Life in Primitive Times

Chevy Suburban

Thoughtpulse
in passing
the coming and passing
rhythms of branches

:species of genera-
tions of families
in a kingdom of a Kingdom,
thoughtpulse

repeating,
a paddle, a peddle,
Janus-faced
platypus,

climbing the slime
of the littoral rock,
sliding through cycles,
pulsing in splices,

families of species
repeating
in forests:
down the street.




On the Highway through Illinois

Heliostruction:
patterns of patterns, versions
of living no bigger
than eyesand

from (here: the moon: a body, a house
: a body, microflora,
its house on) the body,
skytree with branches

about the country it grew in
under & inside
the pulling and pouring
fugue of the center

flexing its ocean.


Echo-logical

The river flows between high banks,
Bends into pools and streams,
The sloping sun dissolves each wave,
And rains them on the trees.

A couple steps from the curb,
He a bluechip on his ear, she with CVS bag,
And they wait for a gap in the traffic.
Blossoms, lamps, towers, forests, frame their frail wading.

From the skyscraper ATM I watch
Evening traffic on Market Street:
Families in fading light returning
To their nests on the side streets.

A Day of the World at Work

Chicago: American, Chinese, British, Peruvian, Russian families
Suspended in brightness on top of the day's clouds, at the top
of the Seers Tower! Looking through, standing in, cubes of glass,
Stepping over the city of people stepping on the cement below.
Man makes wind from the fans of its buildings,
Blowing the smoke of metabolic reactions
In wire and brick, but the earth it is blowing its gigantic
Rhythms of whiteness, hiding our structures like hands
Might hide eyes. Look how the mammals are blinking
And floating out of and into the horizon of pictures!
Coming and going, through corridors streaming, filled
With the image of sky deep upon us, and my, how
This metropolis bustles and breathes, how smoothly
This traffic, squeezed out of tunnels, gleaming
...



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flora


Bridge

Tunnel

Eastern Waterways

"The Wild East"

Men

Western Skyways (Castratos of moon-mash)

Cellar Door (WCW/F&W/JRR)

Human Capacity to Evolve (1)

Proteus

Danger of Biochemical Code

Earthly Realm (1)

Thorneville

Wynnewood

Earthly Realm (2)

Human Capacity to Evolve (2)

Persistence of Comedy


Past/Present/Future

Read(ing)

To a Star

hotwhite heart of that waste of spaces,
what part do you lend to this rhythmic branching
alive on the air through the library windows?

I've put away books, and the science of masters,
to pour over leaves
simple praise of my water;

as well as the rhymes of millennial standing
just to catch any thought
from the afternoon fragments of thunder;

O the rain drops in cups, branches on glass,
till the brain is a stage
of the day and its shadows and,

leaving this scene to the weave of its knowledge,
it flies from the Earth
to the heave of your answer.


"...narrator looks back on the events in that castle from the perspective of the 21st century and reflects on all that happened in their wake."

"I sat beside him years and years ago at a Private Eye lunch at the magazine’s regular spot, the Coach and Horses in Soho, not far from its Greek Street offices."



....set adrift as infants



Monologue for Albert Einstein

Place: Athenian courtyard, with the plastic modernism of a California suburb. Benches line the walkways; the perimeter is flanked by tall beige stucco walls; a large gaping gate opens onto a street, across which stands a large museum/ administrative center/temple, in the Greco-Roman style. AE stands on the grass, in a gray three-piece suit, with dangling watch-chain, and his famous ion-charged white hair, beside a bright-green tree speckled with red apples (one of which lies beside him on the ground). Sounds of traffic beyond the walls, and a distant trickle of water. AE has hand-based fixations, fiddling with his watch, hitting himself in the head at moments of despair, making "air quotes" and folding his hands when reciting a passage, and frequently scratching himself. On the other hand, he does not move around the environment, but stays rooted in one spot for the entire monologue. Time of day, month, year, on occasion of performance remains unclear

