Prodigals for Poor Yorick

By M. Messer

Dense prose and sensory fractality as Poetics. Truck stop flâneury and Metropolitan Tao.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M. Messer
• Release date: Apr 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224169610

Book preview

CONTENTS:

Light Fiends [1]

218 [2]

Turbid Blonde [4]

Oncoming [5]

The Old Method [6]

Blood in the Passage [8]

she of scarlet habit [9]

3 Voices [11]

Death Is Not a Balloon Animal [23]

Abstract of a Nude [24]

Inviolable Embrace [25]

Rosette Nomenclature [26]

650 Special [29]

Fati Morgana [30]

The Primordial Face [35]

Barbara #3 [37]

one liners [39]

Let's Get Pig-Eyed with Drink [42]

Nox Verbatim [43]

Archetypes in Her Honor [47]

The Pinballer [49]

European Poise [50]

CDMX Largo [52]

Ism Triptych [67]

Billy Bones [70]

Your Fears Are Not Mine [71]

Bye-bye, Ed [72]

Terminal City [74]

Duluth Tombstone [75]

Johnny's [76]

Optic Dross [78]

Burned-Out Solace [79]

Dragana Dragged [80]

The Miracle (To Pass the Time) [81]

Feeling Hooked [82]

Green Hellppp [83]

Quinta Del Sordo [86]

Light Fiends

Light fiends: discursive mob, regaling the way—their heads a'swim, image a'swim. Images like bats through their minds' eyes; they are seeing with their minds' eyes while their real eyes twinkle drink twinkle. Guttural looses, cackles on the paths that are spiral bound. This amongst others young and foaming in the light—hundreds to thousands, mauling their brains in the streets: drug-mauled brains, alcohol mauled. Light fiends, later to gather in dark roomed bars where is red light skew; wallowing scrawl of toilet graffiti; the hardcore grotesques of barress's tattoos. Agent's friends, they spin the bottle—spin the chamber, create a conqueror worm of devilish pride, lust, doubt: comedy, rolling—hear the worm storming, down the sidewalk; tidal thrum—the blood gaining speed. Mass blood worming. Missal lips for the worship of light, that pours all around like molten spilling in a foundry. Red light like a wino's soiree—pigmented steam red. Mars smoke red. The light is consort to the hyenaing worm: untanglable riotous; dishevel, buzzing at the mouth. Beset by a trill of heckling eyes amid the multitudes. The light plays keys; hits notes; makes tempo—crescendo, while the drug suscitated meat-writhe prickles and 'beys in the sway. The night never ending, til the sun puts out the lights and all the light fiends flee, sickened in the milk and hash of the dawn. How in worship? Rooftop worship—worshiping the great flood of night light: arcs among the flood, raised perpendicular; pillars scalable with the amphibian grip of the mind. Pillars of fire, perhaps like the type that bore-up Elijah to the sky....The strollers then give up the streets, to make their own light in interiors—in order to unpack their own interiors, representing inner formlessness with near formless words. Heightened flow of brutal elocution—bringing their inside out like exorcism; spouting their spirits, releasing them, swelling them outward—upward, like electrically charged gas running with rumors of the id: cabalistic scenes; elongated human forms; doorways full of light. The forms sceneing amid rooms of ever undrying paint; people's automatic suites commingling—unifying; worlds amorphous combine. Form mutates to express new form. Governing light boils with creation....Light fiends—these are his others, his heroes, his lovers. He is free only in them.

218

Traveling night’s serene harbor—

the borderless pouring in

my tongue rattling with harmony spark

I wheel in lamp-light enclosure

Gold sucking in all around me

Static forming round my mouth

The prayer edits itself, winding its thread to the white-hinging fabric of my lips;

the box grinding its tonic glossolalia

Sugary capsules keep tidy the physical remote:

stored—day—month—year—on a honeycomb shelf

that tips

filling my mind with shattering. A sudden storm of happy memory!

