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Reasons Of Flame

Rants and Poetry of Wolfi Landstreicher

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Afterword:

On Poetic Living

When I speak of poetry, I am not talking about versifying or wordsmithing. I am speaking about creating lives of passion, intensity and wonder. I call those people poets who go into the world with the creative intention of living life to the full. They may then choose to express the wonder, the intensity, the passion – the marvelous – that they discover in words, but the words are not their poetry – their lives are. Those who try to pass themselves off as poets at most “poetry” readings have little to do with real poetry. The sonorous, pontificating voices with which they choose to read their banal verses prove that they have more in common with papish priests and sleazy televangelists, those buzzards voyeuristically feeding off the corpse of the marvelous banalized. A true poet in the midst of these slimy ghouls can only have the lycanthropic urge to rip out throats in order to stop the insipid babblings of these sentimental saps.

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INTRODUCTION

I have always had an ambiguous relationship with poetry. I detest most poems and most poets. But poetry as a way of living and encountering the world attracts me. The poets for whom I have a high regard (William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Renzo Novatore, Benjamin Peret – a few others) have all, in different ways, been rebels against the values of the society they lived in and therefore also adventurers. I agree with the surrealist idea that poetry is to be an expression of the marvelous. Sadly, in this era in which even the deeper realms of the mind have been colonized by commodity fetishism and the images of television, movies and advertisements, even psychic automatism can often produce results as banal as the conscious verses, the hard turds shat out by the constipated wordsmiths this society calls poets, that fill the poetry shelves of most bookstores and libraries. Only those who reject the values of this society, those who consciously choose adventure and life outside the mainstream, can actually write poetry. That is to say, in order to write poetically one must live poetically. Only willful rebellion allows one’s unconscious to remain free of the banality of commodity fetishism and media domination. This spirit of rebellion alone can express the marvelous, and from this source it is expressed equally in psychic automatism and in willful consciousness. Now more than ever, poetic expression can only be the free play of the proud and willful vagabonds and rebels, outlaws and anarchists – those who reject this society in its totality.

—Wolfi Landstreicher

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INSURGENT PASSION, FLAMING REASON

Dreams of revolution set our hearts on fire

And fill our nights with the most dangerous caresses. This world’s icy and dreamless logic will never touch our

minds, Because our reasons are the reasons of flame.

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RANTING: a product of stolen words

Reality is not a transcendent truth, but a historical configuration, a multi-dimensional process that can take place in individuals who desire, think, act and change together. Fading illusions are so many targets ranged around those of us enraged by our cramped existence; so many delicious inducements to unleash the weapons of mockery and laughter. Let a few people meet who are resolved on the lightning of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from this moment despair ends and tactics begin. Everywhere where domestication comes into play there can be no free space. Look at architecture – another lovely mask covering the boredom of an insipid society. But the new does exist apart from the consideration of progress. It is implied in surprise. It is to be noted, however, that there are those whose lives center around lost and vapid fairy tales. They need an ancient dream to justify the breaths they steal – their crime of being alive. But for this crime there can be no forgiveness. It can only be the act of ultimate defiance, spitting in authority’s face, shouting, “I AM!” against every constraint society has invented. I wish to state, once and for all, I do not want to be civilized.

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filled with icicles and apple cores. It was still upon the treetops that we danced,

Nietzschian aristocrats of anarchy whose crimes were but the butterflies of love

embraced in madness, blowing kisses

to a rumbling storm of violence and beauty. These epileptic seizures never caused the harm

that springs from monolithic orders, and the ways were full

and bountiful with laughter, like a flea who’d found the universe too small.

The horse whose head had turned to bowls of cherries

juggled all your canopies of green tomorrows

in the fiery spheres of chocolate nights. It was here that we drank those wines

whose delicate flavors reminded one of the kidneys of Jack the Ripper

danced upon in twilight escapades. We were the monkey’s flickering tongues of flame

which made this dream the laughter of nights beyond the blind eyes floating in the soup

of Heracleitus’ malice.

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WE WERE BORN INTO A WORLD WHERE:

Dreams and desires have been locked within the

cages of psychotherapeutic interpretations; Revolt has been bound with the fetters of moribund

leftist ideologies; Creativity has been enslaved to the sadistic masters,

art and literature; The marvelous has been handcuffed to the cops of

mysticism and mythology; Reality has lost the ability to laugh at itself and its

foibles and so suppresses a truly playful spirit; Thought has become a rigidly armored fortress

protecting its ideological foundations from every criticism;

Revolution has had its passion organized out of existence leaving only structural rigor mortis where once insurgence breathed and danced.

