IISZ 2018 Challenge #6 - Burroughs Cut-Up

[rayheinrich]

Art is not beauty, it is the lie that leads to it.  - Leonora Carrington

   

    Hey!, you people from the future: These Challenges are forever!   Feel free to add something new.
    For links to all the Challenges, just click the P.S. button below:

    Challenge #1 - Cut Up Folktale can be found here.
    Challenge #2 - Death by Words can be found here.
    Challenge #3 - Utterly Mistaken can be found here.
    Challenge #4 - Word Dog Run can be found here.
    Challenge #5 - Queen's Dreams can be found here.
    Challenge   X - Bucket Brigade can be found here.

               



Image: Dactyle (Blickensderfer) Typewriter
A possible inspiration for this Interzone Typewriter:

               

                                                                IISZ 2018 Challenge #6

                            Write a poem, prose-poem, or prose piece using the below excerpt from Burroughs'
                            Interzone chapter of his novel Naked Lunch  and the version of the
                            cut-up technique detailed in the Guidelines below.

                            You can write and post as many entries as you want. (Why not one prose and one poem?)

Guidelines:

1. Use at least 25 words, though it can be as long as you want.

2. The entire piece is to be constructed from segments of three words or longer
    taken from the Burroughs' Interzone text excerpt below.

3. Segments can be used more than once.

4. Gender, tense, and plurality may be changed:
    "father sent the boys to the spring"
Can be changed to:
    "mother sends the girl to the spring."

5. You may add or take out punctuation marks and any of these words:
    the, a, an, and, or, but, yet, to, so, for

6. If you run into a frustrating problem, you can cheat.
    (But remember: The gods are watching.)

Burroughs' Naked Lunch excerpt for Challenge 6:

Burroughs' Naked Lunch
First 1248 words of the chapter: Interzone

The only native in Interzone who is neither queer nor available
is Andrew Keif’s chauffeur, which is not affectation or perversity
on Keif’s part, but a useful pretext to break off relations with
anyone he doesn’t want to see: “You made a pass at Aracknid last
night. I can’t have you to the house again.” People are always
blacking out in the Zone, whether they drink or not, and no one
can say for sure he didn’t make a pass at Aracknid’s unappetizing
person. Aracknid is a worthless chauffeur, barely able to drive.
On one occasion he ran down a pregnant woman in from the
mountains with a load of charcoal on her back, and she miscarried

a bloody, dead baby in the street, and Keif got out and sat on the
curb stirring the blood with a stick while the police questioned
Aracknid and finally arrested the woman for a violation of the
Sanitary Code. Aracknid is a grimly unattractive young man with
a long face of a strange, slate-blue color. He has a big nose and
great yellow teeth like a horse. Anybody can find an attractive
chauffeur, but only Andrew Keif could have found Aracknid; Keif
the brilliant, decadent young novelist who lives in a remodeled
pissoir in the red-light district of the Native Quarter. The Zone
is a single, vast building. The rooms are made of a plastic cement

that bulges to accommodate people, but when too many crowd
into one room there is a soft plop and someone squeezes through
the wall right into the next house–the next bed that is, since the
rooms are mostly bed where the business of the Zone is transacted.
A hum of sex and commerce shakes the Zone like a vast hive: “Two
thirds of one percent. I won’t budge from that figure; not even for
my snookums.” “But where are the bills of lading, lover?” “Not where
you’re looking, pet. That’s too obvious.” “A bale of Levis with built-in
falsie baskets. Made in Hollywood.” “Hollywood, Siam.” “Well,
American style.” “What’s the commission? . . . The commission . . .

