the aural miasma
into the channel of your bronze and purple vision:
an idiopathic halo in a message of bright.

The propensities and densities of animated meat-
the meat is animation, animation meat,
or so he claimed once in Amsterdam:
his naught was not a vengeful naught
nor incensed by the orange burn of clove
upon the third forehead of a creeping dawn;

a hare stomped upon the pungent reeds
but the warning was diffused by punks
standing erect among the fragrant petals:

from zygote to zombie and back again,
a second coming is surely not enough

Sunday, January 24, 2010

value





the monkey chased the elephant down the empty highway
he finally cornered him in the back lot of an abandoned walmart
you have cost me a lot,
said the monkey

and i hate to do this to you
but you have too much value
what is cost,
asked the elephant

and what is value
as the monkey brought the ruby encrusted statue of the virgin
(or maybe it was vishnu or lenin or sarah palin)
down on his head

the elephants last
thought
was
but i'm bigger than he is





Saturday, January 23, 2010

The unkind art of feeding

You have to feed on something,

they said, or I imagine them
saying, and I do... but I don't
want to feed,
at least not doing it to trade
in visible doubts for a life's
uncertain

drift between I am, and I'm not...
fed fat by the neatly packaged
carcasses
clearly drained and cellophane wrapped,
to keep unclean hands bloodlessly
far from mine.

I'm told but I won't hear, We're more
highly evolved
. We think therefore
we are so
discomfited by not knowing...
whether the fed-on think and feel
what we do

when life's last light runs out, taking
with it the green and red that played
over flesh
and bony because... if they do,
it could be, we're feeding on one
another.

That's the unkind art of feeding.

Friday, January 22, 2010

sos

Stale peeps and Coco Wheats
Things that make my life complete
Shipped in a box across the blue
Can you wrap yourself up too?

separate hard lumps

"This person suffering from hereditary defects costs the community 60,000 Reichsmark during his lifetime. Fellow German, that is your money, too." (Nazi poster, 1932)

The arrest warrant made
his silhouette a capital offence
since they stopped distinguish between
watery and separate
lumps

in between
the soft bulbs
the rollicking spinach and rollercoaster snake
lays wholesome meaninglessness

the core is not rotten it's a house dick
what tastes best
entirely liquid or sausage shaped but
lumpy?
Doesn't matter you say you're hungry

Leave the spitting skirt
the weak sister is tipped by a
few
but you don't mind
you never mind
all you need is your eugenics
your master calls now


Disclaimer: So there will be no misunderstanding; please notice that this poem expresses my disgust for this kind of philosophy (however you probably understood that).

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Building a Rainbow to Caliban, in Seven Steps

1. Red-eyed, not weary, we feed
on the rarefied
aerial leavings of gruntled clouds.

2. An Orange gap carves out when
the gobbling is done,
and strings are strung tight across that lap.

3. These six wires grate full Yellow
hymns into fine crumbs,
sifting down through curious weather.

4. The suppler notes land to Green
and moisten stretched tongues
on mannered ferns eager to praise sing:

5. Of powder Blue complexions,
jays abandoning
spent wings to totter off at twilight,

6. In search of Indigo fins
and shallow pools where
they might paddle up enough courage

7. To ask the Violet sky
to stay its blushing
hues, so he'll never be wak'd again.

Francis Scudellari

Monday, January 18, 2010

Nerk

the burro is clever
with skull mounted GPS
the total sombrero
signature

is sombre
like an hombre

home brays
and each day
we are born
into a collective

prayer
do not let
the shallowness
of appearences
befool
or befoul

the absolute
transgressivity
of any given

Lennard-Jones
potential

Necessary Medicine

“The wren lives in brakes and crevices -Aristotle Historia Animalium IX.xi
“The hand does not divide into hands nor the face into faces. –Aristotle Historia Animalium I.i

This is the way things are: the wren skids between cirrus curls,
bark-brown against the suffering blue of afternoon


The tube that leads from the generator to my boy’s mouth
is clear and lined with pin-prick drops that bebop along

the metonymic chain should be swallowed slow--the wren
will ride on broader wings, hidden within the plumage of within

He does not breathe without the presence of my hand against the mask--
vapors, ravaged metals, enter his throat like rapids fall from fissured stones

The wren will be crowned king of birds, cunning in yellowed plume
watered-yellow as the eye of the broad-backed glider it rode upon


This is the way things are: I cannot see inside my boy.
His lungs I failed to build may be etched with blue vessels

The miniature mechanic of the sky will sail down on razor feathers--
its clever ascent guided by necessity.


He leans into me, slow. His belly, all that living estuary,
fits in the palm of me. The lungs I failed to build I flood with mist.

