THE SIRENS These are the seductive voices of the night: the Sirens, too, sang that way. It would be doing them an injustice to say they wanted to seduce; they knew they had claws and sterile wombs, and they lamented this aloud. They could not help it if their laments sounded so beautiful. – Franz [...]
There are four legends concerning Prometheus. According to the first, he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was permanently renewed. According to the second, Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, [...]
Tagged Kafka, parable, thought shardsBEFORE THE GAME Shut one eye then the other Peek into every corner of yourself See that there are no nails no thieves See that there are cuckoo’s eggs Shut then the other eye Squat and jump Jump jump high high On top of yourself Fall then with all your weight Fall for days on [...]
Tagged poetry, prose poetry, Vasko PopaSoft stockings coddle them by day and nail-bossed leather shoes buttress them, but my toes refuse to pay attention. Nothing interests them but emitting toenails, horny plates, semi-transparent and elastic, to defend themselves–from whom? Stupid and mistrustful as they alone can be, they never for a moment stop readying that tenuous armament. They reject the [...]
Tagged featured writers, prose poetryThere was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the [...]
Tagged featured writers, parable, proseHigh Windows When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives– Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide [...]
Tagged featured writers, poetryA piece of a man had broken off in a road. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. As he stooped to pick up another piece he came apart at the waist. His bottom half was still standing. He walked over on his elbows and grabbed the seat of his pants and [...]
Tagged pith... picks, prose poetry, Russell EdsonOh didn’t we dance a puzzle Round the tree when we Danced the way we did In early April when all is Vernal and we needed twigs to Invoke the gods that hovered Near a healthy sprig About a foot or so longer Than needed to produce an Invocation that requires wood Or a cross [...]
Tagged poetry, Scott ZieherHell “If you want to understand the social and political history of modern man, study hell.” – Thomas Merton It’s probably like the excitement of your first cigarette, but it lasts forever, that dizzying nausea — the Unknown: with imitation human heads on their buttocks, bats leaping from black books, dragon tails waving, monkey glands [...]
Tagged Peter Johnson, prose poetryOnce upon a time there was an error So ridiculous so minute No one could have paid attention to it It couldn’t stand To see or hear itself It made up all sorts of nonsense Just to prove That it really didn’t exist It imagined a space To fit all its proofs in And time [...]
Tagged Proud Error, Vasko PopaLife, friends, is boring. We must not say so. After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns, we ourselves flash and yearn, and moreover my mother told me as a boy (repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no inner resources, because I am [...]
Tagged John Berryman, poetryApe You haven’t finished your ape, said mother to father, who had monkey hair and blood on his whiskers. I’ve had enough monkey, cried father. You didn’t eat the hands, and I went to all the trouble to make onion rings for its fingers, said mother. I’ll just nibble on its forehead, and then I’ve [...]
Tagged prose poetry, Russell EdsonBEFORE THE LAW stands a doorkeeper. To this doorkeeper there comes a man from the country and prays for admittance to the Law. But the doorkeeper says that he cannot grant admittance at the moment. The man thinks it over and then asks if he will be allowed in later. “It is possible,” says the [...]
Tagged Kafka, parableIt is not a way of life that a wise man proposes, but a way around life. * You say nothing could be further from the truth. I say nothing could be further than truth. * Sophistry is what reason becomes when it is employed for the purpose of reconciling us to life. * So [...]
Tagged aphorisms, Christopher SprangerA voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine. To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can [...]
Up in the pent apartment, scarcely a story away from an incidental street, flush from another neighborhood murder, at odds, again, with the alleged moon. Hungry, but out of essential soup, so walking the way of all flesh to the quick mart for coffee and reports in Arabic. A targeted buyer of bottles and noodles [...]
Tagged joesmith“The more injured you are by time, the more you seek to escape it. To write a faultless page, or only a sentence, raises you above becoming and its corruptions. You transcend death by the pursuit of the indestructible in speech….” – E.M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, tr. Richard Howard. © Arcade Publishing, [...]
Tagged E.M. CioranThe Man Rock A man is a rock in a garden of chairs and waits a longtime to be over. It is easier for a rock in a garden than a man inside his mother. He decided to be a rock when he got outside. A rock asks only what is a rock. A rock [...]
Tagged pith... picks, Russell Edson. CHRISTMAS AT THE ORPHANAGE But if they’d give us toys and twice the stuff most parents splurge on the average kid, orphans, I submit, need more than enough; in fact, stacks wrapped with our names nearly hid the tree: these sparkling allotments yearly guaranteed a lack of–what?–family?– I knew exactly what it was I [...]
Tagged Bill KnottFEEDING THE SUN One day we notice that the sun needs feeding. Immediately a crash program begins: we fill rockets with wheat, smoke-rings, razorblades, then, after long aiming –they’re off. Hulls specially alloyed so as not to melt before the stuff gets delivered we pour cattle rivers windmills, aborigines etcet into the sun which however, [...]
Tagged Bill Knott