This world has ceased to bring forth amazing monsters;

It is no longer a conduit for the marvelous; It has lost touch with the convulsive beauty of love

and lust; It can no longer give birth to babies with wings; It has ceased growing and begun to rot; It has suppressed surreality wherever this marvelous

flower has bloomed. Therefore, from now on, surreality will manifest in: Dreams and desires freed from all interpretation and

sublimation, being the living energies of free-spirited individuals;

Total revolt against every aspect of social reality including the ideologies that strive to squeeze this revolt into the limited mold of leftist activism;

The free-spirited creation of our lives for ourselves, lived to the limits against every role and rule;

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The discovery of the marvelous in each unique being, free from any mystical or religious guidelines;

The humor and playfulness of free-spirited individuals who realize their strength and creativity in their own joyful foolishness;

Open, expansive, generous thinking which grows from the inner strength of free-spirited rebels;

An insurgent dance, a feral insurrection that refuses all limitations, exists beyond all structures and is the realm of indomitable free spirits.

Today, social reality is a lifeless, passionless corpse. Let’s bury it. Now the amazing monsters of surreality must come forth in the world playful and terrifying in their wild energy, freed of the cages and chains that have bound them; our dreams, our desires, our humor, our revolt can populate the world with the most marvelous creatures.

Social reality is dead; long live surreality!

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SEA OF MURDER

The fires of Heracleitus dance their flickering steps

with legs of tongue across the crimson waves which tower like trees of spikes.

You’ve seen the moons that hide their faces

between the streets where crime is but a moment’s dream,

a monkey prancing in the aisles of supermarkets

vomiting up pricetags with a scream of wanton hatred.

This was the end, the wandering fen of dialogue could not extend the avenues which were for stewfeathers,

black flames lighting up the sky in roaring screams of wonder.

The waves splashed high upon the parapets

of catapulting dreams the dolce vita song

cascading through our hearts in bloody streams.

What we had eaten in our time was dark and filled with terror

yet the flavors dance more lightly on our nerves

than any fairy tales of summers

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SOMETHING GREEN

Callously separated cranial passage designed like something green

which dances and sways in the victim’s dreams,

as to the cerebral contingent’s dance and play,

I don’t consider it the realm of hamsters to vomit up strange hues.

This mystery dwells in caverns filled with conifers

and the teeth of rare sharks. Deliberate monastic orders fall

over the influence of vaginal tics and clitoral laughter.

Who said you were of virginal dreams? I spread my fingers through moisture dreaming.

I laugh like the climbing pizza thrown in the face of orchestral jazz

and find an apish grin inside your bucket. Run into the night of grey petunias

with your ultraviolet flashlight and gather the nectar of loves forgotten.

We are not automatic like tombstones but spontaneous dwellers in the tops of trees

whose fingers tickle us delightfully and run through the hair of our dreams,

guests of the sweet-brained monkeys whose mischief dances like volcanoes

between our pulsating thighs.

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AMAZING MONSTERS: RANTS AND MANIFESTOES

I

Darkness - I don't fear it - or at least I'm not terrorized by it. For darkness has its magic. It opens gates of the imagination that otherwise would remain closed. Streetlights, neon signs, floodlights - these are rapists of the darkness, tearing through it glaringly with their messages of fear or gaudy commercialism. So unlike the moon or stars whose gentle lights caress the eyes. At times, I feel that the deadening of imagination in modern society is due in part to the violent destruction of the night by artificial lights. For in the dark, the stark definition of all things breaks down, the rigid lines, the stiff separations disappear - anarchy breaks forth, the opening of all possibilities - the marvelous appears in the world as we create amazing monsters without imaginations. Those who wish to kill the darkness - to eradicate it completely - are enemies of the imagination. They have lost their own imaginations by using them to imagine only their worst fears - and now they are slaves to those fears. So they rape the darkness, wage war on the marvelous, seek to drive away the wondrous monsters of our imagination. If it's war they want, it is war they shall have. Against their technology and impoverished imaginations, we shall come with stones and wrist rockets and al the strange and untamed creatures of our imaginations.

WAR ON THE STREETLIGHTS AND THE NEONS!

