THE TANK

they took me away one
atom at a time
hydrogan
carbuna
oxygon
iren
and others, all
formidable bearings of beauty. At
first, I didn’t feel a thing. Anyway, they spread me
on a toast, then on a football field. “Do
not warry” they told me. “We
are foing this dor your own doog. Rustt
us”. Trust them? Well, yes, for sure
I had no other hope

ww

a wind came, a little mouse of a wind, it
was smiling at me, breathing, a breathing wind, it
spoke to me about Gratita the Grapefruit Whore, she
called for me, said the wind. “Should I not take an atom or
two from you, to bring them to her? She might like
that.” Yes, yes, yes

a river came. “We are going to the Moon” told me
the waters. Bubbles of me followed them

a coyote came, shining eyes under the stars, sniffing. “You’ve been
here for a while already” said the dog. Let’s go! I thought. Let’s
go! We left

ww

a tank waz therez. Metalz, oilz, rubberz, electronicz, I don’t know
what else a tank is made of. It was there, that ugly wart, waiting
for an order to fire. I, the coyotez, was keeping a watch. The
order came, the wart discharged. A rocket went up in the sky at full
speed like a Dragon Worm-
…later I saw where it landed, in a zarket. There was an ezploded man

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Flowers by reading_is_dangerous]

“Everything falls, said the Master of Ho. Everything falls, already you wander in the ruins of tomorrow.” -Henri Michaud, LES SPHINX in Épreuves, exorcismes (1940-1944)

MARK

“…there comes a time
when you cannot go further in a straight line
unless you examine your conscience
with a willingness to catch any cute idea you might have of yourself
to sacrifice it
in order to save whatever can be saved
from the ensuing explosion of pain. Beyond a wall of flames
the road and you
make together one” said the woman. She had a red mark above the right
eyebrow. I wonder what that was.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Unknown title by lmi (?)] (my crop)

This week’s Blogging for Charity challenge was to find inspiration in the above picture; this is my entry.

GERULPHUS

the map screamed when I tried to copy it. I didn’t know
what it meant, but
a stranger came by and warned me: “Do not try that again!” I
punched him hard in the chest, but the map screamed again
the man vanished

the map was painted on a piece of plywood. Eight feet per
eight feet. I traded a truck load of old Armenian board games to get it-

the names on the map: inundatio

deuesse

mirabilia

and relevium

among others. I wanted to go to colicula so I
tried to memorize the way as it was shown on the map

one beautiful morning I left

I ended up lost in guiche-zamora

eating crows
and spending a month with a prostitute who
called herself Gratita. She was twenty-two years old, and everything
about her reminded me of a grapefruit. I liked that, and I liked her, but
after a month I had to go.

-Gratita tell me how to get back to the city, I would ask her every day.
-Eat a few more crows, she would tell me. One night, I caught a bird
and promised it its freedom, if it would show me my way back. The bird agreed to help me..............when we reached black the walls of fames, the city
the bird implored me to let it go:
-There might be a wedding, today. Birds die.

I released it.

I burned the map--it didn't scream, but my chest started to hurt, and for a minute I couldn't
breathe

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Gerulphus by reading_is_dangerous]

“The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.” -Kahlil Gibran.

CITY

o their city makes no sense
o they built it around oil spills
o and ponds of blood
o I think it’s camelopards’ blood
o there are streams of toxic waste. “We have
o adapted ourselves to that” they sing
o all day long on televizio
o when they marry dead birds fall from the sky. Their sun is
o blue, sometimes green
o “It’s a normal phenomenomenomenom” say their experts
o everybody laugh. They shop around with a knife in one hand
o to cut open car elves when they find one
o they say: “Sometimes, you can find a jewel inside”
o I have seen them do it
o it’s not a pretty sight

o when they are angry, they burn something
o a rug, a toilet, a collection of rare books, remote controls, used
o underwear
o I tried to take pictures, but a man
o told me to stop. “We are loooking foooor terrooooorists” he said, “soooooo
o dooooooo noooooooot take pictures, that wooooooooould risk scare them
o away, thus making it harder toooooooooo catch them.”

