John Thomas Allen, To A Fading Apollonian and Beyond

Professor Pissypants, détournement by John Thomas Allen 

To A Fading Apollonian 

You are one movement,

though the world may 

not tell you twice.

You are not five roads,

no khaki symphony or

a new brand of lightning.

Your hand is sutured

with the barb ribbons

numbered with glue

and a few hops left

down the road. Paper

moons and paper hearts

are not far apart; razor

shiva, honeycombed

with the plastic barbossa

self love drops.  Do not exit

as a paratrooper stumbling

over the rest, only to count

a few left of his own.

Marlene

2004

Marlene’s rosary beads hung from
a flaked skin tone which seemed a
dark pap smear screaming
for a heretic’s grace. Handing me a tiny 

newspaper, “The Daily Bread”
she seemed surprised with rolling
eyes that I could quote Christ. 

She spoke in slurring avenues, dissipation
through which the martyrs seemed
to scream. Carding me with a hollow of her

eyes, she swayed back and forth in her 

chair like a chicken, gazing through
vistas of smoke laced divinity.
Maybe when she touched
those pipes she felt a little bit
closer to God. “She smoked herself
silly,” my roommate said with
fearful contempt. Perhaps this
is true, though her swaying
carried me between heaven 

and hell.

Somatic Lazarus Webs

All at once the cellophane bibles

and a great rifling of iridescent cells

burst in the heirloom jeopardies

of abandoned furniture

pink slips falling in chinoiserie

exclamation points: the ivory note

bodies heave like a voodoo

mamba’s breast in

pastel snake charmer,

the turquoise crush 

of the Gold Nursery

           

I will ruin myself to kiss these leather jewels

points on a crest point. 

A clown’s eye

torn as a silver dollar

aglow in moon algae

simmering with the slow drawl….

spinning in cauterized lizard eyes: 

a Krakon flails in a mud patch of ivy 

orbed lilies straddling a stopwatch

dyed with thermal time zones

in bending seismic heat in hematite’s

hour genuflecting the in noontime’s orbs

the pink slips in chinoiserie exclamation

points indexed in trochaic ink music bars      

in a seance’s shadows and corncobs

of split mirrors, aureolas of REM light spins 

in bent hieroglyph’s etruscan fangs,

gold in whispered staccato shadows

rivulets of concupiscent marmalade

kiss, inched together in bison spectres

           

rolling the supernovas in a tinfoil grain 

pitch a sketch spilling doldrums 

of hourglass sleeping powder sealed 

by the feet of red devils winding balustrades

miles in self cancelling hindu dots

each inspired rain jog meeting itself

in the bored fitness 

of a lectern’s hushed glow

the spirits open in a tear of smudged rain,

A compact kiss of indivisible asterisks

drooling rorschach blots on a moon ladle

wrinkling in increments

of overthought moonlight.

The Union Center

Nondescript, really, like a small series of subway hatches or the floor dimples one remembers as one rises for school again and again and one’s memories are boxed in a Law & Order queue opened, probably, at the moment of death and the firing of the chemicals in a rapid, impotent frenzy that lights up each cave before going for lights off: I was there for something that never happened, or only happened what feels like a lifetime later after I got married and died and all those obligatory miserable things we have to do call ourselves lives. I sat in a gutted (yes, even the chair was gutted) green upholstery chair and saw a strange light cauterize my pupils as the amphibious, ancient glass tips of the windows darkened slowly and began writing this, feeling as though class had started, that in the entirety of the world someone would rise from thousands of millions of lopsided tombs and float up to tell me that one extra thing I need to know in this life, or at least give me a lotto ticket with a passage from Numbers to remind that I once was loved. Jimmy Hoffa was there, and he gave me a caught in the middle look and I at once expected to be shot but he handed me just that scripture in a small billfold, and I heard Reagan the Money Priest begin again with his sermon and he did believe, and I saw the archangels lower their arrows and begin turning on the place, that is to say all of us, and destroy where we came from and one by one start signing Reagan’s checks for him. The checks that are more criminal than anything Hoffa could have ever have even imagined.  I did not stop these fearful marshlings—who I see everyday living HBO fantasies right to the end—from doing anything. I even half-smiled, instantly recognized as not-one-of-them as they revealed it for what it was, a Church of possibility and a dream, the American one, the one we have to destroy for the extra part to come out, for those teachers to guide us into some secret that isn’t there, who spat out things like coal so we could have what is burning now in this cacophony of Anglo Saxon desiccation, this last decadence, this none too stylish oompaloompa death march.

