Juxta/Electronic #6
JUXTA/ELECTRONIC #6 JANUARY 1996
EDITORS: Ken Harris, Jim Leftwich
CONTRIBUTORS:
Lainie Duro, b. thales, Jake Berry, Ivan Arguelles,
Jessica Freeman, Thomas Lowe Taylor, Matt Hill,
John M. Bennett, Scott MacLeod, Scott Thurston,
Amy Trussell
**************************************
Matt Hill
Plectrum Override
From her distant poise is my resolve derived.
By the flank of desire's vertigo does she come
through the telepathic turnstile, not merely as
wishfulness for proximity but as gravity's tug.
A lithe nuance so gravid with passage - a yearn
to marathon your night country. Something
more than thermal breakdown awaits us in the
pleasure crucible: a folded rose stirs, the smolder
of undulant hips, eros in full on flamage. Your
distant blood ecstasy is now upon my tongue.
*************************
Matt Hill
At China Grade
In the folded wings of evening
this living makes me
in trenchant endeavor
quite uncertain
as night falls through
the gypsy crack
of scalloped skyline.
The strict vocabularies of
nature
the bewitchments of
moving water
poise a challenge at the
precipice of action
while a distant thunder
music rises through the
chaparral.
A bonewhistle through the
boughs, the night wind is a
gaelic flute, haunting tones
coupling
as Orion's shoulder
now comes between us.
Will the elliptic light of
other beings now be found
in the riches of twilight,
with tales of the west wind silently poised in the
embered night?
Now, as aloneness takes
me in her arms
under a lash of broken moon
the inexorability of
urgent water meeting
glyphic rock
is acknowledged.
*************************
Thomas Lowe Taylor
DAILY LOG De 24.95
...who controls language controls control....
I
At season, light and death and birth and darkeness
leaven into permanent markers on the other side of this,
nor imperfect hours reckon their own destiny in regard the
pain & pleasure of what follows choice upon choice we make.
This is the hour of which we spoke, as yet uncertain of effect
& censor from the pool within. We rule. No doubt
the other centers lie ahead within their own particulars
made certain by the doubts which gave them rise at all.
Stern capacity at the empty lords, no dismay at their dismissal.
Newer signs to follow the hours upward and from denial cast
our particular realm a liberation of the soul from its mass,
nor irony laden, hard upon this morning's vision of her.
What stays hidden near the clear vinyl of the heart is purpose,
indistinct in mellowing forward beacons lean you on and on
into the howling mists of nothing at all in pursuit
and calling out to follow on word & song the purer spirit.
This would be the moment when the heart melts with its
anchors, flying free at last from the bounty of its disregard
in the history of wasted hours their own reward reaped
& simpler throne & gong your own term preceding light.
You held the hour in my weakness sprung aside & melting
pot of the world's inarticulate substances made into flesh
and sung alert by the dream's significance & stain.
II
My dick. ...wholly-owned subsidiary of the body's time
in the rise and fall of nations, their story a mute parallel
with the style of your dreaming synchronous mysteries
interacting with the actual day-to-day of seeming...
...and The Beloved wants to sit on my face. My luck.
*************************
Jake Berry
from PhasEoStrophes 3, Illumined Strata
27
Enough sequencing postures terminus between cinema
and ratkill.
Pneumatic tubes are a gathering probe into dialectic
consumption.
Vulture weight drives a turgid penance toward cities of
refuge in an electron scattering mask.
Mendicants retain albumen fervishly, sounding large
glands after the florentine directive.
Lame seedings grace.
28
Obscure skeletons crowd gulag mind. Sequestered
through matron plow, crossing the Rhine like a reflex
disease.
Earlier tygers built skull cabins and froze miasma for
sacral atmospheres in canisters wired for broadcast.
Sleepily then, proud beyond ethics, merchants drove
the nature of fever through commodified doctrine that
swam in the bowels of featureless drones.
Trees bear the shape of intention by accident, assuming
humor leeches pale continents from ice.
Coccyx gating.
*************************
Amy Trussell
Cyn's Mouth
Nepenthe for a broken wishbone.
Score and bruise two love-in-a-mist pods
place in heated mailbox with:
a wax rose
a palm
a hawk's wishbone.
Beneath the mailbox place
a barrel of rain
Let the candle seep out of
the dorla
The shapes that form in water
are your answers
Mailman will scrape the remains
off the road and the black box.
