Longing for the Nightmare --Michael Kellermeyer

Now I've edited it.

“Look into the depths of your own soul and learn first to know yourself, then you will understand why this illness was bound to come upon you and perhaps you will thenceforth avoid falling ill.” FREUD

There was a moment during the night when I groped
For the plastic light, between a dream and a nightmare.

True blue from the DVD device.
Slick, oil-spill darkness in between.
There, on the nightstand--
Leprous with the suction-cup scars of Octopi
(Only mausoleums to my barren
Interviews with sweating mugs)
--I had faith that I could reach through the steam of
Nightsweats, recover its gouged-eyeball chain, and
--Give birth--
To a luminance hammered in the furnaces of Mind,
Like a wounded Prometheus, pleading only to once more
Usher a manufactured dawn into our blacker dreams,
The ones we see in the pupils of others and in mirrors.

Prevented by a scarlet arabesque, however:
The diabolical 343 that knew me and the cause of my birth,
I shriveled into a coccon of fetal expiration.

:: :: :: ::

And through those sable sheets,
Past butterflies' long-dead wings,
I stepped into a winter palace,
Where the twilit January, like lamps burning underwater,
Fell blue and electric through crystal windows
That stretched erect to the ungraspable ceiling.

With each footless step, I realized the check-board marble,
Until there, at a deathly piano,
Gleaming black like polished sin,
My ham and beans torso pickled with "KNOW" while the
Headless man pronounced each key, and verified its soul.

I knew that slim white stags contorted in the drifts outside,
Though they were caught behind the icy gates of birches.

And when the phantom huntsman stood from his solitary guige,
His empty shoulders gazed at me, and I felt the Truth of
His ineffable form before his grip had even
Seduced me to dissolution on the
Frost-darkened marble floor.

:: :: :: ::

And when I sprung into the fear-dampened flesh that
Now revived in the starless gloom of a wallpapered cave,
The sulfurous 355 still knew the cause of my birth and the
Dissolving illusions of my suffocating Mind
In its crystalline wonderland.

Time Puddle...As Promised --Austin Givens

Well, here is the recent version of the first "Act" of the poem "Sunset Generation." Hopefully you can see my attempt at unifying the gap between T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg. It is something I want to try to achieve before the world ends. I try to use Spanish, as this language is common, though Eliot used different languages in order to confuse and otherwise raise his art above people. Hopefully, this blends two camps together somewhat.

Like I said before, the poem is musically tied to breathing motions, and is meant to be read aloud with lots of leeway for improvisation. If the performer needs to stop to think/adress the crowd, they are encouraged to do so. The crowed should know they are part of a unique experience that cannot be duplicated. Both words, as well as tone and speech should be improvised intentionally based on reactions and such.

Here it is:

3

3

 

ACT I

 

The holy troubadour – upon raising his body from the grave – three days after –          claimed he knew his time, our time, their time.

                        I asked for vision! Vision! Vision!

 

 

 

 

TIME PUDDLE

 

 

Our time is nebula birthing lampshades in the cathedrals of our veins: holy         communion is alcohol producing secular melodies for our ass naked ears         and genitals, the bread of the new saints of delinquent Poetry.

When haunted graffiti howls against last generation's shit steamed wind shaking        'neath sheets of stars shrouding our green mother who covers up so well         for being so free.

                We checked her out,

        we undressed

                our loves,

                we cursed her shackles,

                        we bled her                                 

                freedom, and loved

                                her womanish figure.

 

When Christ will stumble across crowds of coming and going people, people, people         shouting “I give up!” in the wake of being crucified on concrete and pixels.

When love is the ecstasy of God and we shall make it at all times.

When there will be enough blood to go around: touch all tongues, quell all thirst, iron         all taste, revive our pubescent seraphim.

When we passed the point of poetic manifestos which became the point of no return         for them, but the point of infinite new sonnets for us.

                        I don't want to follow anything at all, just my mother's                                 influence and Picasso's “glass of absinthe”.

When we are the fuse of a cannon holding human fodder at the circus, ready to ignite         a revolution and hear the crowd gasp,“My God, there  goes a fawn in the         meadow, there she goes!”

Our time has given up on the apocalypse where fallout dust deceived the         wasteland lobotomy.

We shall burn our

        brooms, rub skin, and

                make

        love

                in         

                        desolation ash.

 

When fishing will overcome the carcinogenic joke of cigarette fascism.

When seconds drive the sun in our eyes to open brighter causing vampires         everywhere to scatter for platonic caves, and the earthquakes are coming.

The sinister postman

                 delivered the

        messages,

                but we

                        did not

read their howling whispers.