—John Thomas Allen

Maria Morisot, Poetry

Stultifera Navis, image by Irene Koronas

French cut, homogeneous melting pot; the muddy black

gut of American subcultures.                          Candidates

do not ‘’comply,,                    do not reciprocate     tense

terse phenomenon                   it isn’t what signs     come

in waves of fatigue;                below the threshold       of

modern pop-culture                 seance; bring me to   your

                                                bit by binary bit      bucket

                                                seven is the new nine,  six

                                                cradles the cat, does     not

                                                define soliloquy as    death

                                                what once said       Hamlet

                                                to Ophelia the tie is     broken

                                    and shattered are         the principles

                                           of modern            mathematics

                                      so many sainted        men     all

                                    wanting not, waiting not for the

                                        Holy Ghost to let them in; all

                                    white   ‘’like ghosts themselves,,

A third of these sobriety tests;                        and prayers

unanswered, ‘’is there a God,,??        adjusted

medications play at the                       background

            of a holistic surge meant for backlit

            garbage collection; like in the Java

            kits they brought to us in school

            what a ‘’hoax,, my fame; my so-called

            screaming army of transcendentalisms

nauseous so-called hyper-active thyroid malfunction

So the birds in my vacation home can breed; falling

out of their nests and getting trampled under foot

A heritage                   of little pets

dreamed a                   horde of cats

no oxen or                   fornicating pigs

unmarried                    mares; swept

linguistics                    beneath the rug

            binary, trinary; quaternary

            six pence none the richer;

and in her                    song, I feel

reconnected                 with your violent

storm, a suicidal          outburst of creativity

but even the kiss         is unrelated

I want to birth             your condition

give life                       to your mess of

film and                       aperture;

‘’Sorry for the sleep that took me under,,

                        Catalogue plain white

                        pages turning through

                        blackened night; I can

                        only make out our faces

                        a predictability of concert

                        and shame; no more control

                        just a fixated point where

                        two bodies hover, waiting

                                                for the end.

Diseased feral cats walk through walls

substance         could curtail the driver’s

meditation

formulaic reciprocation of posture and

identity; the heartbeat with                 several

reconstructive surgeries foretells

[[ Closing the doors to my enhanced sensory perception ]]

‘’This is his body; and blood,,

in one small disc of consequence; take it or leave it,

the identity of mid-upper class white male homicidal

tenacity, pitched forks water cannons

‘’I’m not a Nazi,, she says,

hanging up her vote in the closet

but the pressure is on to redistribute

the pinions and the gear shift makeovers;

Harangue at the audience of clusterfucks;

‘’this is my diocese,, deliver me from

everlasting hellfire; knock the doors in,

claim I bleed several heliotropic guernseys;

mockery at Standing Rock, to place

monastic pipelines which bleed black

The Second War for the Fountain of Youth

A-symmetrical geo-political bastardized forms

of cardiac arrest;

turpentine cosmology packed with blazers &

interested propaganda short order home cooks;

                                                imminent demise

                                                corruption of a

                                                headlong mainstream

                                                commitment process

How I long to                         necessitate

                                                consumer’s

hypothetical                            reactionary foreclosure;

‘’With this wheel,,      I now pronounce you

man on wife; crushing, bleeding, self-inflicted

—Maria Morisot

John Matthias, Jean Dibble & Robert Archambeau, After Five Words Englished from the Russian

After Five Words Englished from the Russian

This is the second collaboration between John Matthias and Jean Dibble to appear in X-Peri. The first, The HIJ, was published in X-Peri in January, 2016. “After Five Words Englished From the Russian” first appeared as text in the inaugural edition of the Huffington Post Literary Supplement and, after that, in Matthias’s Collected Longer Poems (Shearsman Books). Jean Dibble’s new poster poems will join the first set as part of a three-way book-length collaboration between herself, Matthias, and Robert Archambeau. The “five words” in question come from Osip Mandelstam's great poem “He Who Finds a Horseshoe,” written in Moscow in 1923. In his note for the Huffington Post printing of the text, Matthias wrote, “I cannot read the poem in Russian, but I have loved it in English for many years (favoring first one translation, then another.) Mandelstam is the source of the horseshoe. The dingbats [sometimes now obscured in the poster version] come from “Insert/Symbol” at the top of my MacBook Pro. I think of them as sucking-stones. Demosthenes sucked stones, but so did Beckett’s Malloy: Watt concludes: ‘parole non ci appulcro _ _ _ Threne heard by Watt in ditch on way from station. The soprano sang:’ followed by four and a half inches of white space in my old Calder and Boyars edition, followed in turn by “no symbols where none intended.”  That last statement is, I suppose, the memory trace leading to my lines about codes, modes, allusions, mimesis, and thesis in part V. Anyone who has read my book called Trigons will know that I have, in my layman’s way, been reading neurology for many years, especially where it connects with musical composition and comprehension. Have a Google at Aplysia Californica and see what pops up. If you’re feeling ambitious, read Eric R. Kandel’s In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of the Mind instead. Section II draws heavily on a short story by Isaac Babel. There’s a pun, of course, on his name. There are lots of puns. I was forced to attend a summer camp once as a child and had to deal with a sadistic counselor, a professional wrestler recovering from double hernia surgery. To associate this with Soviet era “camps” and their guards in the Gulag may seem outrageously wrong, but I’ve been unable not to. (Auden said that his best reason to oppose Fascism was that at school he lived in a Fascist state.)  Stalin had lots of noms de guerre, most famously Koba.” Jean Dibble’s imagery derives mostly from a photograph of Osip Mandelstam, but the poem is not “about” Mandelstam in the way, for example, Gertrude Schnackenberg’s “A Moment in Utopia” is in her book, A Gilded Lapse of Time. But the poem, widely associational in many ways, is certainly haunted by Mandelstam’s life and work throughout and, in its awkward way, elegiac.

