Saturday, September 30, 2006

Leper King

Sterquilinium

Whether or not he wears a mask
the Leper King must know his place;
upon a throne, and yet unseen
a paragon of sin and grace.

Anemia and ichor wrought
within one being's seamless heart;
power and weakness, visible;
death and life in equal part

The Leper King now rules this world
but pride replaces blood and pus
and dripping sores belie the crown
appealing to the worst in us

Friday, September 29, 2006

Icke's Pensees

This short reflective poem was written in Icke's later years during one of his "lucid" times. Icke had never been religious and his childhood could not be understood in any way as placid. In fact Icke's later life was quite tame compared to his early years. Most scholars believe this image of God must be understood metaphorically, but it is unclear what the metaphor represents. Some have suggested that God was his own artistic expression.

Icke only wrote several more poems before joining the Cognitive Artist movement at which point his pen necessarily grew ceased to move.

Pensees

At first God was but a star, cold and remote,
Then I saw God twinkle and he looked playful to me.
He shone brighter and he danced like the planets dance in the sky
Always surprising me by his sudden appearance and disappearance
He seemed to laugh and I laughed back and he grew as I grew
Until he was bright like the moon,
Still cold it is true, but within his beams,
I began to see the world,

Creation looked soft and gentle, gray and shimmering like God.
I mistook it for God.
As I took it up and let it pour through my hand
It mesmerized me
And for quite some time I neglected to look up at all.
But God did not cease to grow.

Creation began to take on color
I delighted in this,
There was food.
I ate and still more came,
Nectar sprung from the Earth
I drank and more flowed up

But then the fountains dried
The world become hard,
I dug in the sand for the sweet Nectar and none came
I looked for the fruit but all had withered

I became angry,
Where was the soft earth?
Where was the earth that flowed?
I struck at the rock twice.
And I remembered God and I cursed him.

I felt his hot breath upon my back and my neck.

I looked up in horror and there was God
He burned above me fiercer than a thousand suns
His wrath fell upon me like molten lead
It consumed all about me
And I lifted my hands up to him
And his weight fell upon me even as he burned me

I began to bear his enormous weight
And it did not crush me
Even now I bear it
Even now it burns

The Virginia Bluebell

From Lime Hill to Three Springs
on steep ridges there this flower clings.

If brilliant beauty were a song,
this siren's color could sing it so strong.

This flower in beauty, it truly sings
of tall, blue ridges and wild mountain streams.

From Walker Mountain to Walnut Grove,
young men there seek her for to woo their beau.

This gentle siren of the blue hills,
she has the beauty, and the looks that could kill.

Like Narcissus before with locked-in stare,
or a Medussa who turns men's hearts stone-bare.

This mountain enchantress with color so blue,
will capture girl's fancy, and devotion so true.

From the Maple in Silver Grove to Holston Lake with its shimmer,
every eye in trance by this blue moutain Lady and her deep cyan glimmer.

In the town of Bluff City, there echos the tale
of the Evergreen Hills and that Virginia Bluebell.

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Santuary -REMOVED

Due to the massive flood of negative e-mails concerning the work "Sanctuary", I as a synaptic artist have opted to remove it.

A few notes to loyal readers:

To Mr. Washington of Little Five Points in Toledo, Ohio - No sir, there is no such rap song - it was just a joke. I think it's time for Jerry Springer.
*************************
To "little Joe" of Lee Walla Wanna, Wyoming - no, pink cottages was not a metaphor for anything, and especially not bad cheese. It was actually a place I stayed when I was nine or ten years of age.
**********************
Haerve Michelleau writes "Mr. Visum, is it true that you were one of the youngest drunks in the history of East Tennessee."

No Mr. Michelleau, that title belongs to a country music star named Rhomba Jones. I was the youngest drunk in the ceded state of Appalachi.
********************************
One special e-mail of note from Mick Alliehaundrose- "(unintelligible drivel: republishing would require a beach towel issued to every reader)...you know where I can find that pink cottage?"...