 

When the moon will asexually reproduce its light upon rooftops in the stars: the stage         where its grotesque children drink with Shakespeare's ghost.

When alarm clocks are set for every moment of every day.

        We are here

                and we

        must see everything in

        our time.

 

Ours is a time of technological sunset, and I an absent Benjamin, and I saw the         rising sun above the head of an absent Washington, and now the sun is         seen setting in the satellite sky, yet rising in our imagination eyes.

Kerouac, Dylan, Rimbaud; a season on the road, a season for your eight legs, a         season in hell will change infinitum in millimoments.

When our pens stopped crying and started the painful laugh of realizing that few         may hear us but they will experience it.

When the pixels breeding in Times Square forget which millennium to lobotomize.

 

        Stein,

        your cubism clocks

                will never make

                        our Americans.

        Dalí,

        Sus esferas de la mente

                se funden libremente

                        con pájaros y ángeles.

We are melting in surrealist destino dreams.

 

Goya, the lights are out in our churches and it is forever midnight and forever a         bloody slaughter

One by one the enemies are becoming vertical poems and tragic lampshades         sweating over the eternal steam of 69 coffee shop espresso         machines.

 

        (The scene trembled toward limbo.)

        (The son of man must come now or forever hold his peace.)

(The dove, the dove, the dove is repeating and reproducing.)

 

Time for labor pains, time for atomic fallout dust, time time to rewind and         indecisions and revisions, but what time do we have to destroy word         which is first word and transition of transistor sex in the mid-night mid-day         constitution of a new world governed by whatever exists in the land of         cockroach angels brought by new how long held the gun sat fire to forest         which laps up the water in the oceans of salt wounded hurt time... A time...         A time... A time times 100 times.... We have no more time breath.... We         have no more time. No time to heal, No time to kill, No time to justify         Ecclesiastes to the publishers of horror which we sometimes call our         parents but are most likely whatever runs our mind.

 

It is time to flip over our flower pots and tell them to stop growing up, up, up and         make love.

It's time to ruin the garbage truck parades.

It's time to rummage in youth.

 

It's time for an awakening.

It's time for the troubadour to rise again.

It's time for juke the jive hive dig ditches in our language.

Its time to personalize the television hypnotist as new lobotomy in electric shock         wards are our living rooms with daft genitals waving insanity in cages         disguised as freedom.

 

Smash the iron!

        rum the forks!

porcelain the hammer!

        crack the soul!

patch the hole!

        tear the tears!

heal the hells!

        dampen the yells!

ring em' bells!

        level the mind!

flatten your dimes!

        plow master's field!

 

The enemy is friction cog in the machine clock we create.

        Savio, rust the gears!

        Savio, wreck the motherboard!

        Savio, rupture the oil line!

 

What steel, what shrapnel, what atomic light gives the shadow its eternity in Plato's         cave?

Whose bomb will end our time? whose water will rust our spirit?

Where is all form born from? where is the negative nebula?

How sick! how long! how much can the vomit tramp continue on her titanic knees?

        

        It is time to stand inside eternity.

 

 

 

 

Painting --Will Holbert

This is a new painting you can view more at my tumblr.

Austin, your going to have to give me an abridged lesson on the history of poetry.

-William Holbert

Let No Man Separate

As my first post for this wonderful communities review, I'd like to attach a link to my Bandcamp site. I've recently released my debut album "Let No Man Separate." I would really appreciate artistic feedback.

Let No Man Separate- Aaron James Nicolas

You can purchase the album if you'd like.

His wife, holding him

     I wanted to get back into writing, but I needed to start small. Here is an old exercise from Dr. Mary Brown: a 100-word story. Please let me know what you think. I recently posted a draft of this on Facebook, but I'm much happier with this version. I think it displays the scene I imagined better than my previous version.

     As Garrison Keillor requests, "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."


      When the guards saw him looking their direction, they stopped talking. Their footsteps on the cold stone were washed away by the sound of his wife’s name crashing over him, like ocean's waves surrounding his pale, thin body. He could feel her supporting him like he always asked her to when they visited the ocean. From behind him, her arms wrapped under his shoulders and around his chest as he let his legs lift away from the sand. He floated--suspended between ground and sky, connected to the world only by the warm, velvet skin of her arms.


- Michael Kaiser

A Test with a New Poem --Austin Givens

I know its abstract, and a lot of gray hairs have told me to avoid abstractions at all times. But, I mean just don't take things so seriously. I wanted to create something that hangs in the air this time around. not necessarily something that sits in your living room. A poem that tries to live in the space between the freeway overpass and a loaded semi-truck. Mostly I am trying to test out a new clean html word converter in order to fix this vertical poem thing going on at almost every blog. If anyone out there knows some sort of solution, please help. No wonder no one spaces their poems like the modernists.

