Rupert M. Loydell, Ink & Collage #1

Ink & Collage #1 

Rupert M. Loydell

Daniel C. Morris, A Midrash from the Quill of Mr. Fred Natural

Mr. Fred Natural, image by Daniel Y. Harris 

A Midrash from the Quill of Mr. Fred Natural

Daniel C. Morris

Bored with his flat provisions, Mr. Fred Natural removed his knock off Birkinstock sandals and silenced his cell.  He’d only ever gotten busybusybusy buzzbuzzbuzz anyway when trying to access WZAP across the coast from the Bay Area.  Frustrating, this trying to snoop, as if for the first time. Truth to tell, he’d been searching for edible bugs and a milky dew thought to settle on eucalyptus branches at dusk as cheap organic filler and cholesterol-free butter substitute for a “Mr. Natural Brand Foods” energy bar concern, not angelic visitors. He recognized the damp spores between his toes as having potential to ease his muddy mind. Why didn’t you do last night’s dishes?  All these streams since the Big Bang, and you are still searching for edible bugs and the Sunday Funnies!  Echoes of a daily dose of dissent courtesy of his better half, the usually taciturn Devil Girl.

Surely, Mr. Natural would have appreciated some allegorical cattle lacking spots, now that he’d relocated to a handsome hamlet outside downtown Woodstock, but he had not been privy to prayer because of his flakey father, who never could find the right tool for the job.  PTSD was the whisper. A forklift for bowling balls, was how Fred Natural thought about it. O Fred Natural did try to pray, but profanely. He gazed at some white cattle grazing beside a White Castle hamburger stand.  Not quite what he’d been instructed to seek, but, although no Gnostic, he knew a sign for a burial ground when he saw one. 

For all his efforts upon behalf of progressive causes, Mr. Natural felt he lacked that necessary something to reveal the toxics hidden within his heavy heart. Not the kind of brick Ignatz hid from Offissa Pupp, heavier than brick.  Heavier than body chemistry. Unemployable since the Cold War, he lacked a lot of things. He lacked the breath for praise since going around bragging he was passing as a damaged exile who’d been kicked out of heaven for telling God it was “a little corny.” Sybaritic, he felt his belly weight expanding under his tattered “Guided by Voices” t-shirt, and shrugged at his shriveled penis. Excess, excuses, denial, delusion, lies, and lack.  Oh well, he could still remember to feel gratitude for his naked feet on the clay.  Because of this fact, this fact his feet still settled into an impression of the shape of the nape of a neck on the wet ground, he impulsively bought more of the commercially zoned land than he needed, would ever need, regardless of the size of his extended family in future generations, which, at the time of this writing was zero, down one from but a generation ago. Is it my little dingdong that has caused the dip?  He laughed at his misplaced self-regard and stared at the night sky, blanketed with countless stars.  Dream on!  The truth is, he bought so much land because he was trying to impress his estranged wife, Devil Girl, a strangely silent woman even in the best of times, whose strengths were observation and endurance, and whose silence he could never decipher as anything other than a severe judgment about which he continually felt the need to defend himself. His one métier, he liked to think, was that he was the type of dude who didn’t ask too many questions around superiors, kept his mouth shut about the consequences of being blessed, and did what he thought he was being told. 

Mr. Natural knew the nature of the gift of submission to authority (real or imagined, as if he could tell the difference!) was where the problem started (the problem to this day). The problem, yes, he thought to himself, but also the proof of his possession. The proof of a promise of being possessed was how Fred Natural thought of the border between what was his and what was not, even if what was his was really what he got on the sly through mercy and fear and cunning (not that I blame him). 

Now that he’d remembered to bring the key to the pink pad in Woodstock once occupied by The Band, and presented it to the Devil Girl with the validated deed to the land where the pure white cattle grazed, Mr. Natural felt he needed other things, things like she-asses and opals and hard-bodied nubile slaves, things, in other words, he hadn’t known he needed when he began his evening stroll. Things, in fact, he hadn’t even known existed, much less needed. Mr. Natural’s mind locked up. Crucial distinctions flew by his tangled up brain without enough time for him to process his blindness to the difference between allegiance and inertia. Stroking his long white beard, Mr. Natural, as if for the first time, contemplated the difference between what he needed and what he wanted, between what was sand, what was seed, and what was clay, and, most significantly, between what he lacked and what he lost.

Singing a simple melody of his own choosing and calling somebody up (not me) became much harder for him after that. Instead of searching for locusts and honey and the eggy dew that fell on the eucalyptus leaves and that some who disbelieved saw as shit and others as rare protein milk suitable for a Mr. Natural Brand Power Bar, Devil Girl found him searching in the branches for angelic visitors.  As was typical, she refused commentary, preferring instead to stick to her talents: silence, observation, endurance. Mr. Natural sighed, trying not to give offense to Devil Girl’s implicit critique.

Somehow, like Jesus, nothing literary seemed funny to him anymore and words in general seemed beside the point. He leaped for a branch, but could not catch it. His bald crown was shiny under the harvest moon. His tool didn’t work so good, and still he had not found time to interpret the symbolism of Devil Girl’s most recent instructions for him to plan on taking a journey to the undersea world of night sweats. Is the hole in my heart a loss or a lack, he wondered. Is a sigh an elongation of my breath, or its deepening, or its completion?

Daniel C. Morris is the author of The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction, Poetry’s Poet: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Allen Grossman, Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors Write on Modern Art, and The Writings of William Carlos Williams: Publicity for the Self. He also is the former editor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies.