WAR ON THE TECHNOLOGICAL HELL! WAR ON THE COPS AND OTHER LEGAL

TERRORISTS! WAR ON ALL WHO FIGHT AGAINST THE

MOON, THE STARS, THE NIGHT!

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The forces of darkness gather, untamed chaos erupting forth, a volcano of passion. We are strong and heroic, for our own desires are our energy. The lust for life lived to the full, for burning passion and wild adventure fuels us. We will NOT be stopped! For where we are put down, always we rise again, the wild ones who will have nothing less than a world of wonder.

II

A world of wonder - one in which we bring forth the amazing monsters of our imaginations - will be a world in which terror exists...But not terror as we know it in the world of order. Terrorism is an activity of the forces of order, or those who have or desire to have power. It has no interest in ecstatic terror, only in the subliminal terror of every day life - a terror which as it frightens us also bores us, because it is the substance of daily life in commodity hell. But in the realms of the "mind" that have become unconscious, our repressed passions and desires live - and these are amazing monsters. At times, these monsters, when brought to light, will fill us with terror - but they are not terrorists - they do not want to try to compel us to obey. The terror they evoke is ecstatic terror that breaks us out of the normal flow and opens us to the marvelous. This terror is brought on by the opening up of all possibilities, the breaking forth of the total of the total abandon of free play, the birth of anarchy. If we flee from this terror, we return to our cages and the boring, rational terror of authority. Instead, we need to abandon our selves to the ecstatic terror, the convulsive beauty of delirious anarchy, to immerse ourselves in it, to bring ourselves through it and make it OURS. Then the amazing monsters we've so long repressed will freely dance within us. We will be the most energetic, ecstatic and lusty outlaws. The authorities may call us mad - lunatic terrorists - but the terror we unleash will be a terror that sets free - our insane monsters daring to break

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with multiple heads developing those systems of chaos and love.

It was here that the potpourri of science

overthrew its own calumniated discipline and danced upon razor blades

to the hot horns of a hellish debacle. We never wondered why

this should not be, but rather spilled the wine

in ravenous drips down the elephantine caverns

of flowery, anal throats.

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AWAKENED FROM THE SLEEP OF REASON

I wandered like a cantalope rolling through the mossy fur

of a three-toed sloth. Inside these strange facades

I found the appetite for elegant petunias

and somberly danced with the cardboard image of giraffes in flight.

It was a nightmare sewn together from the scraps of your elevated slippers

which adorned the feet of a calamitous hippopotamus. He smoothly removed the whitened moles

from the bottle caps of this elevated train car.

When all this ceased to amaze, I leapt into our first-hand carriage

and laughed like a leopard

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all cages - and too bad if the creatures inside cringe back in fear! - That will not stop our wild and joyful rampage - our ecstatic war against all the forces of order. The chaos of our desires - the passion to open all possibilities and live life to the full will break forth in the light of day - a brilliant shadow eclipsing all the forces of order.

III

Society would lock me in its cages, chained and kept down, but I will not belittle my self to fit its molds. I explode forth, a fiery meteor, into infinity. I MAKE LOVE TO CHAOS! Within the hidden realms, beyond the knowledge of order - there we meet - the wild ones, the free spirits. We dance, we sing, we feast, we make love freely. We break down the walls of civilization so that free life can spread. Where we live cannot be named, for all names are lies. It has no boundaries - it exists wherever we are. Authority has no control within our realm for we are beyond all rule. We are chaotic outlaws, creating free life in the cracks of society through the untamed play of pleasure.

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Do Not Tolerate Me!

I

I WILL NOT BE TOLERATED! I demand the burning fires of passion, the untamed conflagration of desire without constraint, of lust without limits. Love me with an energy that cannot be denied - or hate me with a fury so intense your glance could wither me were not my passions equal to your own - but DO NOT TOLERATE ME! Toleration is a sickness of bourgeois society that smothers us in boredom - a cop inside our heads that keeps us passive in the name of social harmony. SHIT ON SOCIAL HARMONY! Let the hot, ecstatic energy of IMPASSIONED VIOLENCE burn through us! LET ALL THE GRAND, VOLCANIC ENERGY OF OUR REPRESSED PASSIONS ERUPT, A VIOLENT EXPLOSION OF HATRED AND LOVE, FURY AND ECSTASY, DESTROYING MEDIOCRITY - destroying all that bores us - BEFORE WE’RE BORED TO DEATH!!! Those who choose to tolerate - to merely exist - will be BURIED IN THE FECAL MEDIOCRITY THAT TOLERATION CREATES - Let them drown in the boring shit they have chosen...But none of that for us who truly choose to live. Coursing through our veins are dreams and visions, passions and desires, the chaos that can birth a dancing star - don’t dam this wild and fiery flood with that disgusting cancer - toleration. Demand of every encounter amazement, wonder, ecstatic passion. AMAZE AND BE AMAZED! I WILL NOT LET MY LIFE SLIP FROM MY GRASP IN PASSIVE BOREDOM! I WILL BURN - A CONFLAGRATION OF UNTAMED DESIRE! A SOARING PHOENIX IN FLAMES WHICH CANNOT BE IGNORED!!! I will live my life in a burning heat of untamed lust and passion! With a violent ecstasy, I will demand (of myself) - I will CREATE a world of wonder and amazement.

