Tio, Losing His Sums, Ontologizes 'What Has Become of Me

[translated from the Spanish of Raul Voz]

'The world of dew is
a world of dew...
and yet...
and yet...' - Issa

Y que? Yet what?

I am a cabin

some woods

Tio's Tree

a crotch mountain
in Mexico

I am drawn water from

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Privilege Kicks - A Meditation In Paces Near William Faulkner's Grave

'I believe that when the last ding-dong of doom has
clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging
tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even
then there will still be one more sound: that of man's
puny, inexhaustible, voice still talking! …not simply
because man alone among creatures has an inexhaustible
voice, but because man has a soul, a spirit capable of
compassion, sacrifice and endurance'

— William Faulkner - Nobel Prize Banquet Speech

*

A sign, green background, yellow
lettering, in a Mississippi graveyard,
reads:

'WILLIAM FAULKNER

The creator of

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poem by Warren Falcon
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The Empress of Contrails Writes Upon Darkness - Anxiety of Influence

.
for Anthros Del Mar

I, on the other hand,

have lain down with

countless thousands.

My tent is worn out.

Love cries some blood

where tongues are root-ground,

utterance hard pounded,

soft tissue torn letter by letter,

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poem by Warren Falcon
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from 'Ragas For Krishna' - Part 3

from 'Ragas For Krishna'

Sleepy Bee, he is rising beneath me, the hidden god is pleased

Somniculosus Apis, Sleepy Bee
Ascendit infra me, He rises beneath me
Deus absconditus placet, The hidden God is pleased

He is busy preparing a repast of sacred chilies of his Mother's garden born. Who will hear him sing their praises but me present alone with him here?

Yesterday Krishna arrived more radiant than when we first met beside the cardamom and the ghee in the intoxicating basement of the Indian food and spice shop not easily hidden below the sidewalk, such aromas cannot to be tucked away like the shop is, beside and below the avenue, just as his radiance cannot, should not, be hidden.

Which flower should I adorn my table with? I ask, approaching shyly beside the spice bins. I buzz inside, a bee for the nectar.

If you serve, says he, If you serve with cardamom and ghee then flowers three are best, the jasmine, the oleander, the anthurium. But if choosing only one, he looks at me, something insistent, responding, in his eyes, I would choose for you the anthurium.

And so we begin our time together, the first demur approaches, the blushing papayas, the cooking lessons, then the fires, the chilies harvested, curtains drawn. One day perhaps I shall fall but in this way:

I shall fling
the curtains back

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Expostulations Of The Child-Man, The Pope In Italian Miniatures - A Mystery

The pope in Italian
exclaims, 'Bring me! '
and the echoes bring to him
his bounded wants.

The pope in Italian
twirls his fake mustache, hides behind curtains layered
thick, plots the Blessed Virgin tied upon the tracks, his
dramatic rescue of Her, the imagined headline, Greatest Of Popes.

The pope in Italian
embraces a Statue of St. Micheal when the
guards are not looking, whispers the hour of
the deed, pleads for advancement of the plot.

The pope in Italian
blesses conspiring shadows in mirrored tiles reflecting back, the
guards pretend not to notice his continual muttering, the halting gait,
the concealed silk handkerchief purposefully dropped, they wink at each other.

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poem by Warren Falcon
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History Of A Place, A Bombast, A Psalm In Voices Several

'What thou lovest well remains.'
- Ezra Pound, Canto 181

'Let him not be another's who can be his own.
- Paracelsus

1

'All this our South stinks peace.' - Ezra Pound

In exile, by whose hand unsure - mine, or those hammers of
The ill-starred fathers. Unsure yet on fire I fled their dredged,
God-flooded cotton plains, those self-appointed lords over
They who were deemed lesser dirt or worse. Those who did
Not sing self-praising songs belonged to lordly minds in Hell
So there to I fled and still make a bed there more content to
Be among the bastards for whom the Bard* pleads,
'Gods! stand up for! ' Ay. If the gods will not, and they do, I stand
Up and bray, a fool certain, but in the neighing take deity's cause
Upon Myself - Justice, Beauty, Mercurial Love's Sublimity

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Misiva Para La Oscuridad Como Una Vocación, William Hawkins En Mente

-¿Cómo lo representan, a su gran
dolor ahora,
incluso un rincón de ella?

