His kind heart was obedient to truth's troublous pulse.
[*troubling]
I have not loved the world, nor the world me;
Never flattered its rank breath, nor bowed
Patient knee to its pale idolatries,
Nor coined my cheek with smiles, nor cried
Aloud in worship of an echo; none of the crowd
Deems me one of such a throng; among them
I stood, but not of them--- in my furled thoughts
Shrouded, which were not their thoughts, and had I not
Defiled my mind, I still might myself thus subdue.
Beyond a mortal man impassioned far
At these voluptuous accents, he arose,
Ethereal, flushed, and like a throbbing star
Seen mid sapphire heaven's deep repose;
Into her dream he melted, as the rose
Blendeth its odor with the violet,---
Solution sweet: meantime the frost wind blows
Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet
Against the window-panes; St. Agnes' moon hath set.
--- J. K., St. Agnes' Eve
VENUS AND VESUVIUS
GREGG GLORY
COPYRIGHT © 1998
PUBLISHED BY:
BLAST PRESS
12 BOWIE PLACE
COLTS NECK, N.J. 07722
732.946.4970
A tale strange, soft-focused, distant, then clear,
My dark muse eyes me, sullen-silent as the night
A ruined foil flashing back fabulous suns
Should I take up the Author's patrolling pose?
I sigh, my ruffian hearers, whose ocean silence beats
[on Venus]
Enigmatic clouds crimped a divine skyline.
All this, and more: honey-blood serenades
Sad years sequestered Absurdio to his mournful room
His pubis, freshly ringletted with dirty thoughts,
His curdling thighs unbundled boings and sprang,
He cramply encamped in a humid, drenching tent
In the hell-lit incline of his velvelour lax-o-boy,
The see-through water of his ice-light heart,
Cold skies collated from his wish-index nipped him.
She, the sphinx, the minx, discovered was,
Her maiden, sundial, shattered hand ticked up,
A lonely cloud, flumed crimson, bounded by
Absurdio was shanghaied by his consciousness
Never would one lunar hair of her crisp coiffure
Genuine Absurdio in patient prayer genuflected,
Absurdio resumed his restless tour
A strain, a stain was upon everything like black snow,
Astronaut Absurdio tumbled,--- uncapsuled, lost
Desire freeze-framed him in his vouyer's foyer,
Peeping through a hiked skirt of curling Alpine pine
Should he bridegroom first with attendant touch
He touched, or his seeming hand seemed to touch,
The furred head, moribund, profound, turned
"Forgive my flash of hubris, while I loiter to insist,
"I wonder just what happened to this merry pair
"What catastrophe's haphazard track did they pace,
"Timeline." Absurdio sighed against his hammock's
Absurdio, desire's soldier, soldered on
Spilling balm into the mini-labyrith of his brain.
Her (was she warm?) form poured in oblagattoes;
Created conscious again in his dream-ripple,
As if to dissipate, a distraught wisp
Deciphered sounds now entered her transparent ears
Yet where was this wizard woman's twinkly spark
There was always some sort of gangly changing going on
A freckled Mrs. Frankenstein whose veritable veins<
Her happenstance phantom, her tech-lechery
For this sceptred instant, grinningly alive
Love herself had jokingly sponsored their sparring war
And the nasty narrator choked on their lifesaver
Condemning shadows quite.
--- A. & C.
"Stop moping!" she would cry: "Look at the harlequins!"
"What harlequins? Where?"
"Oh, everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together-- jokes, images-- and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent reality!"
I did. By Jove, I did.
--- V. N.
