......................................................................







Uh-oh: My Search For Truth Has Been Totally Harshed


Because Lady Gaga has abandoned
her Aristotelian investigation into the soul of matter,
I have decided to abandon my search for truth. 
She has also abandoned the practical pessimism
of the Clean Air Act,  which makes me want to
strangle Nietzsche, as it was he who first harshed my
search for truth with his stupid
"Teen Titans versus Brokeback Mountain" novel.

The oceanic calm of the soul —  which the Apollonian Greeks
called "sophrosyne" — is an emancipatory experience,
and hard to achieve, especially when biting tigers
keep harshing the search for truth.
The Midwest happy hour version of the search for truth
reveals nothing less than the fact that the regular search for truth
is nothing more than the search for Gwen Stefani's butt plug,
bogarted during "Cheap Trick Live at Budokan,"
and harshed beyond recognition into a knock-off Kate Spade
gay paisley carpet.

Um, when I was on the University of Maine fencing team,
we used to split into groups and have melees of reviewing
Warsaw Bikini, in which lack of skill and etiquette passed
for the search for truth.
Don't you wonder: What would H.P. Lovecraft do? 
I don't know, but a slick, funky-ass bohemia,
the most popular item at Wal-Mart,
more popular than the Russell Crowe panic room,
brought out the big waterfall whores, classical harshers
of the search for truth —
no, wait: make that
"taser-ers."
 

_______________________________________________________________________________





What Happens If Your Eyeball Falls Out of the Socket?


What happens if your eyeball falls out of the socket?

What if it falls out, rolls on the ground, and no one can find it?

What if this happens while a volcano is erupting and everyone
is being attacked by monkeys?

What if the monkeys are angry because you have distracted them
from punching sharks, and the sharks are mad 'cause they can't punch back,
and now you've got monkeys AND sharks on your ass?

What if all this time you have a four-hour erection?

What if you try to run away, but your erection gets blown off by snipers
atop the Vermont Country Store — will your legs keep going?
What if someone offers you legs, but the legs are from another planet —
should you take them?
What if the alien whose legs were stolen suddenly appears,
and you're standing in a pile of "sea kittens," and the legless alien throws
the "sea kittens" on you, and they're rabid and faking Parkinson's
for the benefit of the Taliban, now led by Bubbles the Chimp,
depressed since his owner died,
and his kindergarten is suing him
(but that's just the way monkeys smell —
 like discarded parts of an old McDonald's —)
what do you do?

Do you pray for a miracle?

But what if all miracles turn out to be bogus,
and the Catholic Church has taken back all sainthoods
and replaced them with LL Bean support cardigans?

What do you do with all the stuff the "sea kittens" horked up?

Oh, so Mother Nature needs another favor
involving clown vagina?

This is not how things are supposed to go in this culture.

Well, just stick around — 'cause the ancient mystery
of "drumstick versus lipstick"
is about to be explained.


_______________________________________________________________________________




Uh-oh: His Is-ness


His is-ness is the gated community problem
of most whiteys:
the full-on grokked populace cadence
of nixon's head on presley's popo
in a limo, with a handful of dudes
named gerald.

His is-ness is green grass blue glass
and 1964: The Tribute
his body a salmon
with black lines waxing
toward thumb-sized Jesus
in yaw time.

Love linen?  His is-ness is of
rough cloth and the moon
and lunch, part ii - the phonemes
of flypaper.
Each night while most of us sleep
his is-ness begets
a soul world
of jacked-up meerkat sugar pickups
floating lucent, vibrant
on echoes.

What did his is-ness look like
before this canticle?
His is-ness was never right
but always an is-ness of little limbs
in first person
taking hold of ambrosia
midway on the trajectory
of flesh
falling from bones.
And so

I am not his is-ness
That breakdown would be tedious
were the gated community not his
and the grokked populace
and thumb-sized Jesus
and popo.


_______________________________________________________________________________




 
Uh-oh: Endangered Species Sushi Jazz Brunch
  
                                             — for Amy Linden


Pizza as a practice is enjoyed worldwide,
and daily, by all nationalities. 
Pizza is everywhere, for all people, right now.
Pizza IS now.
That's why people should not just walk
into a restaurant and say "Gimme a big-ass plate
of endangered species sushi,”  and when the waiter says,
"What species, ma'am?"  people should not say
"I don't care —  you pick."

This charming public vocabulary of seemingly
sweet bliss and nectar is so not helpful.
Personal charms are also not helpful, and neither are
spiritual thoughts and insights.
Especially not helpful are the words
"endangered species sushi jazz brunch."

