Shrewsbury, Vt

#destinybeta: Earth Girls Are Easy

China Rising

SHAREfactory™: BF4 -- Salty Dawg

Dragon Phelan 0.1

Ken K. 1950. Tok.
takes apart his toys.
histrionic disorder.
brilliant mind for engineering.
rebels against authority save for Nori O.
'W.S. sold for 100,000. I'll sell P.S. for 500.'
Macbeth.
Ahab.
No patience for suits.

Excavation

If we dig up this parking lot, you know what we're gonna find? Another parking lot.

Spring

Metal Geer

Xbrick Is For Mommies

Schoolhouse

Devil Motel

the dark ones sing the day is bright
and make specious claims
that the Lamb is Light

while in the copse there is a manse
where the dead are props
for our nightly dance

Boy

Jesse

the Omen

Yorker

Flurry

Kittery

Reach

Old Bones

Cur

Murk Tilders 1958 - 2014

Murk Tilders, perhaps the foremost concrete demoist of his generation, died early this morning from alleged complications of an alcoholic overdose. A close friend found him in a ditch beside the Prick and Pony Roadhouse off of Rt 4, in what the unnamed friend is quoted calling, "doin the Ira Hayes". 

Best known for his slovenly work cracking old foundation mix loose from rebar at closed down Bonanza Steakhouses, the construction world is in a state of deep sorrow -- famed machine operator, Ike Speckle, (who worked with Tilders building the Biddeford Target), put out a statement last night, "When you lose someone as talented as Murk, it makes you question, well, just about everything. Maybe all those Heinekens are how he dealt with the amazing gifts he was burdened with."

Across the nation today mourning fans are coming to grips with the fact that Murk Tilders will never again mix two-stroke in with his non-methanol gas, and rip one last floor with his concrete saw.

Murk Tilders, American legend -- his pain nearly a teenth as meaningful as an above average actor's.

Lunch Lady Justiciar

Steakums for the lot of you.

Tater tots for some of you.

But Keith doesn't eat.

Grapple

Divine Nickers

" ..three kinds of players in the cutthroat world of competitive nicknaming: the hicks, those Appalachians of appellation; improvisers of a style likened to the rat-a-tat of a Thompson gun in their titling, men like West Apple Johnson and Saco Sam Miltfill, who ran the circuit for years, coining thousands of nicks still used today, and not one of them capable of writing their own Christian name; then are there the learn'd men, the university wits who took up the back alley game of nicking to test themselves in mastery of the true word of this young countryside -- men like Dr. Alex Messersniff, from a long line of linguists, and an acolyte of Theodius Cram, he took his skills to the nick competition; his books, his theories, he tested against the ingenuity of this cousin'd brethren of the hillside, and often beat them at their game.

-- The final grouping is but the one man: Norman Clay Church. In his own lifetime he was a mythology in the ginmills and opi-dens of the nicking underworld, for in his uncanny gift were the souls of men disrobed of self-serving accouterments. What's in a name indeed..." 

 

-- ELBERG WITHERSPOON 

EXCERPT: 

THE 1931 WORLD TOURNEY OF NAME GIVING --MANHATTAN, KANSAS

-- So it was Norman Clay Church returned to the tourney for the first time in seventeen seasons. Old now, pocked, smelling of whiskey sweat, still the young ones looked on his entrance into the hall with excitement: this man was better suited a painting on the wall than sit with them, and share beans and cigarettes, and drink with them. 

It came that a Mississippian called Tom Dunn approached him, made to publicly test Church in a pre-tourney spat. Here is how it has come down to us:

--"I say Norman, you look like the old canvas banners illustrated with your visage, but perhaps I am seduced to this thought by the smell of you - Old Hat! I call you, Yeasty Carnival Butter!"

-- The crowd of men went silent as senators to Caesar. It was something kin to decrying God. Tom Dunn, feeling the room near convulse, attacked on, "Your capillaceous and royal-hued nose shows your business in the last years -- a Bourbonic Plague, I name thee, Sir!"

-- Small laughter spoke out of the halo of men. Tom Dunn meant to kill the old man here before Norman could be a threat in the tournament that would soon begin, and where men would test themselves as to who could brand the other with the finest insult in the language; (even a washed up) Norman Clay Church was not a thing to feel sympathy for. Cheer him for what he was, and he might think himself it again, if for just a little while. 

"You, Norman, come to us, we as your children, my good man; but after all these years, you've come as but a sad shell spent in a shot awry -- I name thee Piss-skin of the Forest! A bullet of urine, missing every tree!"