I had no conception of the magnitude of the voyage on which I was embarking; I thought only to explain a single rule. It is a shame that your mother cannot be here today. Passages of emerald traffic, no sound unaccounted for. Comings and goings about the giant strip; big-doings up on Capitol Hilton. Maternal deaths declining sharply across the globe. Pyrotechnics. Well-defined temporal regions of leisure, international snack foods, types of cushions. Wheel of Fortune re-runs. Voices. Splatterings in the empty... ash can. Oh, Jesus! Constancy is dead. However, while I have time and space, though blind, throbbing between two lives, maybe I am seeing that lost world as the impetus for rebuilding this one. In utter darkness they reasoned. Swamp holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time starts. The silences seemed very long. When the pagan Latin Empire desired to become Christian, it included the Church but remained a pagan State in very many of its departments. In the spring he was weary: Alexandros Grigoropoulos: having already traveled about the world of men and seeing their cities and islands. He ended his days wifeless and bored in a castle over a mill. Writing court poetry. "The moon is the mother of pay-thohs and pity," and such tripe. Catching limp trout. He was certainly familiar with the western coast of Asia Minor, but his travels extended far beyond the limits of Ionia. The sun was like a digital shield through the window that day I told her, over several coffees and some futuristic fruit baskets little Napoleons brought by the table like generous tip-grubbing Chinamen my history of the world. It involved a single man, to which she took offense. Until I added, he was a widow. How in the world could i have known then! So pure was she then. Immortal. She leaned forward, mouth poised at her cup, raspberry lips smiling, eyes like twin stars. Motor, heart, and savior of Europe. So he spent his days, pensively meandering in his garden, looking and looking again like a hypnotized child on the commissioned statues of his exploits. No Hermione to reach her hand to him through the shadow of the arbor. Just wandering the shrunken landscape, the frigid museum, theater of his wars -- rescue missions, slaughtered bores, the time he bore meat on his back to a roc's nest to rob it of its jewels. Looking. One day he found another very fine Iris garden. The garden, it turned out, belonged to the man who collected his garbage. He invited him in for a beer and told him some of his stories. Turned out to be a "thing" of his: every day, brought in the poor fellow and hit him with more stories from his days of gore and splendor, the time they pitched tents on the back of a whale, lit fires from the trees that had been growing there from the beginning of the world, and woke that fat sea bitch, who cast him to the deeps. How he washed up on the shore of a king. Each night, he would tip the poor old garbage servant more; the man thanked his boss, and left, and Alexander would sink back into silence and the loudness of memory, her old light moving along the branches. How could he know he was locked inside of a much bigger story. Herstory. (Sound of a car crashing.) Sweet Marjoram! thou shrieking harbinger. The signs that herald the approach of an earthquake, the phenomena of the tides, the ice-bound seas of the north. The rust and the rot of the door through which she came...

...What determined the speech. Something strange is creeping across... It was the worst of times. But through the curling flower spaces, a sea-journey on the highway to the door of my cottage in the Western night... Recirculation! And with a night thus will I first begin.