"There is a crack in everything, and that's how light gets in"
— Leonard Cohen.
The "everything" is an endangered species sushi jazz brunch.
The light is the Gay Pride parade.
And pizza, of course,
is the crack.


_______________________________________________________________________________





Why Are You Purposefully Obscuring the Sunshine Reunion?


This is a story called
“Why Are You Purposefully Obscuring
 the Sunshine Reunion?”
This is a story of desperate doubts
and lots of bait-and-switch.
In this story, people enter a small town for a reunion,
lose their shadows and die.
While I prefer dealing with real shadows,
not strange Hindus who cast hideous plant shadows, 
I must give the author points for beginning with Pausanias
fornicating at a bake sale.

This is a story that asks:
How many Hindus are tree-huggers?
What is their slush outlook?
Where are their big-bosomed dogs?
Do their “breathalyzing darkie” stories measure up?

In this story, the narrator used to be a married pederast
but his child-wife died,
and he has been in a state of denial about it.
Then he meets a kind old witch who wants to make him into
 a pig-headed venture capitalist
for a super-subversive car snacks company.

In this story the narrator, John Mouse, slips into
an alternate, derivative, overdetermined universe.
He doesn't know where he is, but everything seems
somehow familiar:  a relatively unclothed woman
is waiting upon a bed of thick rumpled crushed amber velvet
in a rosy half-light emanating from the silver jewelry
in her navel. He begins to think this universe
is better than the one he came from.

This is a story that says people need something else to love
besides metal crosses running with the blood of owls.
And these people who need something else to love
are members of an advanced race whose genes
have been enhanced and engineered to control the brains 
of the only three Mad Max whores left in Texas.

In this story, pirates appear; they speak a pidgin dialect
indicating their debased condition
and repulsive sexual implants.
But these unchic, unfit and unfunny people
all have their place — hiding breathalyzed darkies
in their body cavities.
 
In this story, John Mouse used to be a whore photographer,
but one day he looked up and observed the highly annoying
moral oversimplicity of snow geese flying toward China,
and it made him mad, and ever since he has been
killing and making cookies out of the dead snow geese
because he is totally ghetto.

I am totally ghetto, too.  But in this story,
people who are fans of opera are not. 
And fans of opera do not want to see Mad Max whores,
aggressive in blackness, chasing unwanted pregnancies
around a fountain.

Suddenly, about halfway through this story,
Blue Man Group appears
and goes looking for the Empire State Building
on the shores of Tel Aviv, because in the past
the carnivorous ghosts of reincarnated elephants
lurked in the forests of the mundane world,
or some variation on it
similar to forcibly Christianized Moravia.

At this point in this story the narrator joins forces
with Blue Man Group, looks at a photo of himself
as a child on his mother's lap,
and decides to remain in her womb
to more effectively fight alongside hypothetical vat-born
Danish commandoes in their life and death struggle
to bury the grisly spectre known as Dead Headless Toad Dog.

Dead Headless Toad Dog was once an aspiring actress at Six Flags
portraying a celestial figure dancing naked over a glowing heath
and telling a story of dragons at sunset, 
and winds that bring the dreams of a thousand warriors
all dripping with the anguish of fallen nations,
and heavy with the pathos of years.
Then Lord Brawl (a.k.a. Dr. Sneaks — also Johnny Volt
 because he generates his own electricity with a pacemaker)
appears and bawdy mayhem ensues,
resulting in Leonard Cohen's famous line:
 “If there is really a heaven, it is highly unlikely to be a place
where angels work long hours in cubicles.”

The problem with this story is that it is never clear
whether Blue Man Group have really appeared
or if Taylor Swift has tragically only hallucinated them
as a trail of mature virgins for Women’s History Month.
In the end, however, this tragedy rather compensates
for the long moments of twee.
Another problem is that Johnny Volt's abilities
have attracted the attention the electric company,
which claims he must be stealing current.
And this is complicated when Lorgash the troll
contracts smallpox and moves to the mountains
where she will not infect any other trolls.
But the mountain folk decide to make her into a mandroid,
which sucks because trolls hate mandroids.
And then pterodactyls descend
to devour the senior center.

The story ends when an alien stalk pierces the Earth,
like a toothpick through an olive,
and the Beverly Hillbillies take control of Venus,
and individuals finally begin to believe
that paste really is pretty lumpy.
Things are then forced into the glib and facile.
Fortunately, this renders the concluding miracle —
that hard-of-hearing men are actually hard —
extremely credible.
 