—John Matthias

—John Matthias, Jean Dibble & Robert Archambeau

AC Evans, AND YOU KNOW WHAT

No Longer This Moment, image by AC Evans

AND YOU KNOW WHAT

Hooray and hallelujah, you had it comin’ to ya! – Johnny Mercer

I. Magnetic Signs

Missing presumed mad,

The Devil phones in: cheeky face glitter

Eye jewels, multi-coloured headpiece,

Get That Look; cute but creepy.

What’s it all about?

Magnetic signs and a stunning new high-voltage

Rebel Angel life-saver, no fix, no fee.

Break glass to open Technicolour alternative.

Mm mm nice! What a freak-fest!

Got a story? Yeah, we hit the high notes, but

Chaos threatened a bigger, better headline;

Fractured images, sinister types in tragic masks.

Radio-controlled text maniacs and – you know what?

He keeps coming round here and – you know what?

He’s a cast iron wind-up merchant and – you know what?   

He’s the Devil in disguise, one risk too many.

So fashionably late, he was just clicking around.

And I was devastated, what should I do?

Snappy shaken ice cold… then he threw a curveball.

Senior military chiefs in dress uniforms,

Power couples, bad-boy rockers, and the usual

Loony layabouts from Planet Hiccup

Larking about in polo breeches, live on TV.

And – you know what?

II. No Longer This Moment

Say hello to your high-end horror rave-up,

Smoochy get-together on Damnation TV.

No longer this moment,

Turn up the lights; get a little bit more or less

On the side, round the bend, up the wall, many genuine parts.

Ghost flesh whistles. Phwoar!

Stiletto-wearing Euro-trash shows us her buns.

Our air movement specialist says oddball villains

Are everywhere, just everywhere, these days. So,

We’ll be finding out how the those saffron trollops

From Unisex Flair get away with it every time.

And – the Devil drives by.

I’m no Mystic Meg, but I can read magnetic signs.

I reckon our fiendish one-eyed Transit Van Man

Will get caught in a crossroads of razzle dazzle drizzle.

Up the creek without a – you know what.

Lashed by screaming corkscrew waves

Of horizontal sleet and ultimate crumpet.

Going under – not drowning, not waving.

Too much too soon?

Prove it, mister Rebel Angel.

Take an alternative route via midnight.

These magnetic signs will haunt us forever.

And – you know what?

—AC Evans

Charlie Onions, FADER

DJ Rxmr Spins Out His Last, image by Daniel Y. Harris

FADER

Here’s the process:

The collected shit of the previous week’s nights on his heels and laces receives a firehose blast while he waits, fading as urban as he can in his friend Marv’s office. He has Martell to hand usually, but on occasion he sips his mother’s Bombay, consensually somehow. They have a vent that doubles up as an industrial strength hand-dryer, however in his case it dries off his sopping Nikes. By this point he’s usually sweating because his mind has dipped into cruel, static waves; the bash of the hose paired with the hacking wind of the vent receives a delayed response from him. It’s around about when he’s reached the high street, drenched in nail bar signs and suits gone underground, that his eyes are spooned out and replaced with harsh bulbs, rendering his progress supposedly futile.

But he makes it.

            His demeanour treks through the baited rabble, never hinting at an inner fleck of hurt or worry. His shirt rages like a loosely planned forest fire, causing any eye that darts indifferently at its tropical charm to tap out, bleeding in the ring; left with no other choice than to admire like a bitch at it. His flask sweats and so does he but all is ripe. He walks past Jenny. Her hand cups his shoulder. She knows she’s done wrong but hasn’t reached that conclusion from his reaction, for he merely nods in limbo. Jenny had forgotten it was one of his stride nights and only realized when her hand got wet. However jolting this realisation was to Jenny on the surface, the manner with which she tingled under wraps, unbeknownst to the DJs and her two sisters, merged seas and lights within her. Her solution was a trip, strip and come hither in the ladies’ restroom; she hadn’t brought a spare set of clothes. All she wished to give was something soft and motel-bound. No, she’d give it at the back of Buffett’s place. Either there or under a rusted bleacher in Lexington.

