book ii - the grand circus pieces (to scribd 07-11-09)

8/14/2019 Book II - The Grand Circus Pieces (to Scribd 07-11-09)

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(BOOK II FROM WLM : DISJECTI MEMBRA POETAE)

WLM : THE GRAND CIRCUS PIECES

byWarren L. McClure

(Last Reviewed 07-10-09)


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02

WLM : GRAND CIRCUS PIECES WINTER 1979-80

Those who were Flower Children thenWhere has the Wind blown them

And the Tit-Sucking Children of the Universe

wlm04-01-06


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4/33

04

WLM : GRAND CIRCUS PIECES AUTUMN 1979

The water in the well tastes so good this Nightthis Night of joyous and secret defianceI am a man the roots of reason suck

This Night is not one of those monotonous nights muzzled by religionnor bound to the apron strings of the harvest festival

nor is it a magic night of terror and rebellion

A Night to marvel at the motion of the weather on the risethe song innate in delightful wonder

A Night when one learns to accept what one's heart believes inwhen one makes a purchase of imponderable valuefor a string

This is not a moonlit Nightfor candid lines made by moonlightwould map their own mystique into its dark asides

Numbers go purchaseless on such a Night as this

language cannot begin to convey the shapesuch a Night portends

Dazzling more than DayNight is a wondrous thingthe womb of man's diabolical disquiet

This Night more so than all the rest

wlm04-01-06


5/33

05


I have to take holidays off occasionally from sublime endeavorsgive vent to internal soundings

shuck off the cardboard containers my infernal culture came instop padding out my asides with Orphic musings

My beard tonight is braced with ice and blended with brandywine

clouds hover over snow-bowed trees and hide the mountain of my secret

the Moon rides over the clouds round effulgent

Whether tomorrow morning I sacrifice a proud cock on the trunk of a treeto some mysterious being hidden in an undecipherable petroglyph

unmasked by my urineto God in Heaven

or some elfin imago enstooled on a fly alarichas much the same consequence

In spite of all my peculiar particulars some Universal will have me in the end

The water-course of human reason

becomes more and more crotchetythe nearer I come to the thighs of the god of the day I am to be gathered unto

To believe is to errfrom moment to moment one can only be sure

I won't look for God on the mountain tomorrowthis moment and one be with that Eternal Analog

For I would abide my finite number of mystic scenes alone

here beneath the passing Moon

like some dark cloud

wlm

04-01-06


6/33

06


Even tho I havean emotional ambiance

toward urns and sepulchreshere I find myself composing in a urinal by the Sea

watching left-handed shadows on the wallsplaying with themselves

in a cobweb pudibundery

It's not my faultsince tacking Semantics onto my coat-of-arms

I have tried to remain constant regardless of the circumstancesa simple signal for the World to go sponge itself off

believing it the greater taowhen one is within

to opt outto know a little about everything

rather than everything about nothing

Yet today I was pecked atby a raptorial bird

hatched from a rhetorical eggand to attenuate a logical scandal

I had to swallow a nominal admonitionagainst glib tautology

then only completely escapingthe difficulty

by hiding under the skirtsof a harlequin

wlm04-01-06


7/33

07


In another universe suddenly deprived of Light and Illusionby the upsurge of the Simplistic

I look thru the eyes of eviscerated owls for new dawns of the Meaningfuland wring my hands over the Night and Fog staying on

Now this command from the Imperial Wizard of Change has come

and I must send him answer under the Old Sealsor suffer the penance of my Own

Go toSlave of My Heart

bear Him this message

saying

Having been drawn unwittingly into the Mysteriesknowing full well what the Future holds

I remain trapped in the temerity of my own spiritual cycle

I would like to join in on your scapegoat celebrations

but I am too overwrought with emotion to makethe appropriate verbal exchanges

My mind is free but my insides still cringebefore the Old Ur-Gods

of Being and Becoming

I still hear the thunder of those awesome telluric days in my hearteven tho in my brain Your Lightning has cleared the clouds