[on Earth]
1 A tale strange, soft-focused, distant, then clear, As when a movie cures myopia, or a drear Nightmare that startles us, shelters;-- or sordid dream's Thematic shadows get ripped by a flashlight pen Oblivious to mood and setting. Such a tale, my friends, As Satan commences in blasphemy, with commentary, But listening saints can hear in holy choir, I begin, here, with you, though it changes in an hour. 2 My dark muse eyes me, sullen-silent as the night Whereon with insect wings she glides, flapping late. Exotic quixotic, I depict her on my verses' vase Inverting the immortality her throne supposes. The castled moon below her, she'll glare on, Past marbled Mars to veiny Venus, if she must In that post-lunar landscape sift gold words from dust. My dragged heart blackens and thuds its tars. What roses, What Sols I scribble, she dictates. I am her pawn. I am too mild-modest to unveil the thundered stars. 3 A ruined foil flashing back fabulous suns Whispers lightnings in my wilted breath. Strip- Teased away from the Ultra-nutribar I eat To aura languid limbs in rugged health, the slashings Shatter my dry attentions into balmy tears. I teeter too near dissolution to feel the fear. The velvet chitter of my needleteethed pets,--- My pens, my peers, my pellucid, inventive cheres Pallidly rattle in the inky stand. They hold my soul In the slangy, charmed embrasures of their Latinate script, Their nibbed hubbub of syllables and shivery tongues. 4 Should I take up the Author's patrolling pose? Hover ponderously, an editor's eyebrow Above witchy Reality? Or ride, randily astride, My meditative pen? Amused, my muses? Perhaps, a precocious Iago moulting mirrors, I'll lose my ahhing audience in appalling smokes--- A magician of the moment consoled by disappearance. Tranquil, lamplit in night's lousy shroud, My selves assemble at the clarion bic-click That drum-taps my unruly soul's tribal pow-wow To warrior order; even my fibulating, lying heart Capitulates, fisting the spurious spirit-spear Of its found rhyme, off-rhyme, rhyme again. 5 I sigh, my ruffian hearers, whose ocean silence beats My aching soul's sharp shoals to eloquence; I sigh, and, if you'd spare an ear to hear me, Take my caddish, candied language from me; mug me! Or, if you'd be vooshed to Venus, succumb to me, Turn the cheap keys of your failing spirits over To me, a hoarse, corrupt rocket-car, Tar-catarrhed in ineluctable sin, and begin. Harrum. I sigh. ---Oh skip it, skip it! Skip this daft narrator's gnarly part; Such naughty nihilism ill-becomes me. Instead, I return the guilty pearl of our veiled tale noir To you, viewers. Vide, lecte, dears. Now start. * * *[on Venus]
6 Enigmatic clouds crimped a divine skyline. Lacy ices drifted on acid, carbolic pools. Lurid skies, vague purple or angst incarnadined, Shone on no birds twanging tangled lutes. Spilled dusts of galaxies in staid starlight burned. Intricate dusts hurly-burlied burning snows Blown to walking nightmare by outre genomes. A fetid, festal energy spooned from sherberty clouds, Lime bright, or mocha coffee brune, or confusedly infused With venusian magenta, a trying shade For human retina unused to alien marvels. 7 All this, and more: honey-blood serenades Of ochre-aquamarine, a sheer fantasy's phantasm Poured the gorgeous poisons of a world of hues On our young, shiveringly young, hero: Absurdio. His tintinnabulating spine rived, racked with spasms; His single organism sizzled in Venus' puzzle. Down in an unpleasant dome he homed. Absurio dozed, Ruminating ruin on his quiet couch; half-deranged His tender head rested, like an exhausted comet. Such a new, human arrival among the strange! 8 Sad years sequestered Absurdio to his mournful room Alone, as only a circus clown minus patsy may be found, Leap-frogging loneliness in life's third, unattended Ring. His parents (in previous incarnations now Photographically enhanced) had evaporated by mistake,--- Measuring tinselly elements at an underground lake Of caramel kerosene, and smoking during break. Wretched, abused Absurdio rewound the fatal video Until their surprised incinerated faces aged to silvery frays. And now, eons later, alone, adolescence pounced. 9 His pubis, freshly ringletted with dirty thoughts, Like a haloed moon arose. In the winsome autumn Of recent nights, It came upright, red-shafted, huge, A crooning bone pronged among wronged sheets--- A blushful lighthouse's thirsty straw agog a spermy sea--- The perfectly predictable consequence of testosterone Spritzed by time's Tom Thumb into both boy and man. His hands grew awkward, strong, with hardened palms. His bearding chin squared beyond childish qualms. 