To test for disintegration
drop 36 (one for each year of life)
letters etched on virgin parchment
into the creek bed
we are always falling off
like lambs on a spit
Hestia smokes a mirror of buds
in the background
The wolf-bitch gives birth effortlessly
while the male wolf rolls
in a painful couvade
Now her pelt is curing
in the smokehouse
parfleche of the moon
stretcher for the sun
To reinvent mathematics:
Steep yourself in salt
and mugwort (artemesia vulgarus)
wait to bleed on a new moon
count in reverse to when you met.
Cure for arthritis:
Pick stinging nettles with no gloves
(they wee at water's edge)
let juice scald the skin
then throw your hands into the waterfall's mouth
rain backs up behind the ducts
the house floods
You can scale a cliff face
with a knife, a rope, or a chant.
To start a french braid
or knot-magic
remove bats from boar bristles
and brush hair
To taste the sweet oil of language:
place seasoned tongue
in Cyn's mouth
and close your eyes
cautionary note-
a spider, she's certain
the center of the universe
is where ever she starts
a web
The trip up the mizzenmast
is delirium
baffling like a sylph
in the night's
sifting glitter
then the fog of morning
(don't seethe )
The kid is falling
into
clabbered
milk*
(*Refers to Orphic initiation phrase, "I, a kid, have fallen
into my mother's milk." -Barbara G. Walker, THE
WOMEN'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHS AND
SECRETS, Harper & Row, 1983)
Lainie Duro
After
Into this web of life
We weave worlds
words of spun silver
dripped delicate
as lace
from iced tongues
numbed by
luxury
The price of ignorance
The reward for remaining such
For beyond is freedom
and with it
chaos looms as an ominous
indictment of truth--
A black widow
fangs welling venom
poised to strike at
first sign
of honesty
*************************
Ivan Arguelles
WRITTEN IN THE MOUNTAIN OF SLEEP
three red geese flying backwards
my heart is a block of ice
with you in the center
sun of black intelligence
white cartouche of memory dissolving
evening in the buddha mind
one-note music of dew
my page is covered with sand
withered ash-plant in the wind
surely the gate will rust
falling at your finger's touch
who said love is a river of no return?
this leaf is an echo of green
your eyes have gone to heaven
your hands have shaped eternity
when will such a summer be again?
for sarah
*************************
Scott MacLeod
THAT SCIENCE
large numbers of problems simultaneously.
present and future damage in the finite world
there are other desirable characteristics
with precision. would surrender
around...strange things.
gone to observe, or computed?
voodoo, narco-synthesis, the indian
rope-trick, we've been a little
hard on demons. we need a
survival.
that can be computed
(he didn't say until)
all fell inside this too
wild stuff, hypnotism, he will forget
he has been told, wouldn't
stay quite
dead.
out of orbit again and without tools.
evil is native.
did not enter
into the original
but it serves
in this place.
something he had not been able
to do before. no recollection.
what is the source of this
enchantment? into the scrap heap,
for purposes of our solution, many
false starts, needle-in-the-
Roman Omen.
wits kick out, then the body
remembers and I took it back
to it. someday the word will either
be gone or "everybody knew that."
clumsy, complex, poorly built
thing an absolute master.
compare it to itself.
more or less.
if we can show that it is done.
(short of surgery, not violated)
never to be, under circumstances, wrong.
(dogs will be dogs)
and widespread and the analyzer - hm-m-m.
further research tended to indicate that the answer
might be contained in the term "determinism."
his solutions fell off rapidly
an enforced wrong datum?
(prime villain in aberration)
thoroughly ransacked,
the last occlude or falsify
it should go right on surrendering,
probably absent, a very sharp pain
in the area of the old break, the way
it behaves, as long as it could help it
and without much relief,
very very alert, a wide power of choice,
an ache in the knee.
....... well. that's
structure. or it worked too well.
emotion, physical pain and every
audio of dog growl and passing car,
something mama had tucked away
weary, ill, sleepy - which can
be "remembered."
his insanity, his wars, his
unhappiness as a mildly amusing joke.
indelible and inherent, all in
proper sound and color,
de-intensified.
lay down or take up,
succumb to it,
antipathy to corpses.
not even know about.
all we want to do is what they do.
the body, suddenly.
that explains everything
an unconscious period
containing physical pain.
the full drama, over and over
the road was full of stones
enough to keep me busy forever.
utterly weird.
the child is sometimes furious,
no explanation
fully dramatized.
the impotence, this
and that, now worked out
after a sloppy fashion,
opposed to command,
and then will surge back
how about schizophrenia
for instance?
people get caught in various places
action with the very stuff
with assurance, fully and retained,
without straying.
the road to nowhere.