A complete discontinuity exists in what I feeland what my face in the mirror reflects

I know You will not see how such dilemmic immobility

can be so frighteningI know intuition is a weary word with You

I know it is useless to place oneself in apposition to Your Perfection

Yet I beg of You timetime in which to decipher my private experiences

time in which to examine this finite integument me

for flaws

Go toSlave of My Heart

ask for condolences

And make sure He breaks the Seals

wlm01-20-07


8/33

08


Distracted by ritual blood-lettingtill we couldn't see our way

yet sanctified by that false god Languageas ubiquitous as sodomy

and almost as contemptuouswe Scribes became mid-wife

to the still-birth of Reasonour vanity making it easy for us to forget

the dithering factthat men queer one another

in these ritual acts

For like Osiris we would destroythe Temple of the Flesh

to achieve godheadthru these dramatizations

of crucial momentsof ecstasy and despair

our rituals

Obsessed by Contrition nowthat mute unimpeachable spectre

the ghost of our guilt-laden gift-givingand haunted by the shades

of aborted shit-childrenleaping from our naked thighs

surely this will be enough to quiet even the Gods

How nice it will be O Thothafter this last rite

after this required extemporaneous elucidationof our silent sins

contemporaneous with our salvationto return to the chronicling

of guilt-lifting Historyand to accounts-keeping

partners in crimeto malice and murder

and to the profiteering offthe high price of sin

wlm

11-25-06


9/33

09


Many grains of sand have run thru the Glassone after the other

it's made no differencefor they have become Time Past and grist for the Mill

Many grains of wheat and of rye have run thru the Mill

one after the otherthey have become loaves and leavened our lives

It doesn't matter

Not long agothe Sand and the Sun were filtering salt from the Sea

while a priestess was losing her cherryin the eye of a ziggurat

I am not that that my mother begatI received my inscape only yesterday

Those holier-than-mehave given themselves over

to Science and Government

Or Philosophy

Those of us engaged in Humorwho gives a shit

We humorists are like drowning sailorstrapped in the trivia of every wave

sipping sand from cups with curly hairmasturbating with our mothers' gloves on

for that is what comes from taking life

humorously

For Humor varies disconfabulously like the Sand in the Seaand man is not funny at all in bits and pieces

without those sentential connectivesbetween

I Thou

Yet after allwhat do we really know

about the truth values of conjunctionsthose funny little sounds

that tie togetherthe whole vast Ampersand of Heaven and Earth

with its epic armoiresand straight-backed chairs

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11/33

11


Overcoming vast semantic difficulties and the tenacity of legenda group of scientists I understand

discovered late one Friday afternoonthat the mysterious stuff that permeates all being

is better for growing tomatoesthan propagating poetry

or producing a viable moral artsuch is the hare-brained nature of the material

and the scientists

Up against thousands of these highly trained mindstheir illusions still intact

what out has one gotwho is prejudiced toward Mondays

who is incapable of perceiving experiencebeyond the immediacy of his gut

What out has one gotwho loves and doubts

except to hurlearthy bits of Old English at

these insufferablesons-of-bitches

wlm04-01-06


12/33

12


Overcome again by my virginal machismomy brain

suffering from culturally extended adolescent praecoxmakes a sign of the cross over its maidenhead

and rages against the canny

Perhaps a concoction of orthodox neo-Faustian conceptswill allay the itching

For no man should ever recognize limitsespecially to his own dark thoughts

For without dark thoughtsall meaning would be adumbratedin the empty mirror of language