I was tired of playing the mail clerk, and barrowing dung in gardens, so I gathered up my stick, and a loaf of salt bread and fled the town. There was a dark rain, that fearful end of summer twilight. And I looked up and down the city for my brother the opera singer. In a midnight fat with thunder, I found him, down by the old canal, green as old copper, drunk as a fish, and he said to me, "You see, I am fond of collecting certain facts, and, would you believe, I even copy anecdotes of a certain sort from newspapers and books, and I've already got a fine-collection..." Then he vanished along the bank where the water was rising. We sublimated hegemony. Our nature is her nature. I drowned my book. Oh, if she was here with me now! Strange times in the flowering East. The large creek. Wake up!!!! Have you no collective unconscious? I can remember her clear as the day is long: Rosa. African-American-Cherokee-Creek-Scots-Irish mother. Seamstress, secretary. Suffered like the divine Miranda. Omnibus. Told old Blake to shove off. Made all the Highland folk proud. Then that King. Electoral Body Strike. Playing the piano for the queen. Able to sing with a new meaning. Like a mighty stream. Since by our nature we grow old, earth grows the same. I mean to discover you by the like in you. But SMS was evolved in Latin script countries, and adaptation to other scripts is variable. “No matter what we do it ends by being melodic.” International Liberty! Transform the jangling discords. Elimination of "media darkness." I don't want to set the world on fire. Anyway you can find it all in the smallest strand of the celluloid rainbow trellis at the bottom of the scummiest sewer. We stopped in the colonnade... terrace... lineaments... every tatter in its mortal dress. How much waste space. John, who used to be a roadie for Earth, Wind and Fire, I first met him shivering on a bench, I shared my sandwich with him, and we shared stories about cities. In April, I passed him, while riding my bike to purchase vegetables from the market, and he was passed out in a flower bed. I cannot help the feeling that I am traveling backward rather than forward through time. Or just as much the one as the other. Like a lantern through the colonnades. Her pretty little laughing face became suddenly serious. The chair she sat in, a burnished bar stool, chain-smoking and drinking the whole time. A female mutant turtle, feeding on ancient vegetables. She rose in her chair as far as she could and, looking at the elder, clasped her hands before him, but could not restrain herself and broke into laughter. She said, "It’s not fresh, but it's fruit." As it turned out she ended her days in outkast dementia. This year there will be more cell-phones than toilets in the world. The author of the brothers called it the intentional pouring of water through a sieve. Most of the success stories talk about combining Acai berry with a colon cleansing. She told them, "Your bastard father wants to leave me," and then, "Poor little neglected babies." Ah, but she was a queer old soul ... heart... land.... NAVY ....Starbucks... 0h, well then there is little left to do but to fish the river near the castle. Now I know how Al Gore feels. Entering a brokerage house, joining half a dozen clubs, and dancing late. Banks and stones and every blooming thing. At two o'clock she took out a mirror and a handkerchief, shined away the marks of her tears and powdered the slight hollows where they had lain. Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound my echoing song. But the colors and whirrs that I pulled through your world on transparent lines were images, meant to do something, programmed through your genes for millions of years. What branches grow... many little birds... waiting ... in this room. Glass-pipes, mortars, golden vessels, in a big house on the East River. Only companion, a love letter. And I quote: "At the end of their journey their daughter first lifted herself up and stretched her young body against the twilight. Up in the flower tree aslant the brook, looking down on the brothers looking up. Cleaving the land. A Buck-eye tree with its hanging chad. The south wing of the museum houses the Epigraphic Museum. Her arms behind her head .... kimono-winged ..... the voice that breathed ..... by the nose seen.... or seeing through hearing the bellweather ... The window was turning blue ... above the apple ... to the world."

First naked first lady in the world. Skorpios. Sunbathing goddess. Maybe the island where they sinned against the sun. Anyway, what goes up surely must come down. She called from the kitchen door as he was stepping out, electricity in the dusk faintly delineating his passing form: "Don't forget to see about the cattle!" The brother leaving cast a shadow on the family. She remembered him fondly: ah, playing the balalaika with Aleksey, who died while performing on the stage of the Sun Music Hall, Knightsbridge. Life flows on the same. The teacher would provide, in addition to colorful beads, alphabet beads, so that kids could choose the bead "C" for the confluence with chimpanzees, "G" for gorilla, and so on, if actual beads of those animals are not available. Language spoken in coastal regions and islands. Some say this day is enough; others, that we are stuck at the Forest Gate; and many believe in the culture that shaped Al Gore. "Call him back! We have everything to gain and nothing to lose." Men of wisdom and men of compromise. There was the sound of rain through the trees as bits of him fell back to earth. At an electronics market in Nigeria, cellphones appear in great profusion, as they do throughout poorer lands. Bringing up the dairy cattle, from the low-land pastures during the summer months. He immersed himself in a telephone booth. The sea the earth abode of stones in the great deeps. "Walking in the zoo is the O.K. thing to do." In the good mother's way with her sons. Such a wild structure. Like a playing card. No longer any military purpose. King in a top-hat smoking a cheroot. Comes from the Dravidian via the French. Two oldest manuscripts from the sub-continent not yet registered by the Memory of the World register. The car in which they were sitting by themselves was almost totally engulfed by the warm sun ...with no material obstacle to overcome, the secret weavings .... how happy .... their muddy daughter had blossomed recently ... somehow... from among this water ...

