Hauntology
This fossil imprint of light
its ejected debris spanned in gas,
deposited as grains on the tongues of oral historians,
later reworked with the extreme prejudice of the pen.
To be kicked in the beard,
as that figure as heavily bearded as guarded
with an inherited mode of speaking
that was ideologically technical in style and delivery.
That rabble's facial down
was the tone to be stroked
-a pillowy comfort for the many and
-a cunning conceit for the few who would wield the message.
Equixeroxes
Rolls in launch smoke sun touches down sand to glass.
Peer over city sinkhole burst water main look like Beirut.
Only half here at any point in space half being half ego
Shot through as eyes full sand windstorm.
It is that vague and anticipatory waiting of boredom
In conversational hanging time.
Useless Myanmar march in a place lined up far off
A tyrant in the sea pouring saltwater into a pitcher
Up to his ankles in surf surge surface.
Wept at the war wall babies clutch mother.
My telephone crush ants no call.
Scotch arm rise pull a sidearm to kill dereliction duty.
Keep at machine type soundlessly wordprocessor.
Music thrum parody of harmony.
Looks like bomb aging infrastructure calls for money.
Refugee taxi driver remembers image at home shiver
Thousands miles away bomb bodies wailing siren.
His eyes cloud over and there now back there.
With him half here half being half a hole.
They cut the hole into parts power grid outages
Construction war zone pierced with machine fix.
Burst pipe pour sand in the basement soak become mud
Not glass slide surface surge surf ripple slow liquid.
Efforts are surges that break, offers of irregularity.
It is a time sink, halved Achilles other side Tortoise.
Left with shards in hand a broken girl.
Red, Red Wine is a great song
But I would transfer text images
In the way Glenn Gould parses a tonal phrase.
Even love succumbs to mitosis.
I jab pen in sinkhole cannot retrieve it an image
Gaping maw of failure eyes rolled back up in head.
Eyes roll back into cavernous hole in head.
A remembrance not one’s own a litany of bullets to the head.
Heading hole down down the hole to head.
Walk now in falsely confident stride things to do busy.
Bury doubt in pockets fingers twitch inside.
Anxiety reduced to walking finding somewhere nowhere,
Relieved all the same to be in a place without bearing or marker.
Geography cleaves, the schist memory, concerns without targets.
Difficult to love the wordsmith
For those with tenuous bonds to the convent of
Quotidian and quiddity.
It is the day and the what, routine and its repetitions and many returns
And the falsely acquired sense of the whatness of things.
This makes an arche-ology of the hole that is the head.
Teeming with glorious fictions swirling a catalogue.
No easier task than to –ologize Being to its what where and coordinates.
Difficult to love the wordsmith
Words warmed over.
To words bound and without release, a prisonhouse of language.
Communication into the hole from the hole a series of holes widening.
Convention to covenant of the verb.
Lucretius on one side of hole where action is only in the making of space.
Make an ark for the writer’s deposits and set it adrift along the shoreline
Of this hole let it hang there in a suspended shell a hanging mandala.
Symbol and signifier float not slip
not pinned down like so many upholstery buttons.
Prides in jeopardy so many prides along the rim.
To each their own hole or the collective hole and dump freely within
It is the impunity of holes and to deposit there
Stands for what is called meaning.
But forget and walk with false pride in full and confident stride and intent.
Metaphors issue from it all in a miasma, harden and crack
With the brittleness of interpretation.
But metaphors are phantoms and images are conduits facilitating memory.
Like a nostalgic smell or a gnostalgic reminiscence.
So many unhinged, unmoored images looking for someone to
Manufacture their anchors.
Jobs sink us into excesses that give false luster to diminishing time.
Revolutions of all kinds infantilize all its members link them to one book
To one image of the absent father who makes occasional prodigal returns.
Will it matter if Commodus or Mao is assassinated on Trafalgar Square
When the image burns a thousand times in size and quantity
Like so many Warholics, critics of said same rolling thousands deep
In galleries and magazines?
Hole-type the gram and the supplement the space the invagination.
The deconstructive trace and the space and the place where
Holes where they will kill all who go there.
Between the warp and weft of sentiment lay so many deserts.
Perhaps a desiccated John Wayne or so many sardonic grins
Where history blackens and memory sinks collapse.
Where no compass serves and time becomes a confusing motley
Of pure molecularization.
Hector runs in zig-zags like a rabbit fleeing predators.
All I see in my dreams is sand sand hole.
Bagged at the ready staunching water flow
But water always wins in the immediate and sand wins
In the long-run bet.
A wager between the wet and the dry.
I’ve known and relished the touch of the warm the wet the quick
Of bodies but they are always in transit.
What endures and remains
Is the dry and the cold, the patient and ever-zuhanden text.
Walls of sandy books, liber harena.
Or to wring the wet into the dry the process of what it is to write.
A little touch of alchemical craft a pouring on of sand.
The dead and dry rule the earth.
The world of the quick wet warm can only carve its domain
Its parameters.
But the mounting piles of books and no love from the warm world
Is proof of a transcendental endurance.
Remnants and the mausoleum of all images,
The hole in the account and ledgers of history itself.
It is trite to speak of history at all.
It makes badgers of us all.
There is perhaps nothing more circumstantially more cruel
Than geography.
And perhaps nothing more mendacious in deed
Than the pursed lips of the unspeaking concealing a hole.
The Great Adjuvantes, Don
Sancho Sante leaned heavy on
his master's load, watching him
carryin' on.
He penned him up for his own good, see
the ol' chivalwreck.
Now he, the old Don, trots along on a mechanical horse
round a wide and deep well,
forever in the balance of an edge
that, like infinity or Archimedes or the Great Rimmer
is always bending that edge toward him.
A matter of public safety, public health, public record now.
All art and dreams penned up this way,
interred
medicated.
Spare a cup o' madness, guv?
Not in this country, no, not in this country,
not anymore.
O Granada, with its legislative tack-up & on bills
to punish the sick
to discipline with stick the dreamers
to clinicize and criminalize away
to roust 'em all out
until Sancho Sante culture knocks down
all the powerwalls and all unprofitable innovations.
A rough beating administered to the creative since
they are the sick.
Throw a tarp over it all
and throw the rest into institutions
or rub out all trails between public money and public art.
Dr. Kane X. Faucher,
FIMS/MIT Instructor
Freelance Writer, Scene Magazine.
Co-editor, The Raging Face.
Co-editor, The Drill Press
Co-editor, Sorrowland Press
Interview Editor, Ditch Poetry
- Author of Urdoxa (2004) Codex Obscura (2005) Fort & Da (2006), Calqueform, Astrozoica, De Incunabliad (2007). Jonkil Dies, The Vicious Circulation of Dr Catastrope (2008)
