the Omen

God and Devil Playlist

There is a just place to ramp up your righteousness with consideration of powers mystical and omnipotent, and that place is listening to bible music while in your truck, alone; the proclamations of a better kingdom, or damnation, riveting as they can be, are more believable when crooned from out of time by the voices of Southern Baptist crackers - their tinny voices justify the histrionics. I love Mahalia Jackson, but her voice carries the weight of a victimized people: her devil is external, her God she thanks for the place that waits on her ascension. This should work for me, but I end up worshipping her voice, not the depiction.
But consider the Louvin Brothers, the great great great all time singers of songs about booze and pussy referred to as sinning and regret; it's as if the masculine language of these songs, the apocalyptic imagery, self-involved as it is, holds higher power by the very fact the hicks crooning are basically talking about besting a bad hangover when they reference salvation: the God of the Louvin records is a disgusted old tea-totaler, the devil a whiskey trickster with an insatiable hard-on.

Yorker

Flurry

Kittery

Reach

Old Bones

Valentine

To the one I love: You'll never read this, but all the parts of me, the ill, the fine, are activated, live new life every day because of you.
To old loves: I was a poor boy with little to give but that what sold you in the beginning, but I remember every woman that I convinced otherwise, and once in awhile I play the scene where it could have been different.
To those who have lost: A mother, a wife, a lover -- I'll take a moment for you all, and I'll thank something I don't believe in that I have not yet faced such.
Love: Is a hard pair of hands digging in the dirt to pluck the last green, and carry it back to the house.

U Wernt Sad Enuf

The reason is you were not sad enough

To see my notes plucked out from under bed

And satchel'd up with all my other stuff

To cross the bridge and go out like you said

You thought the time was left to do goodbye

You thought hello might time and oft resume

When you returned to see our pretty sty

Was there space for you in that little room?

    Was time rid rough by your reflection?

     Do Tigers feed on nat selection?

                                                            30mar11

Cur

Story Dead of Age

It's not something to think of every day, but once a week? Yes. The best story I ever thought of, one I'm not good enough, or dedicated enough, (both of those likely), to write, once a week I think of.

To say 'the best story you ever came up with', one might think of a magic bullet theory, a tag line that explains 'It's Moby Dick on a bus!'

While that would be a great story, no, it isn't a lightning strike gimmick idea, it is a copse of sycamore fig, and every year the fields grow up around it, and every year they flood out, but the trees stand there in the same place. And once a week I pass by them, happy or sad or feeling nothing.

This blog is littered with the droppings.

The Poesies of Henrich Von Keza

Keza Keza from Moria left

With booze and weed, yet bereft

To the mountains, purple red and gold

In Freedom, New Hamshir, is their weed sold

Keza Keza like indian folk

o'the Res here in the wolk

The wolky wood has curse'd thee true

With desire for beer, dope, and screw 

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.

The Coca Narrative

1. The big game is over eight minutes in -- thus:

2. 11 drunk hillbillies still chafing over Duck Dynasty get their grandkids to troll the Coca Cola Facebook page -- thus: 

3. Vacuous pseudo-journalists, (who years ago drew their political straws, on both sides -- not out of belief, but for survival), take to the etherwaves, either condemning the ad or the protest .. (because these hacks have never had an interesting thought in their lives they became journalists), thus:

4. The good sweet kind thoughtful and most just progressives, (those not watching the big game so as to catch up on some NPR podcasts), nominate Coca-Cola for the Nobel Peace Prize -- for the bravery to market sugar-cancer at immigrants and gay roller skaters.

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.

DMF

being a dumb motherfucker is bliss

best of all, I don't know it, 

I reckon I won't own it neither.

Ugsome Albert

He treated life as if every sundown could be the rapture.

His prayers he carried with him as a warrant.

Grady

Book Club

Merciful Toad : The Urbert Finculper Story

"The true story of an American original born in Canada" -- Carlyle Feng (author of The Micklespurt Manor series)

"Awsom." -- Nw York Nwsday

"This counts as a blog post?" -- Taryn Robberpants (co-author of Cracking the Templar Code Buried Beneath the Papal Conspiracy Just Beyond the Dimension Where We Can Measure the Sound Waves of UFOs Who Were Templars)

"Where do you buy this book? Is it on Amazon? Uh oh, it's a self-published e-read... Fourteen pages, wow, and that's fourteen formatted for iPhone.. Look out, Proust.. I mean, did Urb Finculper die at birth?" -- That guy with a lot of opinions

"I stole this book. I like to be transgressive!" -- Not as naughty as she thinks verbal exhibitionist girl

"Definitive Finculper!" -- USA Today

"Ribbit." -- The ghost of Norman Mailer