The Commission.” “Yes, nugget, a shipload of K.Y. made of genuine
whale dreck in the South Atlantic at present quarantined by the
Board of Health in Tierra del Fuego. The commission, my dear! If
we can pull this off we’ll be in clover.” (Whale dreck is reject material
that accumulates in the process of cutting up a whale and cooking it
down. A horrible, fishy mess you can smell for miles. No one has found
any use for it.) Interzone Imports Unlimited, which consists of Marvie
and Leif The Unlucky, had latched onto the K.Y. deal. In fact they
specialize in pharmaceuticals and run a 24–hour Pro. station, six ways
coverage fore and aft, as a side line. (Six separate venereal diseases

have been identified to date.) They plunge into the deal. They perform
unmentionable services for a spastic Greek shipping agent, and one
entire shift of Customs inspectors. The two partners fall out and
finally denounce each other in the Embassy, where they are referred
to the We Don’t Want To Hear About It Department and eased out a
back door into a shit-strewn vacant lot, where vultures fight over fish
heads. They flail at each other hysterically. “You’re trying to fuck me
out of my commission!” “Your commission! Who smelled out this good
thing in the first place?” “But I have the bill of lading.” “Monster! But
the check will be made out in my name.” “Bawstard! You’ll never see the

bill of lading until my cut is deposited in escrow.” “Well, might as well
kiss and make up. There’s nothing mean or petty about me.” They shake
hands without enthusiasm and peck each other on the cheek. The deal
drags on for months. They engage the services of an Expeditor. Finally
Marvie emerges with a check for 42 Turkestani kurus drawn on an
anonymous bank in South America, to clear through Amsterdam, a
procedure that will take eleven months more or less. Now he can relax
in the cafés of The Plaza. He shows a photostatic copy of the check.
He would never show the original of course, lest some envious citizen
spit ink eradicator on the signature or otherwise mutilate the check.

Everyone asks him to buy drinks and celebrate, but he laughs jovially
and says, “Fact is I can’t afford to buy myself a drink. I already spent
every kuru of it buying Penstrep for Ali’s clap. He’s down with it fore
and aft again. I came near kicking the little bastard right through the
wall into the next bed. But you all know what a sentimental old thing
I am.” Marvie does buy himself a shot glass of beer, squeezing a
blackened coin out of his fly onto the table. “Keep the change.” The
waiter sweeps the coin into a dust pan, he spits on the table and
walks away. “Sorehead! He’s envious of my check.” Marvie had been
in Interzone since “the year before One” as he put it. He had been

retired from some unspecified position in the State Dept. “for the
good of the service.” Obviously he had once been very good looking
in a crew cut, college boy way, but his face had sagged and formed
lumps under the chin like melting paraffin. He was getting heavy
around the hips. Leif The Unlucky was a tall, thin Norwegian with
a patch over one eye, his face congealed in a permanent, ingratiating
smirk. Behind him lay an epic saga of unsuccessful enterprises. He
had failed at raising frogs, chinchilla, Siamese fighting fish, ramie
and cultured pearls. He had attempted, variously and without success,
to promote a Love-Bird Two-in-a-Coffin Cemetery, to corner the

condom market during the rubber shortage, to run a mail order whore
house, to issue penicillin as a patent medicine. He had followed
disastrous betting systems in the casinos of Europe and the race
tracks of the U.S. His reverses in business were matched by the
incredible mischances of his personal life. His front teeth had been
stomped out by bestial American sailors in Brooklyn. Vultures had
eaten out an eye when he drank a pint of paregoric and passed out
in a Panama City park. He had been trapped between floors in an
elevator for five days with an oil-burning junk habit and sustained
an attack of D.T.s while stowing away in a foot locker. Then there

was the time he collapsed with strangulated intestines, perforated
ulcers and peritonitis in Cairo and the hospital was so crowded they
bedded him in the latrine, and the Greek surgeon goofed and sewed
up a live monkey in him, and he was gang-fucked by the Arab attendants,
and one of the orderlies stole the penicillin substituting Saniflush;
and the time he got clap in his ass and a self-righteous English doctor
cured him with an enema of hot sulphuric acid; and the German
practitioner of Technological Medicine who removed his appendix
with a rusty can opener and a pair of tin snips (he considered the
germ theory “a nonsense”). Flushed with success he then began snipping

and cutting out everything in sight: “The human body is filled up vit
unnecessitated parts. You can get by vit vone kidney. Vy have two?
Yes dot is a kidney . . . The inside parts should not be so close in
together crowded. They need Lebensraum like the Vaterland.”
- - -