Daniel Y. Harris & Irene Koronas, excerpt from heshe egregore

Ho|ma|ge to Man Ray, image by Daniel Y. Harris 

clyde and bonnie 

vivus secto used as a pejorative dubious discuss formed by torture chloroform of the common sand frog in deadly rural gas stations killing nine sections of vivi that charming wink to hardscrabble and felony case by case precursor for the benefit likely to accrue gun wielding in newsreels and pulp detection to inflict injury for the benefit of mankind how savage is unit seven hundred and thirty one of these many cases without anesthesia testified and was unsure as a cigar smoking gun moll or whether it was a camel glamorized in the glam of out or law or the glam of law advocates the devil in the sick nostalgia of a matinee idol illicit sex vivi when mengele had free reign ad hominem but in this case mixed history and preemption anatomia of the pregnant rat so damn sick of the trite embryo and gametophyte so as to fuck till we tear and shoot another clerk and pick the flowered autopsy let us assume that human dissections were carried out by the greek physicians herophilus of chalcedon autopsy of the human body so physicians had to use other cadavers living specimens assaulted sexually something awful must of happened to cause a necropsic death among schoolboys and rattlesnakes robbing banks in a system of abuse what that sister marie and the grocery store such is the autopsy of quaint cigar smoking gun moll you stay outside the car you convene in springtown you gang killed a lawman eventually they reached a total of nine how human is the practice avoiding the human we so easily exit the human to the cliche of sky rituals bring back housekeeping as it is so endearing buying a case of beer a day or maybe captagon of the new assyrian war on apathy not my way but stirred by the convention and petty narration as to weaken the emul 

—Daniel Y. Harris

Daniel Y. Harris & Irene Koronas, excerpt from heshe egregore

Ho|ma|ge to Edvard Munch, image by Daniel Y. Harris

ted hughes and sylvia plath

even mytholmroyd has the routine telekinetic port for the hacked off heads of purple calves and stray dogs and the savage birthmarks of condor holy robed in rotted verdigris skinned and piled pyled and skinned for shade and dishclout the blackish lump blackpurpled bloodball incendiaries wordwrecked and womb punctured sucking the bone shanks to kingdom come bobs the back end stuck out as crooked as the lunatic lean split gut havoc of a muscled scato tunnel manned by gassy midgets with skin diseases across the mortal shock to hear the urine stained holy cock die by the fire of two blackcut malaiseys snap the hinge of skin the mother flesh fingering right back to the porthole of the pelvis white red black purple plush and pink fizz wrestling with her groins his groins no groins severed and cemented to the scissored tombeau flip this homunculus flip this trespass of vulva to squeeze past the neck to lance the boils of useless in this armpit of the canon crotchpit of the canon or canonic piggrunt redwhite tumuli skulled plated and clear bones and acanthine hair are littered against that wobbly vertebrae or if you must push the wobbly pushback of pulp tendon vein vertebrae ligament sinew deadlocked to futility it must die they must die we must die in something like a barbwire snare in this new century of advanced simplicity and the mustard gas of bad poetry to eye your wobbly knees to snare right into the cancer of your average and normal and expected chronicle hooked into the bored loop of one more drone reading by a deadlocked averagaton who should be killed before taking the mic and mounting a campaign to kill the spirit yolkyellow gummy squared normal obvious heraldic in the crass narratives of ivy or less but ranked beside the hackoff head of the genius you can never be and hate            

—Daniel Y. Harris

Ed Coletti, Movie Title Poem 26, Le Sang d’un Poete (Jean Cocteau 1930)

                 Ed Coletti's Beat-Head 

Movie Title Poem 26

Le Sang d’un Poete (Jean Cocteau 1930)

...sweetest is the blood

                        of poets

                        - David Madgalene

Hyperoxygenated with

the stuff of soul

this languorous blood

fat and crimson

leans against

vessels greased like

butter-laced skillets

awaiting onset

of certain sizzle.

Serum suffuses

organs other

than brain or mind.

When it comes to

alternative faculties,

such juice jelly or jam

provokes and obsesses

much the same as when

wild worthy demonic

beckoning space

rearing unbridled

between her breasts
preposterously possesses.

AC Evans, Midweek Mayhem

"Summer of Scandal," image by AC Evans

Midweek Mayhem 

’ten shun!

Seriously, where have you been?

She was sleek and cool and

A mere gentle buzz allows a hook up

In your area and ta-daaah!

They enter as French maids, nurses,

smoking sluts, chav slags and the denizens of a thousand

Grotty bed-sits in Farringdon,

All stockings and suspenders,

All makes and models, encore, encore.

Our latest releases erupted last night

Devastating carnage all round

For one week only, a right bonky horror show

Chiller, I’m going nowhere he says, off for a

Discreet dial-a-grab meet across town

Whammo! Boffo! Socko!

Deep space dead space west façade

Ah oui?

Alive and kicking someplace else

Like Madam Glam Bash, kinky little wotsit

Shades of opinion,

The most wanted,

The most vulnerable

Fractured moons, memories of fantasy

Identity disguised by music from nearby stars

As we go through the night

The Devil fades out

We think we dream

A fragile radius, a sensational confession,

Obey your new mistress slave of my heart

Live, hot and a sloppy snog: Try it! Love it!

And send us your selfies,

Recreate that famous psycho neo-horror

At Café Reality with a cutie from

The Unknown Zone, all cylinder boring

And crankshaft grinding at your leisure.

Teen honey?

Posh frock?

Midweek mayhem?

Buy a flat and a Random World Generator

Snow over the mountains seems far away now.

--AC. Evans