Mr. Alliehaundrose, this was 20 years ago and my memory is a bit fuzzy but if it still exists it stands on a small stretch of sand on the island of Little Saint George just off the Appalachicola coast. Call Beulah and she can "hook you up".

And, as a side note, I know that they make "dribble cups" for those challenged by overactive "spittle glands" but if someone could engineer one to capture "drivel" overflow from the brain BEFORE it gets to the mouth/pen/keyboard ... WOW - what a gold mine that would be, eh Mr. Alliehaundrose?

Visum OUT
"my love is a pink cottage, palmetto bugs my disdain"

Monday, September 25, 2006

Ode to Roger Whittaker

Sterquilinium

If I could go back in time
through entropy's clouds I'd pass
to execute my only wish
and kick Cat Stevens' ass

Don't you hate that hippy?
and all his maudlin songs?
that reek of unwashed sweaters,
and communal water bongs?

Storyline: Barbarossa's Teats

Sterquilinium

L'il Timmy Rompkins was born in the Summer of Affection, August 1966. One year before the Summer of Attraction, two years before the Summer of Infatuation, and three full years before the Summer of Love. L'il Timmy was, like everyone else born that summer, a sort of victim of zeitgeist. Had he been born three years later, he would perhaps have ended up being a commercial real estate agent with a summer house on Martha's Vinyard. But instead, like everyone else born that summer, he had become a research scientist, and a respected one at that.

L'il Timmy's first memories were of dappled green lawns, replete with metal toys in a time when metal toys were enjoying their great victory before the onslaught of cheap plastic shit. Some would say that L'il Timmy's mind was like a metal toy. But those shortsighted fools would be wrong. Dead wrong. For L'il Timmy's mind was far more like a spear of brocolli than any metal toy. Uncannily similar to a spear of brocolli, in fact.

He often thought that it was odd that his first memories should fixate on those robust Tonka trucks and metal robots of gears and wheels, instead of on his beloved older brother Big'un. For the remainder of L'il Timmy's childhood was lived in a sort of orbit around Big'un, an orbit that could not be described fully by the considerable impact of Big'un's physical gravity. And this was most unfortunate for L'il Timmy, for Big'un, while a genial enough fellow, had from an early age been afflicted with an affinity for the occult. Big'un's first real toy was a simalcrum of Thomas Edison's "spiritphone," a device that purportedly allowed one to dial into the phantoms of "Dimension X". In fact, Thomas Edison's "spiritphone" was an early experiment in toymaking by Platudinor Enterprises, and rather than connecting one to the spiritworld, it played a scratchy disk recording of "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers" over and over again.

For hours a day, Big'un would ponder the meaning. What were the spirits trying to say to him? "Their tops are made out of rubber"... was this a metaphor for the elasticity of the mind? Did it refer to people wearing rubber hats (like the plastic helmets of hippy motorcycle riders or the American troops in Viet Nam?) And what about "Their bottoms are made out of springs?"

L'il Timmy, though, was content to sit in Big'un's presence as his older brother pondered these imponderables. And in that long detatched observation, L'il Timmy acquired the patience that would serve him well in becoming the world's foremost authority on biogenesis.

THE COGNITIVE MANIFESTO

Sterquilinium

There is a spectre haunting the visible world. This spectre is Untruth, and it is the duty of the artist to banish Untruth. In ages past, men sought Beauty, likening it to Truth. But it is not Truth. It is Beauty. And for ages, Beauty was Art, and Art was Beauty. But Beauty was not Truth and thus Art was not Truth.

Then men arose who said in strident voices: "Let Art Be Truth!" And they strove to make Art Truth. They broke free from form, from line, from perspective, from skill, from talent, from melody, from rhythm, from meter, and most of all, from Beauty.

But Art was not Truth.

It is only now that History has ended that We may know Truth. But Art is still not Truth. For Art is Man's rendering of Truth via Media. Whether that Medium be tactile or visual, audial or olfactory, the Medium has linked the Artist to the Audience in the communication of the Truth that only the Artist may know.