But... if you're really not feeling like Burroughs is your cup of tea today,
then use the text from this wonderful book instead:

Richard Dana's memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, excerpt for Challenge 6:

Richard Dana's Two Years Before the Mast
First 968 words of Chapter II - First Impressions

The first day we passed at sea was the Sabbath. As we were
just from port, and there was a great deal to be done on board,
we were kept at work all day, and at night the watches were set,
and everything put into sea order. When we were called aft to
be divided into watches, I had a good specimen of the manner
of a sea captain. After the division had been made, he gave a
short characteristic speech, walking the quarter deck with a
cigar in his mouth, and dropping the words out between the
puffs. "Now, my men, we have begun a long voyage. If we get
along well together, we shall have a comfortable time; if we

don't, we shall have hell afloat.—All you've got to do is to obey
your orders and do your duty like men,—then you'll fare well
enough;—if you don't, you'll fare hard enough,—I can tell you.
If we pull together, you'll find me a clever fellow; if we don't,
you'll find me a bloody rascal.—That's all I've got to say.—
Go below, the larboard watch!" I being in the starboard or
second mate's watch, had the opportunity of keeping the first
watch at sea. S——, a young man, making, like myself, his first
voyage, was in the same watch, and as he was the son of a
professional man, and had been in a counting-room in Boston,

we found that we had many friends and topics in common. We
talked these matters over,—Boston, what our friends were
probably doing, our voyage, etc., until he went to take his turn
at the look-out, and left me to myself. I had now a fine time for
reflection. I felt for the first time the perfect silence of the
sea. The officer was walking the quarter deck, where I had no
right to go, one or two men were talking on the forecastle,
whom I had little inclination to join, so that I was left open
to the full impression of everything about me. However much
I was affected by the beauty of the sea, the bright stars,

and the clouds driven swiftly over them, I could not but remember
that I was separating myself from all the social and intellectual
enjoyments of life. Yet, strange as it may seem, I did then and
afterwards take pleasure in these reflections, hoping by them
to prevent my becoming insensible to the value of what I was
leaving. But all my dreams were soon put to flight by an order
from the officer to trim the yards, as the wind was getting
ahead; and I could plainly see by the looks the sailors occasionally
cast to windward, and by the dark clouds that were fast coming
up, that we had bad weather to prepare for, and had heard the

captain say that he expected to be in the Gulf Stream by
twelve o'clock. In a few minutes eight bells were struck, the
watch called, and we went below. I now began to feel the first
discomforts of a sailor's life. The steerage in which I lived was
filled with coils of rigging, spare sails, old junk and ship stores,
which had not been stowed away. Moreover, there had been no
berths built for us to sleep in, and we were not allowed to drive
nails to hang our clothes upon. The sea, too, had risen, the vessel
was rolling heavily, and everything was pitched about in grand confusion.
There was a complete "hurrah's nest," as the sailors say, "everything

on top and nothing at hand." A large hawser had been coiled away
upon my chest; my hats, boots, mattress and blankets had all
fetched away and gone over to leeward, and were jammed and
broken under the boxes and coils of rigging. To crown all, we
were allowed no light to find anything with, and I was just beginning
to feel strong symptoms of sea-sickness, and that listlessness and
inactivity which accompany it. Giving up all attempts to collect my
things together, I lay down upon the sails, expecting every moment
to hear the cry of "all hands, ahoy," which the approaching storm
would soon make necessary. I shortly heard the rain-drops falling