1 0 His curdling thighs unbundled boings and sprang, Pirouetting poignant manipulated triplets Upon the pulsing pointer of his moaning groin As he swam Pan's ancient, ardent australian crawl awash In the Caribbean crucible of his sweat-swaled dreams; His sleepy teeth ground against giant, tiaraed teats. Wounded by his own desire, Absurdio spawned Unseemly lesion-dots on his knotted pajama bottoms, Paler than the snaily paisleys already winding there. 1 1 He cramply encamped in a humid, drenching tent And coughed awake still aching, torqued in shrunken pants. His furring, burgeoning body's once lucent form Clouded toward stormy adulthood's horny, knuckled norm. Only the marginal innocence of his virgin lips, ---Pouted to receive an apparition's dissolving kiss,--- Retained their fulsome, petulant, purplish childishness. 1 2 In the hell-lit incline of his velvelour lax-o-boy, One saw a cowling shadow parachute slo-mo from his skull In the delineated darkness of a filmed dream. His silent eyes, closed to heaven, endured A durable pair of bug-ugly goggles, snapped Primly in place by a pinkish plastic tether at his ears. His nimble, impaitient thumb drubbed adagios Against his impaitient, tempted temples. Ohs Yawned from below his sweet, nasal declivity; The VR headset warped, a double bow upon his brow, Poised to twinge and whang its dodgy target, Those red circles centered on just one misty wish. 1 3 The see-through water of his ice-light heart, Fuel-injected by the rude roar and vodka-boil of sex, Was doubled in the VR goggles' shotglass apparatus. In tonight's tittering iteration of his single, Searing dream, where was the girl, the She? Let us Scan the fake, pick the pixels, lozenge the rengas Of programmers' pop-eyed loops, swallow suns Or do whatever, whoever, however need be done To spotlight in life's divided cell the primogenic One. 1 4 Cold skies collated from his wish-index nipped him. An earthly Arcadia appeared; a galvanized valley Tinny under aluminum heaven, was sourced From whacked smacks of aberrant bits of static, Enhancing his whims with imagination's majesty; Inverted mountains, tipsy on their starch peaks, Ranged still lakes loaded with shotgunned verbaneum; Mossed redbreasts creeped across the angled lawn Mooing at woodpeckers who chewed trees of lead; Star-flowered vines screwed absent-present oaks of air And purled like invisible trellises, going nowhere. 1 5 She, the sphinx, the minx, discovered was, A downcast abandoned statuary whose ass ascends; A shadowy mute among the academic ivy's gloss, Her stiff stone skin was one exquisite blank Compounded of rare lights bleeding as they fell Through other, farther, fainter taintless lights, Defining whiteness. So, above. As for below Her nether half a blue fluid ink remained, A disfigured shadow semblance that attached, A skittish circus tent, to her body's upper whiteness. 1 6 Her maiden, sundial, shattered hand ticked up, An apostle pointing at a sky-blue book, Shafting through Nature's monstrous greenness With a simple whiteness summed of simpleness, As if to spill a bell. Attendant hours tolled Cumulus-slow through soft forenoon's sways Momenting toward the slave existence Absurdio had always Intended to be hers. His cola-fouled breath he held, Dithering her splendid image with his swan-soft, Slightly perspiring palm atop the swervy curve and cup Of the alarmingly mobile, docile, swift control ball. 1 7 A lonely cloud, flumed crimson, bounded by The imitation-shape of her complex suavities, Half-geared to swell a summer rainstorm's tears In puddly, ploppy pluvial benediction upon The evil coeval heat of his hot delirium. "O half-groped, untouched, doped isotope Of this radon-free semi-demi-reality! All if, if, if! Will you never swivel or pivot ever From your smooth stagger-pattern on the TV In vivid splinters? A decadent Miss' shaggy quiff?" 1 8 Absurdio was shanghaied by his consciousness To a heroin-incertain fairyland of ifs. Poor Ab! No angelic integers or numeric mumbles ever spazzed Original anger or new-budded love From the mutant look of her elect electrons' Seamless electric face. Thrill and chance, Those boiling bodings that hurt the nerves, Braked their roulettes and rollercoasters, moped --- Exiled by inconsequent conquest's certain grace. 