And yet, all media are corrupt, for being physical, they are fallen. And being fallen, they are themselves Untrue. And being Untrue, how can anything transmit Truth?

And still yet, in the Artist's mind, Truth resides. For it is in the Artist's mind that Art is created.

Now, We ask, why is Art communicated? Why do we communicate Truth? There are two reasons. The first is to fulfill that vicarious pleasure that the Artist takes as Creator in the reception of the Truth. But this is not the True goal of the Artist. For the True goal of the Artist is Truth. And Pleasure is not a Truth. Thus, the reception of Truth by an audience, in addition to being impossible due to corrupt Media, is also a means to corrupt the Artist himself.

Secondly, the Artist may pursue renumeration, in order to sustain bodily needs while he continues to pursue the Truth. In this case, the Artist transmits a corrupted Truth (and thus Untruth), and in return receives corruption itself, for Material is the greatest Untruth.

And so We see that the only two purposes for communication (and media) serve only to enhance corruption.

And so We issue this Manifesto: The only True Art is Cognitive Art. Art that never leaves the Mind of the Artist. For in the Mind of the Artist, Truth may be found. Any and all media are corrupt, and thus are not Art, for Art is Truth and Truth is not corrupt.

And so We, as the COGNITIVE ARTISTS pledge to furthermore practice our Art only within the confines of our minds, never seeking to communicate that Art in any way.

Monday, September 18, 2006

To ponder the descent...qui custos es mei

To teeter, fulcrum's edge, feet like talon and steely eye clutching and surveying at once one precipice of a canyon of psychosis; yet with souls sheathed in the armor of God we are the broadsword of mental accuity laying waste with fierce and bloody dominion the black and featureless chasm of numbing instinctual thought which defines that ruin below.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Press Release

Sterquilinium
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

THE STERQUILINIUM DEMANDS IMMEDIATE APOLOGY FROM TURKISH GOVERNMENT

WHEREAS the nominally secular government of Turkey has allowed its official representatives as well as its political leaders to make inflamatory, offensive, egregious, and erroneous statements about His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI,

WHEREAS a modern state is charged with maintaining diplomacy not only in the effort to maintain peace between nations, but to prevent bloodshed and the loss of life amongst its citizens of all religions,

WE RESOLVE that the government of Turkey should offer an immediate retraction of all official remarks that are demeaning to Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican, all Catholics, and all Christians.

FURTHERMORE, we demand that the government of Turkey make a further apology for the attempted genocide of Christian Armenians during the First World War,

THAT the government of Turkey apologize to the nation of Australia for their brutal treatment of Australian soldiers during the First World War,

THAT Turkey makes an immediate return of the basilica of Hagia Sophia to lawful representatives of the Greek Orthodox Church, notably the Patriarch of Constantinople,

THAT the Turkish nation cede all historic Christian territories back to their rightful occupants, namely the indigenous Christian peoples of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches who have suffered terrible oppression under the yoke of the Islamic occupiers.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Storyline: The Sole of Whitt

Sterquilinium

Warto McConkey stared in horror as his fiancee Crystal Silverloin burst into a pillar of flame.

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Storyline: The Secret of Da Bomb

This entangled skein must now begin to be straightened, the knot loosened, the ball of paperclips unhooked piece by piece. Who could not have seen the eternal figure of Platu even in his modern guise and known we are dealing with one of the eternal figures, a living totem, and incarnation of the Sophic spirit? His alignment was with Ceres as indicated by the mystical representations of Greenback tower and the placement of one of the stones within his possession. The force of agriculture, the civilizing force, covering and growing upon Gaia.

The first mask is shed, the first face revealed.

Yet still the face of Da Bomb as it bobs about in frothy waters made turbulent by his own frantically beating arms remains unclear. Black and inky water, the void within, the eternal hollowness, this is the alignment of Da Bomb and the pit-temple, the bottomless grail, the pathway to the hidden telluric power, untapped within. Enigma, paradox, riddle and contradiction. His art is a half-smile, his number an endless sequence. Yet in itself an unsatisfying answer.

