D I V E R C O D E X

Poem written with the help of the Curiosity Group

2008-07-30T09:03:00.001-07:00

Traffic Jams of the Stars

F. Durst rose to morning in Budapest and found his smashed Prius.
Vulcanized, dipped in blue rubbers from intertubers on holiday ,
he scowled while Judith Light abandoned her Lexus in the Red Light district.
And there was this one time, in Lisbon, I saw Scarlett Johansson crying in an Audi—
her BFF Paris Hilton went to Las Vegas and caught a bug—it wasn't a Volkswagen.

While touring Sienna in my Fiat, I accidentally ran over Sofia Loren, it wasn't pretty.
Unlike that guy who thought he was Bill Murray
parked his Peugeot into an embankment outside of Leicester.
He narrowly missed Herve Villechaize—faked his death in '93—
swerving around a nest of Corncrakes on the median three kilometers outside of Krakow,
rolling his Mini down a ravine where it smashed into a Polish dancer,
proving that all a tiny man needs to make Heaven, where he can frolick freely ,
is reckless wheeling in a cloud colored Fiat through Finland.

There he can spy on Sebastian and Lucia—not married,
but sexually entwined— and then north along the Amalfi coast
where Rick Astley in his American Police Interceptor performs a perfect PIT maneuver
on the back bumper, jostling Sebastian and Lucia—still sexually entwined,
nearing climax—to fly through the guardrail and over grazing sheep.

The police dossier read, "They suffered an orgasmic Rickroll."
So it's appropriate we ran into Johnny Depp—it was fabulous
and with Liberty Bells on woke up this morning to share the gospel
with Wild Bill Hickock dumpster diving for fancy Belgium chocolates.
Looking for ale cans for his Mr. Fusion attachment,
desperately needing to get to work at 88 miles per hour.

His Sam Elliott spry locks shake as he sings:
"Ima kick it like Judo, sing it like Menudo—
I make you fake & fraudulent suckers fall apart like a Yugo.
It's true though, from Juneau to Belluno, from Fox to Telemundo,
you're just numero Duo, I'm the Uno."

Later Cantos enumerate scrumptious dreams of Mr. Clooney,
naked except for his smile driving awhile, the streets of colorful Madrid.
Catching slim glimpses of shocked faces, my heart races and breaks though
the steamed windows of our Audi. They see us being naughty and they like it.

Billy the Kid feeds his Gremlins after midnight in his lime Gremlin
watching a bootleg Deustch dubbed Wayne's World
and fucked up his car. So standing at the DMV counter, do I hear Europe's
The Final Countdown —again—playing through someone's headphones.
"What model is the car again?" The clerk blurts as he scans my form. "An '84
Chevy Celebrity. It was my Grandmother's," I respond, noticing how much he smells
like his lunch—never trust Yul Brenner with your Maseratti in Istanbul
if Alec Baldwin's with you; he sold Yul a bad Yugo at the battle of Ypres,
bonding over whoring in Luxemborg.

New July Poems from Portland

2008-07-29T00:09:00.001-07:00

camera flash bouncing off raindrop momentary daytime

the last iceberg stewed for a kalpa with war & peace
a colophon for the veterans & the crocodile kids

alm a euro from a volvo for all I care
I’ll travel portland as the prophet of the exit poll
a wolf blitzer of the elements snazzy tie
twitter gandhi & jesus policekissing on the rocks
radio back take ears off throw them into a sea stop

spend a lugosi friday & lon chaney night
dressed as the stones with my paramour
the parasite eve raccoon with rotten apple cores
stumbled in my garage pilfed cat food pellets
gobstopper eyes peppercorn on camera
& naomi watts follows sucking on a parliament
from a vincent price splatterflick
atmospheric mellotron soundtrack

bumblebee screened american apparel tee in an alley
where she lived when she had that web money
watching distended smoke trails from a rocketship
disappear into a sheaf of papers
fanned out to play aboriginal dreamtime sonatas
to leopards their latest romance
cry out funny apologies I feel all inside

a fantastic sweetened employment of love

naomi teaches the sheets in video wonderfuls
like an astronaut in an elevator
a stranger in a 30 million dollar suit
holding the moon’s clockwork in a tube sock
with monstrous bipedal bob dylan songs
building behind us

———*———

She and I rehashed an old dialogue of Plato’s on illustration
like the cries of unexpected infant from a Parisian tart in a bazaar
crammed with the pungent stench of cigarette smoked carp heads
and citizens consumed with relish these icthyian innards
sopped with suicide drafts of a failed novelist
on his fifth mortgage, fourth smack, third junk on the hopeless sea,
and second pot of coffee—dirty ring finger belongs to Joe Dirt,
a stardust stitched tinseltown poet at a coffee shop with Jean Paul Sartre,
strumming a typewriter and fiddling with a conspicuous placard
fingering him with the invisible hand of fate.

So sick of wallowing in a Tom Collins in a sleepy hollow,
take the freeway on the weekend to date his lovely
and watch her make a coffee table from smashed pots and planters
in a neo-vorticist design. You’d never guess it but she’s a poet
with her Lolita glasses and honeydew crocs. He saw her on a slipcover
amongst the Fred Meyer cabbages, there was a Pettibon drawing
of a smoking hot nurse toking on San Franciscan seasoned herbs
and outsourced spices inspected by 47.

