Saturday, October 10, 2015

Dieu de Assassiner (from the Fomorian)

Jesse S. Mitchell

Dieu de Assassiner
On the High line near Gansevoort street I dreamt I saw the black Madonna of Czestochowa appear to me in the rippled dark bark of a tree stump.  I pretended to believe in miracles.
Death Avenue.
There was thick multitudes of birds in the air and in the tree canopies and whole wide expansive tribes of men and beast a’ throng on the boulevard.  I pretended to care about strangers.
Chelsea Historic.
Little clouds of steam that roll under my feet, the buzz of taxis stalled in the street.  Minidress ghosts flutter and appear in the breeze, reflect in the passing panes of glass.  I pretended to believe in god.
West 23rd.
We all wish the stars would come out.  We all wish the sun would drop away.  The sky is too bright and the glare is too much.  We all wish together.  A desire in unison.  I pretended to believe in convergence.
Chelsea Park.
Our skin just gets thicker and thicker and our senses dull dull dull, black-eye the moon, bloody the sun, the sunset, the sunset red.  Until you can’t sleep anymore, burning up from stars and from want of stars and from what of burning.  Roll over.  Pull the curtains.  Dreaming.  

Monday, October 5, 2015

as hieroglyphic as the last (a section from Regnum Machina)

Jesse S. Mitchell

And it isn’t that I am afraid the sky is empty.  Afraid that there are no gods behind the sun and moon, that no angels or demons hide behind the curtain-night lighting and snuffing out the candle-stars of the broad firmament, that the mechanical whirlings, the pulley ropes and sawdust bags, are not manned and meted out, ecclesiastically.
But instead I am worried that all of it is illusionary.  That everything of it is nothing but chemicals and gas, all rising and descending based on weight and density and relative gravities and all just reflecting and distorting light back to my eyes based on angles and exposure to sunlight and starlight, wavering off into cynical night.
No sky at all, not empty, not filled, just gone.

Plato says we are all just staring madly at the works of shadows upon walls.
The continued plausibility of which is dependent on the skill of those who fan the fires.

And wide-mouthed winds howl through the trees and feed further the flicker flames
And make the distorted-shades dance even stranger still
And the more bizarre and more bizarre until the senses are never to be trusted but except for the thick chill all over the skin and the wailing noise that traps the ears.
The eyes.  The eyes.  Are all but lost orbits prismed in by every kind of dishonesty, they pull the mind this way and that way and control the lust of the groping hands but never settle any desire, any doubting doubting doubting…

The shadows on the walls.

And every word that leaves the lips as hieroglyphic as the last, hard and geometric, finding their ways difficult along the curved elliptical lines of comprehension.  Some code.  Some translation that is thought, taken to heart, understood, standing back waiting, approaching the magic that is the communication between two diverse oceans, each lapping at the others shores.  Trouble.  Trying.  A word in edgeways before dying, the breath so dry and labored, every step and every utterance a mystery. Souls. Peeling.  Things. Feeling.  Odd sensations brought about through long enough lives to begin to cobble together sentences out of lost or certainly misplaced words along the way.  Grunts. Moans.  Sighs.  Sighs. A whole life seething in sighs, that the calm is wretched and mistrusted, probably a seedstone of hurricane.  Hum.  Sing.  Sugarcane typhoon.  Nothing else to make much sense.  Nothing more coming through, static, ambiguous the reception.  The ménage a trois that plays silently on the muted television set as memento mori and the housecats curls themselves effortlessly around the houseplants and the blinds were never opened this morning, so there is a dreary cool.
And few shadows on the walls.
It is the hobgoblins in the hemoglobin, the flushes to the cheeks that remember for us that we remain human after all, a swollen tongue and epileptic, a shaken tree with shallow roots.  The kind of thing that soon finds itself out of ground, pushed up and storm-shattered among all the wreckage that makes up history, but to be a ruin or part of a ruin is to be forever if not necessary.  We cut our teeth on that.  Amen.

(a first section of this poem is included in Altpoetics End of Summer Edition 2015 part 1.  altpoetics.wordpress.com)

Thursday, October 1, 2015

(intro) to Medea's Videos Pieds-Noir

Jesse S. Mitchell

These are the cemeteries, filled with bodies, all the spirit-nil bodies.
(This is where we keep them).
These are the libraries, the buildings, the houses, filled with books, word-naught books, dead books, stories.
(This is where we keep them).
And these are the stories, bodies, filled with the deceased, letters spent all diseased,  the baffling dead.
(This is where we keep them).
And these are the sandy, dirty sandy shores and banks that we let our oceans wash upon. Carry us.
(This is where we keep them).

Medea's Videos available here