That was one of his many names.

His symbols are the wheel and the lever, coincidentally made flesh in his body now, as it was suspended, semi-buoyant, with arms and legs flailing in useless pinwheels, describing arcs and ellipses. His own words mock him "Epur si muove."

He was Dionysus, another primal force - art and culture and tradgedy. He was the madness that pulled Nietzche down to his grave, the hand that held David Hume's pen as it joyfully anihilated both God and the universe by narrowing the knowable to the infitessimal of immediacy. Da Bomb was god to the modern age, but a god who could not save itself from that dreadful substance that fills voids, substance that began to suffocate him.

Big'un had watched him for a moment with a silent curiosity. He reflected on how he had once seen a hummingbird whose legs had inhumanely pulled off. The bird had thrashed about just so as it tried to find a way off the hard earth. Big'un turned his back and walked off just as Da Bombs head slipped under the oily water and disappeared.

A cry from the guards, they brushed by Big'un as they sprinted towards the sea wall. It was deep there. Twenty-five feet of sheer rock to water at least again as deep. The guards wore body armor and were in no position to attempt a rescue. They called out desperately to the men of a nearby dredge. But the distance was too great and the sound of the BRU machinery too loud for their voices to reach the workers.

Da Bomb sank down into the murkiness, the overcast sky permitted no faint beam of light to reach him, yet looking up, the polluted water seemed to have the crimson cast of an ancient vintage he had once drank. That was of course, before he went out into the night.

Friday, September 08, 2006

Open letter to ABC news

Dear Support at ABCNEWS:

I'd just like to say that from what I have heard of your miniseries (9-11 commission report), you have hired technical consultants to ensure that it closely follows the findings of the 9-11 commission.

I am of the opinion that you should not be censored by the loud and boisterous cat-crying from the parties who might be shown in a less than sparkling light; also, that in editing your film you are giving credence to the (popular, I might add) opinion that the media is completely skewed toward the left.

I do not understand a group who cannot separate the parties from the individuals who formerly represented one segment of the Democrats (I know that not all Dems supported Clinton).

Now, I am a lifelong, proud member of the Grand Ol Party. My opinions are definitely, well, influenced at best, and shaped at least...by my politics (although I do make an attempt at being impartial).

Which is what I am hoping you will do.

This much I will tell you though...facts should be presented. Conjecture should be left open to interpretation, but the findings of the report should be presented to what is basically a public who will most likely never read it.

You have the opportunity to stand for what is right and true. I'm not saying this in hopes that the Democrats will loose any ground in the upcoming elections (although that would not bother me) - I am saying it as a former journalism student and current writer (technical) - who believes whole-heartedly that the truth must be told and the consequences should be dealt with.

This is what responisble people do. They deal with the ugly truth. They stand tall in the face of adversity. They shy away from manipulation.

My journalism professors used to lecture me on integrity. Once lost, never regained.

Never rat out a source...stick to the facts, and just the facts - no lectures, no persuasion, no politics. Just the facts.

As a media-driven organization, I believe you owe it to the American people to be impartial and demonstrate to the world that you do stand for integrity; and trying your damndest to sort through the sordid detail and peel back the truth (not shaping it - exposing it).

I know that it is swimming up stream into the currents of Delphi, but it is an absolute imperative to the journalist (and this "docu-drama" is a necessary stand-in for a largely illiterate public).

Best of luck to you in your endeavor for the truth! I pray you stick to your guns and not cave to the obvious attempts at censorship by the radical left-wing.

Sincerely,


Standifer Evasto Visum

For more, see the site:
Editor and Publisher

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Storyline: The Mobius Nexus

Sterquilinium
Hansel Daggerfjord looked into the perfect circle of his cup of espresso. The thin khaki froth had worn away to the very extremes of the cup, leaving a mirrored black surface that reflected Daggerfjord's eye back at him in a sort of masonic symbology that a practiced master of semiotics would have presumed meant that the Rosicrucians were on the warpath.