They’d sit together, legs a tetragrammaton of fairy tales
in which he is the Hasselhoff of princes and she his lovely paramour;
if only Ayn Rand’d stay outta the picture. When she fled the motherland
she was endowed with the novelist’s gift for fuckuppery.
The simplest gesture a chum like Chekov’d pen a few details,
she could paint a whole 30 page illustration and take the name of God,
seal it on the clay lips of her mudpie shadows and grow wings
to make any college student think collectively, “I too could be a poet.”

So a student collects the mead drenched spittle
from Kurt Cobain’s Sea Anemone of a face
and pays homage to the flannel calves
to this Northwest poet with a shotgun in his own House of Pain
while across town in the House of the Rising Sun
they read essays the length of World War Two cigarettes—
Picaynes, Galousies, Lucky Strikes and the boxes I saw in Europe
with fine engravings of pregger runaway xray Amsterdam lungs
designed with a triple X, but not what you think,
not for sex-positive denziens in jug band fetish videos,
their straw hats, checked long johns, and lovely ripped garters
running up bandaid scabbed trackmark legs in a color your own
vericose illustrations of Michaelangelo’s Last Judgment
and if I were worth my weight in salt, I’d make a damn find novelist,
but the X’s stand for all the hugs you get when you gave up kisses
for a dream gig as a novelist. How can I cut off a pound of flesh
to spite my face for poetry? Every opportunity I have to be with you
is a just another form of self laceration. If you look up emo online
you’ll find this illustration—little Buddy Ebsen in a Batman Costume
socking a three year old kid dressed in a Rolling Stones headband
and the spilled mallomars and charleston chews fan out
from his trick or treat bag prophetic goat knuckle style.

The two ice pirates, his parents, grasp hands over the table
and the theme from where everyone knows your name puckers the air
as he makes designs on her with line art in a gouache painting:
cheap colors, old paper in a language that everyone has forgotten.
What use is English to a novelist when the words of the future
are arrangements of farts in lovely candelabra like forms.
Your grammar should wave upwards on air currents,
breaks and genetically reform like the smoke
from a dark green cigarette sticking out your colophon, pregnant
with esoteric information and wonderful illustrations.

———*———

The “sweaty toothed” mechanic billed me in the face with a Secretly Canadian slap,
the economy laughed in the shape of a brown bear in a bellboy cap,
millions took countless jobs to pay off Caesar’s credit card,
and I think I priced myself out with graduate school.

I spent October in a Motel 6 laying the fragrant mint of regret on fluid stained pillows
while outside perennially eighties crustups rob my car.
They got the computer, breathing machine, paperwork, sketchbooks,
and the ex-girlfriend naked photographs.

Could the answer be in the scriptures? I consulted the National Review, Newsweek,
and U. S. News and World Reports for any divination from his Holiness,
Pontifex Maximus Barackus Obama,
anything for refuge in the folds of his uninvisible three-piece suit.

I’ve salvaged for those who fought annexed Parliaments with photograms—
Hitler’s secret throat skeleton inertia’ed on a throne of gold
by John Heartfield and Tristan Tzara janked the gears
and made molds of a young Obama instead.

Obama sits in a magical island high school reading essays by Thomas Paine
and Alexis de Tocqueville to prepare himself for the Antarctic of jobs.
He’s dressed as Captain Blood gnawing an adamantine scimitar
against hanging chad mummies spilling out of the endless trains of the foolish.

I got in my resurrected car and Violet’s reassured me I not alone
in this campaign for the lost crystal skulls of an alien ship and face
Minoan automatons coated in dark stockings of ash, priceless knicknacks
built for slicing the perfumed air with a decorative flourish for his Majesty Obama I.

And if you wish really hard, the clouds’ll part and the Lord will irritatedly pop out,
“This is my son, Obama. Serve him and when you die you’ll be set in a Prius in the sky
and promising leads for jobs in the New Jerusalem.” But I was at McMenamin’s
with a first year Cranbrook art kid, talking about his summer in India.

They get Coke and NBC while middle-aged Portland plunders buddhism—
gold Gautamas for gold Santos and replace the goofus for his gallant nemesis.
Obama picks up the phone at 3 AM on the first ring and jumps in his police Lamborghini,
makes the Bubblegum run from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.

And spoil a few friends with faux finish cabinet jobs along the way.
Of course! Slapped back jones’ll get you benefit laden jobs and the rest—barbarians at the gate,
low glucose listening to the Beach Boys for a million years hacking like the undead Hackula
behind the frozen donkey wheel making sure no more warnings light up my car.

Because we might be able to make a world in a cold water flat, but where from there?
There are a thousand worlds that came before us and we lose jobs to contemporary tourists
carnival cruising on the lido deck with the Pirates of the Caribbean.
I wonder if the hype around Obama is sustainable and won’t break like a heart in a car.

———*———

Setting aside the Frank O’Hara for a blog post positing my liferules from highschool.
I breathed fire in the Portland rain with the Real Player Kucinich slamming Bushie on the internet.
I’ve got some loans I’m trying not worry about.

If Obama’s proves, the market’ll better and I’ll stop eating frozen burritos.
They are so delicious and so warm and with crunchy iced beans that puck your mouth.