Tal vez
que se forja en adelante, encontrar una
foto, un caballo
a la pintura, como en la película,

luego a sí mismo ocupado con la realización
de ella, entonces ver cómo la barriga es demasiado,
tiene que ser diluido, una pata de nuevo
recortada a la medida,
una convulsión breve de los ojos y la pintura
depende de las manos,
un problema monumental que hace que corregir,
o por lo menos, las perspectivas de sufrimiento de uno mismo
en medio, en contra,

o, en el

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Midnight in Dostoevsky

Beginning with lines by Frank O'Hara,
for Frank, & Elaine Stritch,
Good Company All The Way From
'The Theatre of the Seven Rungs'

'I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.'

And a perfect day, drab Saturn's day, dark, stormy, muggy wet to skin, pretend one's at brunch though it is now 6 pm and one has just boiled the only egg in the house, fried one leathery strip of bacon (apple wood smoked and ice-box withered) ...I have managed to offend, I forget that I still have a few left around, Christian friends, the only two who've hung in there through my many theophrenic forays either cashing in my genitals at the 'admit one' desk or camping out at the 'Complaints' window finally getting my chance to ask the white haired deity, 'Any chance I can get my testicles back? ' THWACK! back to the back of the line.

In time I have learned to pick pockets there such as are theologies. Those standing anxiously eager to rush forward to the Admit One desk are too careless and unvigilant to notice I've reach easily in and stolen what spare change that may be of any real 'good' in their cracked and glued back together 'god-banks' pink a the piggy ones but not as cute. Mine own refuses tape, glue, plaster of paris but is always in need of gaffers...and I DO get the pun. Still, it pains me to have afflicted the Fundy Two with theological blues and warts, they who seek to thwart where they think I am bound but truth be told where I already am, with Dante, with Virgil, a host of others boiling their egg and sizzling their pork (not from the piggy or god bank, mind) trying to barter a few pocket stolen coins for a slice of bread.

Now as the lightning strikes about my place, to save face I play choral music, 'O sacred head, ' but like an itch demanding to be scratched till raw, I claw my way toward Palestrina in order to arrive at sulpheric, vodka-soaked bliss, dear dear hardcore Stritch on the turntable pleasing all indigents dwelling at least in the imaginary balcony, upon my frayed carpet, my frayed end, of the 'The Theatre of the Seven Rungs' grinding out, The Ladies Who Lunch, two versions, one from her prime and one from the 'return to the back of the line' place but having by now toward the end more than a hunch, Elaine alone, pockets full, old and grand, standing solo and proclaiming, Everybody rise! I stand and grandly bow. 'Old Cow! ' I shout above vodka drenched ice in a glass. Lightning strikes. The window lights up a skyline. I sit on my childhood Bible for good measure, Pascal's wager made with my arse. Parsing sins rosary I reach, hands shaking for Smirnoff reading O'Hara for comfort:

'St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your
whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am
I to become a legend, my dear? I've tried love, but
that holds you in the bosom of another and I'm always
springing forth from it like the lotus-the ecstasy of
always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted
by it!) or like a hyacinth, 'to keep the filth of life

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Two Poems, Remembering Barnardsville Days, Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina

1

Uses For Wings - Variations From 'We Can Be Broken' & Other Discarded Poems

'It means so much that we can be broken.' - from an early poem,1978

for Tien Ho, departed,
and Michael carving
the empty space
of her leaving still

*

Here is a Presence beyond
illicit fires bearing witness
to evidence, remains of flight,
contrived escapes blocked by panes,
walls striped in ramming panic,
of ritual and a broken neck,

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poem by Warren Falcon
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Po Chu-i, Ancient Governor - 772-846 CE, From Far Away Thinks On His Angry Wife

Of Po Chu-i: 'As one of his poems explains,
he suffered from paralysis at the end of his
life, one leg becoming useless.'

'A well-fed contentment...
is there no greater achievement in life? '

Her heavy face displaces among
clouds, is swollen with hard tears,
her sorrowful gaze calls for the
always hungry child that was lost
when they were poor, without work
and down on luck. The frozen ground
reluctantly yields these many years
to slowly make his little grave,
too long unmarked.

It now wears a monument tall, of finest jade.

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poem by Warren Falcon
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