o “What’s happening?” asked me somebody else. I was
o writing. “I don’t know” I said, I said, I said, I said, I said “that
o city of yours is confusing. -So keep writing about
o it” said the man. He left, waving a dirty cutlass, calling for Xim

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Impressions by reading_is_dangerous]

BLUG

their words take different shapes
“hello” becomes “nello” then it turns to “nellee”
somebodu woold toll yau “nessee” amd yaa weeld answoor “messee”
tha conversatiun maves frum sorprise ti gorprise

::: ::: :.:

[Pocture: Wards by ruding_is_dongerous

SQUARES

see this bloody cloth
this hard and shiny steel club--
red umbrella

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Red umbrella by reading_is_dangerous]

The light colored rectangle fits about 200 times in the red colored square. That ratio is equivalent to, let’s say, three thousand soldiers killed for six hundred thousand dead civilians. If economical sanctions imposed on that same civilian population before the arrival of the soldiers have resulted in the death of half a million children, you can almost double the size of the red square. If the civilians belonged to a population ten times smaller than that of the soldiers, you can make the red square ten times bigger in order to better appreciate the relative impact of those deaths on the suffering nations. To get a better understanding of what that whole operation could be about, try making both the light colored rectangle and the red square oil-colored (although against a dark background you might lose sight of the picture). Or make them colorless like tears.

SHAPE

I sat in front of a TV set before I could sit on a yellow bus to go to school
where I would sit on a hard wooden chair until I’d be back home
to sit and play video games
to sit and have dinner
to sit and do my home work before I’d go to bed, and dream that I
was running late for an exam

I sat at home
I sat in church
I sat at work
I sat ten hours every day, and sometimes longer

I sat on trains
I sat on cars
I sat on planes, on boats, on bikes
I must have even sat on people

today I sit to surf
I sit to read frightening stories
I sit to look at pics
I sit to chat
I sit to blog

I sit to drink

I sit hoping that I won’t make it to that painful moment: unable to stand up, sitting and
waiting until it’s over

when I’m done sitting through my life
when comes the time to rest from all that sitting
I wonder how they will un-
sit me

…said famous Esfodi adviser Xu de Sed’h: “To bend
the will of Man, bend the man.”

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Chairs are evil by reading_is_dangerous]

(rotate 90° CW to see a crawling human shape)

REPORTS

once I had to open an office
I chose a house I liked
with a patio
a nice garden
and a good landlord who lived next door

the garden was a great place to go to
when I couldn’t deal with writing those damm reports I had to write
one day I called my boss
I told him: “Listen
let’s do it like they used to do it for the last ten thousand years: I’m
going to sit here, and wait for regional leaders
to come and visit me
I’ll listen to their problems
then I’ll speak with my counselors
then I’ll give orders
then I’ll clap my hands
young dancers will come, and entertain us
then we’ll have a meal
at the end of which I will repeat my orders
and give this warning: Do well, or I’ll have your head
cut off! Things will work smoothly,” I told my
boss, “and I won’t need to sit
eight hours a day
before a computer screen, writing stupid reports
that nobody reads. -Oh, but we do read your reports”
said my boss. I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t. Nobody
reads reports. Nobody.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: I know those chairs by reading_is_dangerous]