When the driveway’s wet, you can burn Rome but you can’t grill a burrito
like you were a quick stop cub scout then Kucinich gets on the air
getting his “the President is dead, long live the President” merit badges
when he kinda looks like Mouser from Super Mario Bros. 2. but without the glasses.

My student loans feel like original copies of the Magna Carta.
So I get in like Robin Hood to dropkick King John embiggened by Peter Ustinov
(accented with a scotch laden, redacted, Scott Joplin waggling brogue)
and get hosed, drenched, broken, and home to write in my blog:
“We didn’t land on Qdoba, Qdoba landed on us,” with a pump and a squeeze
with perfect, little Gattaca food babies.

It takes a dude like Frank O’Hara to swirl up on his Olivetti with an olive martini
to point out how miscast a Martin Luther is Kucinich. He’s our man in Oompa Loompa Land,
with an Alfred E. Newman grimace from a mad, cracked, grimoire on his puss doesn’t have a plan
for the loans or the groans and you know the news ain’t acknowledgin’ no fillibuster.

If I were O’Hara and I saw Dennis trying to Mr. Smith it in Washington, I’d change the channel too.
Printing moldy, national archive demerits and Kentucky fried clairvoyant writs
for a cowpoke Master Controller Program whose slit grin won’t get fooled “agin”
doesn’t make compelling television. I think we’d all rather eat burritos.
I eat it because is it delicious and because it is my heart.

We could make an interesting blog pasting up the newspapers and history books
you had since college and let Kucinich be the kitty cat hanging from a branch,
balancing a polished shoe on a blasted big buck in an editorial cartoon
where the shoe is a triumph and the buck, posterity and put down the paper
and toss out that Big Bomb—it’ll give you shits
and besides you can use your promissory note as a primo zig zag.

Even Frank O’Hara knew that, dude smoked up on a beach years ago.

Tender Memories of Magic and My Childhood

2008-06-23T21:35:00.001-07:00

Ruminations on David Copperfield...

Portland Funbook 2008 Submission

2008-06-14T18:31:00.001-07:00

Daily Sestina: Portland

2008-05-24T21:03:00.001-07:00

The Secret History is Done

2008-04-28T14:45:00.001-07:00

Go to this Link here to download a small (172k) pdf of the Secret History of Dr. Kobra!

The Secret History

2008 Cranbrook Grad Show

2008-04-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

For a quick survey of the pieces within the grad show, please visit

2008 Cranbrook Grad Show on Flickr

Cranbrook Grad Show Installation

2008-04-15T06:38:00.000-07:00

So I've been working on these vinyl posters, things involving video games, magic, sleep apnea, and etc and finally finished hanging them yesterday.

The show's on April 18th, Friday and I'm lookin' to get dressed up as a scientist!

The Secret History (Dr. Kobra's version) in progress

2008-04-11T18:31:00.000-07:00

My Reinterpretation of Procopius's The Secret History

Half-priced photobook grainy Operation Overlord memories
clean pressed safety pinned to 20th century flesh antibacterial mop up McDonald's.
Crusty discarded catsup hands, pink, supple coca-cola War and Peace lined palms repulse—
paralyzed nostrils, cross country runner's stare, took Normandy leg by bloody leg,
seen people sliver themselves with sunflowers and cylons on a track to stop a radioactive locomotive—
Anna Karenina with a digital wang in a nature film.

Now Eisenhower's invested in making you an Easter Egg of suffering,
no guitar hero to hold you back, on the field of Verdun strings snap and you fall into a pile of puke—
a genuine southern comfort. I saw this movie with my girlfriend,
when Walther Matthau's cave eyes tided up in a remix of Faure's piano quartet
I took my stuffed childhood animals and made monstrous memories and I cried again
flubbed up, afeared, fucking mortified, scared of dying so she and I fucked positionally—
plasma LED spine skinjobs on a taut bed, she was a lady Godiva in clouds
and I'm a vice president selling comedies door to door.

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Himmler's superstitious lightning baked gingerbread men
whistle an aria from Fidelio to unlock a mansion, blitzkrieg the black and white closets
for grandfather clocks, sacks of flour, bricks of gold and toss haute couture from Istanbul
upon a railway platform til Costanstinople groans under so many halter tops.

Toothy, splattered panzer shoulders make a cyclops
through brittle stalks of sunlight in a sea salt salsa.

If you pull back far enough to impression the fuzzy outline of a heap of broken destroyers
as she and I tread leg over leg on your beach towel making warped love faces.

It is hard, difficult even, to tie the heart in a windsor knot
when your arms are an ash sweater from the forge of Mt. Vesuvius.

"You son of a bitch!" Slaps his face with a frying clang. "You bastard,
stay with me now! You can't put the two of us in a little box labeled meanwhile
and then memoir about the two of you naked somewhere else
with eye socket spark conversations blinking."

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A Siberian huskie spits up his broccoli apertif with a superdeformed grimace.

5:30 AM, Naomi Watts looks like an emotional zombie from a Val Lewton flick,
smokes a Parliament Ultra Light, already done the cocaine she had in the tip,
atomic bomb shadowed in her yellow screened American Apparel tee
in an alley on a streen which you lived together when you had that web money.