My Poor Feet, Gone again, Round the Bend

 

With silver in your soul, won't you come ask me again?

        I can't stand

                the rest of the world

        without you in it.

                With silver in your soul,

                                 I will walk again tomorrow.

 

I got a letter,

        a voice from the devil, when I was finally doing fine.

I got a letter,

        a whisper from the howling wind,

                 eating the moon spying on our

                        naked forms at midnight.

 

It said something about starving twins in China

It said something about our circus show and occupations

It said something about a poetic spirit in the snow

It said something that sounded like ash three hundred years after its fire

        the fire where it glowed and danced

                and rose and fell with a mothers tears.

 

And I'm just wondering what kind of golden child you can have

with letters chained around our neck.

With letters hanging from our neck

With judges tying letters around our neck

with death just neath' a hole in the gallows.

 

I don't have to stay, and neither do you

        We're all just hound dogs by mid-day.

I don't have to stay, and neither do you

        They will put blood on our teeth

                and we will hunt outlaws

They will burn books and letters and homes of outlaws with children and mothers

        and they will use our noses

they will make us wander till we die in the mud.

                

 

I got a letter, a whisper from the shadow of the wind:

        What shall we do? What shall we do?

 

 

 

 

The Modern Art Review: Symbolism

As I pointed out in my last post, Symbolism is heavily influenced by the romantics, especially Blake, Friedrich and Poe. It is a mostly French and Belgian school, prevalent in the late 1800s. It was related to the "decadent" movement in the same period, and is characterized by the grotesque, unconscious, terrific, gothic, sublime, and inhuman. It is highly metaphoric, highly suggestive, and highly psychological. The aim of the artists was to tap into the unspeakable code of humanity through secret avenues in the every day. In his rudimentary Symbolist's Manifesto, Jean Moreas sums up the movement:

     In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be     described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.

Edvard Munch's "The Scream" is the poster child (often literally) of this school. "The Scream" is perhaps one of this eras most-comented-upon paintings, and I won't add to that conversation anymore than to point out that the profound anxiety appears to be caused by the almost Sartrean nausea associated with the broadness of a world lit afire with unrestrained power.

Here beside it is another work, highly Freudian, violent and painfully pre-orgasmic, simply named "Vampire."

Of similar subject, "Sonata of the Sea: Finale", by Lithuanian painter Ciurlionis, uses creamy, velvetine color schemes that blend and swill together, creating a romantic impression of fused harmony in nature. The harmony is, nonetheless, miserably disturbing in all the best ways.


As in the grotesques of Poe and Lovecraft, within the symbolism of this composition, there is something larger than humanity, beautiful and sublime, eager to swallow it whole in a dazzling "wave" of gorgeous monstrosity.












Beside this I've placed a fantastic but soft scene, "Cloud Boat." The feathery will of the earthbound boatsman surpasses him in ability and eternality.

Carlos Schwabe's "Death of the Grave-Digger" is of a different brand. Munch follows a style that is eagerly Freudian, driving into the rumbling chaos of primitivity. Schwabe, however, prefigures the Jungian tradition, matting out blatant symbolic archetypes. While admittedly campy, the composition is disgusting and concise, capturing the last synapses in the dying man's mind as he crumples into his own handiwork. Not as sophisticated as Ciurlionis's existential terror or Munch's Freudian revulsion, Schwabe nonetheless calls no punches. He is upfront about human terror and pours it into a mold of symbolic destruction: the seductive angel and the impotent geriatric, her fermenting sexuality, his dominated will.

Symbolism left a profound mark on literature. It's influence resides in the works of Rimbaud, Pound, Elliot, Stevens, Wilde, and Yeats.

Wolves Something Etc. Etc.

 Hi, my name is Davy.  I'm Austin's friend.

This is a song I wrote and recorded a few months ago:
Wolves Something Etc. Etc.

(I am the wolf.)

If you want to download my album for free, you can go here:
Babies

Feel free to read my poetry and hear some other songs:
WeirdSuburb

Drink absinthe sometimes,

-Davy

Poem Evolution...Austin Givens

I am trying to get back into the swing of things. I got some art hanging on my wall from a good friend that has my name on it.....its the cover art for my next collection of poetry. I have been trying to tie it down for the last three years now....damn, it has been too long. Well, I guess I am just trying to clarify the elusive beast. Give it a name, and paint its picture with some words. I want its focus to be more of a collective writings work. Something to tie in my whole life. I guess I stare at Walt Whitman's naked soul too much.