#
*************************
Jessica Freeman
HALVES YET TANGO
Now scarlet ocotillo clusters
Philistine remnant rod lo!
And a chief priest sayest rind
It will be remembered handed
Down midday'll further Society's
Aim
hence trigonometrical foodstuffs
Power laxity over gainst white
Frame ruin ray-trance Q @ N Q=r
Incommunicable things now marry
Sea's blue serge kinship to
Bind fictive cordage
borders pass tribe O Judah
unto Caleb son of Jephunneh city
of David lo! garlicky tenderloin
generation'll triumph mighty
It'll be member'd opiate
Enkephalin trails
Snow no longer pink:
ripe avocado halves yet
tango
Jessica Freeman
No bread no water
Devilish massacres glower October
The lines are dead resolution
Cut from updated software's nook
0.01 second intervals or toil fruit
Will they yet impound Greek wines?
Wine, the most healthful and most
hygienic of beverages quoth
frenzi'd Louis Pasteur
Moot southern court debates partially
Digested food avgolemono soup OPA!
Spanakopita houmous tahini leg O lamb
Gyros eggplant paputsakia feta olives
Party trays available as fertilizer
imprison imprison imprison there
is no man in the family
imprison imprison imprison
there is no man in limb stump today
largely due to old men
on the strength of a Promise
on fetid air's good-bye
free to leave
Plummeting ally//policy violence
first, recognize Vietnam, impersonate
A Big Easy cop, rob October 1943
Inner-party directive
It is wrong to have a handful of Mao
government functionaries busying Mao
themselves with collecting grain Mao
and taxes, funds and food
supplies, to the neglect
trace salts free noria.
*************************
Matt Hill
Juxtaria Truncate
Sonic vision precedes acoustic disturbance
in pieces of surreal discharge
a transducer of embarking wind
across the torn horizon of offset morning
A protocol of great circles
ruled by the hypotenuse of perhaps
master patterns emerge in fragments
of big picture spume music
X thematics of eternity's pump
oiled murmurs embalmed in sun rock wind
does space occupy itself?
across the resonating thresholds, shape happens
*************************
Ivan Arguelles
ECSTASY AND MIMESIS
to take as a sign the standing outside of memory
the errant fix in the statue of eros
gleaned in a prostrate july with no lingering city
by which the compass futures gold and entelechy
what is white in reason is strife
that to suffer indignation of the gods is healing
a witness to wounding and keys the air
puffs of cloud changing into darker vessels
to keep the arms at bay by risking the past
holding candles to danger but only a menace
the fierce parrot of oriental language strangled
that fills heaven with this portent
must move on in the labyrinth dance
trying to remember the meanings of certain words
the unwritten text becoming more frayed with each decade
"you never listen to me"
the brain's educated centaur pausing to die
while the mountain-walking of the immortals goes on
the coded hoof and the minuet of desire
and nothing accidental in the tragedy's weft
to spaces beyond ken an illusion of birds
travelling in the phonetics of cuneiform
notches and wedges that imply a sexual treason
while the mummers celebrate a todentanz
with verses from euripides hawked into lax german
these leather gloves this lip gloss this haunting
in that black glass I look forward
into the ocean's opaque revery
let a hero be immolated here
let clytemnestra share with robespierre the fear
torturing whom with what
monologue interieur of rimbaud Zietgeist
to achieve the fence of experience and to fall from it
the late climax of agonizing revolution
enduring age to scrutinize more carefully death
whose contours and alchemy always allure
"La Deraisonnee" I know her!
*************************
Lainie Duro
Phantom Limb
I want to dye my hair
Black
and embrace death.
Or some such
any such
solemn spirituality.
My life, so full of
habit
So lacking in
ritual.
I am too connected with the ground
And cannot reach
Be reached
I have metamorphosed
into something so solid
I cannot be touched.
They look anyway
And fear what is so close as
to be assimilated into theirs
But so distant as to never care
Like a limb that exists
even after it has been amputated
Or maybe
One that feels non-existent
even though it is there and usable.