Gasoline boar traps and acidic trebuchets, broken into deSotos and down Toronados,
spilled refuse and half-eaten gyros with hummus levees staining gray construction paper
in which she cuts out the apartments, parking lots, trees, and windows with mouths the size of fists
from love, Mayan glyphs of love exploding and being felt everywhere, your Rolex by it—

casting couch big bouncing butts regular as Big Ben, chiming,
"my—anaconda—don't—want—none—unless you got buns—hon."

I know that's no way to stay captain of the girl's basketball team, but
I had a war to fight, smokes to puff, a degree to score, and a need to ghost.

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"Can I touch you with my Madame Curie notebook?" Her words sear flesh,
fear is the mindkiller and grows a thirty foot skeleton overnight.
My guitar pick through freckled electrons to your fuzzbox.

I am the bandana'ed Rock of Love, mouthwashed whiskey on my breath,
host to a thousand adult contemporary chicks who don't read the fine print
ballin' this long haired dude here who used to be in a band and now's derelict.

Remove from the microwave, wrap it in lead, dead as a head in bed,
my exquisite speckled penis of a thesis is now South Beach compliant
so it will farewell in, but not out, your thorax, my concubine.

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Haroun Al Raschid drives his Rolls-Royce Phantom Two,
30 horsepower six cylinder engine with Stromberg Downdraft carburetor
into the wicked smile of the desert where he'll find an ancient temple
of the Order of Detroit where's kept a chalice of Christ for the ultimate Pimp Cup—
truly a cup for the King of Kings—

then those were the tweeters that were his eyes skeet skeet skeeting the surface of Mars
and the subwoof of his chest pulled through a hole in a space porthole,
his advanced alien face reveals an angered baby snarl. With teeth and then gone—
he chose poorly. The skulls of poets and space jockeys piled up and the blood pooled.

This is the cup of a carpenter. If anything goes wrong like I wig out lost in an infinite jaunt—
he makes a print with a Model T on the bride's train on their wedding day.
Her suicidegirl death's head garters as she falls to the ground point in cardinal directions—
Kate Winslet will be my constant, my celestial Rose and vigilant Iris.

Heaven on the Moon. Check. Affairs in order? Check.
Kiss your ass goodbyle. Check motherfrakkin' check,
chest flamed hoping here with Kate and my kid slashfaced, butterfly stitched, dark
on the deserted heliport, the football's aluminum handle in my hand
as the last screwdriver I will ever have pissed down my pants.

Monstrous bipedal rampage layered Bob Dylan songs building behind us.

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If the internet feed's ready and my server blade's purring I've a massive handjob opportunity
with at least three openings for a vivacious redhead in pleather, a voluptuous blonde in fishnets,
and the last for an exotic and historic lady like an empress, czarina, even the Virgin of Guadalupe.

In the locker room, after basketball, there was a cum archipelago congealing on the floor.

The Krakow cracker, the non-Italian Stallion, Pope John Paul the Dos,
was a painted Icon with fissuring wood, shut-upped.

For once, right?
I was like, super impressed with myself, like a showgirl with a big feather coming out of her ass—
I chop down Mount Rainier with the cheesy wedge of my chapped hand.

And there I was, for a season a lucid hustler, a Johnny-on-the-spot, nipple singer
freshly CPAP'ed with a mirror shard of crystal meth in my back pages.

Inconceivable! an expert-for-hire debating if someone was good enough to get into heaven—
to get into my pants—if they had to be Catholic, if—

The motion carried with three dissenting.

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At one police plaza, on the dole detectives record involuntary moans on acetate.

In the library the tub upstairs makes a dark, human sized painting in the ceiling.

I'm a latern in the steeple, an appendix to the crash oceans from a place I call home.
My xeroxed bloodwork is filed in Utah mountains deep within the bowels of a warehouse.
Waiting on a 10 o'clock job, Coltrane's "Love Supreme," a counterfeiter'd survived the Holocaust,
crafting a Flemish master's minor opus of an aloof Venetian Doge with a gold platter,
St. John of the Cross's, that's you, the heart on it—a fist wrapped in blood—
valves in complex knots and snots like burbling snails all over it.

Wow.

Wow. I know, but I say it louder.

The record cutter's tone arm trawls a diseased clockwise.

A partially dissolved body sieves through the hole in the ceiling falls as Christmas shrapnel.
There's the nose, and there, mixed with teeth is a bit of ear.

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The further my borrowed third eye, I got it from a dear friend with Heineken collateral,
the further it opens it makes an W. H. Auden face permanently sniffin' petunias.

However I can stay it plasticene with gossip, who's holding who's hand, in what room
do they talk all night, walking from each others' apartments, I totally heard them fucking—
so that seals that deal.

When it comes to the garbage bags of my ears, what has been heard—
train thuds, whistles, and down bow second violin groans—
I cannot unhear the greatest miniboss music I've seen!

My third eye, my perennial pineal gland goes adventuring in a suit of blue polymers,
robotic platform jumping and firing potent energy pellets of thought—
early 1990s wireframe cel shaded memory curdles at bad dudes with elemental weapons.

Christina Aguilera, nublie lass in a g-string and galoshes, makes a compelling suffragette.
Her lasso of truth, electrified musical barbed wire, throws me behind an x-ray screen,
the CIA spied my hidden gun and employed me from the phyrric surprise of intimacy.

