MICHAEL SEAN STRICKLAND

Goldbarg’s Variants

§ 12.

Perverse nostalgia for that tyrannical place he fled, the exile transforms into a turquoise art’s combinatoric potential.

You’re right about the exile being a thwarted traveler. Whether he stays or goes, his melancholy art makes melancholy all he touches.

D’un seul coup intense F. Maa rings synchrony from sequence. Intense shadow of the moon’s hand checks, it seems, the amorous onslaught of the solar beast. From his intact mother’s yoni, Karna crests, enveloped by an intense glowing caul of light.

Lunar montage of the unexamined life’s breached birth. Solar sequence of hand striking the shadow on his chest that his kin, the Aryan ikon Arjuna, chose, to the woe of all, not to examine too closely.

Deemed by most to be, like Judas, a physical traitor of the spiritual universe, a blot at the spiritual center of the physical cycle or circle of existence, Karna, as D. I. Swopes shows, being the notional incarnation of an annular eclipse of the sun, encodes, rather, an enduring physical and spiritual truth of terrestrial cosmognosy.

I like how Judas and Karna are the same yet different. In a different universe, the same traitor. In a different circle, the same point.

A propos of which, Moéu Noäu Nin says she and several other people from the island were made unwitting and angry victims, at the hands of Clonish Niechala and her band of Chicana Hellions — angry pirates all, and all, poignantly pretty — of what she refers to as the “angry crime of neutral bigotry.”

What else did she expect from the angry people there? It’s not as if anyone would mistake the Agore Bar for one of Agua Prieta’s more cultural cha’abrankar. But anyway — do the melos e artes of deft satire, the seemless tease-morsels of sardonic slander, really constitute species of cultural crime? And the culturally insular people such spiritedly unterse Salomés playfully mock with piercing sarcasm from barstool and bandstand, its innocent victims?

My favorite of your aural chestnuts is what you whispered to our favorite neighbor during lunch at Utressa (my favorite, by the way, of the several lupanares discretos you’ve introduced me to) the other day: “The contralt’s a eunuch, sir.”

Ah, yes. The Flouzianian Sea purls in the perspicuous distance. The perpetual acanthus rustle lends perspicaceous voice to the voiceless wind.

Talus-born giants rage in the Glo-bersh half of heaven’s talus-born body.

In person, the stewed giants are still. The stilted half of Glo Bersh still lights the sky with stewed rage.

The flock peals the pleasant years before their appealing son plunged into the appealing fire of death.

Vocal flock and silent death. Like a surd submerged in vocal fire, vocal absence of the silent son.

Take aim with the plastic lance, I mean, arrow. A band of plastic, notched, at each end of the bow into which the string’s loop slips and sockets with a toxophile thrill.

The objective eye reorders the steps into three objective bands, each with a uniquely toxophile objective: string bow; notch arrow; draw, aim, release.

And so the pink face of dawn tints the world ruddy, picks out along the ridge line all those blushing lambs of lurid time spitted on the burnt and bloody staff of night.

And so thus does the indomitable Cyclops of night scan with his mighty face the robust “world of criss-cross cause and effect” (V. Nabokov, Lolita, I, § 6), and stuprate with his virile staff the stout lambs of impregnable time.

“Who dwells in the autumn fire, brother? Who lives at the top of the autumn pyre, brother? Your autumn brother does, brother.”

I like how Bror-te Etrorb (alias Robert Trober) draws out, not just the logical heat inhering in the surface strata of the sonic fire of his allonym, but abiding, as it were, in the deeper semantic cerements and incandescent signifiers of ditto, brother.

On the weird brim of that humdrum space, the weird opening in the familiar rock, I take an ordinary step, and step out into the weird space of — me.

Belated step from the belated rock. Belated brim of the space opening up into the belated me-ness (not minus) of me.

Again these strange people standing on the deranged banks of an embroiled river. Disgusting, disturbing vision that overwhelms me with its intangible and noxious power. And I am propelled, sucked along by the implacable current, which seems alive, like some uncanny monster driving me — where?

Your dream seems more literary than disturbing to me. People, river, bank, monster — literary.

Hope smothers at bottom. Its pain not the smiling crack in the mammalian shell, the raw welt of candid punishment. But something shading off into a more mean and muffled, abject realm of integument.

Yes, yes! With frustrated degrees of pain, hope insinuates uncannily through the cracks in the frustrated shell and — no. Hope is the fugitive, which, at bottom, is frustrated.

Keep your eyes peeled for their shaven weeping which is not apt to deny those who behold them the grief of their shaved agony.

