Mimimus Lectures Himself - Pluribus Not Unus, Culpas Minor - Upon American Bards
.
I pose you you're question:
shall you uncover honey / where maggots are?
- Charles Olson
myself
the intruder, as he was not - Robert Creeley
1
O great light inward,
which cannot (what can)
be said of America obsessed with manners
no matter the carnage stretched to dry
in a land where, Vonnegut clear here,
'love may fail but politeness shall prevail.'
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poem by Warren Falcon
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A Gypsy Cab Author Caught In A Texas Milky Way, A Letter Poem To M. Meursault
for Bob. M.
Mark the first page of the book with a red marker.
For, in the beginning, the wound is invisible. - Edmund Jabes
And so it was I entered the broken world to trace the visionary company of love.
- Hart Crane
'A man of many false starts...'
- Opening line from the manuscript spoken about below.
Mon Cher Marcel Meursault, homo viator **,
tumbleweed rumor, post-war roamer,
son of Cain, Biblical stain in from desert storms,
Petrochemical companies flare just cross the highway, multi-lane signals of Mammon Cathedral in the Wasteland, it's neon void promises a Velvet Jesus, a Velvet Elvis to a desert kingdom of the far flung, you being one of them, now home from the war in exile before and after, returning to the beat up but beloved truck that also tells a story and leaves a stain. Black puddles beneath write the names of God:
Jake, his slow breakdown while breaking into those stately mansions of the godly rich; hard lessons of earnest Private Dodge wanting approval and love ill sought from the gold-toothed, refugee Drill Sergeant Tomaso, late of Liberia, a wannabee Jehovah with too much power over America's young game boys shipwrecked onto military shores.
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Pisciatoio de Nero in Zero world
[reveries from many years viewings of Fellini's 'Amacord' -
'Pisciatoio de Nero' means 'black pissoir' in Italian]
'Hear me a moment...
Perhaps it is better
if the jubilee of small birds
dies down, swallowed in the sky...
The senses are graced with an odor
filled with the earth.' - Eugenio Montale, 'The Lemon Trees'
the blowing spring blossoms
the falling snow
the sex-crazed madwoman
has her place and is made place for
in the seaside town - Gradicia
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Scroll For New York City - A Son To His Sums of Eros & Father, Oh! & The River
memory
torques
into soft
teas
June
steeps
turns
steaming
said window
(and torsos)
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Ragas for Sleepy Bee
for Krishna, both of them, god, man
And so we began
the cooking lessons
the first demur approaches
the blushing papayas then
the fires the chilies harvested
curtains drawn
1
Dawn.
Slow him down.
He speaks
his accent thickly
richly Tamil
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poem by Warren Falcon
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What Bells & Sex Have To Do With Each Other, A Mythic Rendering From Ancient Texts & Dreams, circa 1981
'The bells, I say, the bells outbreak their towers...
- Hart Crane, from 'The Broken Tower'
For Marianne Annur
...I will tell you of Fatima.
She is the bell,
The tintinabulum,
The veil and the will.
Then take me to her.
You can have the tapestry of streets,
The bowls of tint.
Shade the surface black
And she will emerge
The river,
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Instead Of You Today One Black Mouse
Instead of you today
one black mouse.
It arrives the first
day of your departure.
It catches the corner
of my eye, my blood eye,
as you call it, and I
think at first that this
is only sunlight reflecting
from a window being closed
across the street but
my beating heart, faster,
holding my breath, tells
me it is a mouse that
precedes its smell in
the house, that is, if
it takes up residence,
and the curtains remain
permanently closed.
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poem by Warren Falcon
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The LoRuhamah Poems - Her Death Discordant
for Judy Asher, killed at age 21
These meditations/laments are set in
Appalachian mountains and towns of
North American Southern states, circa mid1960's
[The name, LoRuhamah, means 'not loved']
Hosea 1: 6 - 'And she conceived again, and bare a daughter.
And God said unto him, Call her name LoRuhamah' for I will
no more have mercy on the house of Israel, but will utterly take
them away.'
Part One
1
O rue rue LaRue among the ginkgoes
cloven leaves all fallen whose burnished berries
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Some Ways Of Looking At A Black Mouse
[to the reader:
This is part of a series poem...this one
follows 'Instead of You Today One Black Mouse'
which should be read before this one for greater
context. There is a playing going on in both
poems which is not only about love had and lost,
a black mouse that shows up, as well as a dove,
the day before the lover returns permanently
to live in native country of India. There is
a Wallace Stevens' playing with notions of
poetry, meaning, and more, and a playing with
language and signs which shall hopefully lend
some jarring but enjoyable takes/slants/songs/
glyphs.