River Basin from Jan Hammerquist on Vimeo.

...Western Sea

,,,after a two-year stay in Ceylon, a violent storm drove his ship onto an island that was probably Java...

Poem
"on one side, the head of an implacable and beautiful god; on the other, a curious animal." - Rexroth

Recognizing that one subject is as good as any other,
That impossible balance
Of comedy... tragedy: you will never know life...
You will always know, with its thousands of meanings,

The life of our making... Brain...
Rain rain rain. Rain.
Laughing... drowning...
Sails on a house
I have built for you.


[Pixies]
choir in the yard
in the house next door
where a grandma brought
some songs from the shore

Just below midcourse, the rivers approach each other. (T&E)


In those old far-off days, each game for the 2600 was done entirely by one person, the programmer, who conceived the game concept, wrote the program, did the graphics—drawn first on graph paper and converted by hand to hexadecimal—and did the sounds.


...Monkey gone to heaven...


...Transoxiana...


... creating a picture ... through drift ... slip ... Barthes' grain ...


Harmonica Solo on the Diag

There must be a thousand poems clamoring for expression today, as I sit here in a shadow, a sunny April, eating salt and vinegar potato chips, under a pine tree. People chatting, passing by. Squirrels cogitating on the grass. And I could tell you how these poems, like brands arrayed in a rainbow along one corner of a corner store, form one block, merely, that glints briefly with the osculation of the sun along their cloakfolds, as you pass their rack on your way to the register, barely noting their light or text, passing on… Because whatever story we’re caught inside of today, pocketing change to reenter the distract theater of the street (by the way it seems irrelevant to this fatter, better trafficked story that these meeker words are caught, equally, in the current, like pebbles weakly rolling in the onslaught; as, too, it only makes sound sense that you do not consider the cellular phonetics of pouring all your soundwaves through the air—being caught up, rather, in that riverlong task of getting to point B, thoughtclouds necessarily investing most ΔT in condensing and descending through the spinal mountain chains and hillocks, till a Hudson or a Huron might emerge to—reach the ocean of the other person, who catches them, along with what ever’s been precipitating over there, that, wind-system of another———————or expend all our time worrying about what kinds of deliveries, quantities, exchange-rates, are made along our thickly woven highways—if we would actually like to decode/make/use these proteins for our bigger, hotter pursuits—) where the garbage tumbles evercloser to the mouth of the city sewer (on my way here, walking through a branch of the library, I was thirsty, and so changed my path to a fountaion, and as I stooped to take a drink, the water hardly came, but I waited, hand on button, till the trivial trickle became an arc, crystalline, important, and it made me wonder what, exactly, brought it here in such a fashion, picturing the machine’s tubes or the building’s pipes, till, when I reach my tree, I’ve branched out in thought, and by now have gotten to imagining the subterranean streams of any city, as the spring light publishes the treeshadows on the surface of my chips… through its gassy ink I’m reading over the ingredients: POTATOES, SUNFLOWER OIL AND/OR CORN OIL, LACTOSE, SODIUM DIACETATE, SALT, MALIC ACID, SODIUM CITRATE… and how these foiled vessels, upon dissemination and consumption, might be floating this very hour oceanward, sucked out, to be scrutinized by birds, or hauled discretely into the boats, where some men in Day-Glo overalls grunt and chat, and as such barely penetrate the momentary subject of their speech, though there’s more than they can eat inside those nets—so that all that really happened was that the men, their words, floated briefly then departed through the salty air and to the shore of mighty markets—), it resembles more a landscape than a still-life… Wind/sun splattering treelimbs on my limbs. People passing…