_______________________________________________________________________________





I Am So Not Rocking the Long-Sleeved Under Armour Today


It was a great decision to rock the long-sleeved Under Armour.

But today I’m wearing Spandex.  That’s right—Spandex.  

Before you take your mental picture of me wearing Spandex, I better inform you
that Vin Diesel, jaw clenched and wearing a bikini and a fur coat in a kiddie pool,
is so front-loading his mischief right now he’s the only one who knows that I went
to Gay Pride wearing rhinestone DUBYA snappers.  Then the fat ninjas busted in.
The disco bloodbath that ensued was so insular that I'm the only one who knows
that Vin Diesel does not just order a steak – he orders The Last Unicorn.
And this creates a paradox that unravels the crop circles that Satan made his bitch
when Vin Diesel was born, and the nurse said, “He built this city on rock and roll.”

I simply do not have the words.  Oh, wait; what about “kill me now”?

Sadly, this 100th Generation Honda Civic Forum reeks of 1988.  It also smells of
“Kindergarten Cop.”  But I am happy to see my ass there.  There I am, wearing
a maxi pad slathered in aloe vera, even though I’m not Asia Argento.   That wasn’t
Vin Diesel's fault though; Vin came a long way from afro-wearing break dancer
from the LES.   For those of you who have not been cryogenically frozen,
a mid-30's stud wearing a Starbucks shirt, then dropping out of Hunter College
so he could make the move to lactose intolerance by wearing his underwear
on the outside of his pants, will be far scarier than Vin Diesel beating Hitler
while wearing Jewish-tough-guys as fancy contact lenses.   Rule# 1:  Do not turn a
creature of lesser intelligence into a skinny guy wearing a shirt stuckt down in his
pants and a big round hairstyle of Nicolas Cage.

Vin Diesel Is _____ And Young.
Venus Williams's  Ass  Is ____ .

Hello, I'm Chuck Norris!
 

_______________________________________________________________________________





I Am Mormon-Hot


I am hot.
Mormon-hot. 
Oh my effing God, I am sick-hot.
Ick-hot.
Ich bin ein Mormon hot.
Mormon-Fight-In-A-Clown-Car hot.
And that includes soup.
World’s-oldest-freestanding-pagoda-visited-by-Mormons hot.
Married Mormon Graduate Students On Welfare hot.
Tragicomic-mormon-homosexual-at-war-in-california-face-down-in-the-stun-bath-
weeping-hot-tears-behind-3D-glasses hot.

Feminist Mormon Housewives + Bath Time = hot.
Mormon Mommy Wars>>>The Agony that is Weaning:
            hot showers, self-pump, bacon and hot dogs . . .
Hot.
Postum ..... Twinkies … hormones …  the Book of Mormon tells us
that women are nothing but a hot married gay Mormon man who,
once inside the body, just mimics estrogen.
Even though the Mormon church is based on
a 14 year old’s dreams and fantasies,
the Mormon mega-dance phenomenon —
fog machines, cool deejay, earsplitting music, wallflowers, cliques —
is not just cute but four hours of man sweat
leaked from a Mormon man-ass.
Hot!

I'm blaming Mormon hormone replacement therapy
that Women are from Venus, Men are from the Book of Mormon
where God has blonde chicks hanging all over him!
Celebrated tuxedo-shirt-wearing beefcake and Christmas greeting amanuensis
Laura Bush must be a Mormon,
‘cause If you've ever looked into her eyes,
you know she'd be the first to share a comforting bowl
of hot, buttered polygamist Mormon squirrel
while self-raping in prison.
In the hormone charged mosh pit of 2008's Mormon Prom
I found the most
Christ-centered utopian dream . . .

_______________________________________________________________________________





I Am Registering The Timbre Of A Plastic Bottle Hitting
A Wooden Floor Midway On My Trajectory Toward Death

                                             — for Steve Evans


I've been doing some interesting work with kitty slippers which,
when sewn out of newspapers headlining Iraqi death tolls,
create a cheap parody of our planet
that constitutes a kind of science.
Or, failing that, art.
I’ve also been taking sick-hot Tommy Hilfiger teddy bears,
made in Ameribama of spindly bones,
and shelving them up high, so that they appear to be
staring down like a cat.
I have also put Arcade Fire in a room with Vincent Price's corpse,
threw in the Berlin Zoo’s flash mob climax
and the three keys to God’s secret uterine temperament.
What I got was an alternative universe buddy movie
where Anthony Hopkins smirks at Chris Tucker while both of them get fat,
and a single note from the throat of Michael McDonald
echoes across the planet
over the course of a Kali Yuga.