When you see the 'x's
in the poem, read
'times' as in the
math sign for multi-
plication. & of course
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poem by Warren Falcon
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Now, Heart' - Some Of What I Remember When I Listen
A river is a process through time, and the river stages are its momentary parts.
—Willard Van Orman Quine
From early poems,1970s, youthful indiscretions/attempts to vocally/poetically arrive at/derive a worthwhile writer's voice. Some explication might serve or enhance these under serving, undeserving though 'striving-after' poems hidden in old journals understandably unpublished but now so with apologies which are these expiatory explanations. Recently rediscovering these early arrivals, derivative yet aspiring I recognized and reembraced an enduring self maturing, arriving into late middle age:
Obsessed newly by jazz, mad about the many miraculous lady singers, entranced all too easily as youth are wont to be by sorrows and sexual infatuations which feel, emphasis on 'feel', like love, here are two of many 'songs' as tributes and life markers to jazz singers who provided soundtrack and felt expression to my angst and easily inflated/deflated sense of self, of beloved others, and of that new territory, independent life away from parental home and childhood community discovering, blundering into the fray of separate hearts and minds, irresponsible genitals and insouciant jouissance ('juiciness', in French) , discovering then and again and again that like Walt Whitman I 'contain worlds' and many disparate selves poorly formed, most of them collective projections and expectations of who or what I wanted to be, what others wanted and expected me to be, resulting in much confusion, tumult and multitudes of momentary throw-away selves. Thus singers like Bessie Smith and Dinah Washington became anchors, warm contexts and containers, for my daily fragmentation and re-formation.
I lived on 3rd street in downtown Chattanooga, a refugee from zealous, politically conservative white evangelicals and the vestigial yet still viral Southern Confederacy. Just a block or two from where Bessie Smith was born, I used to watch from my upstairs porch the steep hilly street's comings and goings with a glimpse of the Tennessee River between tenements across the street, its persistent rich aroma heavy in the air. I imagined Bessie Smith as a little girl playing up and down the street like the kids I saw then - once, two of them gleefully chasing a frighteningly large and confused looking rat.
William—he insisted on 'Willie'—an old man down the street who knew Bessie as a little girl, used to come up to my porch after one day hearing Bessie from my phonograph singing blues onto the always busy but attentive street. One of the first and permanent things I learned from my porch is that a city street has keen, observant eyes, acute ears, omnivorously seeing/hearing everything, indifferently, perhaps, but nothing escapes it, a roving, all-knowing urban Eye of God.
Extremely green and eager as green always is though stutteringly, and without apology, I enjoyed Willie's many stories and back pocket bottles of Old Mr. Boston Apricot Brandy, both of which—story and spirits/spirited story —dissolved or appeared to, age, racial, cultural, and sociological differences, along with those catalysts/cata-lusts, the forever alchemical Bessie and other jazz singers, Billie! Dinah! Ella! Sassy! Lil Ester Phillips! Nina Simone! to name only a few of the sensuous solutio chanteuses resolving sexual confoundaries by Miss-ambiguating sins' plethera with loose lilt and will- o-the-lisp whisper tongues.
One night Willie, much 'in the pocket'—an expression for being well onto tipsy which I've never heard from anyone but him—wanted to dance to a Bessie tune playing, 'Back Water Blues', him recalling nights as a young man in rural Tennessee where he'd worked hard days in oppressive vegetable fields then hit the after hours juke joints for 'colored, twas segregation days, ' he explained, where he would go to drink, dance then dive/delve, as it were, into the sensual mysteries of moist skin, hot breath, mutually open mouths with their commodious moans and mumbles, venial hands, always vital parts, private hearts mutually pounding ancient known rhythms, odors and tastes of gin and those slender, forbidden, now greedily stolen bites in those all too short nights with their damned intrusive dawns.
'Dawnus interuptus, ' I quipped, us both slapping knees, passing the narrative bottle fore and aft hefting moments re-grasped between us, offerings to the equally narrative river, the all-knowing hungry street.
Jumping to his feet, Willie described 'powder dancin'' (pronounced marvelously, 'powdah') which I had never heard of. Talcum powder would be copiously scattered onto the dance floor where couples in stocking or bare feet would ecstatically dance, gliding and sliding sweetly scented, muskily bent toward later glides and slides in the slippery joy of momentary allure and amour on dimmed porches or surrounding woods often enough and gratis upon delicate slabs of moonlight gratuitously dewy providing cushion for Passion's out and in, honoring and dignifying deities of skin wanting more making more skin, headlong Nature's frictional algo-rhythms indelibly scored in every/each his/her yawing yen.
Willie shouted, 'YOU GOT ANY TALC POWDER? ! '
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poem by Warren Falcon
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