For if it were not for the bifurcated superimpositionsof the Beautiful on the Ugly

butterflies haping by to preen on the pissmire of the Mindwould be frightened off

then whither would Art be

wlm04-01-06


13/33

13


As a result of imbibing too many magic spellsmy mind has let loose at both ends

and to sleep it offI have laid myself down

in a Bruegelian landscapebetween two sheep and a lion

A friendly python cradles its headagainst my cheek

and cuddles my feetin its coils

All would be so rightwith the World

were it notfor the confounded Wind

sweeping by in a continuous wailcrying Beware

Bewarethe appearance of things

is not what they are

what they arebut covers the truth

like a veillike a veil

I don't sleep very wellbecause of the Wind

for it tells me overand over again

that when the potions wear thinthe lion will leap

on the sheepthe snake will tighten its coils

the true nature of things

will have its flingand turn Paradise into Hell

wlm04-01-06


14/33

14


Down in happy Valleythey're building a new bridgeto carry us acrossto take the place of the oldthey're afraid won't holdthis heavy loadwe're takin' with us

we're takin' with usThey're paintin' it orangenew-bridge orangeworkin' like the Devilall day longall day longAnd I'm sittin' hereon the wayward side'neath the archin' spans

puffin' up a stormenjoyin' the glowfrom the new-bridge orangeenjoyin' the glowfrom the new-bridge orange

Oh the river's not deepand it runs real slow

but man is it wideYou can just barely seeto the other sideThey say over thereeverything's real coolit's like bein' backin your mother's armsor in nursery schoolThey say it's as warm over thereas the glow is herefrom the new-bridge orangeas the glow is herefrom the new-bridge orange

But I can't see muchon the other sideand the new bridgekind'a looks like the old'bout twice as wideand further down the roadSo I might not goI might just stayon the wayward sidewander along the riverwatch the water run slowI might just sit hereunder their new bridgeand puff up a storm

enjoyin' the glowfrom the new-bridge orangeenjoyin' the glowfrom the new-bridge orange

wlm04-01-06


15/33

15


Flying on Feynman's wings thru Time the other wayinto an Anti-Sun

seeking the opposite of Ultimate Formthe Refusal to Feel to be Meaningful

the wax melting in our ears Icarus

the feathers falling out of our brains

gathering sticks for a fire we'll never lighton the bank of one stream or another

questioning everything except the Moon the Sun and the Morning Starchasing after the Wind our Father

our umbilici still tied to our Mother Earthsucking the nectar of Primal Reason from her withered dugs

directly into our psychescaring nothing for the Geometry of Numbers

or the Mechanics of Logicor the Science of Time

living where one can only livein the Here and Whatever

not as we exist Here and Nowas will-o-the-wisps

spending the force of our witsdriving semantic wedges

into the heartwood of our Beingwith the trip-hammers of our tongues

the heavy mallets of our minds

hung up between Scylla and Charybdisbetween a rock and a bottomless abyss full of roiling waters

drowning ourselves in inane conversationsfrolicking in the cruel currents of deep structure and surface meaning

hanging on to ropes made of permeable examples

incapable of supporting the weight of our unfounded joythru the Maelstrom of Existence

holes rust thru the old tin cup of our allusive irony Hrothgartill the metal won't hold the mead

memory persists thru these sere periodsbut fragments into a series

of prismatic imagesflips Time inside out and back again

like a kaleidoscope turnedby a Mad Magician

astonishes the synapses in our brainstill we neither know nor care

with Oblivion bearing down on uswill we freeze in apathy

or bolt in terror

wanting to gomust we persevere

wlm /04-01-06


16/33

16


Our wits swart with patinawe kneel before syntax

facts before which we abhor the godsVocabulary will be our end

A semantic scission of many snippets

has cut a broad swatchfrom the cloth of existence

Logic has killed God Thomasand Mary Christ Thoth

Heaven and Hell have becomecomputer games

dungeons and dragonsmaximized meanings

miserable riddlesWe understand everything

we believe in nothing

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18/33

18


We turned up shardsof a tea-cup or two

primal artifacts of value eventouchstones perhaps

of some sense of right measure

to be found in collapsed structuresand the secret life of the Will

Who knows they were not expressions ofsome lost experience of I-Thou

Perhaps they were too correcttrying to be ideal and not themselves

argufying without paying heed to partsoscillating between principles of effect

and eclecticismWho knows

wlm04-01-06


19/33

19


It was becoming an old shoelying still on the beach like curarized rats

watching the scene between the Turtle of Loveand the Frog Prince of Salvationawaiting the vocabulary for next night's dream