You do mean shared, don’t you? From the coarse allure of such shared agony, such woolen weeping, silken dolor screens the eyes.

D. I. Swopes’s Case Against Reality is based on the idea, not that reality wants to play tricks on people, who by and large are too thick to notice, but that she at times might spread herself a bit too thin here and there, leaving a gap she’ll instantly close as soon as one notices it, and thus, it is this difference that forms the basis of the evidence for his or her CAR —

An evanescent excrescence in reality’s watery realm — a thin trough between two thick swells beneath which the sand, the shells, and some brightly colored fish dart for an instant, and then there surges again the turbid tide of common sense, the salty thick spray of consciousness. How convenient that Swopes catches reality napping precisely in those timorous transitions between wake and sleep.

Or like the convulsive flash of spooked serpents bolting through the threshold between meadow and wood. One of their spotted necks glows in the umbrage of the underbrush, and is gone.

Transitory neck in the convulsive shade, transitory serpents in the perceptual glades of memory.

Involuntary plagiary, sometimes intentional, is about as different from intentional plagiary, sometimes involuntary, as the humble adultress who’d assuage her arrogant fever by straddling a tree or a log is from the loving senimalist who tracks meek sinemota through the intense thickets of promiscuous textuality.

To IPSI or to IPSI — that is Swopes again! Je pense que tu trouves itou que les faux mots trouvés itérativement par the trash thug vigor of that senimalistic perverter of textual amor are but the ipsissima verba of some false fever-dream of a more parsimonious, perhaps even otiose, auteur.

Pluck me from those others who’d stone me in the great fissure of the cast-off head.

Cast-off stone in the fissures of the great head you give me gives me pluck.

I find incredible force in the sun’s incredible other.

Sundry force, and sundry other things found beneath the sun.

This gesture of my thin foot. Thin aspect of these thin wings living inside me.

Living is an enormous act. One aspect of me is an enormous foot trampling those wings.

Imaginary hands, imaginary dance, imaginary ardor, imaginary rest.

Idiotic dance of idiotic hands. Idiotic repose aflame with some idiotic burning.

Amen, painful master.

Frightened I am, meine Geliebte.

On the silken brink of error, the airy silk of fear caresses me.

In the living air that thrills me to the brink of intoxication, fear of living would be a vile error.

We should cherish this magnanimous œuvre of time the magnanimous heavens have bequeathed us.

Time is indeed the idealistic opus of the idealistic sky. I see you, I hear you, I feel you.

The yellow eye of the cow of heaven burns us with its yellow anger.

Dark hollow eye-socket when the dark cow sleeps. Dark ire of its absence.

The soul battles the body. A monstrous relationship of panting and agony.

Your trope is as charming as your body. And charming too your panting soul as its engages mine on the battlefield of love.

Talk about the wrong wind diddling the wrong horn, hounding the wrong flame!

Mutual wind buffets the mutual flame, tootles the mutual horn.

In this autonomous place bound by space I oblige him with my fettered neck. The autonomous wings of time’s constraint.

Blind time in a blind space. The blind neck of blind space.

The essential “I” of the practical intellect powers the simulated good of the effective “you.” Together they warrant the virtual “we” of two artificial people in an artificial place.

Green people envy the green intellect that constantly discovers the green good in green places. Evergreen “we” forms, dominates, impels the supple fulcrum of “you” and “I.”

Strange are the collective ends of the cold will’s pain.

Strange suffering of the pallid will’s Panglossian goal.

What I deny myself denies what others deny me — from the white brêche white hunger sheds, the white title or tithe of transformation sprouts.

Such physical entitlement, I mean attachment, to physiological famine molds a psychological rift that denies the visceral slough sticking to me, to others.

Wonderful you! To put the wonderful power of wonderful fear in me! Oh, you wonderful rock of modal model muscly magical might, might have been, and might yet be!

Needless fear of that needless power. Needless rock latent in what might have been born of you and me.

Je veux céder aux serpents violets de l’Arathu Sea. Je veux céder my ovid personality to the pyretic or pyric font of the conid arts of convulsive altarity.

Welcome to CACA, the economic fount of altarity! — this side of the Arathu Sea, at least. Clitalysis, by the way, is an economic expedient to knead and knuckle the ovid personality of some unknown economic entity X such that the convulsive serpent of the economic ego of altarity slithers out.

I love the hard body of Babur’s thought. I love the easy alloy of lovely music Romer’s Samba churns.

I love the limber body of that Bantu bassist in Romer’s Samba, how she so supplely and variably folds into and coaxes out of that instrument’s alloy resonance tout ce qui est pliant du corps dont B. Rao pense.