But Daggerfjord couldn't even spell semiotics. Nor had he ever read Kierkegard, Eco, or Percy, who seem to be the sole proofs that such a thing as semiotics is anything more than a farce-science used to pad the blurbs on obscure author's dustjackets. And it was a damn good thing Daggerfjord was not a practitioner of that most dubious of sciences, for it would have distracted him from what was, for him and for us, a pivotal moment.

For, you see, though only a character in a story, that Jagger-lipped gypsy somehow sensed the End of The Exposition, even through the thick curtain that divides fiction from creation.

And though he felt it as something of a brief ennui or even malaise, he had the strangest subconcious awareness that suddenly things would begin to come together, that a profusion of characters would begin to wane, and that many threads left dangling would either be snipped away by the shears of the merciless fates, or would be woven into a tapestry that would convert this chaotic panolpy into a semiotic panorama.

And thus it was, that at the very moment that Daggerfjord tore his eye away from the espresso cup, one of the collaborative authors of Storyline declared:

"THIS IS THE END OF THE EXPOSITION! THO WE ARE FAR FROM DENOUMENT, AND THO THE CLIMAX SEEMS NE'ER SO NIGH AS IT WAS WHEN WE COMMENCED, NEVERTHELESS I SAY THAT THE EXPOSITION HAS DEPARTED! LET NO MORE SUNDERED CHARACTERS ENTER OUR TALE! LET TIMELINE AND STORYLINE BECOME ONE, LIKE AN ARAB HUMPING HIS TEMPORARY WIFE!"

And so it was written, and so it was done.

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Storyline: Some real dung, man...

You may now beckon from yon memory, yea reader of wall-eye and ice-pick wit, a vision of a time and a place that you may have confused with some other time and place (but then, it is really not your fault, the wall-eye and all)...but to wit...beckon if you will that memory of that place that is so blue, yes reader, blue!

Ah the connotations of that word...so many meanings. One may be blue for the unrequited love, or blue from too much breath beheld (beheld?). One may be blue from reading too much Chaucer, or Capote, or Kerouwac... "blue in the face", that is.

Which leads us, reader with the far-away stare, to that place of the face of blue, that devastatingly handsome place with the mug (putz) of blue - that's right, numbskull, Putzenbleu (bethcha didn't see that comin', you wall-eyed freak, for what else am I to believe of one who digs in dung?).

Warto McConkey and Crystal Silverloin had first met here back in ought-ought. They were both in town for a convention having something to do with their respective occupation du jour, that is, they were both in the exciting employ of that thrill-a-minute industry, Cable Television advertising sales.

They were trying to work a deal to wire up everyone in Greenback, Tennessee with Cable TV. She had just developed a new gimmick for impressing Cable TV execs by wearing a catwoman costume to her sales pitches. The patent leather really showed off her more than adequate physique, and she had a quirky little way of punctuating her advert patter with a little game show modelesque move she commonly referred to as "getting the points across".

Of course, those pesky advert execs of the cable capitol of the world, Putzenbleu, France, were always receptive to any "œpoints" she might offer.

Little did she know that on this day she'd happen across the man who'd change her life forever.

Warto McConkey had heard about the â"interesting" costumes that some comely young Cable TV advertising sales reps were commonly using to get that almighty advertising dollar. He decided he'd get his share.

Donning a bow tie and form-flattering (for his manly physique truly resembled an hour glass, or perhaps a peanut), khaki outfit complimented by leggings that covered completely his stilt-like legs, Warto was quite the sight.

This time, this time he would woo them. Lester's Radiator Shack on Highway four-eleven was counting on it.

