Editions MSS
Editions MSS
MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND
Goldbarg’s Variants
§ 11.
Don’t you just hate the theatrical crimson shenanigans Atoca Inhart deploys in the sole utterance — apart from the ubiquitous de rigueur circumstantial moans — as the crimson wife of Atta Manna Testa in A Tara T Dirtytm of the same name: “The son’s crime is but the murderous hand of the father’s crimson arm.”?

And the son’s indefinite reply: “The father’s arm is the indefinite instrument of the wife’s hate.”

Fantastic Car-Li is not one to deny the fantastic cash to be gleaned from tricking out her fantastic yoni with fantastic car lube.

The individual gain for which the individual yoni contracts itself denies the individual Car-Li.

Such transient pride two mortal hearts might feel when the ephemeral sparks of instant envy of each other’s erratic avarice fly!

Caught between the snug systole’s cynical avarice and the desolate diastole’s unclubbable envy, the lonely heart might choke on the savage sparks of its own autistic pride.

With inner storm raging, the convulsive beggar convulsively begs. Furious dogs trapped inside the hovel to which their derelict owner abandoned them.

That former hounds of furies past still haunt le pauvre clochard — oui, I’ll grant you that. But that the pother of now should devolve its wily diathesis to some ci-devant uproar of inconclusive epilepsy — I doubt.

The inexplicable eternal flame of fleeting passion that flares up in a train or at sea, while the more permanent hosts fan their alien wings above the fleeting ground of lasting love in those immortal regions of departure and return.

Like the iridescent alae of dung beetles rolling regional clods of national earth. Or that national myth of some inextinguishable salamander of notional fire that hosts its natal flaw with as much aplomb as it submits to alien love in a train or at sea.

As Adam and Tara Trembart’s poignant world of wistful sand and barren voice pluck longing out of me.

They retired into the timorous fame of some other world unknown to you or me, Tara and Adam did. Like a pair of armored lyre-fish plucked from some kinetoscopic Lethe and pitched reeling and flouncing onto the desolate sands of the phanerotic peep show.

Their discerning disdain invites you to find your own way through the discalced hermeneutics of their dirty kingdom.

That’s just my point — I find their kingdom to be purely mental, a meretricious thaumatrope of meridional resentment.

I’m thinking, for instance, of that fluctuating currycomb of a scene in the abandoned stable, where the optical flickers mimic or even imply, given the living absence of any explicit titillation, the vivacious palpations man and boy flog and shrive each other with.

Bare master strips the covered stripling, the puny blond slave. Callow groom disrobes the covered swain, the virile dark strutting sahib. They card and curry and scour each other with strickle, strigil, strappado, and mock strangulation in the vivid hay.

Where guide and dupe match stride to stride, the faux circle of mutual need buckles pace to the rhythmic fiction of its own duplicity.

The good leader knows that leading is just a good way to keep pace with one’s followers.

L’arrogante ébullition exégétique dont B. Rao pense — la crase divagatrice de ses mains excitées comme la tempête digitale d’un pécheur exemplaire qui temporise au clavier — dans le temple de son écriture could stand to be tempered by a little shame, methinks.

Ça m’est égal those insensate witchy tropes Monsieur Babu R. props up and pounces on for pennies a phoneme like a predatory parrot from parts dark and distant where witchy sinners have been reported to temper their olla with fat trimmed from malignant epicureans comme lui.

Those repulsive words the master had for that delightful young lady, for instance, who, indeed, was showing the repulsive first signs of what later at IPSI in Agua Prieta was diagnosed as Ishtar’s Hand.

Hence the evocative words with which that fully-formed Tixputanita subsequently dubbed her band. Fully-formed symptoms of that ethological affliction, by the way, typically do not mar the immaculate individual’s psychosomatic index (PSI) until the Oosdoli cnidocysts (typically acquired, according to this brochure put out by the Institute for Psycho-Social Infections, by “the consumption of undercooked flesh of the stormy auk illegally taken in the fully-formed anthropomimetic stage of its erotic [sic?] life cycle”) have matured to fully-formed pansporoplasmids.

D. I. Swopes says that Velasto Prastier’s “Tetrastic Trilogy” charts a melancholical journey whose aim is to cast light on the hidden causes of those obscure things that compel us to hurt each other — and that the dark victory to be tasted by those who manage to plow through all three volumes is like insouciantly casting off the dark mantle of one’s own dim or dismal vanity.

She said something about coming into her own hot victory? Bathing her pungent mantle in the rubious mad light of dawn’s calorific causality. The ardent snail’s hermaphroditic journey toward something infernally absurd or abstract.

The scandal of seeing in lust a budding vice — only the budding law’s decree deems it so, for law’s truth is simply a way to apportion blame so that the budding lust of the vicious feeds the burgeoning lechery of the virtuous.

