(∃x)(P(x) and Q(x))
COSMIC CANNONBALL
"This will kill that." "The press will kill the church."
An Obsessive Combination Of Ontological Inscape, Trickery And Love
by Anne Sexton.
Busy, with an idea for a code, I write
signals hurrying from left to right,
or right to left, by obscure routes,
for my own reasons; taking a word like writes
down tiers of tries until its secret rites
make sense; or until, suddenly, RATS
can amazingly and funnily become STAR
and right to left that small star
is mine, for my own liking, to stare
its five lucky pins inside out, to store
forever kindly, as if it were a star
I touched and a miracle I really wrote.
The Artist as an Old Man, by Erica Jong.
If you ask him he will talk for hours--
how at fourteen he hammered signs, fingers
raw with cold, and later painted bowers
in ladies' boudoirs; how he played checkers
for two weeks in jail, and lived on dark bread;
how he fled the border to a country
which disappeared wars ago; unfriended
crossed a continent while this century
began. He seldom speaks of painting now.
Young men have time and theories; old men work.
He has painted countless portraits. Sallow
nameless faces, made glistening in oil, smirk
above anonymous mantelpieces.
The turpentine has a familiar smell,
but his hand trembles with odd, new palsies.
Perched on the maulstick, it nears the easel.
He has come to like his resignation.
In his sketch books, ink-dark cossacks hear
the snorts of horses in the crunch of snow.
His pen alone recalls that years ago,
one horseman set his teeth and aimed his spear
which, poised, seemed pointed straight to pierce the sun.
1) They cut him open
tearing, straight black pulse
& out like a plug
fell his heart
glinting muscle burning rose
to lay waste
a young stag
god killer
all flying crazed body
& shapeless face.
2) Artful butchers, we are.
Ripping up roots or peeling back each flipping wet skin
defiling dandelions
& making blow fish piss
slipping bullets
eluding every possible gracious electric force
to touch the night
stupid.
Redemption holds a gargantua of hanging blade
swift, pendulimic
Adored.
Rotations of buzzing propeller penetrate skies
twenty four hours of every day
to give form to more half starved & lost worlds.
You want the truth?
Eat this blade,
don't stab out the eyes of your stoic
leave
the parade.
( 1 & 2 are excerpts from The Butchers, a poem by Amy Marina Denes )