That specific because she reckoned, with confidence, that he’d acknowledge such an attention.

            Martin Raoul DJ’d as ‘Rxmr’ to the crowd at The Fader that night (it was his peak, in the most sudden form of that word - $600 of equipment burnt with him watching, tied up and unavailable for any more Christmases with his girl Martha; they had oversized Suge Knight t-shirts on that night, Raoul had 3 teeth and not enough beat to keep him up). Ironically all said about his death was essentially rumour; to be frank his moniker’s meaning was too. He said that he fancied having a gimmick in his shows, like everyone flexing out an X with their palms, wavering slow as a weathervane in July (if that seems Southern to you, congrats; you found my intertextual tribute to the Houston in him). I miss him.

That tangent’s not completely necessary but I put dedications into my work instead of as a vague preface.

            Marv’s friend has his legs lifted over his crown twice in a row. It’s not Suge’s Knights, it’s those who’ve chosen him as their muse for the night; surfing the violet-lit crowd. None of them notice he doesn’t speak more than three times throughout the night. Rxmr spins out his last with a slow Isaac Hayes. I’m snowed in, my will’s imported and not natural, rape in my lungs, heart stuffed in my gaps; you’re mistaken if you think it’s misplaced. He lands near me and his bulbs aren’t as nuclear. I cringe at myself for rushing into his face, but it drenched me, he tongued like dribbled in Tanqueray. Hayes changed to Tribe, small blood to rife, his poached egg eye split outward; there then, a beat life.

            Rxmr addressed the scene as best he could, pointing out the cavalry with his headphone-stuffed hand, aiming to coax the crowd into ramming the gang onto the daisy-chain spittle floor. A lot of people came here the weekend after Coachella. The crowd flailed limbs vaguely in their direction. Most freaked at the man I kissed. Clean shaven brown now red velvet and slippy, he was dying and the Tribe song had finished. Rxmr fell back into the solid curtain, halfway there turning to Martin Raoul and then out for hours. I have Marv’s friend’s address and I’m thinking of going to visit his mother. I think she’s called Renée. I hope she’s coping and alive. It’s been ten years.

—Charlie Onions

Derek Beaulieu, Visual Poetry

40

letraset-absed visual poem

Untitled

letraset-absed visual poem

Untitled

letraset-absed visual poem

Neptune

poem made on Excel

Omaha

poem made on Excel

VEXATIONS

poem from VEXATIONS photocopier 

disintegration project Vexation Vol 1-69 

—Derek Beaulieu

David Alpaugh, Visual Poetry

 Strip Taze

“Strip Taze” was published in Rattle in 2008

O Mission Impossible

“O Mission Impossible” was published in the 2015 Marin Poetry Center Anthology 

(in a skinner, much less visual, straight type form without the color background).

An Iron Chef Explains Why He Cannot 

Be Your Friend on Facebook

“An Iron Chef Explains Why He Cannot Be Your Friend on Facebook” 

was published, some years back, by Bluestem Magazine.

Revolutionary Sonnet

“Revolutionary Sonnet” is from my book Heavy Lifting (Alehouse Press, 2007). It was produced by reducing the first line 13 times and twirling each subsequent line slightly so the “beginning words” are not in the same position. The incredibly small 14th line will yield “THIS LINE RUNS AROUND IN A CIRCLE LOOKING FOR A BEGINNING A MIDDLE AND AN END” when viewed under a powerful enough magnifying glass or microscope!

—David Alpaugh

Fusiform Gyrus, Two Poems

Dr. Feral Fist Offers A Bleak Diagnosis 

On The Continued Reign Of Doxx,

image by Daniel Y. Harris 

Prosper (a long decline)

Euryphion lusts at the mitzpah café,

Ritualising the mundane DOXX

Until one day KETTLE

The ritual is sacred, DOXX

And the horrific, KETTLE

Profane.

Overture: The tetrapod and Pyramid Hydraulic Ram Water Pump stand around pondering state sponsored street art and doughnut-flavoured vapour. 

Break it down

Brown blood flecks and dead heroin peaking shrine to blackmail hex on kin from unmade sheets of transaction shiver kick awake afoul cut face bone exposed hungering cold tired hook for the screen the reasons and rationale of a malnourished clinical deity old straws busted copper rods to suck scanning for dog ends baby where are you shadows colonising sky another night cold a prison number scratched in biro up her arm is he pimping you again?

—Fusiform Gyrus