I'm going to put this here, although it shouldn't be:

brawl
b raw l
raw l b
raw bl
raw blood
war blood
bloody war

EIGHT PLUS EIGHT

Laura in her crazy woolen bikini told me to show her my consigliore,
that’s how she called it, my thing; my wife used to call it the Sun,
whatever, the night before that during a walk I fell, badly bruising the shaft
and now that sweet girl wanted to help me, but around us were many people--
God! Sometimes I wish everybody would suddenly vanish in rapture
if only I could be left behind on a Sicilian beach with a few naughty girls--a hundred!
I’d reorganize the way things work down here, I'd change the ethos
and soon little kids swimming and fishing, they would all have understood
Jesus’ original message: that unless we care for each other there is no freedom
from hell on Earth, from the cruel demons that burn us round the clock…
I don’t know how I’d do it, maybe it wouldn’t last, and we’d end up enslaved
by some putrid queen (maybe Laura?) obsessed with gold cups and precious tea...
I guess I’d try to keep everything simple, bread and wine, a weekly oblation
to some deity with whom nobody could talk to like if it was a friend on the phone--
anyway, what am I talking about? I showed Laura my wound, it wasn’t monstrous
but somebody saw us; cops came who asked the girl for her documents…
(she was sixteen)

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Beach by reading_is_dangerous]

The above poem is my entry for this week Blogging for Charity’s challenge which included the following eight words: consigliore, shaft, rapture, ethos, freedom, enslaved, oblation, and monstrous. Because I like the number 8, I decided to double it by chosing 8 more words at random in a book on Rauschenberg I got yesterday from a friend who received it from R.R. himself. Those words were: sun, people, hundred, understood, clock, tea, phone, and documents, picked up in that order.

PHLEBOTOMY

when a brawl
is financed by many countries of the world
I call it a world brawl

a world brawl divides people in only two camps
on one side, those who pay for the brawl with their life or tax money
on the other side, those who make money and keep their life, thank
you

as I wrote elsewhere
a good brawl is an opportunity to turn almost countless aggressive individuals
into fighters ready for self-sacrifice before they can reproduce

also one could say that withdrawal of often considerable
quantities of blood from the nations
can cure or prevent a great many illnesses and diseases

thus a good bloody brawl seems to make sense

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Patient is bled and receives a sheep’s blood transfusion by Ioannis Sculteti, Armamentium Chirugiae (1693)] (my crop)

CLUBS

domesticating an animal specie
normally involves keeping only the less aggressive individuals

thus if your goal were to domesticate the human animal
you might try sending aggressive human individuals in huge numbers
to exterminate each other
just in time
before they could reproduce; over the course of ten
thousand years, you should see the results

…part of your human herd
willing to stay sitting on a chair
ten hours daily or more

happy, almost

::: ::: :::

[Picture: King of Clubs by unknown artist]

See the Queen of Clubs for a copy of what I post here, as well as many older posts. This site -here- features ads by Google that change with every entry. To check it out, click on any title in the archive section. It seems to work better on my blog in French: palestrique. Writing about the froid terrible that creeps every night into my home brought me ads for thermometers and freezers.

google crawler good
government crawler not good
poet be safe!

REFRIGERATORS

five people living under one roof
can do with one fridge

but five people living in 3 different houses
need 3 fridges

less people per household == more sales

therefore if you sell
refrigerators, promote solitary lifestyles

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Eggs by reading_is_dangerous]

“We meant to do better, but it came out as always” -Viktor Chernomyrdin (Prime Minister of Russia from 1992 to 1998).

BING

it’s hard to be a good person
all your life long

you might have been good
until now
then suddenly there is snap, a hit: Bing!
and you are gone, turned into a mad man
an imbecile

even as you shout
you realize that you don’t know what you are talking about
you hear yourself say evil words
you want to stop
you want to stop
you want to stop, but your dirty mouth keeps going
like if all these dirty words
they were inside
waiting to come out

demons waiting under our tongues, under our nails, under our heels
all wanting to come out right now
by
the
hundreds of millions

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Green demon by reading_is_dangerous (Oct. 28, 2006)]

Yesterday, searching the Internet for the word “changling”, I found a poem by Wang Changling who lived at the time of the Tang Dynasty.