on deck, thick and fast, and the watch evidently had their hands
full of work, for I could hear the loud and repeated orders of the
mate, the trampling of feet, the creaking of blocks, and all the
accompaniments of a coming storm. In a few minutes the slide of
the hatch was thrown back, which let down the noise and tumult
of the deck still louder, the loud cry of "All hands, ahoy! tumble
up here and take in sail," saluted our ears, and the hatch was quickly
shut again. When I got upon deck, a new scene and a new experience
were before me. The little brig was close hauled upon the wind, and
lying over, as it then seemed to me, nearly upon her beam ends. The

heavy head sea was beating against her bows with the noise and force
almost of a sledge-hammer, and flying over the deck, drenching us
completely through. The topsail halyards had been let go, and the
great sails filling out and backing against the masts with a noise like
thunder. The wind was whistling through the rigging, loose ropes
flying about; loud and, to me, unintelligible orders constantly given
and rapidly executed, and the sailors "singing out" at the ropes in
their hoarse and peculiar strains. In addition to all this, I had not
got my "sea legs on," was dreadfully sick, with hardly strength
enough to hold on to anything, and it was "pitch dark." This was my

state when I was ordered aloft, for the first time, to reef topsails.
- - -

More on the Cut-Up Technique:

The Wikipedia article on the cut-up technique can be found here.

And:

What is the Cut-Up Method? by Ken Hollings, BBC Radio
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33254672

Generations of writers, artists and comedians have made new works by mashing together old works.
It can be a beautiful thing, writes Ken Hollings:

I can still recall the strange thrill I felt as a teenager coming across a paperback copy of William
Burroughs's The Soft Machine hidden amongst the comic books and men's magazines in a corner
shop spinner.

This was nothing, however, compared with the excitement of encountering in its pages not a novel
but a vivid literary hallucination, shocking and confrontational in its approach to language. Words
had been edited into weird new juxtapositions - sentences, paragraphs and whole pages cut up into
flickering images.

As an experimental technique, the cut-up method as applied by William Burroughs in his work from
the late 1950s onwards, already had a rich history. In fact, art in the age of mechanical reproduction
would have been unthinkable without it.

The cutting together of pre-existing material into radical juxtapositions closely followed the development
of a mass culture that had been busily recording itself in photography, newsprint, sound and moving
pictures since the start of the 20th Century.

In 1920, Tristan Tzara, one of the Dadaist movement's founders, published a short poem that advised
the reader to cut out the words from a newspaper article and pull them at random from a bag - the
result would make you "a writer of infinite originality and charming sensibility".

Photography and print contributed to the political photomontages of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch,
both of whom were involved in Berlin Dada. The biting satire of their imagery, by turns raw, aggressive
and sophisticated, gave hints of what was to come.

The cutting together of pre-existing material into radical juxtapositions closely followed the development
of a mass culture that had been busily recording itself in photography, newsprint, sound and moving
pictures since the start of the 20th Century.

In 1920, Tristan Tzara, one of the Dadaist movement's founders, published a short poem that advised
the reader to cut out the words from a newspaper article and pull them at random from a bag - the result
would make you "a writer of infinite originality and charming sensibility".

Photography and print contributed to the political photomontages of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch,
both of whom were involved in Berlin Dada. The biting satire of their imagery, by turns raw, aggressive
and sophisticated, gave hints of what was to come.

Cut to: English artist Brion Gysin in his room at the notorious Beat Hotel in Paris cutting picture mounts
atop a pile of old newspapers. Along the axis of each cut, the layers of sliced text formed themselves
into sequences of randomly juxtaposed words whose jumbled meaning had him laughing out loud.

Busily lashing together his breakthrough novel Naked Lunch in the room below, William Burroughs realised
the potential of Gysin's discovery. Applying the cut-up method to his own typescripts, he produced novels
that threw meaning back upon itself, scrambling the habitual organisation of words and images. The cut-up
became a more violent expression of the editing process - a breakthrough that looked forward to the point
at which text, sound and image are no longer separated from each other.

During the 1960s, thanks to the electronic revolution in mass communications, this happened at an
accelerating pace. Burroughs and Gysin, together with an early computer and sound recording expert Ian
Sommerville, experimented with how tape recorders and cameras can recombine words and images.

