High upon a promontory -- yes, that’s
right, a promontory -- he lies chained to
a great stone face. The chains themselves are stone.
A simple enough trick for a god. No
waving of arms or even a wink of
an eye was required but will only. A
god’s will. And it was done. Now, every
day at noon, birds come to eat his liver
without onions. My friends, I call you friends
for good reason, he will say. Were it not
for you I would have no company at
all. Speaking from experience, I have
a little advice for those times when all
seems lost. Just keep breathing, that’s the way to
do it. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Hold it. Breathe. Hold it.
Hold it. Breathe. Hold it. Hold it. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
* * * * *
I am pleased to be here and would like to
begin with an excerpt from my last book titled, . . .
It doesn’t matter -- you wouldn’t read it
anyway . . . Cantilevered horoscopes
decry untoward photogenic bares
and airs as upside down doors navigate
excelsior and tassels. Novellas
recite covalent platitudinous
homogeneities. Aphoristic
soliloquies dredge plastic coral reefs.
Conspicuous gematria belie
nascent copasetic sestinas as
cornucopic ambassadors inspire
millennial blank assurances, as
tiny lepidopterists and windmills
troll tellingly tumescent aquifers.
* * * * *
I am describing it the best I know
how. As difficult as it is in this,
the rapidly encroaching fog, it is,
still subject to analysis, red, yes,
and easily recognized by the rare
homologous nature of its texture
and circumference. No guessing game, this
is a rapport, an abduction. There is
a house, and not only in dreams, furbished
with antiques, a pale green crackled vase on
a pedestal. Dr. Fost is humping
the daughter of a dear friend from top
to bottom. He is barely able to
recognize the forest for her trees. Tall,
supine, ebullient as Venus, she
rains. Sticky and stuck, they talk while they work.
* * * * *
Traditional Poet: Theogony . . .
Postmodern Poet: You talking to me?
TP: I am reading from the classics.
PP: Haha. You mean the Jurassics.
TP: Ignotum per ignotius.
PP: Mirabile dictu to you, too.
TP: Have you no sense of History?
PP: No history, no mystery.
TP: You’ll see in me the mirrors of
Your Self. To mock traditions is not new.
PP: Fate? I? Lie? I? Not folly now
to mourn his true Kore, coy modern mistress.
Where lies the hope, if all the past is lost
To words? Where is the gain, and at what cost?
Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-
four, one twenty-eight, and more, and more, and . . .
* * * * *
Was any woman ever loved more than
a patent? Not just any patent, but
the patent to vulcanize rubber, whose
inventor lived thirty years in debt and
abject poverty, who lost six of his
children in infancy, or the patent
for a polyphase electric motor,
that spinning heart of the world, dreamt up by
the same guy who happened to invent the
radio, radar, and remote control
robotic boats, well over a hundred
years ago, no kidding, or the patent
whose inventor died so rich that he left
enough loot to give a Nobel Peace Prize
plus a million bucks to more people than
you can shake a stick of dynamite at.
* * * * *
Out of nothing, a fire no bigger than
a point, hotter than a quadrillion suns.
From that fire, time and matter, a great cloak
unfurling at the speed of light. Later,
dust, darkness and space as giant suns form,
explode and collapse, again and again.
Heavy elements are formed. Black holes and
stars are formed. Galaxies are formed. All things
are formed as they move faster and farther
apart. Over time this solar system
with its planets. This planet with its moon.
Water. Carbon. Life. The universe made
self-aware. Man-made elements. Man-made
suns. Man-made life. Man-made entropy. There
follows a great and growing darkness. Cold.
Mindless. Forever expanding. The End.