The Journal of Captain X

Oh mistress mine—my

mistress hath not any

charms

more fulsome than any

seas

rich with frothy wrath

or black moonlight, I mean

her soul starts out like a light

flashing from a scarred peak

to harbour home a mariner

nauseated in unhealthy seas

longing for her bouncéd wiles

along the avenue of starred lights.

She knows the old law

seduce your husband’s enemies

and win favors

so I sally her

the numb bitch

without her knowing it

right before his eyes,

how do I do it?

While she watches him for cues

I leave him plenty of clues!

Her back-up singers:

one is a big blonde

with a sleepy head

who has been kissed

by the wrong men.

Chestnut the second

with deep, fearful eyes.

Strawberry blonde of fire

is the last, waiting.

Her other friends

TV models

were kidnapped in Disneyland

by creeps who make them walk sexy

you know

and turn tricks for peanuts.

It’s a classy life.

There are three classes of poetry

in contemporary America―

the high-class bumf

of London magazines

a little Tory nostalgia―

the walloping mouthers

of beer-drunken Welshmen’s

English, not Dylan Thomas

not anything―

and the harpings of happy housewives.

Models have a strange life.

Striking beautiful poses

set up by queers

to bait the jaded.

But this knowledge

is no secret

among women!

I assure you.

Women, icons

or bait,

chum!

The phrases and lingo

you know I know.

All suburbs

are filled with

temporary homes

for these waifs

until life

weds them!

Sad, sad.

Playboy had charm

unveiling beauty,

go away kid

ya bother me!

Noblest vision,

the sight of

lovers

feedeth those in love.

The sight of lovers.

Brutal pain I linger with the turds

on the golf course

of threading managers

hawking worthless goods

so

you’ll lie flat among dwarves.

Welcome,

is it the American Dream,

a British payback,

out-West bunkum,

the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations?

A simple question.

Who sold our love for petty dreams

of sacrificial conquests?

Who left us out in the cold?

Oh!

My Uncle’s pimp

gets ‘em married

feeding the economy

keepin’ ‘em out of his hair.

The prize prize bull

of a typical farm family

prettily stepping

through the ring

like his father before him.

Let’s pull the plug,

the computer is waiting

to calculate

my next move.

Its goal to fascinate

me into artificial insemination.

I tire of it, lady, tell me

your name or love.

It cannot be

thou’rt numb,

unsired, unbegot

or unwished.

What human wishes

led thee here

from infancy

to think?

Whose human love

forswore all comfort

at home

to make thee a place?

No pimp or photog

Uncle or sire

and no stage mother

made thee great,

thou art my own.

Live among thy wishes,

see according to thy lights,

desire what you will

it is all thine.

But can the wench think?

Is she not a tool of powers

beyond her ken?

Will she not fail me, blame Lucifer?

I will write of her anyway.

Lady in my book you are desire

itself, the sum of all happiness

and the ink in my pen.

When fear turns you against me

you shall see what you shall see.

Just for a riband.

Funeral: he was a great man

as

far as it went,

but then he faltered

and fell headlong.

I suffer for him, farewell!

My friends, is he not ashamed?

The dead, dark days,

what, frighted with false fire?

We did leave home

and found fair hostelry

along the way, and Inquisition

Terror and Infamy. And all

this for the putting out of the light

we were accused of,

to accomplish our murder.

A mirror reversed he the blanket of good usage

besieging us in our rustic revels,

he the pimp, the forswearer,

the ignoramus of our true love,

the forger of all dalliance

dares to counterfeit our visage.

The

Harrow...

Masters why have you sold me

for gold coins in the wasted field

when I offered you fair work

at the harrow not under it?

We must all have dirty hands.

Elliott Carter

who has some idea of our freedom

even if he freezes

in our paroxysm

it is us.

He is old, now

as in ten years all things

have lost their youth.

My protector, once.

Give him a round,

even of applause.

His works exist to study.

That odd pain

of the young dybbuk

taking our place

in the loins of woman

lavishing her charms

of lip and thigh

on a reduplication

of our tormentors

in a miniaturised version―

oh, oh a counterfeit money scheme is it?

A possible definition of film criticism:

predetermined tunes

wildly forespent

against all odds

a disaster

eliminating knowledge

of incapacity

and criminal dependence

among gentle savages

chasing after game

vanishing vanishing

who tilleth the land

hideth in alleys

weak as a cat

a man of no cloth

who readeth book

wildly forespent

of incapacity

against all odds

pre-determined tunes.