Reconstruction is made possible with wings and tubes

Sunday, January 17, 2010

the wanderer





icy lights
behind black

glass. come on
buddy, you

have to go
someplace else

can i stay
until i

finish my
candy bar

let's go - now!
i went to

harvard, i'm
a teacher

at berkeley
the candy

bar's made of
coconut

it will freeze
and break my

teeth, all right
make it hard

on me, do
you really

want to make
me fill out

a report
and take you

downtown in
this weather?



then i won't
be your friend

any more
i went to

harvard. i'm
a science

professor
at berkeley

berkeley is
three thousand

miles away
i know, i.m

waiting for
the bus, but

i lost my
ticket, and

besides, you
are not a

real cop, just
a transit

cop, oh just
a transit

cop, and this
is what, your

private bed
room, icy

lights. sudden
blast of air

goodbye. lost
my ticket






Saturday, January 16, 2010

the waves break in triplicate

i. try a little dumbness

a flipper with a creaky wheelbarrow
can, seasick, carry so little else:
even numbers hoist a tragic burden
of twos and fours and sixes-
an orange drum of oozing crude
squats in the scarlet square of public proof:
normal schooling has not broached the riddle of three-
perfect odds for the splashing pod of scalene glee:

this is the first wave, barely asking questions,
feckless breakers born of slim perception.

ii. then came the silly thumping

a hairless mammal born of aqua water
smooches to a lonely warehouse groove
propped on stilts of rust and gray,
scratching a riff devoid of moisture,
in a turn-table suit striped with pockets-
fine this crime that outlives the sea:

this is the second wave, rhythm rising,
a changeling child of chilly waters.

iii. trump is the beginning of cool

a vest of stuffed squid and shrimp is stylish
for most of the downstream fossils:
these slick boardwalks in the fresh of splintered rain
where triple cool are collar pops in lemon pink
for the eternal culture of grope and move:
it's never too slim for a flippered slipping-
to grind this sand to a fine-toothed beach:

this is the third wave, darkling by nature,
a cunning crash of foam and spray.

Friday, January 15, 2010

greasy sculls

Auroral sub storms
decipher a jading look
mold off watery sphere's
core it’s
out of action

prominence of
heliospheres
ionospheres

will not avert
the slave’s filament
ripping the bloody nucleus
of hushed bodies

welcome to the geosynchronous
judgments keep
forgotten urns on
muddy ground

do not linger with
them
elliptical sub storms
took their accord
eons ago

No,
bend your ear to the ground
among greasy cold
sculls
you will hear
harmonies
curved
strangely

shaped hilarity

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

the pulchritudinous turpitude of medusa in the tub

i. to peek upon the washing is its own secret rite

the first bath of an oddly promising spring
easily births its own peppery cascading joy-
what might have speckled in the constant winter
rushes into the copper stream and, lonely, drifts away:

the pesky mites that might have ravaged bloody roses
clamor onto crafty rafts of golden straw and, clutching, float away-
they will not burrow in the clay-skinned perfection of ageless models,
they only want to, quietly, stroke themselves and drift away.

ii. windows are made of abysmally slow liquid

reflections of a dead branch grasping,
held by green hands that will not let it drop:

these trees inside the water
that hints of other currents.

in the dry season the rooks come out to play-
it is not the dry season now:
the release of pent-up yellow on the weedy hill
has its own inner sense of play.

a shadowy plumb of straightened lines,
in the sinking house of stark soffits:.

skinned knees on cracked concrete are a plum reward.

iii. it's hard to deny the cyclical

there is no mortared vault of berries yet,
inscribed in autumn with the thumbing of beads
or the angled facts of a hooded ghost:
the jeweled sconce of red and blue and green
plastered in a room that has drifted obscene.

through the years no angle stays true:
the pedestal font begs for the dirt of your ablutions
and the adulation only, if at all, reflects back at you.

there may be a green salad at the picnic next door.

Stones

Lately, simple stones have taken on
the heft of enormous boulders.

It could be that our gravity has changed,
or that these rocks are newly made
of a matter with greater density.

I'm ever an enthusiast
for Greek myth, its stories penned far away
in fertile fields of elites bred
from the straying loins of finely flawed gods.

That's what I tell most, but I couldn't
tell you any details about twelve labors,
monsters taken, torn asunder.

Hercules must have shouldered his burdens,
I imagine, froth at the mouth,
drawing on his inner strength to support
the brunt of a weighty world's cares.

Or was that Atlas? The question may be
moot, examining my own thighs.