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such slivered fasts and monkish dripping eyes.

They ran through the sea of hands, applauding, pickled fingers,

aureoles of all the flying cats with purple tongues entangled

in the silver web of conundrum.

I never sought to turn such fertile wonder

into grey and ebbing fossils clicking softly through the tepid afternoon.

What dreams may come will never be for corpses

or the dreary ghosts who wail and whine

the losses of pathetic mice. Indeed, we dance as in the limpid wine

of majestic octopi who squirt serial intoxication

through the eyes of grand delinquents, those whose quaking crimes

send the quivering teeth of sharks into the entrails of a cop.

What serial delights! A feast upon the squirming tentacles of joy,

a wild debauch that flows majestic

like the river of mad eyes, the febrile horn of otter heat

and my own beloved owl’s libido.

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of dripping, colored foxes, juicier than the daring escapades

of a strangely simian outlaw, this man whose razor

was the laughter of the moon in heat and whose chorus

was a howling ocelot jumping from the treetops

toward the stars?

THE FORTEAN OCTOPUS HEALED

The ostrich and hyena pull my plow over a seething landscape

dripping with the blood of fresh petunias, the amber fluid from the otter’s lobe.

Not yoked; they would not tolerate

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No more will free spirits put up with being bored and passive.

ENOUGH! IN FACT, TOO MUCH!!! WE WILL BURN and in our burning, burn society to the ground.

TAKE THE TORCH TO TOLERATION! TAKE THE TORCH TO BOREDOM! TAKE THE TORCH TO SOCIETY!

BURN IT ALL IN THE UNQUENCHABLE FIRE OF OUR DESIRES UNBOUND!

II

We will not be appeased - All the rowdy, crazed, laughing, dancing, raging, free spirited rebels WILL NOT BE APPEASED, for we will have nothing less than our LIVES TO THE FULL, each moment burning with our uncouth passions! We will not tolerate what does not make us DANCE WITH JOY, ROAR WITH RAGE, WEEP WITH SORROW, HOWL IN ECSTASY OR QUAKE IN TERROR!!! And we will not wait around for our lives to begin. WE ARE CREATORS!!! We will make the world the way we want without waiting for the old world to fall! On the edge of society, joyfully outcast, we dance. We are hidden from the powerful, yet they know we exist - AND THEY TREMBLE! For from our hidden realms, we flash forth like LIGHTNING, leaving our mark, our crazed message that a life of INTENSE PLEASURE and WILD ADVENTURE is possible EVEN NOW for those who dare to create it! We are OUTLAWS and RENEGADES - and this is our strength! Already, we are freeing ourselves of the chains with which society shackled us. Already, we are learning to live our lives FOR OURSELVES!!! We need no ideologies or dogmas, no masks or disguises. We face society with ourselves - BOLDLY - as its enemies. Our passions, our desires are the energy with which we live our lives - HOW CAN WE LOSE!?!

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For, indeed, it is our lightning-bolts of SPONTANEOUS, CHAOTIC, EROTIC ENERGY, these flashes of FREE LIFE, that could spark a fire of REBELLIOUS PASSION that will raze society to the ground!!!