Faces flicker on the dark curtain

They come, one-by-one, like sparrows flown into an empty room

—Color billowing the down-pour of dark

Through the flagellating lush, the parade winding down illuminated roads

To the nursing house

Booming the throttle alongside the moon

that capers in pace—

a midnite foal matching my race

Rather, my eyes stirrups for moon's riding, to the last light

The weakling spire light...

The old maid greets me at the threshold, sighing and growling

with a rag in her mouth—the way ecstatic for old maids

I trundle down, gathering likenesses amid opened cupboards

the kitchen yet lit for a last puff (and one more cup)

The box is grinding vile wax: dressing the atrocity; testimonials

To clasping old hands; holding breath, abashed for being same blood

so long apart...

Parting with narrative’s comedy spelled

(a tidings’ drink gone quick to the throat with father)

I creep stair-way, bracing the outgrowing form

shuttling off the day’s age—

leaving it coiled (mother’s scolding) at the top of the stair

To the impossible sleep, the first memory: a lullaby

And closing me, a bluish animal hops and settles on my chest

greeting me to warm me

welcome, just as I drift off. —In the charm of youth

To be home

Turbid Blonde

Turbid blonde seeding opal fliers

(A basket of broken eggs: exhalations, tiredness.)

Gleaming that catches the stalling bulbs wagging out from the wall:

the pink frontispiece heavily scratched with blues

This molecule, this straying; where have I come from? the drawer...

Possessions tied round the craggled root of my head like a planetary mobile

The world comes alive, for no reason

It finds me—it does not last;

but I am borne in this cloud, that moves, jetting...

absurd with fliers

Buying cheap cigarettes at the gas-station;

noon-time sad, drunk

Confusion—forehead heavy. The remote

lacing the shape of my heart

The thought skipping...

What does God reach in the naked mind?

A picture? A perfection?

Eloi, Eloi—god-Damned

Drawing me to the clouds, drawing me to fly...

My legs, cane

Windows: a chain of shatter-black-still

Miserere—wet-nosed

Drawing me to the clouds: a mystery, yes—a perfection!

How do I fly? How do I fly?

Oncoming

Evidence of interment, I turn in my bed. The world is looking out for me (trying to meet my gaze) for the first time in forever; finding me out at night, as I depart my brother's farmhouse. A shocking still—a still full of a wind suggesting discourse, disarranged. But I pay it no mind, this talking world. I hurry away from it, for the time is not now; and the world's entreaties after so long, are cut-out. I will not permit their effect—sing entreaty to entreaty. But I hurry on, always hurrying on. For what? hurrying away from everyone...Be-cause there is a secret being worked at, that has nothing to do with the world.

Time marks me and I feel myself falling backward from the page—hands ahold of me, easing me backward; but I'm amazed at how far they keep tipping me and I haven't fallen yet. I feel the sleep overcoming—manifests of early dream in the dark. I don't cry out because I want to be embraced by these hands tipping me backward from the page. I tip far enough back to close my eyes. And I wake again—before the page; before the hands come over me again.

No adamance or insistence. I am too old for it. —Now only a sly resignment, that tries to steal its moments. I'm growing more and more fond, however, of the hands overtaking me, giving me peace. The imagination seems so much more grand in repose. The wisps through the vault—red, tortuous smoke bringing forth whole hierarchies of archetype. Lying awake in bed, novels tumble loose from the sheets. I can't make it real and I don't care, as long as I have the fantasy; as long as I can see it. A lotus eater maybe—babels of fantasy are all I need, and to fall each time. I'll never care if it comes real. But what stories I could tell!

There is always naught; and now I prize it. The naught. I bury my face. —There is always. And mine is pure and needs no one. I ask all to come, but there is hesitance; so I race ahead against hesitance not knowing where I'm going. Astounded at weirdness and relics, and if I cannot say it others will come after me and find me skeletally reposed in flowers—one bitten fiercely in my teeth. I know this. I have proof of this. None come with me: my strange ways, my bad trips; I try and entreat—but all say wait. So I run ahead! going nowhere, running blindly in the storm because I could not even entice a fool to follow.

At what? It is mine and there is yet to be one who can breach it. I've