Well, anyways, I guess I wanted to let you all know I feel some momentum rolling through my heart and genitals, so this poetry thing can get on its way now. So here is part one of the featured poem which shares the title of the book. Its form is a mixture of William Carlos Williams breath meter with that of Whitman. I want the work to constantly evolve, based entirely on performance. A poem is never entire unless heard out loud.

It is structured in a way that each performance is entirely different. The poem is based highly on improvisation. When read aloud, it should breathe in and out and reach certain moments of intense release. These moments actually deconstruct grammer in a way to disorient the listener. The effect can't be reached simply on paper. Let me know what you think. This poem will not be complete until I die....

Well, it seems html is never a good tool for poetry. It won't register blank space without " " tag....ugh. Its so frustrating. No wonder all our poems are becoming so vertical.

Well, until i figure it out, I guess I will share a much shorter poem I wrote tonight...I will figure out how to fix this soon.

This one is called "Naked Walkin' Blues Poem #1,2,and3"

When the electric monks come to take you
with their portable souls and
cellular phones,
I'll tell em' all to get the hell outta' here
You left their God out in the snow.

And when your taxpaying father
can no longer breath or smile
under the lampshade of sky
I'll tell him we went out walkin'
beneath the naked sun.

And when its me who finally gets busted
knockin' over banks out in the dust
I'll tell em' you put me up to it
with your hair and your smile.

Modern Art Review: Hellos and Howdies

When I moved into my little rural grotto, I found that I was lacking in books of art. This need being met by a shopping spree on Amazon, I found myself accompanied to my new realm of solitude by the handcraft of Sargent, Homer, Friedrich, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and many more old friends.

For the next few weeks, I'd like to share some of my favorite finds in the world of art. I'll also leak some of my work, literary and visual, as it comes out.

The book I'll be drawing from is simply called Modern Art, and it surveys western visual art from Impressionism through Postmodernism. Lately I've been really getting into the works of the late 19th and early 20th century avant garde. Beautiful creators such as Gaugin, Beardsley, Schwabe, and Redon have been filling my eyes with wonders and philosophies of darkness and light, all poured into the canvases and parchments that they caressed to life.

I'd like to post on these lovely people for a while, sharing my finds with you. In the next few days, I think I'd like to show off Symbolism, a macabre, fantastical style of painting that borrows from Poe, Rosetti, Blake, Wagner, Friedrich and others. To begin with, let me give you a taste of Odilon Redon. These two images are charcoal sketches called, respectively, "The Crying Spider" and "The Spirit of the Forest." They are heavily oriental, and you may recognize the spirit as the Japanese kodama, a tree nymph seen in the film Princess Mononoke. Both are mystical, appalling, sexual, morbid, and human.

More to come. Hope these bizarre images inspire you with the beauty in decay.

"Stringy Bird"

Recently I've been enjoying the simplicity of pencil drawing. With all the expectation to create fully finished colorful 'masterpieces', it's a good feeling to be able to step back and create something visually interesting with the simplest tool.

"Stringy Bird" is a drawing I did during a slow evening.  It came from the need to slow down a little and enjoy drawing again.

"Stringy Bird" | Graphite | 2010
Sara Holbert

Truly,
Sara

"The Married Life Thus Far" by Austin Givens

Married Life Thus Far

Come fly off the rocker with me,
          into the tipping point
     of life, and tonight --
So I can feel the gun in your hair
          which tastes like air
     and the way you look at me when --
"come and dance with me."

Heavens, keep your shoulder to the wheel
     you're too beautiful to define sex as an act of anything but the way trees puke oxygene.
          Come on! fly off the rocker with me!
Or just come and dance with me.



About the poem:
So I just wrote this last night. Looking for a bit of input. Just thought I would share it with you guys. I tried to utilize parataxsis (juxtaposing of unlike images) here without any base words. I think it makes the whole thing seem spastic and undefined which was the goal. Let me know what you think, you fools. Rip it to shreds and dance on its ashes if you would like.

Take me a'Riddin' in Your Car Car!

So we are getting places. Contacting as many of the incredible artists I have performed with over the years: all my ramblin' and such (its really not that much). So far, Davy long, whose incredible picture you can see on the side over there, has agreed to post a new recording for us. I heartily welcome anything he can shove down our throats. I will let him introduce himself once he gets something to post. I honestly think he is one of the best minds around. His creative songwriting fuses Daniel Johnston, Eliot Smith, and the late, great, poet Nanao Sakaki (especially when Davy sings in his native tongue).

I can't wait for him to be a part of this community.