To dream To Dreamin the stable in which we sleepcradled in each others' arms

the only window within ourselvesopaque to external circumstances

open only to inner harmonies

Then to wake up in a cold sweatscared half out of our wits

with a different time senseand our ideas of the past

all shot to shit

If we had never have had to awakenit would have been so easy

to have continued to believe in lieslies that would have made life so easy

so simple serenelike God and LSD

Would that our lives on wakingcould have been made up ofmore palpable essences

day-dreams relaxation poesiesinstead of Light and Struggle

wlm

04-01-06


20/33

20


Those summer nightswe would pitch our tents on some stream's shingle

or creep into haylofts and sleep like sparrows

By day we cut rhymes into the resiny bark of the shaman's tree

the languor of our language forming symbolic clots

Dominated by aspect and undone witcheryour honeyed tongues would plumb depths unsuckled

or toy idly with leaf-line and shadow

Tho the resonance of our words inspired assumptions not demonstrably relevantself-respect bubbled from our purified hearts

quenching spiritual droughtuniting doubtful principles

We played no more a part than scenery that Summer

wlm

04-01-06


21/33

21


We were alone in our forsaken templespiously relighting candles blown out by the Wind

Masters of Stained-Glass Windows designed to let in so little Gracewe could not imagine of what use we had ever been

Out back we had dug a latrine for our collected worksnot wishing to be stamped by posterity as cluckholds

for having listened to ourselves at toilet

selves that harked back authoritatively in rhythm and rhymemouthing mythopoetic riddle religious rot other archetypal fiddle-faddle

intuitively generalizing particularizing theorizing

Virtue the drivel of the mindBeginnings Roots Stems stored in a Retrieval System labeled The Past

irrevocable where you can't ever get at them again

the foretaste of one's birth-blood and fecesthe afterglow of one's bones and ashes

elisions marred by asterisks

We scratched out life sketcheson the flesh of our temples

till Time broke our reedsmarveling at teleological miracles

one breath following anothernever diminishing the Wind

We leave you this legacyWe lessened nothing by ever existing

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24


We were squatting about the common fire before our shermsour shadows flickering on the baobab tree

our women-folk already curled up fast asleep in their werfswhen the subject came up

Given we men have a truly macaronic feelfor the latencies inherent in the rococo derivative

let us side-step the droll study of relevant problemsand alternating between cracks in the noosphere

throw ourselves into some left-handed recrudescencesomething the gods

with their propinquity for easy laysmight have left hidden between Time's hairy feet

something in the nature of a riddlethat beetle-like can zip about the womby realms

beneath Earth's auriferous sandswith no more of a ripple off Causality

than the shock-wave from

the sticking of a fingerin a virgin's eye

something empirically inconceivablelike a new glottal release

for a communal screamor Transcendental Reality

wlm04-01-06


25/33

25


Once we came upon a dried up lakestinking of fish and crawling with flies

In the cracked clay of this bowl in Base Earthwe found what we thought was a universal mold for Absolute Form

with a facet for every square

Just then our World's slow-moving Clockfell behind the horizon of hazy hills

splattering the hem of the Sky with fiery plumesIn the bowels of this Phoenix

some of us imagined we saw an Owlof hoary respectability

auguring wellfor the hood-winking of our fellow-travelers

into thisour new-found vision of Reality

In the manner the pinions fellothers of us sought and found

expiation for more sacred liesYet by the time the Sun had duly set

the magic problem remainingas it so often is in this sort of mythic legerdemain

was how to carry off the spoofon our own rigor-crazed minor theoreticians

how to transcend the transcendentiality of those minionshow to keep tranquil

those bland familiar facesPatience we knew would try their metaphysics

nor would those in whose mindsnumbers have replaced Science

and flow-charts Artever tolerate admission to belief

in outright MythOur tao would be to turn their brain-screws back a click or two

to thought untrammeled by rational reflectionto index them back into

an image of themselvesas Human Beings

before Good and Evil

and Systems Analysis

wlm04-01-06


26/33

26


Rather than stand brainless in Paradise tonightpraising the double-dealing godsin mute autotelic purposeless passagesand by awesome movements of the balls of our eyes