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The town built a vegan strip club, built it all the way to Valhalla,
set an eight limbed, ridden hard put away wet ex-Hell's Angel bouncing
and plugged mistletoe in the sheriff's pacemaker to Missionary the joint, "Ragnarok."

Overhead the sputter of rusty, to' up from the flo' up Chevys and Fords
and lightning strikes the sky, charcoal lamp projecting human imprint
in the flecks of rain on a blacktop and inside everything is ESPN.

Her outline wrapped me in a foreign language—Byron poem written tensed leg
circumnavigating my back—a gasp of hair dividing eyes.

She uses her striped, manicured fingers to truss the space between
youtube Beethoven spark of Elysium Milky Ways of stars and paths
and I fall into white flags and draw ourselves in the sinking moon
to sail through the heavens in a transdimensional lunar whale
til shiver, alone, dizzy, the wall—cars—airplanes—smoke across the face of the sun.

She left me a butterfly with Nagasaki wings
and an elephant feather stapled to a scrap Jasper Johns gray painting
in my femoral artery so when I think of her, I'll limp like a gangster.

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Perturbed stuffed french hamhock Michelin Man douses himself in chicken stock,
marinates himself in a lead lined pan, and on camera Gordon Ramsay blows his top
like anything directed at him is an inverted bearclaw punch to his mother's throat.

He gets up every monring with an ecossaise by Schubert in his Scottish heart
and a cancerous cellphone in his cabbage, his bright thoughts are cutlasses rending sails
and Errol Flynnin’ it, running plays from the Bible—Wycliffe's version—and hells for it.

Morningstar—non serviam—bottomless pit style.

The designed imperfections of Egyptian Cotton rush past him like the Prince of Wales
tossing off a piano reel of cheap gold plated links round his queen's godmade hips
guaranteed for a million, no billion—nay good sir, a trillion years!

Epileptic action lines—a lead jacket on his lungs—violet petals in the mouth—
Pollock puts down his whiskey reads a missive in a primed canvas with a red cigarette

leaning into darkness.

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Music fills the space of our correspondence.

While the camera pans across us the voice of SPAWN waxes orgiastically
on our names, smokes a cigarette. I wonder if the mountain will bend, yield to the rain,
or fall to pieces—the kingdom of God is within you.

Grail libations over broken legs, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari rain shadows oily slide
Claire Fisher’s exposed breasts in the back of her lime-green hearse.

In a few hours this sweat’ll become frost so angels make essays
soft as sinews snapping in a neighborhood full of kitty cats—

two days to go.

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Tri Lambda bacteriophages pledge to the chapter in Christ's divine gut.

Quetzocoatl quaaludes line my innards with some sordid esophagus sword sweaters,
a thirty-nine alarm heart flare in my sinuses, up in bed and arms and legs tied down
to strung up sleep diagnosis devices—I must admit I may have made a mistake—

A sad carebear shaped drop of water plinkos copper gutters and plop!
blots the crossword of my face. Eventually'll roll to my nuptials,
smashed Easter morning Cadbury's creme eggs.

Failed land war in Asia supine on the loess with Tammerlane's terra cotta terrorists
preserved thousands of feet below me, beyond the the Jesus Horses of Manzikert
with jade daggers for hands, scorched mustaches packed with dry, desert dirt—
wandering hot wind spirits smoothing the fallen emperor’s waterskin.

I could've had trees and weed growing out of me.

Gasps, the swamp like stench is a facemask, raises his arm and wipes peat
from his temple revealing a bloodshot prying protoplasmic eye.

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Assignment for Type 2 Class ( CCS )

2008-04-10T09:00:00.000-07:00

Chapter 12 of The Secret History of Procopius, 6th century historian of Constantinople. This dude hated the emperor and empress, Justinian and Theodora, blaming them for the troubles of the day. Plus I think he was drinking his haterade, but despite this we have one of the earliest examples of propagada in the modern sense of the term. Think of this like the unauthorized biography of the Byzantine court, and maybe they're demons? You know, nothing big.

The Secret History by Procopius

Use this text for your magazine spread, class. Use as much as you need, it is not required to use all of it, but I recommend reading it just because its interesting.

Now the wealth of those in Constantinople and each other city who were considered second in prosperity only to members of the Senate, was brutally confiscated, in the ways I have described, by Justinian and Theodora. But how they were able to rob even the Senate of all its property I shall now reveal.

There was in Constantinople a man by the name of Zeno, grandson of that Anthamius who had formerly been Emperor of the West. This man they appointed, with malice aforethought, Governor of Egypt, and commanded his immediate departure. But he delayed his voyage long enough to load his ship with his most valuable effects; for he had a countless amount of silver and gold plate inlaid with pearls, emeralds and other such precious stones. Whereupon they bribed some of his most trusted servants to remove these valuables from the ship as fast as they could carry them, set fire to the interior of the vessel, and inform Zeno that his ship had burst into flames of spontaneous combustion, with the loss of all his property. Later, when Zeno died suddenly, they took possession of his estate immediately as his legal heirs; for they produced a will which, it is whispered, he did not really make.