1 9 Never would one lunar hair of her crisp coiffure Split off, twirl, or dangerously dawn orange Like the burnt inhaled singe of a spliff. Never, p'fft! All love was dead, desire defunct, hissed flat In the monumental deflation of the sure. Where was to be the wrenching fix, the heady remedy? What cure could toy his totem-world to stark reality? Absurdio plunked his whole mind in his heart And thought. And thought. And thought. Could it hurt to pray? 2 0 Genuine Absurdio in patient prayer genuflected, In patient prayer did patiently inspect his knees; Any glance listing against those lucent eyes Saw God reflected, a profounder Blank in blankness. Deep in the gothic fundament of their tombs Responsive saints spun shriveled, shrived cadavers To hear the holy moistness of so undevout a mouth Spout "God." And yet, no rent heaven yawned Anointing him with day, nor remade what he was, Nor she, the ecstatic static and the playful clay. 2 1 Absurdio resumed his restless tour Of the prismatic computer's chilly rainbow rooms: Phony noon presided in tangerine, heart-rending hues Over the local, erotic focus of his loves. A spouting, sympathetic cloud maneuvered near And passed on again into frisky sunshimmer; A clammy aftertouch of lemony shadow lingered On the moat-dark undersides of fractal leaves. Snoring backwards in his spraddled chair Silly birches flickered streaked with oval droops of cool, While galloping Cupid's reigning love-thoughts trot Down his sleepy cheeks and trace A crystal bridle drawn by drool. 2 2 A strain, a stain was upon everything like black snow, And felt more wicked ice within his stalactite heart Than raw outward aberrance dared to show. An iridescent darkness, a deepness of absence Soiled the unpointoutable apparent to his witness soul. Her dimpled elbows, simple bends, digged Into the soft argyle turf with wounding runes. In her empty, happy lap, sidelong sifted sapphires Of quiet light dashed and spilt their milky stars, Spattering trace evidence of some slight, damp want. 2 3 Astronaut Absurdio tumbled,--- uncapsuled, lost Among Beauty's forlorn flotsam, a jetted jerk Whose sour foreknowledge coffin-mittened dripping hands Clenching and unclenching in a madman's clasp After stark Snow White who twirlled eternally repelled From the lurching, avid lunges of his untutored touch. The magnet-magic that created her kept her from his crush. Then his naked, nasty, gnarled, marooned left foot (Or was it thonged and handsome, a Greek god's ped?) Intruded, thus, into the afternoon's spooled storyline. 2 4 Desire freeze-framed him in his vouyer's foyer, A randy stallion-statue displayed above his mare, Plumply morose in his recreated shyness, same as ever. What further use was doubt--- unless by addition's error He wished to subtract himself? He became devout, dissevered All annoy of anguish from his mirror-minon Dunce, each ounce. His on-screen he was there, here, The really reel, real deal. And yet.... (and yet!) And yet, The wet, generated earth still presumed to bountifully bouy His calculated weight. This dream 'he' within a dream Dispersed his doubts of truth with hopes of joy. 2 5 Peeping through a hiked skirt of curling Alpine pine< Absurdio sunk binoculate eyes against her buck Naked, pale, and blue-washed bod, drunkly tipped Against Venus' fin-de-fawn and sine curve vale. A sun-crouched lioness, but blue-lipped, she lay Keeping her cold secret, at once lit hottentot hot And known freon-cold to the potential touch. Our boy, the trembling man, only then began, at first, By frittery extentions of his film-self to engulf Her palpable sides with his ghost's caresses. 2 6 Should he bridegroom first with attendant touch Her shoulder made lemony by sunlight, sponging his lust On what was some Venus Eve's first, bitterest, citrine brine? His space-gloved hand went floating toward her Side,--- the sly, slippery side nearest, dearest him. Intermittettent abscences were eradicated, bit by byte, Solving sober Zeno's ouzo-drunken paradox In the gross, closed glance of Absurdio's dreaming eye, (Though God's ultra-fine squint might more acutely stutter) Closer to her faux female beavery smoothness By pixel-quantum amplitudes of dotted light brightening Toward the ultimate touch of her molten shoulder. 