She is a statuesque law of luxury, a luxuriant decree of the highest lust. What blame, what scandal, what vice in the tall truth she —

Even nasty people won’t make nasty room for him or her on the nasty sand.

For proper people on the condign sand, there’s never a lack of suitable space.

On the pregnant brink of the expectant abyss, trenchant anguish teems in the heart, like a fertile valley gravid with resurgent thunder.

Confident thunder of the heart. Confident verge of the confident abyss of the confident valley of confident sadness.

From mind to lethargic mind, the lethargic sage transmits the lethargic rhymes: such scars attest to the wounds fear inflicts on us, and we call those scars, hate.

The geopolitical spirit of what the geopolitical pandit’s geopolitical verses expound boils down to: socioeconomic threats feed the geopolitics of hate.

The floating gaze flits clean over their flat chest and flighty chin.

Untainted by the rude sight of their red chin and rotten chest.

I remember the muscular torments the mystical master moved me with. I follow his muscular shoulders down the mysterious path over the musical earth. There, at the base of the fortifications, an ancient stone wall, he —

Mechanical torments! I see his mechanical back moving over you, the mechanical master crushes you into the mechanical earth. All roads, sooner or later, lead here, mechanically, to this mechanical wall.

Like a ram butting out its life, uncontested, between the boards of the stocks its own rage has clamped it in.

Like slivers, splinters, shavings, chips, dry saw dust, life dribbles out from the wooden cramp the satyr’s wry rage xylified his loins with.

It is the valid nature of love — or, rather, the nature of valid love — to endure by way of trust, no matter how invalid.

The functional nature of love endures all the functional modes of faith, while the many modes of functional faith endure the nature of functional love.

Nose, ears, eyebrow — you’ve pierce them all. Now, take the ultimate plunge — throat!

Half-baked ad for someone totally baked.

Strong repentance, rather. Woeful reminder, painful symbol, of the strong confession the initiated shriver seeks.

Confession relates to repentance as woe relates to —

Look, look! The bright towers of the pueblo and the bright head of the master towering over —

The split head of the master, in this split city of split towers.

Between the narrow walls of the busy city, we join the throng, the iron-pierced penitents on the way to the busy moat.

Stretched and pierced with iron, in-slanting narrow walls of the barrio propped apart, the stretched fosse of the ramparts.

Vicious remedy for a vicious rage. Vicious nails claw the bite of the vicious itch.

Such relief from that itch is simply anti-ethical. Anti-ethical clawing of the nails of anti-ethical fury.

The current attitude of the thoughts I currently face should resolve into nonsene by and by.

Of act and thought, the former is the more flippant. And of the flippant nonsense of any plans I might —

Might temper the nodal mange of all the mystical nonsensical advice all those nodal others keep trying to poison me with as to you and me and he and you.

Mystical scurf tempers the nodal scruff. “Je est un autre.” Or rather, Je est autre?

We employed sinners stride masterfully through the middle of the employed depths.

At the bottom of the center the upright sinners stride the steps we master.

Eyes that pain me to look on or she to look at mine with, the interrupted dreamer deems analogous to light from the annoying stars, while an annoying spark speaks from the dream with harridan tongue.

Arrogant language to give voice to the arrogant stars that inflect our eyes with arrogant light.

Such pretty ruins their culture has bequeathed us, their lament for which, in truth, is pretty, despite all the shrieking and moaning which, from a purely aesthetic perspective, are pretty too.

Sepulchral power of those sulfural ruins — lamentation as yellow as the mineral itself, and the sobbing shrieks almost as foul-smelling as they slice away at the sociophysiological truth of loss.

This glowing effigy, for instance, lacks a head; this one here, a chest; and, this other, a tail. Memory is a fraud, like an eroded river bank swept away by flood.

The various parts of the images the river sweeps away and carries downstream — they speak more about the various paths of fulfillment than about any diversity of lack — sundry heads, tails, limbless busts — fraudulent effigies attest to the multiplicity of —

Of all the crumbling errors of faith that overwhelm the heart when it finds itself wilting from either weakness or love or awe. Melt me, Sir, I am your slave.

Doubt is as infinite as faith, or vice-versa. And the heart is capable of infinitely mastering both.

I hate playing Tradine Oru. All those prophecies tightly nested one within the other, presaging some arboreal art’s constrictive woe or some starword of profanity.

Tradine Oru traditionally is simply about nesting or nestling the Aryan Ikon in the stairs and jars of the Harpies’ lair of hateful ills. It foresees, that is, announces, traditionally, nothing.

A small book of spare cantos expressing the matter of pain in clean verse.

A short book of skillful verses, one clean canto in particular of which pains me with its rather explicit matter.

[ A not-for-profit instantiation of human imagination and human labor ]
Copyright © 2013 Michael Sean Strickland