Thinking of one story—dimly sensing it—fog-sheeted trees—one morning in childhood—microform cottage—Upstate—waking in an off-white autumn morning—bleak weekday—chill of the sky through the house—and—rushed—for breakfast choking on a quickly-gobbled apple—and Dad not knowing I’d a seed lodged in my throat—clogging speech—but thought I was feigning silent-sickness—and angrily repeated it was time to go to school—going to be late—and might miss him his train—so I followed—guilty mute—to his car—a rusty Dodge Dart—by my mother referred to as the “Dodge Fart”—waiting, fatly warming on the drive—like an old horse—crystallized—breaths of brown—and climbed into the cabin—reeking of old leather, puke (mine), cigarettes (his)—Winstons, I remember—that softpack he’d preferred—with its outer tightly-fitting see-through membrane—and its dermal meaty layer of red and gold—and those white letters—always singing somehow (not of WWII and cigars, but) of Western cowboys—a name one of them would have, I fancied—if spinning ropes and roping cattle (surely having already ingested the Marlboro mythology, a child long inside the broadcast net)—just as this Block & Barrel brand of bag of chips—it reminds me somehow of the highseas—same cartoonishness of connotation —but this time really for no good—denotable—reason (then again what’s the reason I’m reminded of that day— Dad—appleseed—which by the way I eventually swallowed—then days after still wary of an inner tree?)—as I discover now, Googling the meaning for the phrase, just some mellifluous corporate poetry of that SYSCO—whose trucks you see sometimes passing, between highways, shitfarms, costumers—as an ant surveys your countryside of hair—you there!—under that other tree—and how—many million syllables—are you —today?

I wonder are you thinking at all of—me here!—with my own momentary—tree—and where an ant just crossed—my country—and I think that’s why I just made up—that little story—on the prairie—starring you—or your starring—but really isn’t all this—chatting—a bit much—a wind—picking up after winter—coming over—this—stuff—and yes—I believe—I can’t hear you at all…





Ol' Son

Walking

breath, bring it out

why, any old things,
any nouns of a child,

times his mouth fat with starburst,

and his wheels down the trails of residual trees,

and summers cannonballing into pools.

As a wind fanning flames maybe breath brings these things to the front of the mind.

Walking, city winter,
mammals dreaming and revolving in the rooms, the traffic
groaning from field to field in the early morning.

In their wake,
scanning fragments

phone-books and bottles,
fall's old news,

a child shouts,
and a man walks to work


in this field
in this wind


blowing things around .



"This effect is the result of the fragmented nature of Sumerian chronology and the overestimation of the length of the Egyptian I and II Dynasties... kings since the Flood..."

Botanical Garden

"Root nodule" -- particularly
strange-sounding, not quite musical
word for a poem, but it's what's stuck
in my head from the botanical garden
visit in Washinton ... Old men,
children, and their mothers,
following the paths of the tropics
and the deserts and the coniferous
and the deciduous and the hundreds
of orchids, and the mothers
with their carriages pass through
the sliding doors, tree trunks,
vines, rivulets surrounding
this passage, texts on the functions
and formats and histories of plants,
windows of light locked into
great walls and cielings, surround
the families, I am convinced they are innocent!
and that the light which pervades these
wellwatered hallways is knowingly
playing among their thoughts,
--Orchids Around the Globe -- who reads
such signs? some of them; not that it
matters, really; they are wonderfully
foolishly passing it all by,

as just as invisibly a plane
draws a white line
upon the blue wave
above the Capitol, and a woman
wheels her baby past a series
of stores, this sunny Sunday
of looking at what we're thinking

(The Beginning of an Idea at the End of History, just waking up,
or the equivalent, in a garden of the copy-pasted Acropolis...)

where streets are filled with coffee
and ideas, most of which have almost
certainly always existed, at
least as long as mountains have let
roads drive words between
our spheres, once tropics and deserts
and forests and grasslands have borne
separate thoughts, and we've come to love
to see the light play on all the species
of outbranching roots... from mutual thoughts...




Tony, Understand Sweet Apeland. They might have all the cabbage, but the juices they monitor and graph are flowing down the valleys of our Iberian-Anglo Olde Tyme library farmland... "Fuckin' curry w/ young jackfruit, dong"...!

Life in Primitive Times (Conclusion) from Jan Hammerquist on Vimeo.