2 7 He touched, or his seeming hand seemed to touch, A pebble-cool graininess of skin for one firm instant, As if heaven had been reached by pounce and poise; This hesitant touch faze-shifted to a hasty dissolve ---Sugary sands sifting sinuously Though tightening fingers crooked to close at last An empty angry fist upon her nothingness. He gasped! A hatted rabbit in a worn mauve waistcoat laughed; Its albino eye from a daubed laurel's closure Laughed, as that funny-bunny Fate has always laughed Whenever overreaching man guessed his guesses sure. 2 8 The furred head, moribund, profound, turned And spake: "What neglected nail spurs these pauses, Pulling slurring the nimble wiggle of our narrative thread? Do I skip a blip in my story, hoary hearers? Has consumation's consumme soured to confusion? Flip back a windy, lefthand page, sages, and see. Returned, dears? Me too. I'm here, waving gravely. Tain't so easy to dismiss a self-eulogizing myth, is it? This story's story is insular and thick with tricks. 2 9 "Forgive my flash of hubris, while I loiter to insist, Exonerating myself like a murder defence's memoirist: But I'm guiltless, guiltless! My omniscient narrator's Rumored Diety is in fine effect. I'm winged Jove-King of these greek acres of pasty pages. Bored of my bon homme odyssian maundering? Well, then, Page down, my d(r)ear, inscrutible cherubs, Pass my unflattering flounce of digression's procession And surpass in a click the dark prow of my tale. 3 0 "I wonder just what happened to this merry pair The He and She of everyone and everywhere or when During her gentle dissolution's final cue? Did she, nameless, moan cognomens in the approaching Pinch of his garrolous, approaching claw? Did she shudder like clawed rainbow trout when she saw The roaring boy-bear's troglodytic unencumberd maw Lathering after her innocent, undressed tresses? Or did her thin skin whip him, a scorpion pinned? Did formaldehyde smear her wincing sides? 3 1 "What catastrophe's haphazard track did they pace, Hand in hand around the rosy road's fated bend Skipping to some bland fabulist's quickly scripted 'The End'? Among what sunset's sullen yellows did he reap Her raped, awakened wheats, if he did? Or did She winnow her weeping self away, flossed dust, Ere his sly scythe could sigh thro' her flaxen fields? ---But, I'm done with this stuttering narration's Nervous tick, and clock you back to our mainline's 3 2 "Timeline." Absurdio sighed against his hammock's Narrow netting,-- for so much potential so absolutely lost Must give one pause. His ungainly goggles Crested a slicker pate, slid syruped perhaps, On a ski-slope nose crinkled at some sodium Odor, or perhaps a tinge of things ranker and fainter. Absurdio cursed. Gangly in her dropped socks, her half- Strangled form performed, in soliel-licked imagination, Astericked tricks beyond conception. ---A-hem, The sinuous mystery of that trapped tadpole, Desire, Increases in the pale, ectoplasmic tale below: 3 3 Absurdio, desire's soldier, soldered on His mountain-rhymer's gogs again, divinely tighter To his thrusting skull, blotting out svelt Venus' Ambient, intermittent light. Slowly those eyes Settled into stellated iris-wideness, as inside His interior landscape darkened by degrees, And nightrise, calm and serene, came caressing His openness with her ever-maiden obscurities. He scanned half-doubtingly about. And she Was there, scarcely visible, a luminous intrusion, A pressure of touching light that arced and ached, 3 4 Spilling balm into the mini-labyrith of his brain. The setting exactly trite and tragic as before, Ressurrected when he thumbed 'Restore.' Ilex trees, or their avuncular, venusian Mulberry mirror doubles, dappled lashy elongations On the foreshortened, deforrested ground of his being In leopard blotches. His smaller, computer-generated Self stepped sprightly a miniaturized horizon, Lent a tightrope-walker's lightness nightly By a sparse, spectacular gravity that doubled The veiny, vulnerable, fluer-de-lis neck-lengths Of the arising flowers that haunted dawn. 3 5 Her (was she warm?) form poured in oblagattoes; Her breasts' concupiscence floresced and finished In attentive nipples; he shivvered, diving Inner-spacewards again, unstoppable, blushed By the program's thoughtful prop of rose backlight. A soapy sigh scrubbed from his bubbling lungs; How he tautly longed to eye her mufflered infinite! That which hung encoded, skiffed and scudded, behind Scratched cataracts of her teeming, purblind eyes. 3 6 Created conscious again in his dream-ripple, Delux-outfitted in apple pants and a velour- Lined waistcoat swarming with swan buttons, Potted and puffed, germily germinating Absurdio