The expensive beautiful fruits line up

in jumbled sprinkled piles on the shelves

and the Muzak blares “All You Need Is Love”

in a jazzy arrangement until your eyes blear

and fall out of your head on the shelves

in jumbled sprinkled piles, beautiful fruits

saving the Sumatran rhino:

it’s just like being a kid again

wouldn’t Jesus be happy

float down like heaven-sent

memories the giggling parties

of unexorcised haunted youths

mimicking your parents around the card table

after you’ve gone to bed

the last refuge of civilization

is Walt Disney you

spin backwards every

day into

senility. And yet

you know the truth,

don’t you?

Kiss my tush

the devilishly beautiful

young men and women

in their time of bloom

or rutting season

serve as foils for commercials

straining to be hour-long.

You are held spellbound

at what is being done to you.

News of the Day:

Terry Waite of the Anglican Church

emerges from the Hezbollah

after six-and-a-half years

on November 18^th, 1991

into the glare of klieg lights

with a face six-and-a-half years

innocent of the decline of the West.

Useful intelligence:

“Nights in White Satin”

at the supermarket,

held up by a snotty checker

a young man with a past

of oppression in the barrio.

Vanishing vanishing.

And criminal dependence.

Overture to a comedy!

In my heavy black coat among the pink girls

braving the cold weather

to douse their nipples

and fresh loins in the sea

dipping and rising

not thinking or thinking

of far away and the sea

grey and green and umbrageous pink

with seaweed and avocets.

The bottom of the barrel,

the spirit of the place

is divined through television.

The local public television station

spends two hours broadcasting

a college rock ‘n roll

bisexual love story minus

a grain of wit or humour

but filmed in Godard’s black-and-white.

This type of film proliferated

in prewar Berlin,

the city was guilty

of some horrible sin

and had to be scourged,

recognize the scenario?

Everyone has a part to play.

I turn the channel on Police Gazettes,

mariachi bands and

watch five minutes

of an hour-long commercial on becoming a landlord.

In this sinkhole of

intellectual dejection

the con man is king. At the beach

our self-congratulatory philosophical victory

in the scorching sun of years of drought

allows us the sweet prize of an inner life

for we have no outer here on the plage

where all are mad, all are monitored.

Magic rules here defending from the sea

endowed teenagers creeps and women whose dogs pee.

Young I walked this stretch in fog. Vanished.

... ever-profounder depths...

the more I write about simple things

a smile and a laugh would require

to dissipate their malos aires

the more laughable it gets―

should I let sleeping dogs lie?

I have seen the city destroyed,

citadel, this gave me wisdom,

I left it for the road

not any road

but the one giving on

to no citadel,

computer

it was made

to annoy me,

all that data

and no mind,

save its creator’s

so evident.

Lenny Bruce.

A dumb Jewish comedian

who finds out it’s irrelevant

saying anything

First Amendment

relevant to your ass

all of a sudden

as if it mattered.

The heavy shelling

driving you into the past,

and you can’t pay your debts

because you bought in at such a price

into the game

in the backroom

and you scream louder

self-evident truths.

And we have Postmodern

i.e. stupid TV Guide

synopsising The Entertainer

as the story of a failure

The Long Goodbye

man kills wife

dick gives lift

hood aces dick

dick finds writer

writer commits suicide

dick kills man

wife joins body

El

Sueño de la Razón

let the hypocrite

cease from his

persecutions.

Let the stooges

and the puppets,

the hallucinations

cease from their activity.

Let the day continue

that was begun

so well. Alcibiades

and Phocion.

The former had a dog

a very expensive dog

whose tail he cut off to give

Athens a story about him

and leave him alone, the latter

found a popular audience once

and said “what have I said ill?”

What a perversity

this is,

the Nazihunter

so-called

Yuppie is a Jew

the most anti-Semitic

any ghetto’s ever seen.

How the hunting of Nazis

becomes a Mafia war

you explain it, Hollywood.

Television in Los Angeles

late at

night very late Virna Lisi as Marilyn Monroe

getting put away by her satiated mate

and Peter Cushing’s blackeyed Nazis

thronging underwater in “shock waves,”

what does it all mean, I ask you

this blistering appraisal of our experience?

How I left home

the day I bought

a record by noone

to hear a new piece

they all left me

I have no quiet

but I know where I stand.