One outcome was The Third Mind, a collection of essays and collages dealing with the practical applications
of the cut-up to cultural and political change. Another was Cut Ups, an experimental short film made in 1966
by Burroughs and Gysin in collaboration with director Antony Balch who ran a couple of "adults-only" cinemas
in London.

The soundtrack comprises a small selection of recorded phrases, read by Burroughs and Gysin and repeated
in different combinations, while the actual footage has been chopped into a random sequence of actions and
scenes. According to Gysin, one cinema in Oxford Street stopped showing Cut Ups because so many customers
were leaving their belongings behind in their haste to walk out.

Around the same time that Cut Ups opened, Burroughs wrote of hearing a tape of cut-up news broadcasts called
The Drunken Newscaster and "laughing until I fell out of a chair". With a little patience and a lot of practice it was
possible to rearrange the words of a broadcast media item to convey a completely different message from the
one intended.

Editing techniques could involve either splicing magnetic tape with a razor blade or using the pause button on a
machine to create a smooth transition from one word to another, thereby making people say whatever you wanted
them to. "Reagan Speaks for Himself", assembled in the early 1980s by Doug Kahn from interviews given by the
then president of the US, gives the impression of a Hollywood actor struggling with a script.

Easy access to twin cassette decks and home computers in the late 1980s meant that the reworking of words,
sounds and images was open to anyone. Artists such as Vicky Bennett (aka People Like Us) in the UK and
Negativland in the US became adept at altering films, phone-ins and talk shows to offer surprising readings of
media events.

Meanwhile, British satirists Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris helped reorganise how people consumed broadcast
news with groundbreaking shows like On The Hour, which offered biting parodies of current affairs coverage, and
Blue Jam, a nightmare of the small hours seemingly intent upon unravelling the entire fabric of radio culture.

The cut-up's more deliberately comic applications have brought the method to a far wider audience than the earlier,
more random experiments of the literary avant-garde.

At the same time the proliferation of digital platforms has narrowed the divide between the two. The video cut-ups of
artist Lenka Clayton and media satirist Cassetteboy make use of different processes but share the same unsettling effect.

Clayton took every word of George W Bush's 2002 State of the Union address and rearranged them into strict alphabetical
order. Her resultant film, Qaeda, Quality, Question, Quickly, Quickly, Quiet, plays dispassionately with the statistical
frequency of certain terms, such as "America" and "terrorism", in what has become known as Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech.

Meanwhile Cassetteboy has trawled through transcripts of David Cameron's speeches at Conservative party conferences
to transform his speeches into a foul-mouthed gangsta rap. Both films represent remarkable technical achievements
while at the same time reducing our leading politicians to the status of yammering ventriloquist dummies.

Society, from the Dadaists onwards, seems to get the cut-ups it deserves.

END

Future Challenges, Dates and Timing:

        Challenges will be posted slightly before 6am GMT which is 1am in New York City,
        6am in London, 2pm in Manila, 5pm in Sydney, and 7pm in Auckland.

        There will be 2 more challenges. The next (7th) challenge will be posted on Sunday, Jan 28.
        The 8th will post on Wednesday, Jan 31.

    IISZ Team:
            rayheinrich: Head Chief Executive Head ( HCEH )
            lizzie: Senior Executive Vice President for Creativity and Chaos ( VPCC )
            quixilated: Executive Vice President for Narratives and Perplexity ( VPNP )
            vagabond: Executive Vice President for Quonundra and Qwertyness ( VPQQ ) [/size]

[Richard]

when too many crowd into one room
a useful pretext to break off
whether they drink or not

there’s nothing mean or petty about me

I've never done a cut-up poem before, but it is a technique I've always wanted to try. Also, I'm open to suggestions for a title, or does that have to from the excerpt as well?