Bloomed, attempting the Tristian romantic manouver But abandoned by the stern narrative frame Of a contrite Christian's uber-grace. His hands, as pawns, nakedly displayed His emotions' opening gambit in a dream-slur Of utter lovliness. He touched, she shuddered, 3 7 As if to dissipate, a distraught wisp Or shy butterfly flittered from a lepidopterist's Urgent lurch, more cuffed than coaxed; A cranky collapse inaugurated by the drastic lack Of available, unavailing, RAM space. She shivered, but held. Her spongy shoulder Underwent a faint shimmer, as if conscious- Ness were being beamed aboard. Her patient skin Was still all ash and shale, but her awaiting hair Lost its stiff crispness, gained a honey-tone And the delectable bubble-bounce of "body". 3 8 Deciphered sounds now entered her transparent ears. A distant bird minced its watery treblings With the gorgon terrors of her first, lurid heartbeat In her registering brain. A pale breath escaped, Although Absurdio would've sworn he had not heard Any inaugural breath tipple and enter. Her eyes reared To know what stun had touched her as they flared Into wet, instamatic life. Their pristine prisms Socketed a world within her newly permeable skull. 3 9 Yet where was this wizard woman's twinkly spark Among all the engrossing chaos of her fabulous mass? He had not yet eyed within her eye that smarmy, Human cloud of becoming fogging her skyey iris Which marks troublous love's trembling, intrepid step Contra-distinct from lisping lust's insipid limp. Not yet, not yet. His playful paradise was still Too innocent in its ivied, idyllic clarity To boast of that human ruination dubbed Love. Stars crossed gaily, like kites, in night's meadows above. 4 0 There was always some sort of gangly changing going on Within the weathery swirl of this inner world Beset by the dramatic setting of Romance's Hurrying hurricanes and tortorous calms. Her addled belt slipped at his toying touch To couch in the creative vulcan valleys Of her slippery thighs. His dizzy head Danced, lassoed with animate, singing stars, As in Disney-visions where cool cutlery Carols hausfraus and bold boy hunters subdue, solo, Lugubrious bull-moose. He was in love, she lived! 4 1 A freckled Mrs. Frankenstein whose veritable veins Pulsed bloomed beads of blood up her supple neck. Living swans lounged in her frowning brow; Honey lozenges waterfalled her scuffy alto Into azure pools of purer contralto. She spoke! Her new words, her first, purred: "Absurd---...." But he had already stopped her half- Articulate baby talk with the sweeter understanding Contained in a kiss he hoped unending. 4 2 Her happenstance phantom, her tech-lechery Semblable, spasmed by benign self-deceit, Flowered into frissoned being on his primped lips. He let the solipcistic kiss linger, linger, As a royal rosepetal will huddle on kinked, kingly lips. The gamey wind was game to applaud their parading, Clapping aspen leaves whose whirl on them was hubbed. What they knew somehow was what was love. Of the universe's immensest aviary, they knew That they themselves were the central doves. 4 3 For this sceptred instant, grinningly alive In their sparkling cave and sprinkled spire, Absurdio and his girl were joyously joined, Twin instances of some remoter, scumbled One, Identical startled arcs of a single desire. A stately elm jigsawed the rooted stars With wagging shadows, while moonlit music tooted. Oh, they kissed and kissed until heaven split, And split again in moody, Mandelbrotian, fractal fit. 4 4 Love herself had jokingly sponsored their sparring war Of embraces, each deep cincture tighter and tighter. Her teasing taffeta said slurring, silken mumbles Against his entranced hips burning rope-burn sudden At her cloistered damsel's clotted knot veiled within. She did not hesitate, but with rapid hand And palliative tongue urging extra surges Moved with the remover to remove. Had History's grainy memory vouchsafed their names Their wantonness had been famous. As is, They tickled and tilted, strained and parted; And strained again, until joy's jubilant hulahoop Rattled to napping quiet at their intermixed feet. 4 5 And the nasty narrator choked on their lifesaver Halo (rubyfruitier). [for climax] On her home-town Mon Venus, the swarthy pitcher mounts Against death's delerious impact and mossy Time's Verdant verdict, that takes back (not yet, not yet!) Our personal, rag-tag, tattered, hole in the ground With wild mounds of lushness. Held winceless