Lester really needed the attention of those six families in Greenback who were now wired with cable, to wit, the Sax family of Wiggle Planes, the Platudinors of Black Philo Hollar, the Ying family of Burmese Dachshund Way (who made their money dealing in Spider Butt Silk from that infamous nemesis of the silkworm, the Yongtze-Provence Butte* Spider (*Butte, in the Greenback dialect translates to "Butt"); the Boar-Dong family of Ham Head Hill, the Grinders of Sausage Flats and the Jones family of Common-Name Lane - all members of Greenback's elite, effite and always replete "Apex" society - a group of Greenback upper-crust.

Warto was pumped. He had it all over the rest of those maroons in the waiting room. One guy looked like Captain America, and another was done up like Art Linkletter.

With his "connections" back home, and his dynamite get up, he was sure to win an account for Lester's Radiator Shack.

Yeah, this khaki spandex was just the ticket. And the bow tie...man, a gentleman of upper-crust appointment (ee wuz I tell ya).

And if it didn't work out, he could always wear it as a disguise when he traveled.

It was about then that his bubble truly burst, for she walked out of that office with her account in cat's claw clutch, and his heart was forever lost only to reside behind that shiny, bulbuous breast, (ah, what the heck, BREASTS – this ain't a family show).

They were in love at first sight; it was a union that would be the pride of all of Greenback.


Menlo and Platu had just “gotten to the good parts” in watching the Democratic National Convention's tribute to the Roman Emeror Caligula entitled “Caligula: Blueprint for a Modern President” on the “Misery Channel” when the show was interrupted by a special announcement from Lester's Radiator Shack on Highway four-eleven.

Lester, it would seem, was having a special come Saturday. REAL special.

Radiators were not the only thing on the cheap at Lester's. Radiators were the front for the real operation out back in the junk yard. You guessed it reader. Ol' Lester was selling stink bombs, and a certain family from Ham Head Hill was buying them up left, right and center (did we really have to put the right in there with those “other” two?).

Anyhow, it was about this time that Menlo turns to Platu and says,

“Did you ever hear a rumor that ol' Lester was kin to the Boar-Dongs?”.

To which Platu replied,

“Uh, yeah. Intersting you should ask. Lester changed his name after becoming involved in some nasty infringement case with a national supplier of electronic parts and gadgets. Seemed he truly sensed that their high-priced corporate lawyers really had him on the ropes, so he changed the name on his business license from “Lester” Baby-Nap Dong to Lester Grinder's Dong (Grinder being his Mother's maiden name), to thus throw off the scent of the Federal investigators involved in the case (for this was back during a less than intrepid administration). It was all quite sordid, and difficult for most, but the really super-genius (albeit horrendously naive) or completely stoned (but real sharp when it comes to coupon clipping)consumers of news to really understand. The typical consumers of news. Pretty much everyone who watches/reads/ingests news. Why do you ask?”

“Of course, of course...Platu dear boy...has it not occurred to you that our man Lester Dong (whatever), or rather, Lester (whatever) Dong, is actually none other than our dastardly nemesis, Sultan Zphat?”.

“Of course not Menlo. It would be preposterous for me to jump to such a conclusion. Zphat is of some foreign descent. Definitely not a name that is from around these parts.

Dong is a really, big, family in the Southern United States. I'll pass this off to your upbringing, Sir.”. Obviously, once again a proof that "thee ain't from 'roun chere".

“But Platu, really. Do you not see that his mannerisms are those of a Sultan? Sure, he's all black with radiator grime and all, but scrape that away and I'll bet you'll find the heart of a nomad, or a really big bird.”

“Nah, he just knows radiators...he don't know no Sultan-in. Scrape it away and you'll just find more Lester. Leave it alone Menlo. Your powers of wizardry are failing you,” replied one final, exasperated time our Mr. Platu.

“Well, he looks like an oil sultan with all that black grime on his face”.

“Trust me, he is a simple man, our Lester Dong,” and with that, Menlo and Platu went back to sipping their whiskeys and watching more of that timely classic “Beaujangles Hyde: Terror of New Orleans, Hero of the Left-Wing” on the “Educajin Channel”.