Francis Scudellari

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Aubade

originally posted 14/09/09

(wo(a)nderings from a night person...)
Dawn sneaks up
on a person like me
who used to drink her way
through the night &
justify to an itinerant conscience
the lines she crossed in the name of surviving
I cut myself
loose & now I sail into golden dawn
on a sea of tranquility
caressed by flickers of early purple
awakening
helpless as water
to the pull of the moon

Monday, January 11, 2010

Tingling

at last...

he pours out, his coctions
conned with too-cunning smile
from these gullible tips of wilting

lips impetuously
pushed by a pouting posy.
Its bunched buds weep chartreuse then slink

off into the waited
years of welcoming swallows.
Their needle wings paired with calls pierce

the sky's purple-black bruise,
revealing light, stenciled clues
he sorely needs to fly himself

up to shivering heights.
Once shin-deep in substrata
routes flooding forth from badly zoomed

maps, his questions run
afoul. Ascot-wrapped but choked,
the relentless sinks to unhealthy

altitudes, and he falls
through stained ceiling of acid
nave where his fancy first took off.

Tingling...

Francis Scudellari

Saturday, January 9, 2010

home grown religion

There's an ellipse beside me
grinning James
I abhor you

not because of your
alcohol intake
the fact that you
never cut your hair
wear white shirts and
frequent knick knacks in your abode

it's because I've
shaved mine short
drinking standard beer
wearing neutral-colored shirts
keeping my habitat colorless

smoldering ash
twice the man I am
seeking faith in inertial observations
snubbing money-making clerics
because they are fundamentally ugly

you’re my
home grown religion

Friday, January 8, 2010

SUSPICIOUS YOUTHFUL JUICE


Suzanne Somers promotes a fountain
That has some doctors upset.
It affords a juice which has been recommended
In order to hear voices far away or of the dead.

I wasn't even suspicious about that place.
You don't have to call the plastic surgeon in a futile fight.

But this truly is a person
Who had gone to gruesome lengths
To keep her pinch of powder out of this skull
And mix the gland juice with the powder.

A raw food is said to be Demi Moore.
It is hard to know whether to be impressed, suspicious or amused.

Mrigashira natives will help you zap your handset back to life
When every juice is gone. Frequently named in the Bible,
Their absence would be famous for the fatness
Of the olive and the sprightly juice
Of this popular new Jamba Juice flavor.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
This is a country that has always been suspicious of centralized government.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Wen Chang

I wake monastic
to a morning of spare light,
and an itch to be
tetchy lingering from last
night's candle-lit creeps.

A quick rummage through closets
where I keep hidden
pantechnicons of surplus
garments discarded
by near houses of worship,

finds a never-worn
surplice cut to my liking,
and I slip it on
starched and musty white
atop wrinkled blue

jeans. In the hall, I perk up
primula bouquets
laid at feet of ivory
and I ignite
a joss stick, letting its curls

of fragrance implore
the deity to bring down
his leather-bound book
and nobble my stubborn mind
until its ructions

subside. But Wen Chang keeps words
clutched dear to his breast,
and I'll need another means
of making myself
a muggins with romper thoughts

new freed, ever penned
to bounce about. So I head
to the scullery
and peal yellow and red blotched
skins from twelve pippins

to bake in two tarts, bubbling
up brown: One I'll eat,
the second use finally
to coax a musing
from my still stiff friend, Wen Chang.

Francis Scudellari

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

exosat

Feathering Jack
bottolism again
while Spoonful shows adipose tissue
for the man

He'll show the bastard myoglobin
dripping deadly infection
and dark lactic acid.

Endtoxin freezer burn
Jack's rolling into a sphere
while snow falls on leather
and hips naked skin
rotates

yeah, crowded radiant cityscape
breathes hastily icy air
cosmological red shift stays
for a short while
mere dust awaits

no need to kick the center
apastron rules.

Monday, January 4, 2010

N.E.A.T

Years ago, on the Caloris basin
my timepiece congested
manufacturing
perpetuity's silence
without the blast of life
your brown pelt
stopped entwining mine
my wine-colored
room became a hang out flambeau

and you went on and on
I'm a free falling salted sissy
looking for my mug

Radioisotope dating my
man is a bearded fossil
harebrained drained kirkwood
looking for nadir
when she's
gone elsewhere snubbing
your mattress transformation proposal
or my rigid hedgehog

we thought we'd never see you again





cosmic despair (is there any other kind?)
enervated frankie
grittingly hammering iridescent jackrabbits
karmic lethargy mandated nebulousness

open the door
the door opened
ah mr francis
we thought we'd never see you again

good afternoon palgrave
you're looking well
i'm a little surprised to see you still here
perhaps time

doesn't flow
so freely after all
i've been cloned
several times sir

overhead penumbric quasars reverberated
is madame here?
is she well?
she finally had her species change operation, sir

really
and what kind of cat did she finally become
she changed her mind at the last minute sir
and became a goldfish instead

there it is right there
every table and chair in the conservatory
and most of the floor
was piled high with comic books

silent tarantulas undulated sluggishly
we have every issue ever printed
of action comics and detective comics
would you like to read some?