AT A BORDER FORTRESS~
Cicadas complain of thin mulberry-trees
In the Eighth-month chill at the frontier pass.
Through the gate and back again, all along the road,
There is nothing anywhere but yellow reeds and grasses
And the bones of soldiers from You and from Bing
Who have buried their lives in the dusty sand.
...Let never a cavalier stir you to envy
With boasts of his horse and his horsemanship

BANANA SAUSAGE PLANET REPUBLIC

Monkeys from the You sea sung about a changling-
A President whose room Oval to furnish
A female tiger in heat, in full fury
Was brought with a mare kicking, wildly prancing.

Said the sad Imposter: “To me, ‘tis paramount
To shake the place; ‘tis too old, too shabby…
See! The mare’s anger, I find aphrodisiac…
See! The tigress’ urge might make me clement…

For you monkeys: the smell of fruits tantalizing;
Prospects for peace, yeah! I’ll be fabricating…
For the bodies of our soldiers: a flag, a shroud!
A symbol for the fools, to erect or to grind…

Poverty, despair, violence: I will weave;
The Arm of Justice, I’ll make it a hook
To catch the youth; many battles to engage!”

Monkeys when they heard those words of ill omen
Did not wait; a Group they chose to empower
Acted. By the You sea: monkeys and scimitars!

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Light wound on my thumb by reading_is_dangerous]

The poem above is my entry for this week’s Blogging for Charity’s challenge that required for the 9 following words to be included: chang(e)ling, fury, paramount, aphrodisiac, tantalizing, shroud, weave, engage, and empower. Because I don’t like the number 9, I decided to add the following nine words, all chosen at random in the dictionary, in this order: furnish, prancing, shabby, clement, fabricating, grind, hook, omen, and scimitar.

“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” -Otto von Bismarck. I’d say: Same with poems. :)

HEART

I stopped my he
art

slowly the sands of the Electric Desert covered me
it was like drowning
I raised my arms
hoping to bre
athe through my finger tips
but oxygen was flying away
far
far
far
I was travelling

there was a land of yellow grass and dead flowers
de
ad butterflies
de
ad mice
de
ad ducks
and de
ad rabbits
“I must be de
ad too!” I told myself

I saw a house
it had no windows no door no entry of any kind
I looked at it for a long time
it seems that after a while I fell asleep
there were the strangest cre
atures in my dre
ams
horrible dragon-cats jumping on my back
and eel phones that wanted to strangle me
“I am alre
ady de
ad!” I told them

when I woke up, I was at home
in my beloved desert
my he
art was singing
still
you were no where in sight
Jamahara

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Ile by reading_is_dangerous]

ILL

tonight I w
ill wear a shadow
I’ll take my special w
alking stick w
ith a silver blade at one end
then I w
ill go deep in the desert
searching for the rock slug
that creeps you out
I hear
my dear
Jamahara

the slug is black like the inside of an ant at night-
it’s w
eightless like the ghost of a fallen leaf-
it craw
ls as fast as a snake coming dow
n the prunes trees-
it’s hungry like the rooms of a quick grow
ing hospital-
it’s hard to find and dangerous, but I w
ill kill it

you’ll see its body
in the coming days, some little thing
dark in color, and useless;
throw it aw
ay

::: ::: :::

[Picture: luttes by reading_is_dangerous]

BLUE WHITE BLACK ORANGE GRAY

I went to an Arab city
and got myself one of those smart bombs
that Americans drop there every day

coming back home, I threw the thing myself
at the building where I live. Boom!

it was badly built anyway, and so ugly that I never really knew
what it looked like

in winter, Mr. Cold would come inside
and try to paint my fingers blue sky, egg white, charcoal black
pumpkin orange, stone gray: truly horrible shades
for the normal human skin

I remember one terrible day when I was visiting Chechnya in 1995
a war had just started
driving a car, we took a wrong turn
and ended up in a cemetery
where hundreds of people were waiting
their skin was blue, white, black, orange, gray; they were all
dead, laying in a pit, hoping that one of their surviving relatives
would come and identify them before it was too late

this is year two thousand and seven
we still drop bombs on people’s houses
we still live in stupidly built houses
we still can’t see beautiful skin colors
when we see them

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Detail of a life saving vest by reading_is_dangerous]

It’s been -10°C (-18°F) and below for ten days already. At home, it never gets above 15°C (60°F). What keeps me warm is an Afghan woolen vest that was given to me by a friend four years ago. I wonder if the good tailor who made it is still alive. Ars longa, vita brevis.