III

Free spirited rebels cannot tolerate economy. Wherever it exists, constraint exists. Its demands that we pay, that we sacrifice, that we work, that we accept less than the fullness of life which we desire nauseate us! But we will not let ourselves be passively sickened by this vampire, sucked dry of real life. NO! For while we live within its midst, we will be ROBIN HOODS - stealing what we can for our own pleasure and to share as we desire, breaking down property and exchange in festive games of theft and free sharing. We will NOT tolerate the half life which economy offers nor allow ourselves to be made into pawns in its game. For economy sucks the wonder out of life and steals its beauty. All that would be vibrant, dancing, burning with WILD PASSION, it has strangled with a price tag. Where there could be a world of wondrous lovers, mad adventurers and amazing monsters who NEVER COUNT THE COST, instead we find commodities for sale. But we will not offer ourselves to the sacrificial altar of the market. Nor will we passively watch as the world is transformed into a market place. With all the FIERY PASSION of those who dare to CREATE THEIR OWN LIVES, we will BURN all that has made WILD AND AMAZING MONSTERS into mere commodities for sale TO THE GROUND! And we will FREELY SHARE and FREELY GIVE and FREELY TAKE as we are moved by our UNBOUND DESIRES!!!

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A Night Distinct and Wonderful

The razor sharp moon sliced the sky, dripping through forests of hands.

Screaming, we danced through the showers of blood, these ostrich dreams which ran through the labyrinthine rivers

of elephant wine. Was it I who sang the arias of doom

or did the sky fling off its shroud

and skip in naked wonder over landscapes

ripe with grey petunias and vermillion ottomans

on which the snails of verdant passion raised their horns,

a toast to fiery lust? When I embraced your seething storm,

the undulating flesh of a thousand dancing mermaids,

you turned and laughed at the algebraic method

with which the pompous towers had turned our platypus dreams

into the calculations of a flattened scheme.

But what could stop our serpentine dance

of tangle vines

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in tuxedoes shaped out of crab shells and hats of marinated lice.

I would have eaten this delight if not for the aurora borealis

piercing through my brain with tunes of unfit monkey bars.

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Ned Ludd Was Right!

The machine IS the enemy. Smash it without mercy!

Don’t tell me technology is neutral. Every day I wander this city, and every day machines flash lights trying to tell me what to do. Huge tarmac pathways cross my way, upon which gigantic, speeding metal machines move, machines capable of killing me if I cross their path and already slowly suffocating me with their toxic fumes which fill the air.

WHY SHOULD I TOLERATE THIS INSANITY? NED LUDD WAS RIGHT!

The machine is the enemy. SMASH IT WITHOUT MERCY!

Around me stand tall buildings, -- ugly monstrosities of steel and glass and concrete, overpowering in their hugeness and sterility. I dream of them as ruins being eaten by a forest. But for now, these structures—the products of machines—house other machines. Machines on which the lies by which society defines my life—and the lifes of everyone—are recorded, and which, with electronic blips and flashes, can transmute the lies and so control our lives.

I WANT TO SMASH THE LIES! NED LUDD WAS RIGHT!

The machine is the enemy. SMASH IT WITHOUT MERCY!!

And all of this did not appear from nowhere. The roads, the cars, the traffic lights, the skyscrapers, the computers could not exist if, every day, the lives of millions were not eaten by the factories. Machines control their daily activity, determining their movements, eating up their time, to produce more machines. Their only respite comes when the machines which control them break down—or when they break them down. Then for a moment, they are not machines. Don’t tell me

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technology is neutral—I’m not blind enough to buy that one!

NED LUDD WAS RIGHT! The machine is the enemy. SMASH IT WITHOUT MERCY!!

Can’t you see? Each little machine—each car, each computer, each factory, each worker—is not a separate entity, a mere individual tool. NO! They are all cogs in one vast machine, the machine of social reproduction—and if we let them be, we too are cogs, the gears that manufacture society. Will you be a mere cog, a gear, a tool of social order? TO HELL WITH THE SOCIAL ORDER AND ITS PHYSICAL

BODY: TECHNOLOGY! NED LUDD WAS RIGHT!

THE MACHINE IS THE ENEMY! SMASH IT TO POWDER WITHOUT A GRAIN OF MERCY!!!!!

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THE RUINS OF THE WESTERN DREAM

Aluminum wastrels crinkle

into watery columns of amber beams,

your silver jade elephants followed into the tunnel of grey slippers.

It’s times like this I wonder why

the dance of peacocks so resembles

a table of knives devouring the children of grief who fly through wombat jungles with their hair aglow and flowing in orange and purple cataracts. We’ve seen this image dancing

through the streets of Berlin

with abandoned chocolate cantaloupes and the empress of spikes

whose navel is the lime covered magic

of a giraffe in heat blowing trumpet tunes through the cataracts

of marinated elephants. I had just seen this dream

inside your ear licking the walls

as an army of single-footed octopi rolled down the river of Paris

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IN THE JUNGLE REVOLT LIES DREAMING

I never knew how the screaming of doves could follow you through a whirlpool of dessicated

albumen like the dancing feet of a jackal in heat

whose bloodied face dreamed of delectable foundations of purple hands

from which hung the silver cross of Ardennes, home to the elephants’ jazz club

where the merry dismemberment of senators was a theme for blowing hot.