In the same manner they made themselves heirs of Tatian, Demosthenes, and Hilara, who were foremost in the Roman Senate. And others' estates they obtained by counterfeited letters instead of wills. Thus they became heirs of Dionysius, who lived in Libanus, and of John the son of Basil, who was the most notable of the citizens of Edessa, and had been given as hostage, against his will, by Belisarius to the Persians: as I have recounted elsewhere. For Chosroes refused to let this John go, charging that the Romans had disregarded the terms of the truce, as a pledge of which John had been given him by Belisarius; and he said he would only give him up as a prisoner of war. So his father's mother, who was still living, got together a ransom not less than two thousand pounds of silver, and was ready to purchase her grandson's liberty. But when this money came to Dara, the Emperor heard of the bargain and forbade it: saying that Roman wealth must not be given to the barbarians. Not long after this, John fell ill and departed from this world, whereupon the Governor of the city forged a letter which, he said, John had written him as a friend not long before, to the effect that he wished his estate to go to the Emperor.

I could hardly catalogue all the other people whose estates these two chose to inherit. However, up to the time when the insurrection named Nika took place, they seized rich men's properties one at a time; but when that happened, as I have told elsewhere, they sequestrated at one swoop the estates of nearly all the members of the Senate. On everything movable and on the fairest of the lands they laid their hands and kept what they wanted; but whatever was unproductive of more than the bitter and heavy taxes, they gave back to the previous owners with a philanthropic gesture. Consequently these unfortunates, oppressed by the tax collectors and eaten up by the never-ceasing interest on their debts, found life a burden compared to which death were preferable.

Wherefore to me,- and many others of us, these two seemed not to be human beings, but veritable demons, and what the poets call vampires: who laid their heads together to see how they could most easily and quickly destroy the race and deeds of men; and assuming human bodies, became man-demons, and so convulsed the world. And one could find evidence of this in many things, but especially in the superhuman power with which they worked their will.

For when one examines closely, there is a clear difference between what is human and what is supernatural. There have been many enough men, during the whole course of history, who by chance or by nature have inspired great fear, ruining cities or countries or whatever else fell into their power; but to destroy all men and bring calamity on the whole inhabited earth remained for these two to accomplish, whom Fate aided in their schemes of corrupting all mankind. For by earthquakes, pestilences, and floods of river waters at this time came further ruin, as I shall presently show. Thus not by human, but by some other kind of power they accomplished their dreadful designs.

And they say his mother said to some of her intimates once that not of Sabbatius her husband, nor of any man was Justinian a son. For when she was about to conceive, there visited a demon, invisible but giving evidence of his presence perceptibly where man consorts with woman, after which he vanished utterly as in a dream.

And some of those who have been with Justinian at the palace late at night, men who were pure of spirit, have thought they saw a strange demoniac form taking his place. One man said that the Emperor suddenly rose from his throne and walked about, and indeed he was never wont to remain sitting for long, and immediately Justinian's head vanished, while the rest of his body seemed to ebb and flow; whereat the beholder stood aghast and fearful, wondering if his eyes were deceiving him. But presently he perceived the vanished head filling out and joining the body again as strangely as it had left it.

Another said he stood beside the Emperor as he sat, and of a sudden the face changed into a shapeless mass of flesh, with neither eyebrows nor eyes in their proper places, nor any other distinguishing feature; and after a time the natural appearance of his countenance returned. I write these instances not as one who saw them myself, but heard them from men who were positive they had seen these strange occurrences at the time.

They also say that a certain monk, very dear to God, at the instance of those who dwelt with him in the desert went to Constantinople to beg for mercy to his neighbors who had been outraged beyond endurance. And when he arrived there, he forthwith secured an audience with the Emperor; but just as he was about to enter his apartment, he stopped short as his feet were on the threshold, and suddenly stepped backward. Whereupon the eunuch escorting him, and others who were present, importuned him to go ahead. But he answered not a word; and like a man who has had a stroke staggered back to his lodging. And when some followed to ask why he acted thus, they say he distinctly declared he saw the King of the Devils sitting on the throne in the palace, and he did not care to meet or ask any favor of him.

Indeed, how was this man likely to be anything but an evil spirit, who never knew honest satiety of drink or food or sleep, but only tasting at random from the meals that were set before him, roamed the palace at unseemly hours of the night, and was possessed by the quenchless lust of a demon?

Furthermore some of Theodora's lovers, while she was on the stage, say that at night a demon would sometimes descend upon them and drive them from the room, so that it might spend the night with her. And there was a certain dancer named Macedonia, who belonged to the Blue party in Antioch, who came to possess much influence. For she used to write letters to Justinian while Justin was still Emperor, and so made away with whatever notable men in the East she had a grudge against, and had their property confiscated.

This Macedonia, they say, greeted Theodora at the time of her arrival from Egypt and Libya; and when she saw her badly worried and cast down at the ill treatment she had received from Hecebolus and at the loss of her money during this adventure, she tried to encourage Theodora by reminding her of the laws of chance, by which she was likely again to be the leader of a chorus of coins. Then, they say, Theodora used to relate how on that very night a dream came to her, bidding her take no thought of money, for when she should come to Constantinople, she should share the couch of the King of the Devils, and that she should contrive to become his wedded wife and thereafter be the mistress of all the money in the world. And that this is what happened is the opinion of most people. 

The Cast of Law & Order makes an appearance

2008-03-26T18:12:00.000-07:00

I did a series of portraits of the main characters of Law & Order I encountered during the summer while I was veggin out after working long hard days cutting grass for rich people in Rochester Hills. These images are going to be integrated with my triforce tattoo for a large poster, which will be the 2nd in a series of 3 as a compliment to the "King of Dreams" one below.