[vagabond]

i had the strange thought that your poem can be read backwards, line by line i mean.
this would make the last line the title.

am not sure either whether the title has to be from the text. anyway, there´s always point 6 from the guidelines : )

[Todd]

Failed Tinder Profile
or Anyone Can Find a Useful Pretext to Break Off Relations

1) Unattractive young man (for a spastic)

2) Six separate venereal diseases

3) A big nose: specializing in pharmaceuticals

4) Lives in a remodeled shit-strewn vacant lot you can smell for miles

5) Barely able to drive, always blacking out

6) Barely able to accommodate people, but there’s nothing mean or petty about mail order whores—performing unmentionable services trying to fuck me.

7) Neither queer nor available

[Richard]

Todd, number 5 was my favorite until I read number 6

vagabond, I like the backwards idea

[vagabond]

Slate Blue


A love-bird, a vulture
fought over a fish head.
So close in together, crowded, we might as well
flail at each other hysterically,
kiss and make up.

His face congealed.
I can’t have you always blacking out,
a grimly unattractive pregnant woman.
I need Lebensraum -
you´d like a Vaterland.

Her face had sagged, hot sulphuric acid
squeezed through strangulated intestines.
What a sentimental mess,
you can ease out the back door.
She miscarried in the latrine -
a violation of the sanitary code.

Now he could relax like melting paraffin,
cooking it down. He would never show,
he didn’t want to hear about it,
bought drinks and celebrated, stirring
blood with a strange, slate-blue color.

Envious citizens spat ink eradicator
or otherwise mutilated
the brilliant, decadent young novelist.
A love-bird, a vulture.

this is definitely the sickest thing i ve written so far. if it is offensive to anyone it can be erased or put in the sewer
p.p.s made a few edits after posting.. and i guess the only rule i followed closely to was number 6

[rayheinrich]

Richard, Todd, Vagabond: Amazed at how diverse... and solid, and entertaining... six separate venereal diseases :-)
Vagabond: The Queen mentioned being offended that you'd think something
derived from a great work of literature was offensive. (She still loves you.)
(Mine's still a mush of obscene fragments and I still need to get 4 and 5 in...)

And Richard... on that "Title" Question:

The title question, in relation to guideline 2 at least, hinges on if a title is thought
to be part of the "entire piece".

Guideline 2. The entire piece is to be constructed from segments of three
words or longer taken from the Burroughs' Interzone text excerpt below.

But IS a "title" part of the poem/prose or not?
Is your name a part of you or not?
When you look at that red fruit on your table, is "apple" a part of it?

Some references:
"title": the name of a book, composition, or other artistic work.

Old English 'titul', reinforced by Old French 'title', both from Latin 'titulus' ‘inscription,
title’. The word originally denoted a placard or inscription placed on an object,
giving information about it, hence a descriptive heading in a book or other composition.

And then there's:
Guideline 6. If you run into a frustrating problem, you can cheat.
   (But remember: The gods are watching.)

And the fact that the above are "guidelines":

From Wikipedia:
A guideline is a statement by which to determine a course of action. A guideline
aims to streamline particular processes according to a set routine or sound practice.
By definition, following a guideline is never mandatory.
Guidelines are not binding and are not enforced.

I'd say we can do anything we want, just don't ask the Queen.

Any thoughts?

Ray

[nibbed]

Sleepy


Affected by the beauty
of the sea and approaching storm,
for the first time, a full impression:
the wind whistling a new scene,
a new experience, enough to hold on.
Raindrops falling, the bright stars.
Now's a fine time, there's a great deal
to be done; strange as it may seem,
I lay down.

[rayheinrich]

Sleepy


Affected by the beauty
of the sea and approaching storm,
for the first time, a full impression:
the wind whistling a new scene,
a new experience, enough to hold on.
Raindrops falling, the bright stars.
Now's a fine time, there's a great deal
to be done; strange as it may seem,
I lay down.

Beautiful... a fresh sea breeze amidst all this depravity.

[rayheinrich]

          < might as well >
       
        The human body is a
        single, vast building...
       