-- Here it was that Church, with the arthritic spiders that were his hands, rolled a smoke, lit it, and contemplated Tom Dunn, while all the rest waited his reply.

-- Norman said, "You have drempt this since you were a boy, Tom. But as I am old you thinks I am ripe. I am not so ripe. I am as sour and tough as an old cock o'the yard. Heed me, I will crow soon enough, and when I do, you will, in the auditory, relinquish your other senses to me: I will have you smell the fecal waters of the Nile; I will have you spy the trees of a Gaulic winter closing in on you; I will have you taste your own cold panic as it sweats inward and condensates on the roof of your mouth. You will feel your liver for the first time with this poison I have for you. Know this: I will name thee, Boy! You ladies loan, you wizard fart, you tankard of peppermilk; I name thee Tomcat Foldpants, for in this is the parallel of such a voracious nature as thou hath!  Your appetite hath made you womanly, and all around are you merited for a folder of other men's garments!"

Debt

opinions are desires.

she pushes her cart,

a lumbering colossi,

under the birds

falling from the sky.

the case is pocked 

from climbing stairs 

the way a heart can ossify 

from word counts, 

placards reposted, 

a pyramid scheme of passwords:

her first pet, her first love, 

a marriage she took part in once

a man who's initials

combined with her birthday

unlocks the debt on her visa card

opinions are desires, she unlocks her case.

every ordinary day polished 

every dullard serialized.  And no one stays.

What happened to boredom? she thinks.  

What happened to a man 

who looked for you in the same old place

what happened to not knowing things, 

and dollar bills for the maids.

Grady

Freight Release

Francium is rare earth

FR Leavis was a goon

F Roosevelt was svelte 

in the Family Room

Arundel

MacAdams Gravel

the thin man down

in the gravel pit

his insides moored

by ready mix 

pushing snow

up off the pile

to load the trucks

that sand the town

in olden times

his namesakes would

macadamize

the roads to Ayr

last week the doctors

kedged his guts

he won't see

next aprils flood

More Of H.H. Lime's Wisdom

"Clean white teeth come from chewing action and abrasiveness."

                                       -- Mr. H.H. Lime

The Quotable Mr. Lime

"Dikes make above ground tanks viable."

                                 -- Mr. Lime

Dat Yo Daddy

Sind

the last settlement before the desert.

a trapezoidal hill before a river where once families of fishermen lived in mud huts.

when gold washed up with the commotion of these fishermens' nets, 

the casteless out of the lower depths of Tapo Meru crossed the desert on the prospects of merchants' stories:
of stars shining in the mud, 
a constellation of gold chinks.

these were the ones who made bricks from the mud, and walls from the brick.

these were the ones who named the hill Sind and the river Ket.

These were the ones who traded gold dust, and succored the caravans halfway to Tapo Meru

the hill grew crowded with walls and smithy holes and whore stews, 
and the river a sewer.

it was this way until a year an invader army lit the river afire, and tore down the town

and by the winter had built a balustrade out of the bones of monsters, stodged up the Ket, and squatted there for one hundred years.

this exists in a library.

today the hill is what it always was.

an outcropping of limestone overlooking a lethargic brown wash south to the sea.

on the nights we rested there we shared our camp with other merchants bound for Tapo Meru.

they shared wine, and we held a contest of telling tales, the subject the ghosts just outside our fire.

(13)

Drunk Shakespeare

Tapo Meru

after days of nothing but hills of sand, the black trees appear on the horizon. 

they will always be the horizon. they are the highway of Tapo Meru.  an orchard of gargantua speared deep into the sand.

the Arboretum Infelix.

a day-traveling caravan cools in the shadows of these trees
and discovers the illusion.

they were made by men out of many smaller sycamore, 
hard as iron, that long ago had been fished from the northern dams,
and dragged to the desert by slaves.

like fingers clasped together, 
the trees were tied with the fibers of a well known river stalk 
that came with the wood from the north, 
from the rivers of the city -- retted cooked and plaited to make rope strong enough to hold the trees together.

of these trees taller than the eight towers of Tapo Meru, 
(one for each dead king),

not even the ageless inside the city can satisfactorily explain how they were stood.

French Tickle

Gilles de Rais

would

kill the pets

Germany 20 Japan 85

Historie

The pilgrims built a church.

Then they built a tavern.

The States not coincidently 

are rife with superstition.

Beer Garden

The Krauts are here

with their blonde hair

with Coca Cola

mixed in their beer

with borrowed stares

the Krauts are sour

their women fair

(13)

Chron Logy