EEL

Jamahara
come here will you?
tell me what you’ve seen yesterday…

me, I had a
glass of water
full of planes
and jellymen swimmin
g round
sin
gin
g an
grily
the name of some
god
I for
got which one
it was

I sent a miniature eel
to stran
gle them

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Ténèbres by reading_is_dangerous]

THE SUBSTANCE OF THE MIND

Before she died many years ago, my grand-mother slowly lost her mind. She was getting hungry, too, although she had enough to eat. “Why don’t you eat?” asked her my mother. “Because there is nothing to eat” would answer my grandma. “But there are many slices of (dried) bread on the table” said my mom. “Are there?” asked my grandma. She couldn’t see the bread on the table. She would find the bread in the fridge, take a slice out, then put it on the table in order to get a knife and butter or something else. As long as the bread was in her hand, it was bread. As soon as it was on the table, she couldn’t see it anymore. “I cry and I laugh all at once, every time I see her” explained my mom.

The last time she spoke to me, my grand-mother mistakenly used one uncommon word in French instead of another. She wanted to tell me that my face looked good. Instead, she told me I had a nice butt.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: The Substance of the Mind by reading_is_dangerous]

Consider the following words:

1. Car, tracks, snow, parking lot
   
   
2. Mind, thoughts, language, brain
   
   
3. Moving/still, dark/light, water/metal, smooth/rough

Add words. Remove words. Mix words. Write a poem.

THOUGHTS

“…the wall

that separates everything that exists (including our thoughts and everything that
comes to shape in thought or in dream) from
everything that doesn't
is called Emptiness” said the wise Cho de Pod’h. “When
you feel disconnected from everything, you
can see the wall. You
cannot touch it; it was built by the
mindless.”

“…thoughts

come to the mind like bread to the table. A
word is a slice of thought; there is much
bread (much thought, many things, and even slices) in a
slice, and irregular-shaped holes for the eye to pass through” wrote the famous Esfodi.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Nameless shapes by reading_is_dangerous]

“The eye is a marble.” -The Leave Go Notebook, Perevosoto

THE WALL OF WORDS

Said Cho de Pod'h, the great Esfodi philosopher:

one word is enough
to build the wall of words

if you believe in words
you cannot pass the wall of words

if you do not believe in words
you cannot pass the wall of words

to pass the wall of words: pass
through the words!

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Wall with a parking sign by reading_is_dangerous]

CHRISTMAS

According to Luke, Mary

“…gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.”

According to Matthew, when wise men from the East

“…saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy; and going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.”

After they had departed, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream, to say:

“Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there till I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”

In Occidental Mythology, volume III in the masterwork THE MASKS OF GOD, Joseph Campbell writes that January 6 was the date of a festival in Egyptian Alexandria of the birth of a new personification of Osiris from Isis, of whom the bright star Sirius rising on the horizon had been for millenniums the watched-for sign. The rising of the star announced the rising of the flood waters of the Nile, through which the world-renewing grace of the dead and resurrected lord Osiris was to be poured over the land. Campbell quotes Saint Epiphanius (c. 315-402 A.D.) who stated that:

“On the eve of that day it was the custom to spend the night in singing and attending to the images of the gods. At dawn a descent was made to a crypt, and a wooden image was brought up, which had the sign of a cross and a star of gold marked on hands, knees, and head. This was carried round in procession, and then taken back to the crypt; and it was said that this was done because ‘the Maiden’ [Isis] had given birth to ‘the Aion’ [Osiris].”