actually i'd like to read them all
would you like to take a closer look
at madame?
no, a goldfish is a goldfish

i'd rather read the
april 1947 issue of detective comics
i think
i missed it the first time around

will there be anything else sir
please order every issue of batman comics
and also adventure comics
i was always a secret superboy fan

vapor of vixenish wineglasses envelop
yet another

zeros are beyond counting





Sunday, January 3, 2010

PLEEEEEEEEAAAAAASE HELP ME OUT


Let me tell you that I have been masturbating for a long time. PLEASE!
Go clear the room out of Harpies and archers
Check out these screens! Pretty Sweet, huh?
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase help, cause I think this MOD looks soooooooo cool!
Greg! Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase, do me a solid? Please help me out!
Hope there is more help included in the game for users like me.
Please give out some more codes. I could not get one. Would review for sure.
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase tell me how to do it!
Then get gun out of safe from the 2 digit number you got earlier

This one goes out to BAB's mum, who has been quite ill
And I would really love you to dance this song pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase!!!!!!!!!!
It didn't help me feel better. But to each his own.

Check it out - finally figured out how to stick you in my top 24.
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase don't let this suck. It would be so funny if that happened to me.
It's not a perfect science, but pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase
Come over and search around my house for parts
That would help me keep this thing attached to my pants.

Sony always wins, baby.
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase link the Chadwarden soundboard,
One more bowl pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase????? I WOULD'VE BROUGHT MY
OWN MONEY IF I KNEW YOU WERE GONNA CHEAP OUT ON ME!
If so, pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase tell me how to do it!
I am begging now, please help me with this game
Please tell me pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase
I don't like to wait
People living in NYC tend to let everything be out in the open

PLEEEEEEEEAAAAAASE!!! If I have helped you, you like my work,
Want to get me a coffee or you feel like you wish to help me,
Help me poop. Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase help me.
The dangly bits thing bothered me.
PLEEEEEEEEAAAAAASE HELP! I HAVE BEEN ON THE COMPUTER
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase!!!!!! Uh, I said NO, seeing as it's 45° outside!
Whoever told you the TT bikes were being phased out doesn't know his a**
Thanx Steve and all of the above (except for hoverboy) for your help.
Any chance you could put WORM OUT or COUNTRY FREAKS up on here Dale?
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase, Please, Please, Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase

So, really, you're telling me you've got sixteen pound balls. Do
Not give out any personal information about yourself pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase
Give us back our thread. Frown. Burnt toast!
Long story short
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase take my number - whoops - her number
And let me know if you find it. Lord help me!
Take your medicine as ordered, and we WILL hold it.
Call out to her. If she wants to see you, she'll be here...come see me, Toy Fairy?
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaaase. (Pause. Nothing...

...should I go?? or should I just go to the CLUB???? Help me out here and
DON'T make me splain it all again...

Saturday, January 2, 2010

ascribe to me a body....

ascribe to me a body
easily broken
that I might bear a story for every scar

assign to me a body
hurt so deeply
the only way to cry would be
a howl

ascribe to me a body
shaped by moments
so time with
you
is
carved
into my craft

author me a body
honed by longing
that I might write
of smoke & spark & flame
blissful fire...
sweet pain
timeless twilight
graceful dawns, easy waking
thresholds, moonscapes
oceans, shorelines
hope's wilderness

ascribe to me this body
changed and grateful
that I might die
with you
as my last thought

Talia lit

Talia lit
a candied wick,
her annual try
to melt away
the cherry-glazed
sadness,

but having
no taste for cake
and no fondness
for pie, she drips pink-
blue stings on her
waiting

palm, its cracks
brimming with waxy
rivers, to set
a striped and flamed
believing, where
as when

the tremors
go out, she'll wish
for tears to rise
and curled smoke to close
the black eyes of
heaven

Francis Scudellari

Friday, January 1, 2010

story with Norse words

window fellow
drags leg
ragged skin
ill kid
freckled gape
root birth
wrong sky
raises muck
lifts gear
scant scraps
slight gauntlet
wants get 
cake loan
until sale
tight thrift
skirting carping
rids trust
calls ill
they ugly
weak skill
ransacks stacks
scores scare
bags egg
casts loose
takes knife
scuffles simpers
hits husband
anger slaughter
clubs both
outlaw law
seem same
low though
bleak crook
wings die