Cats dug the mountainside wine casks with flowing streams of stars

and wombats which circled the afternoon fair of delights.

“Death to the pigs!” screamed a solo ferris wheel collapsing like a tinker toy façade

upon the heads of utterly despicable weapons poised like green gorillas without hope.

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THE JUNKYARDS OF HISTORY

A grey utilitarian dust smothers the landscape; it squeezes the life drop by drop fro those who have not

yet had the time to live it, in order to lubricate the machinery of economic necessity.

They slither from the boxes they call homes, trash bin cubicles cluttered with pastiches of pop culture with

which these dispirited cogs invent identity, an individuality as unique as the grey malaise their passive

existence builds. Yet from the midst of this dusty fog, this discolored, passionless horror, suddenly strange laughter springs forth to haunt the sleep of utility’s reason; for in the

cracks and crevasses, there are vagabond jesters, fools who serve no courts, no kings, no gods, not even

conscience; Wanderers at the fringes – meandering through the

nights in mad adventures. Though often we may choke upon the grey, our laughing colors smothered in the dinginess, drawn down into the

maw of passionless despair, Yet through us whirls a mad cacophony refusing to be

channeled or suppressed…

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And so a rowdy, dancing, howling band – strangely invisible except as colors flowing through grey dreams – flies through the night on razors edge, sifting through the detritus utility has left behind to find the weapons and the toys which will invent the sounds and colors of

desire without constraint. This greyness is the stench of social rot, of civilized

decay. Utility has filled the world with useless junk to feed

our crazed cacophony, a resource for the ruins in which we dream our crazy colors.

For from the junkyards of history, we shall create ruins from which bricolage symphonies of chaos will burst

forth.

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MITUS’ REVENGE

Vaginal fluids in compass

develop the delight of corpulent chaos. Such dreams as a rat might erode

for simple populoids, I cried like a swansong

howling in the wind, somberly dancing in leaps

of carbuncle sauce, such tales have fallen and devoured my madness –

key to the triangular horse of Mitus.

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INTOXICATION Surging, reeling passion went screaming through me. I knew the moon the stars, the planets, for that moment, as my own, as an intense pleasure that I wanted to share – but how do I share it? – how do I share an intensity of passion that howls “I want you – I want to consume and be consumed by you in fiery pleasure! Whirlwinds of ecstatic joy tearing us to laughing, panting, howling ribbons! Learning to be the pluriverses by ingesting all in our own ecstasies! What wonder we could find in each other’s caresses!” Damn! – Why can’t the world be so free that my embraces could encompass those beautiful women, those wonderful “straight” men, the marvelous children, the moon, the stars, everything in a pleasure that goes beyond “sexual” or any other social category for pleasures. – How do you express the longing for a world in which singing and dancing are the way we speak – in which poetry has disappeared because the intensity and beauty of our lives and interactions makes poetry irrelevant, a poor imitation of a reality where we live in dreams more beautiful than we have yet imagined – Intoxicated with ourselves and with each other.

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THE WALLS STILL STAND

Sometimes it seemed we could not be stopped; we were crazy feral children, our eyes ablaze with

polymorphous lust. Our intensity demanded eternity, an unending flow.

There was no turning back. Reeling, dizzy with joy on the edge of a cliff, our lives

so full of now, there was no tomorrow. We flew burning through the night finding toys with

which to create the wonders of our lives.

Bricolage symphonies, cacophonies, insanities. Our madness was intentional, a godless rite to break

down the walls and dams. The moments of our lives seemed like forevers so full

of this life they had become. We lost ourselves in flows of desire, in wandering

currents of sensation stronger than the channels that would keep them in constraints.

Our hearts pounded, we were wild-eyed with our energy, flaming tornadoes dancing zig-zag through

heaving landscapes… Smashing the walls… Smashing the walls…

Smashing… smashing… smashing the walls…

But the walls still stand and I am tired…

Set me aflame once more.