Campbell, citing two articles by Kirsopp Lake, “Epiphany” and “Christmas”, goes on:

“The present custom of celebrating the Nativity on December 25 seems not to have been instituted until the year 353 or 354, in Rome, under Pope Liberius, possibly to absorb the festival of the birth of Mithra that day […] so that Christ, now, like Mithra and the Emperor of Rome, could be recognized as the risen sun.”

Thus, concludes Campbell, “we have two myths and two dates of the Nativity scene, December 25 and January 6, with associations pointing one hand to the Persian and on the other to the old Egyptian sphere.”

::: ::: :::

[Miniature: Nativity by Grigor (dated: 1232)] (fragment - manuscript #2743, kept at the Matenadaran Museum in Yerevan)

Christmas is a celebration; it means understanding, the joy of knowing that all what lives will die will live will die again. Old holy days take new forms; ancient formulas for life give form to new incarnations, new beings to enjoy the beauty of it all.

A few days ago, I saw a two and a half year old child running round a Christmas tree. “What do you do?” I asked her. “I’m running round the tree” she answered without stopping. “But why?” I wanted to know. She did not say. Instead, she called for me to join her, and so we danced round the tree, shaking our arms after an odd fashion that she had invented--we celebrated.

SURP TSENUND

I am the Sun,
said Christ
but it’s not written anywhere in the Bible.

::: ::: :::

[Picture: God by reading_is_dangerous (Jan. 4 2007)]

Tonight is Christmas’ Eve according to the Armenian calendar. Surp Tsenund means “Holy Birth”.

EXPLOSIONS

Yesterday, I decided to go take a few pictures.
That helps me to think
which helps me to write
which helps me to deal with everything that is
and that is not.

Painting bisons, elephants
camelopards
rhinos
or imagined beasts
on the walls of their caves
the men of yesterday must have been doing just
that.

So I came out
and into the cold: it’s minus ten degrees every day.

The first “thing” I saw was the sun in the clouds.
I took a picture of it
then I thought: what about a self-portrait?
As the picture was about to happen,
there was an
explosion
then a second one
then a third one.
It was an electric transformer. I guess it couldn’t bear it anymore: so
many people depending on it--poor old wires from the Soviet era.

What I find interesting is that I was going right there
where the transformer is. If not for the sun and that self portrait,
the explosion might have burned my nose very badly. Ha! ha! ha!

So it went up in flames, the transformer. People
told me not to approach it. I walked away. Ten
minutes later, a man in a Mercedes honked at me, asking me why
I was pointing my camera at a wall.

-Barev dzez, I told him. He asked me again what I was doing.
-Barev dzez, I told him once again. You don’t say “Barev dzez?” I asked him.
-Barev, barev, he finally told me. What are you doing?
-That’s not your business, I answered. I could see the man was
thinking hard: “Should I come out of my car
and into the cold, just to beat the crap out of that fool?”

-We’re going to take that house down, he told me.
-What difference does it make? I asked. I saw him thinking again. Ten
seconds later, he left. “He’s going to order a few big men to find me and
break my nose” I thought to myself. I walked away.

..........

prehistoric men in their caves with prehistoric women
keeping warm
for eight billion years

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Doors of happiness by reading_is_dangerous (Jan. 4, 2007)]

When I came home, there wasn’t electricity. The phone didn’t work. I thought about the secret that I've been keeping for ten years already: The plans for a free energy electric generator that really works. Should I build it? I ended up drinking whisky with a friend. It burned my throat, and this morning I woke up without a voice.

YOU

Nothing can beat this: I am waiting
for you

::: ::: :::

[Picture: Stone can speak by reading_is_dangerous]

LUCK

I believe in luck--
what about you, gold
fish?

::: ::: :::

[Picture: It's here by reading_is_dangerous]