Sometimes I get so caught up in these ornate recipes
that I forget the humble loaf of bread prototype
for the Mount Rushmore / Holly Hobbie
“prairie dildo” trope.

Edward Kennedy Ellington, 1899-1974,
once said something similar to,
 “Doesn’t ‘Destination: Redneck’
 feature a crude parody of Yoda
 getting his groove on with Pink?
Too bad he failed malaria training.”
Yeah, too bad.
I could’ve made some awesome kitty slippers
out of his damn creamy bee.


_______________________________________________________________________________





I Am Sensitive Energy For the People


Do you perceive fantastic, exotic things that other people can't —
like non-corporeal tongue fungus in fleas?

Do you sense things that you couldn't — or shouldn’t — logically sense?
Like intangible clouds of Irritable Bowel Syndrome in malls?

Do you feel the pain of the world within your own heart, manifesting
as cat flatulence?

As a highly sensitive person you may know you are different.
After a while, you may be aware that others think you are stupid,
or have stupid ideas: an envied “normal person” just sees a three-bean salad,
but you — a creative, highly sensitive person — probably see
Sam Peckinpah judging the “Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas Pageant”
in front of a bullfight for vacuum cleaners,
and maybe much, much more.
Like perhaps three white people who are not LL Cool J  —  one of them being
Bob Dylan and the other two being a pole-dancing Madame Blavatsky
on top of Edgar Cayce — receiving a brain transplant from a vending machine
for ten cents worth of “Radar Love.”
Or Jamaican children specially rendered into a pickled herring paste
and served on crackers in Jamaica.
Whatever.

It’s not peaceful or calming when we air out the unconscious mind.
For example, in making titanium jewelry we may initiate
a cascade of tortoises.
 

_______________________________________________________________________________





I Am All Over The Oblique Ascensions Required for the Process of Achieving Aphesis


Untroubled by history, religion or research, I am passed out in this here alley
halfway between the smell of stale piss and rat droppings, naked and titty-pink
in the cold dim dawn, and it’s Wednesday.
 

Wednesday is considered either the third or fourth day of the week, depending on
whether you start your week on Sunday or Monday. That’s why the Dutch call it
something I can’t pronounce.  Here in the U.S. we call it “hump day.”  Which is what
French people call every day, when they’re not using the term “le weekend.”


There’s lonely weekends and there’s lost weekends.  Some weekends you’re the
dog, other weekends you’re the hydrant.  “The Lost Weekend” won the Academy
Award in 1945.  But Freddy Fender had a hit with “Wasted Days and Wasted
Nights” in 1975.  In the words of the husband of the woman who wrote
Frankenstein: “The barely articulate Jack White has never found weekends
particularly sad.”

I’ve never met Jack White, but I am passed out in an alley and also not particularly
sad, but definitely deciding to abandon this heedless delusory sleep of a unicorn
Tom Cruise.  Where does my “American Idol” cell phone end and my hangover
begin?  Answer: between the sharp smell of stale piss and the rat droppings which
contain bits of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s beef stroganoff that she made with
hundreds of petals from the famous Julia Child Rose during the days when fishes
walked and forests flew.


I never once saw a Toronto Maple Leaf hockey game, but I have eaten a beef
stroganoff, though maybe not the one made by Sister Rosetta Tharpe from the
petals of the famous Julia Child Rose.  On the other hand, the reason I’m passed
out in this here alley in the first place is because I just experienced a foursome
with the fetching Olson Twins and rounded out by Penn Jillette.


Penn Jillette displayed a glorious beauty like that of a fat valley, and we know this
from the Bible, the part in Ezechiel about the ritual orgies of the Serbo-Croatian
beard-pullers, from whom Penn Jillette is descended:  “And the glorious beauty of
Penn Jillette, which is as a fat valley, as the hasty fruit before the summer, which is
what the beard-pullers seeth, and with their walrus teeth eateth.”


These Serbo-Croation beard-pullers were ithyphallic, concupiscent men, whose
modern-day descendants continue to luxuriate lewdly in the dandruffy sacristies of
academia, visible from every vista, like Tiny Tim marrying Miss Vicki on “The
Tonight Show.” 

 
At some point during his life, Tiny Tim emptied a can of spaghetti into a frying pan,
in imitation of a crude turnip parody of the woman whose bulbous and squat
na-na is the only thing required for the process of achieving aphesis.   He then succeeded in cloning a Giant Tiny Tim Squid while stranded on a desert island off the coast of Taiwan, where the Olson Twins were spotted rearing chicks on the jagged reef nearby and in desperate need of a good puppy name. Therefore, the clone was made as a way of getting a chance to start over again with a more creative interpretation of Tiny Tim:  Michael Jackson.