Sleep Apnea Testing, Stage 1 (March 16th-17th)

2008-03-17T14:09:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks my quality of sleep has declined drammatically—
I've always been a snorer ( many of you probably know that already )
but seems I stop breathing numerous times a night—
I took my digital recorder + sure enough I struggle to sleep.

In Sleep Apnea, when you approach REM sleep
the point at which we dream
the muscles in throat are relaxed + cut off air flow
the brain sends adrenaline to the heart
the mind wheezes, crying out for oxygen
+ you're roused to move + force a breath—
this can happen up to 200 times a night in some cases
unknown to me, denying rest + REM sleep.

I wake up almost every night about 3:30–4
heart pounding, head aching, mouth dry + wide awake
I can't remember the last dream I had, I can't remember what a "dream" dream is
lately I can't read more than a few pages in a book at a time
or work on something longer than a day before I get tired or distracted
yesterday I was so drowsy on my way to CCS that I had to have a cigarette
from an animation student named Ryan to wake me up.

There is treatment, it involves becoming Darth Vader
wearing a device that uses compressed air to force your airway open—
everything I read on the subject says this device
can relieve in as little as one night
+ finally give me a solid night of sleeping—
after who knows how much time?

Because it makes me wonder about many things, for example: my work—
the hallmarks of my work are quirkiness, humour, fantastic poetic leaps,
fluid, dynamic use of imagery + mediums—I wonder
if we define dreams by forming intuitive associations based on internal logic
+ if I haven't had a chance to enter REM sleep for god knows how long—

Could it be possible that I am making my dreams?

##########

So last night (the 16th) I submitted to a sleep clinic on Woodward, just south of Cranbrook and got there at 930. It was deserted except for the technician who took me to the chair and applied a dozen plus electrodes to my forhead, temples, chest and legs

The electrodes had to be wired into this box I had to carry at all times and somehow find a way to sleep while holding.

I was shown where I was going to sleep that night, given a small television with rabbit ears and tried to fall asleep at the early time of 10:30pm to Law & Order SVU, the one where Clarissa Explained All about Sex Addiction.

The Technician watched television in this room

While I tried to sleep over here

I'm so unused to not only sleeping on my back, but with some colecovision equipment that I have no idea of the quality of my sleeping, whether or not it was successful for the test or not. There was a singular moment of a lucid dream where I had convinced myself I was in Amsterdam and I was doing this sleep study with three other ladies in this giant poster bed. The impression was so strong that I still can't shake it.

So in the morning, after a restless night, I was wakened for breakfast.

Gotta keep those electrolytes up!

I go back on the 30th to perform a CPAP test, in which I get fitted for an airpressure mask to force my airways open at night to facilitate my breathing, wearing one of these

So we'll see how it goes. I'm really sleepy right now and expect to fall fast into unconsciousness tonight. My birthday is tomorrow and despite all the awkwardness I'm glad I have done this because if it leads to a path of healthiness, then by all means bring on the cybernetics!

Robert Frost's Travelin' Picture Show

2008-03-03T05:11:00.000-08:00

Robert Frost once wrote with a Sharpie on a box of Wheaties over Karl Malone, the Mailman's, headband that the world'd sign with fire then the fucker distracted said ice. Imagine a picturesque lake rimed in cashmere and the gelatinous gingham flecked form of Robert Frost evolving from a stump on the side of the lake drawing up devices to pack his sandwiches with red stamped health department condemned deli slices from shady Amsterdam places.

Robert Frost goes with a little coddling into his happy place, a Showbiz Pizza with a real deal Holyfield original cast recording Song of the South, them critters lay out the fire while honky tonk raccoon medicine makes Robert Frost's veins run icy, locks his limbs, and crashes his cashmere Jaguar into crudely rendered cardboard cutout of a general store done up to fool a cattle rusltin' posse with a sixth grade comprehension passing through.

It is a well known fact that Robert Frost has a twelve foot forked tongue decked in cashmere and from time to time no longer knows this place, everyone is a science fiction device—tall, yellow, oil-dripping firemen who rescue kittens from styrofoam trees only to put them on ice like micro machines of prebiblical demons in mid snarl. Or to use the tiffs on Hungarian off label variant record covers of black metal defendants who believe in the axe and the hurdy gurdy and wield both mightily like warrior limericists.

Leaning against the elevator, inhaling the intoxicating the oncoming storm which'll do till the Ragnarocktober beer boycott renders him sober Robert Frost wiles his days knitting a cashmere sweater to stay the ice that is piling up from his fridge drink dispenser, hacks a wooden heart by firelight and builds nativity scenes at intricate detail and magnificent craftsmanship when the blacksmith isn't there.

While waiting, Robert Frost snaps a few icicles for his coffee, thinks how weird that Robert Frost is in one piece. When Robert Frost reads the what the ghostwriter wrote about his life, he wonders what with all the stuff on his desk, words for poems, flicks for storage, musical tones to collect in a USB based tome why Robert Frost'd hand paint signs with noncanonical gospel scrawls, and do 'em up in laser beams, stripes 'n thangs.

