Win On Diagonals

What i like best about Evan’s termite joke was the dissapointment of not being dissapointed as you think you might have to be with it’s punchline=bar-tender….termite  says…where is it, licks chops….ecology of it’s guts

VI.
So, all my bad luck today was because I had to see you.
I bought a small coffin, because I reckoned that the one
under the ground must have rotted long ago – I suddenly
felt very happy. I was floating in the blissful haze that
characterizes religious transcendence and the onset
of alcohol poisoning. I had an appointment with
People magazine.

“Now I know it’s for places and money and things – not people.”
(Mrs. Leo Warren, 1972)
-Marvin Gardens

A Religious Procession of One

The third art of living became a burning and unsolvable issue.
The continued search for analogy led to dramatic confusion.

Everything there is beautiful and easy -
everything but leaving!

You’re getting impossible, I didn’t mean that at all.
You’ve misunderstood on purpose.
It means all sorts of things but it doesn’t mean what you think.
We all have to be reasonable or what’s bad gets worse.

Suppose a man is innocent of what they say he did:
in my life, that’s the way that it’s turned out;
I’ve had a lot to think about.
Give me an idea and in two minutes there’s a second
pushing out the first.

-Marvin Gardens

Breadcrumb

1. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning In the Visual Arts (New York: Doubleday, 1957:153)
2. Albert Churchward, Signs and Symbols of Primordial Man: The Evolution of Religious Doctrine from the Eschatology of the Ancient Egyptians (London/New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, 1910: 308-315)
3. R.P. Morgan, Twentieth Century Music (New York: N.W. Norton & Co., 1991)
4. Michael Ventura, “Hear That Long Snake Moan” (Whole Earth Review No. 54, Spring 1987: 35)
5. L. Hudson and B. Jacot, The Way Men Think: Intellect, Intimacy, and the Erotic Imagination (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1991)
6. Barbara Walker, “Yoni,” in The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1983)
7. Robert Graves, Difficult Questions, Easy Answers (London: Cassell, 1972: 176-79)
-Marvin Gardens

Now Free to Rhyme
food good
made head
air year
In Deliberation
forage orange porridge
-Marvin Gardens

 

I always get stunned with sentences and facts like: “Hitler’s army marched on Moscow with many more horses than Napoleon’s….and finding out this is true 

Every time other time I shave…I’m reminded that King C. Gillette was an unsuccessful novelist.  I try not to think of my own lack of success or lack of caring much about it.

 
We legally Screw
5-16-07

By Dom Maltempi

 
 
                                                                                 i.             
                                   

I could see her in a dirty restaurant kitchen

Thinking about Kinsey’s bug collection

Before culling sexual histories of many men

Specimens double-locked up in sliding steel draws

 dipped in permanent juice

                        She might as well be a woman today

            Some daytime hours she feels more like an old couple

about to commit double suicide in a third rate burger booth at closing time

 
Making up stories and holding it all in

Stories are from nowhere and leaking all over

   Stories without underwear

 slaked thirsty thirst of thirsty curs

 
Nowhere is looming for a struggle-joy to boil cold-hands apart

                                   

                                                                               ii.             
  ‘We are meant for each other papa!’

      

 You don’t know if you love me anymore and I don’t know when it started

Pieces of language dropped as a seafood bread crumb trail looking

for the last fleshy Halibut

for the mouth

of an absconding ex-hostess former Miss Philippines

half drunk in a lobster tank her hands taped together but looking beautiful

 who waits for the morning that does not play clavichord so well

Lost as a child and taught mathematics and home economics

By one of Goddard’s mischievous movie clowns

the weekends are parcels of gruel fed to the pissed off maimed

         in there flipped husks smoldering

 
                                                                              iii.             
 Lewd jokes from the pothead maitre de

       I could never remember these jokes

            They were addressed to another in a sweet rage

        But spoken in such a way

that you knew they were intended

                      For the whole staff

Not just Miss Boney knees

Obsessing about the whiteness of a tight uniform jacket sleeve

Now the bathroom is locked

Double locked

Fort Fucking Knox in a speeding meteorite

 
 you double check that door till you’re unperturbed

    find some equanimity in a common object

new deodorant cake with its congealed firmness

 was the most beautiful thing

you have seen

all day

but there is no regret to detonate 

you’re foreheads wizened

seething grace

Imprisoned in a flimsy plastic prison imitation

of some celestial shaped gate

with a new-darkness detection meter

 
                                                                             iv.             
 
A rash of first dates

Sloppy kisses on razor-burned skin

Closing time gags featuring a sou chef’s crass announcement

Hated state legislator is pretending to juggle a metaphorical budget

Mr. Whittler with the chalk in his hand

I can’t tell where he or the chalk starts or ends

Is knocked on the jaw by the legislator who takes out his gold card

  swipes it through his hair

for any possible damages done

   Whittler’s apoplectic by the half wiped off specials board

 
You never get paid enough

to pay enough attention to this meddlesome stew

   Playing a part of the coddled or the cozened

You lost your car keys sometime before shift started

  But you never went to work

                                     

Bush also offered a more limited definition of success in Iraq, characterizing it as “sectarian violence down.” He told the Associated General Contractors of America: “Success is not ‘no violence.’ There are parts of our own country that have got a certain level of violence to it. But success is a level of violence where the people feel comfortable about living their daily lives. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve.” He did not elaborate on what would be an acceptable level of violence for Iraqis.

I went to the zoo this past Sunday with my immediate family and good friends.  I had not been to the zoo in over a decade.  I have lost some critical intelligence since that time, but never mind that.  I was hung over but happy.  My friend Mike and I sat way in the back of a Dodge minivan joking, while the women led the way.  I had to take a dump in a BP station close to

Fordham Road

.  Everyone called me ‘papi.’ I bought mixed fruit Chicklets which were disgusting.  I sang a song about the BP gas station that I was inspired to sing not only because of my bowel relief, but from a song heard booming that went something like: “That’s my philosophy, watching you’re ass squirm when you hugging my tree.” Well, my version of this song incorporated the BP, and my defecation, and a few other things as well. 

 Seriously, if you want to enjoy the Bronx Zoo, go on an overcast day in Late April. If you are hung over or enjoy doing so, get a little zooted, and high as a kite pushing your baby in her stroller, ask the ticket girl if the Cheetahs are asleep, and demand to see proof.  All in all, the experience was a fun and rewarding one.  I have an old memory of ‘smelling the skunk’ in the children’s zoo…a little fountain like structure that invites you to smell an approximation of that stinky defense mechanism.  I remember seeing the same old fountain when I was a kid and last at zoo. 

 Ok, The lion, a solitary creature probably going fucking crazy because there is nothing to hunt.  He might as well be the king of flummery or Smiles, but the question that took quick little stabs in mind was: IS THIS LION MIC(ED), that is, did the Zoo, or some practical joker pretending to be employed by the zoo place a microphone on the lion, amplify him for the sake of show?  The lion did indeed roar the day we saw him.  It was a satisfying sound that scared not a few adults, and many children.  Was the king of the zoo mic(ed)?