Let us meet head on the phantasmal reality of our circumstanceslet our tongues unwind the wonders of our minds

perhaps move thought off zero rest-massinto some black hole where we can all defy causality

Let us delve into the irrational cognitive systemsof a fast-failing group of organic sentientsobserve the struggle of the Hawk and the Owl for their psychesexamine their hairy hearts

Let us hale out of the privy shadowsthe sacred zoography of that woolly land of theirsgoverned wholly by fable

After all hasnt Time already made the most of them or willWhy not hasten the debacleWhy not

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Could I capture like a child wholeness in a few simple wordsrid myself of this meaningless manicheism of good and bad vibes

opt out of endless change

fuse if only momentarily Fact and Originalityreduce life to its most basic chord

some naked human soundsome primal scream

But my doubly recalcitrant Victorian Muserefuses to go along with this line of thought

Meanwhile miserable Nature tears up our old love lettersand makes a shambles of my library

A roaring of bulls fills the voids of the World OutsideThe clamor of the masses trampling one another to fulfill promises

fills up the interstices

Yet here and there slivers of Salience pierce the confused airleaving space for abstract ideas like

Love Hope Faith Charity

and cleaving a way outfor Poetry

wlm04-01-06


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Then we were at the International World's Fair of Foolscombing the cobwebs out of our hair

heavily stimulated by manifold emanationsour Sprachspiel early on whetted

by insights into acausal concatenationsduly resounding off the Grooves of Learning

Trip with me I asked if you willoutside Time outside Place

down one of those wydah-bird toad-infested pig-trailsangling off from our species-specific Life-Path

where caprices such as experience peter out

suffer me a dysfuntional juncturein one last-ditch flight of libido

then cut away these pseudo-truths I cherishthru bedizenment with Things Eternal

Ply quickly Occam the razor of wit you wield so wellperform this simple but permanent rite for me

After all even minds born sterileI see still reach the stars

Ouch

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WLM : GRAND CIRCUS PIECES SUMMER 1981

Suddenly again in droll spirits following the ways of things that changea traveler once more in a world unfamiliar and most difficult to explain

my ratiocinations darting about like swallows helping the Windexploding like moths hitting cellophane panes

as they come into contactwith the brown tents of Reality

Beyond the parameters of the repressedexistents at one with the sticks and stones

our mores the pithy echoes of ancient mythsWe the Wise live now the lives of depraved rusticswearing a hairy shoe and the mask of a frog

Thus it is as one might have expected at a Country FairTime Shape and Substance vanishing

in the presence of Flesh at the Feast of Unknowingwith Blood running the Water-Clock

at the Revel of Fools

O Wise Ones all is not well in the World of ReasonDown below a faint glow like sunset reflects up from the Grass Labyrinth

like some Clown has set fire to our boot

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Single brief utteranceslink one silence to another

Perhaps they contain piddlingsoff some contingent martingale

tied about our neckshaply by a fool

our father our mothersome philosopher chaired

some king on a stool

We hem-haw ourselves aboutwith belief-feelings

brain-bound to our tonguesor beholden ourselves

to referents and implicationsoff prophetic musings

Myself I am more at ease

in a context of cold souponthan warmed-over sooth

I loll in the unconscionablethe unforgivable

Forgive methe malaise I gloss over here

blew my mind-way on an ill windoff a plague of neo-plagiarisms

of blustering doctrinescarrying fever

bringing on complicationsby the efficacy of re-definitionstautologies following tautologies

silence to silence

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WLM : GRAND CIRCUS PIECES


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book ii - the grand circus pieces (to scribd 07-11-09)

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