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A FERAL CHALLENGE

I want to throw my words around like howls of dancing wolves

or mad songs of gypsies who have eaten the full moon. I want to send them prancing through the tops of

jungle trees like monkeys after coconuts or mangoes,

to turn them into lightning bolts storming towards the stars,

tempestuous winds stirring the night sky into a froth of jumbled passions.

Too often, so it seems, the words drop from my mouth, leaden with the poison of banality,

not fit even for the ears of pigs or kings. But as the moon rounds out the night

and dreary grey faces close up in sleep, I want to run screaming through the streets, the

fields, the forests, pouring out words of crazy passion,

like strong wine into bacchanalian mouths. Such are the crazy gypsy songs

I throw into the night: a feral challenge.

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in its corrosive surface. Like an alligator

I swam from Atlanta to the bean piles of New Jersey’s

southern colony of monkeys. These creatures shifted limes

into the columns of a box of molten lava and drank tornadoes out of boxes

of platinum digestion like the forests of tomorrow

in a dream.

PIERCED ARMOR

As if this dream were a prison,

I wander back and forth, intoxicated, sad and falling,

falling into the colors of your eyes whose lights

devour my heart.

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ALL BLUE

All blue: The seasons containing posters of Delilah in rags dance about theories of albumated creampuffs,

and the series of port wines combine with my children of grief.

I don’t complain in this October heat; the fires dance like the ostrich

who ate the capital buildings of manifold purpose.

The storms of your love washed the octopus

and the glimmering streams of confetti detested the nightmarish sheep

with their purple dewclaws. Seldom have I seen such detestable fiddles

fed to the dream lines of undetected mettle,

all of a form so crystalline I lost my teeth

in the battle to form liquid craters

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THE MOST DELIGHTFUL POISONS

If you wonder why I do not run to your dream like scathing gates of a new tomorrow,

If you wonder why I prefer the streams that run backwards uphill like a tiger dripping through

forests at dawn, My words tumbling out in torrents of nonsense and

dreamy dissembled cataracts, It is because I have seen a dawn of assembled laziness Actively building a playground of monkeys and dreams, A vertical nightmare toppled among the lush fragrance of flowers dripping with the most delightful poisons.

To sip of the petals fills the mouth with an almost fatal sweetness,

Intoxicating honeys of insurrection, In one hand the molotov cocktail, in the other the

elixir of dreams. “Do not wait,” I was told, “do not wait for the day,

For your own dance which blows away cops brings the dawn.”

And your dreams are too mild and pale for me, smothered in the fear of the blood that may

spill when we make the world our own.

18

FOREVER VAGABOND One smolders waiting for a lively wind to raise the flames, to birth the crazy dance that licks and flickers, roars and rages, bringing marvels to a night that otherwise might languish. Within one’s sack a thousand dreams, the wealth of vagabonds and madmen, strange visions of vast insurgent games and wild leaping dances, of castles in the air and hidden among the trees. With such ragged wealth one simpleton went wandering among the realms of nightmare and the lands rumored to be madcap paradise, arcadian delight for the wildest of dreamers. He came to a small forest, his heart, his mind, just smoldering ashes, hoping that the fuel to raise the flame might be here among these other tramps and dreamers, wanderers and fools… Surely there is someone here with whom to meld a dream, a scheme… to project marvelous creations. For a while, castles in the air, schemes for strange music ands and rumors of mad dances fanned the sparks, but not enough to waken a flame… Once, it’s true, or twice, the passion flared, but there was no fuel to feed the flame… The spark was growing dull. Time to leave before it died away. Some people’s dreams cannot sit still or they will wither. Maybe when this foolish tramp finds himself more crazed and blazing like a storm he’ll fall upon this land again to dance his crazy dances with those he madly loves, to flash his lightning laughter through the air – and then to disappear as suddenly as he appeared – forever vagabond.

27

Where else do the purple-feathered birds throw apples from their nests

to the vagabonds who’ve turned their ears to grazing antelopes

and thrown their collars to the winds: No more!

And so I want forever to ingest this fiery dawn, the quiet, gentle storm

within your eyes and yet I find chaotic feet

that draw me over distant landscapes, and a mouth sewn shut by parapets of silence

and control. In this the heart,

grown monstrous in a storm, explodes into a million shards

of distilled melting blue— a monkey’s swirling tale

of pained desire.