The Olson Twins never once saw a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game, either, but
they did cook and eat squid with Julia Child on her long ago cooking show, “Staten
Island: Friend or Foe”?  And at some point someone will come to in an alley and
rediscover the squid / Tiny Tim clone wearing white sweater socks and singing
“Red Leather Forever” at the Pythian Temple.  But it won’t be me.  I came to this
here alley straight from the Midwest in a four-door Impala like a cross between a
honky-tonk hero and a barn-dance fiddler, and I gotta get home now and anoint
my azaleas.  Why am I always saying I’m anointing when what I’m really doing
is abluting? 


_______________________________________________________________________________





Why Am I Suddenly Responsible for John Cougar Mellencamp's Castration Complex?


So, you want to be a rock star but don't have the talent, money or skills?
Just take a look at how Bono’s pre-programmed Al Gore blood Passover
unravels the “castrated Jonas Brothers” allusions of Mussolini eating chalupas.
Then you’ll understand what it means to be under the influence of Aerosol Jesus,
dilating like a mo-fo satyr upon a farm of cysts.  Back in 1980, Ronald Reagan
painted Jimmy Carter in a garden and deprived him of androgens, opening a huge
soft spot in the previously impenetrable defenses of Scandinavia.  It is this spot —
wan and constipated as the Moody Blues, melodic and dripping with emotions —
that inspired the massive fish murder of Congressman Sonny Bono, followed by
a comical theft of 118 minutes of dismembered Taylor Swift.  Even Alfred Hitchcock
could never have imagined that.  And even when you reach the near-insanity of
Bono perched on an angel by a hearing aid store in Dublin, you’re still nowhere near
John Cougar Mellencamp, poisoned, castrated, shot and drowned all in one night
by a priest when he was 13.  Talk about 24/7 dwarf-dark undertones! 


_______________________________________________________________________________





I Am Loving Your Summery Goyish OM

                                             — for Benjamin Bourlier and Jack Spicer


Life is pretty freaking dull these days: I wake up early, go to work,
come home and buffalo blog.  Then I experience your summery goyish OM
and holy peeing game show I itch all over I am big on fire whats up I can not
feel my foot I feel like ice cream getting beaten up by giant stars of GOY and the envy of all things Jewish = the Pixie Dust on PETER PAN!  And because I ain't no Korean social critic there is no way work is getting done as I am losing myself in internet hockey blog fame and the boy-honeys are all over me like a Second Life cheddar Obama knowlege base, and the sun's hitting me, suddenly the damn
sun's all over me, I’m getting showered in golden sun drops, and I’m the
hairiest girl I know bouncing all over Yogi Berra like a duck on a june
bug like a donkey on a waffle electing Millard Fillmore
for a fifth term to rule the Jewish 1960's
with Ray Charles in Montana. 


_______________________________________________________________________________






Why Can’t I Be The Forlorn Mildew of Dorian Gray?


Hey, god of mold: ever joined your cats in a ménage a trois?
Have you and them ever played “hunt-the-fawn” at dawn
while penetrating the deep pie-holes of suburban America?
If you want to have gay sex or visit a library, it's probably
your last night to do those things because my brain, which is on
everything including the front porch, has informed me that Dorian Gray
is really just rare Italian library truck fueled by the plagues of Egypt.
And now all I want to do is be a stooge from an audience of 12-year olds,
getting touched by five presidents.
As I was firing up the MC5 just now, I realized I am totally wtf?'d out
by William Kunstler — and what if Limp Bizkit turns out to be
NutraSweet?  A holiday for mice-sized swine? 
The closeted plausibility of chihuahuas?

Come back, Mickey Rourke! 


_______________________________________________________________________________________________




After turning 50 this year, Sharon Mesmer decided that samsara really is nirvana.

More here:
"Is Flarf Corrosive? A Discussion of Sharon Mesmer's "I Accidentally Ate Some Chicken 
           and Now I'm in Love with Harry Whittington," hosted by Al Filreis.
Three Poems in Jacket 30.  
—Half Angel, Half Lunch, HArd PRess, 1998  
—The Empty Quarter, (Fiction), Hanging Loose Press, 2000
In Ordinary Time, Hanging Loose Press, 2005 
Annoying, Diabetic Bitch, Combo Books, 2008
The Virgin Formica, Hanging Loose Press, 2008