        And we're trapped between floors
        kicking our little
        heads. We flail at each other
        stirring our blood with  
        the hum of sex.
         
        We kiss and make up;
        then softly plop
        right into the next bed,
        still trying to fuck.
       
                  - - -





      < never show the original >
       
        The vultures had a
        brilliant, decadent, young  
        crew cut, college boy
        gang-fucked by live monkeys.
       
        His front teeth had been
        cultured pearls. He had a
        bale of Levis with built-in
        kurus drawn on
        a long face of slate-blue color
        and a self-righteous
        process of cutting up  
        falsie baskets made
        by a shipload of
        bestial American sailors in Brooklyn.
       
        Since the year before he had been
        in some unspecified position in
        an anonymous bank in South America;
        a practitioner of Technological Medicine
        specializing in pharmaceuticals with
        a side line of six separate venereal diseases.
       
        He had smelled out this good
        condom market during
        an epic saga of unsuccessful enterprises
        and reverses in business
        and was finally arrested for the violation of
        a whale in the South Atlantic quarantined by
        the German Board of Health in Tierra del Fuego.
       
        On one occasion he
        got out and sat on the
        back of vultures fighting over fish
        and said “No one has found
        the tall, thin Norwegian with
        a patch over one eye."
       
        ( He had eaten out the eye when he failed at raising frogs.)
         
        The Norwegian
        was found
        in a foot locker,
        goofed and sewed,
        in a Panama City park.
       
                    - - -

[dukealien]

Godown: Mergers & Acquisitions


Commerce shakes the rooms, a single
vast building.
Since the rooms are mostly, well,
American style,
they specialize in pharmaceuticals,
photocopies of
the casinos of Europe, and
oil-burning junk.
Vultures fight over a bale
of Levis; might as well
relax in the red-light district
of unsuccessful enterprises.

Don't mind admitting, this challenge was particularly, well, challenging.

[CRNDLSM]

In Cairo and
in South America,
in the casinos 
in the states,
in the cafes 
in the street,
in an elevator,
in the latrine,
in the red-light
in the zone,
in a footlocker,
in his ass,
in together crowded,

in a coffin.

[Keith]

Imports Unlimited

My Unlucky was a tall faced
live monkey surgeon,
congealed with permanent
clap in his ass.
Given a pair of tin snips
and some stolen penicillin,
he could get you by
with just one kindney.

We shook hands with a spastic
shipping agent,
while the self-righteous English
plunged stowaways into a foot locker
until someone washed up a dead baby
and my two partners fell into
hot sulphuric acid.

Flushed with my success
I squeezed a blackened coin
out of my fly,
onto a good looking, crew cut
college boy, neither queer
nor available.
and bedded him in a latrine,
with strangulated intestines.

They all pretend to fuck me,
but the check is always
made out in my name.

[RiverNotch]

An Ode to Aracknid,


The only native in the Interzone
who is not affectation or perversity,
but a useful pretext to break off relations with...

What's the commission?... The commission...
The Commission: anyone he doesn't want to see,
the only native in the Interzone.

A hum of Sex and Commerce shakes the Zone:
denounce each other in the embassy!
A useful pretext to break off relations with

six venereal diseases. On one occasion,
a bloody, dead baby in the street,
the only native in the Interzone,

retired from some unspecified position
flushed with success, with strangulated intestines,
with a useful pretext to break off all relations.

The police questioned Aracknid. "Blacking out in the Zone,
a violation of the Sanitary
Code. The only native in the Interzone?
What a useful pretext to break off all relations...

---

Sleepy


Affected by the beauty
of the sea and approaching storm,
for the first time, a full impression:
the wind whistling a new scene,
a new experience, enough to hold on.
Raindrops falling, the bright stars.
Now's a fine time, there's a great deal
to be done; strange as it may seem,
I lay down.

That reads like my impression of a translation of some mystical medieval poem from the Middle East. Absolutely stunning.