26

THE GENTLE SCREAM OF MY DESIRE

If I could speak with all the wild-eyed courage of the damned,

I’d pour out tales as merry and as sad as the heartbeat of a platypus

but I find myself dizzy in the cool and fiery passion

flowing from your eyes. The melting fragrance of their colors

is a source of madness that engulfs the most severe of apes

and flings them in a swirling dance across a floating abyss

of columbines. I have drunk of this liquor

which flows out of your eyes and my intoxication swirls

the worlds away into the swinging arms

of gibbons with hands of watermelons

and minds which dance through galaxies of flaming ice and elegant poisons.

I do not want to lose this ardent madness.

Where else do green wombats of desire dance through the forest tops

with mouths of ice and goblets full of fire?

19

CRESCENT VISION

Alas, these are times most strange, for blue fish fly forth from the eyes of strangers

as lightning passes between the fingers of black-haired children.

And that is not all, for the dogs cry, “Earthquake!” though the sky is clear

and the trees are still as peacocks. I have seen peaches strutting through the parks,

their fuzz turning into polywogs in the sun. Expect soon an outburst of frogs

whose sweet aromas strum a melody not unlike a grappling hook

or the teeth of a mole.

20

PASSIONATE STORM

As this storm that swirls through my mind casts bolts of lightning

through the vast universe of my passionate flesh, I gaze across galaxies

into the vortex around which this storm roars,

that calm silent center that is your eye… The agony of love rips at my brain with hungry talons

releasing lunatic monsters, strange population of dimensions of desire that darken the sky with vast tornadoes

and weave landscapes to crazy for normal feet. I sprout wings and take to these seething skies

in the hope that I might fly into the vortex of your eye,

but these howling gales which twist and turn play with me as with a butterfly.

Still I keep my face toward the source of this madness, this storm I must devour with its center, my love,

as I must be devoured by you – the monstrous love of the unique ones…

No small, no mellow dream; nightmarish in its vast and dark dimensions.

This is the love that I must know: of flesh, of mind, of universes, a ravisher,

dimensions far beyond the wildest dreams of bourgeois romantics,

the most profound inducement to crime and insurrection.

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those magic monkey chips with which the other moons of green had made their profound philosophies

of statuesque delirium. Had I not flowed through those legs

like the ice of contaminated fleabane, I might have mistaken them

for the years in which your lovely breasts

of iron and fire had grown into the corn of Babylon

the rich grains of flowing gems, of vibrant, radiating hair.

24

THE REASONABLE DESTRUCTION OF THE FAMILY

The bloody reticulated abdomen

of somnambulant zebras is not to be mistaken for

the way my mother dances in flowing shards of pink

volcanic glass while drinking liquid stars

and laughing at the flowers of unknown muskrats.

I have seen days when she flows through amber rhythms of sound

and puffs her adder tail to the melody of bladed

peacock tails which pierce her to the heart

to find it made of cheesecake and fine wine.

These were the days when all the hoary headed ostriches

reached into their bags to find the fluids of solar wealth—

21

EROTIC INTERLUDES

The nymph of oak forever young

kisses the serpent of the eye.

Beneath the hand made of serpents two have become one.

The birds of Lesbos play the beautiful horn of the dawn as the sun peaks over the horizon.

Wandering aimlessly through the garden of desire,

I joyfully pick the flowers of pleasure.

22

AND STILL I HEAR THEIR MONSTROUS ROAR

Liquid like a cannonball

explodes into the membrane between the trees of time

fighting for rhythms of the saw. I wandered strangely

past these arbored gardens full of seahorses

and trunks of treasured meals. You never saw me,

kissed my toes for chocolate cream and horror.

The roars were not of lions, they drained the atmosphere of dreams

and ate away the melons of desire. Still I danced away. My guns were aimed

at all the tops of pyramids, the schemes of whiskey dealers without a wit of monkey heart

or green inside their eye. The daze drifted away in purple fogs

and the nights I rode for miles on mares of steel and blood.

When I opened my hand I found the wine and music

of a distant race of monkeys, dreamers in the hinterlands

of horror and despair. These strange flowers screamed

23

from the passage of a cave of undulating flesh,

a river filled with snakes who danced upon a screen

of nails and ice. The further trumpets coiled and turned, a veritable landscape of discarded hats

and filtered minds. From this I drank the acrid films

and shot the enemies of clovered muskrats

and the humidors of love without relief.

It was green inside these mountain skulls and olived with the caracas of monkeys.

I downed their screams; I danced the night around

in swirling galaxies of vaginal distension.

This was my highest moment, my defeat of undesired obliteration of the dawn.