*************************
Jake Berry
from PhasEoStrophes 3, Illumined Strata
32
He'd begun to notice peculiar behavior in the elements
of his environment. The windows seemed slightly warper
toward the oval as if they'd begun a metamorphosis. The
carpet buckled and growled, snapped at his ankles,
mouths with large broken teeth emerging from the fabric.
What is the precise ritual of a screen door tied to the
trunk of an oak tree? How do you measure its velocity
against druid legend?
Where the seams work loose small two headed moles
appear. Bound to the reactor's logic. I supplicate the pure
ovum of dream.
Towering ovipositor machines in the gobi desert, visible
only in a cloudless midsummer dawn.
As mouth can shape the 10,000 moans, brought from
the hanger covered with beetles and fireflies buried in
dread.
33
"There is entirely too much structure in this house," he
said. And with that began to tear at the windows with his
bare hands until they were bleeding. How much order
should one tolerate before wrecking the temple?
Blonde in half-moon neon hotel sign. Shattered by the
crocodile and egg mytholinear hypothesis.
A lake gathering pebbles unwinds a blissful turbulence.
Foster noting, cyclic vacancy...
An origin waiting for branching tongues in static.
34
Sick of the black current and the fear that feeds it, I
scatter the moons of ashes in a fetid rain. We have
finished the doctrine at last, logos in chains, turned the
dogs on their own -- Jezebel's window seat.
Impossible delays in genetic serum account for the
increasing role of deviance as scapegoat in the
disinformation racket.
Blown from the dugs of a steel-bodied crone, the young
feed on a bitstream of gratuitous obfuscation. Commodity
is a waste dispersal system.
Or enchanted to reveal a pit of the secular ape. At home
with electrodes bone deep screaming carnivorous
commands -- anxiety's gray security.
Largess of the fractured corpse.
*************************
b. thales
from .02
program 1
resistible compote
laconic choirmaster
artistry swingy funeral
screechy hyphenate inflexible
salary seen verdict
communion expertise
legerdemain proline stood novice
transliterate duffel
fungal sophisticate
Sumeria
hydrogen
welsh aspidistra
threadbare teratogenic
potbelly embower rump
baseplate draftsperson
fluoresce
lob tomatoes
cherish healthful mailbox
submitted lee limb anatomic siskin
clamber joggle portrait
trick stature
crumble
pigeonberry encore
emerge lengthly taffy
mutandis
first perversion fatten
alluvial compote
hobo mince knuckle
dysprosium exhibit
hereunder persistent
deductible complicity
compulsory riddle
summand brisk
radius pinnate perk
representative
find
*************************
Scott Thurston
brain sketches. (infinite storage)
1
but there are different sorts of lines
lines that slope up gently
level out
drop off expand
lines that go up straight
lines that go down straight
lines on a scale between and beyond
2
walking a track that
absorbs the language of
surrounding cells
point to past and future
line
**
if I could wander a system
of streaked imperatives
marked over landings
space soaked derivatives
could I call a loss
to become
excising a transcended
potential becomes nubile
queen equals added extra
free is not free
**
traced longings provide an area of assistance
and an approach of belonging
the lines damage the glow
delimitations lie that line next to this
glow forms a sunset image
moving into that break off a piece
space of walked over paths
gasp wax mark of passing
**
becoming unto actuality
transcended that death-space
who pooled an extraction
of extra makedness
all over
above
**
trapped conspiracies reek of
appalling motion who wants
who looks begins
the challenge attempting
to begin
belong
over
*************************
John M. Bennett
CRUST
where hole, I could snorkle failing flake of fam-
wished I could laid down cold 'n bloody ramped
(some jars were passing (combed hair bees)) oh yes
I slept among the legs and last estimated ("honor
scars") scabs of nightly sky
sky handle dripping you was tape relay to trip
"among the legs" slow wetly breeding in your hair
ajar so slightly breeze "upon the gore" retention
racket slimy ramp those giggling flakes the
presentation snorkled in your belly curl where
Lainie Duro
Staring at walls, picturing collapse
a sign leads
to nowhere
the door opens
into
nothing
From where
did this yearning
beginning
To whom
do I credit
desire blood craving
Finch screams
you cage
from mellow roots
and small beginnings
leaving only a
turtle-doved-neck with
weeks worth of bruising
Garbled soul-gone
bureaucrat
For nothing
Turn a tie
A trick to try
dig another ditch/grave
vamping eternal
unto this
immortal flesh
*************************