Robert Frost takes a drag, puts on Natasha Bedingfield and cuts a fence for a neighbor, splitting rails and hairs so they can't test for mercury, though it seems for the last two weeks Robert Frost got the Comcast high speed and on his desk goes to Peru, the Restoration, and drunkenly climb up ocean cliffs in an inkjet boat like a kid trying to 360 the swingset. Robert Frost takes off at the last second and casts a long shadow over the earth, the cities look like circuitry of a giant computer and when Superman showed him this when he was seven Robert Frost said you can't see the borders from here.

And Superman gave a nod in Helvetica.

Scattered Writings

2008-02-29T17:29:00.000-08:00

Thermodynamics

First Law

She stood me up! her eyes disappear
at dusk. She had elegant gowns
no twentysomething could afford, but
when she wears those striped socks, I am a Roman
crafting his meagre verses boxed in
by the barbarians; some bloody saxon'll
wipe his carcass with my manuscript: germs
descending to burbles in the burp of a sparrow
from Portugal two millenia hence.

Second Law

Spoiled myself on television finales, I remain
viscous and go home for a few days to say goodbye
again. Its wrong to call you from the coast,
you won't follow: we lose touch;
sharing letters, postcards, and finally
myspace comments. I forget you occupied my space;
the image I have of you smoking outside Kinko's
is streaked with toner and too dark.

Third Law

Stars stuffed my rib cage, five times its normal size.
Lying in her bed; rattlers wrestling in the rafters.
Use a jelly soap with quarried stones,
douse my smoky uniform in Febreeze,
share a final Folger's and a kiss in the frost.

Untitled

White ribbed shirt two layers underneath,
hair: pigtailed curtains draping her face.
Tough armor; her bare shoulder broken
by a beige strap. Caps the color of freckled fists.

While she changes; see through my head
the simple equation of a parachute. My beard
measures her neck.

Nobody's Home

Her damp red hair; she shakes the rain while crashing in cars
in a noir cinematography of smoke sucking drags exhaled:
the reversed highspeed camera flick of an iguana's tongue.
Rodin's carved hand plugs her throat with a shot of lead,
the chaser: a soot tinged helix streaming from her nostrils.
Make myself the mist, a nighttime thesis of moire patterns,
or an earthtone shipper with pastel dynamite shoes,
to converse with this Victorian thing. That was yesterday
and yesterday, you'll read, ash fell on Pompeii, but today
the sun bleeds like a flashlight in the mouth.

The Crown of Attacticks

I can't fight the mist when it refuses to be a dragon.

I will be more than the door I walk through, from the Inferno
of my lips to the Adversary of my heart, armed
with this baseball cap of the woven mass
of Odin's ravens, Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory bound,
their feathers rigid, wing over wing, bodies curled;
pliable as death allows, upside down as beaks and heads pry
into the porches of mine ears, they whisper earbud intimate
a fugue of the passenger on another's song.

January Morning. Harrison Apartments. Brushing my Teeth.

After the weekend's digressions of my hippie friends,
after renewed library books with their annotations at the end,
I have to go to work, clean up before birds on wizard trees
warble through my window's jaws their sonatines
as I brush, scrub, spit and rinse; dribble blood and preen
until the smile's the quintessence of health
and replace the toothbrush on the shelf, where it resides:
next to my father's shaving kit, his false teeth inside.

Saturday on the Rocks

My words on paper totter like a toddler,
high school fiancees stroll in love along a stone fence.
He keeps looking back at us; she is pretty and
Bela vocalizes in baby vowels, his magic spells,
waving a huge stick he believes a wizard's wand.
Mike leans on a rock, pulls out a Camel
looking like Ginsberg's famous photo of Kerouac:
eyes folded, nervous square pocket of poems,
his amulet against fear. Portland is finally
a real world, away from this campus
where strangers live together and discriminate.
He will be a confessor of antiquity,
converse in a solitary tongue, to trade one monastery
for another. Sometimes we would sit at night;
whether it was the factory or now on these stones
hold the same conversations. The world hasn't changed:
we're still in Indiana, we're still young.
My dad hasn't died and we still wonder
if the next place will be tomorrow
and will tomorrow be sunny?

Lowered Expectations

The last half of the book when we finally get to the moon,
but its awful dreams are written into twenty foot skeletons.
Hang your coats on their weapons while she opens the curtains:
the flickering molasses of our faces fill a dark room.

Jupiter hasn't exploded, it has always been night.
It doesn't matter.

I have the doll of you, you have the facsimile of me:
we were on the swings, you were eight, I was younger
and haven't seen you since. Maybe you left the island?
Your parents braved the dog, made it to a boat?

The moon is a dollar and then a quarter
and the bones give me fuzzy transmissions.

I Zigged When I Should've Zagged

traumatic wakeup repeater
in grave walker vibrato
crumples his car
cuts a bunny with a mower
dies a thousand times
in a glacier trolling its beard
through white flecked forests

splayed on rocks
phosphorescent chyme on moss
stewed tomato aorta
cerebellum shivers
from firefly camping

Poetry Readings

2007-11-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

Read at the Heidelberg on November 6, 2007 in Ann Arbor for the monthly slam. "National Treasure" & "He's not here, he's somewhere in the forest."

At Monie's house party in Hamtramck, MI, the Tartans took the stage and performed three numbers to clip cloppy wooden floors and chicks and dudes out the doors