Larry Lies

[Hare]

This is fabulous...

I later discovered the husk of a moth

torn in his window,
a letter from the battered night.

[Scrow]

Hello,

It's difficult to reply to your thread, because it's all - well, it's not something you'd expect to commentate upon, as it's something you'd expect to read in a book you've bought. 'The Spokesman' I'm reading and loving the sounds, and I'm still reading the rest of them. I wish I read quickly enough to say something clever and sensible, but I can't, at this level. I'm so sorry. "I like reading these, and they'll last me a while" is probably the best you'll get out of me for a bit.

Sarah

[larryrap]

Holy Moly, Sorella, cookala, Brian, Angela, Matt, Jee, and Geoff! You're lovely and welcome, and I hope the cookies hold out.

[larryrap]

4th – Easter Weekend

As people slept off night's excesses
a blue and white theme was sewn through the city:
flags three weeks short of Independence Day
and cut-out clouds stapled to a running roll of sky.
Such mornings makes misery seems like blindness
as April grows shaggy with daisies and rust,
weeds swivel like pilgrims in chlorophyll bliss,
and a child's pink T-shirt flaps in the face of God.
I swim through air as though fresh from an egg,
imprinted once more on the clackety world.

[larryrap]

5th - The Beam and the Barrel

The baby's been tossed. The street is a trough of horns and hooves, men cursing and colliding, a dead donkey's feet protruding from a pit, a dog running, smoldering cake in its jaw.

A camel skids on manure, two glassmakers crash in a pile. A wall topples in an unusual wind. Two oxen burst free, goring an orphan and a woman with child.

The baby drops past a courtyard window, rotating slowly, mute as a doll. Inside, scholars argue a fine point of law.

The beam nears the barrel. The cake settles on straw. Ten men hide sticks as a stranger walks by.

The courtyard seethes with grievance. They notice the baby. Some call for a mattress, others draw swords. A fight follows.

This goes on all day long.

.........."In the case of one throwing a child from the top of the roof and somebody else meanwhile appearing and catching it on the edge of his sword,
.............there is a difference of opinion between R. Judah b. Bathyra and the Rabbis." – Bava Kamma 26B

[bop]

larry,
I like jaw and manure and law. I don't think just dipping into this thread will be helpful, but fluffitness is better than ignorance.
bop

[prooftheory]

This last one has the noirish feel of a Tom Waits spoken word thing. Very nice.

[larryrap]

Hey bop and proof, it's nice to rub shoulders with you.

[larryrap]

6th – The Detour

In this minor town which success has passed over,
which has survived the intrusion of a half-hearted mall and an upscale medical center,
a place one never seeks but only passes through, headed elsewhere,
which registers on GPS but not on the map of the mind,
nostalgia and longing have taken possession of me
and a litter of lazy demons stirs from sleep
to sneer at my unlived life.
I've often offered to cast them into a poem,
but they settle and say: "Leave us alone, we're legion."

[Dunc]

Larry

Daily News - nobody does it better. You have that power over the look and feel of the problem.

Missing - That's one hell of an elegy. Not least, I lay these words like trinkets at the mouth of a void, / filling nothing with nothing.

Easter Weekend - a rolling anapaestic tet advancing down the poem like a psychodelic wave.

The Detour, the town and the demons that reflect both it and you are effortlessly in symmetry. Very effective.

Your thread's always a treat.

Regards / Dunc

[larryrap]

Thanks Dunc, you're very good at bolstering my confidence.

[larryrap]

7th – Hairless, the Musical

It's about cutting one's hair in contempt,
a cell of regressives thwarted by the eco-police
before they poison the children.
The audience response is heartening, but wait:
the theater is inside a camp. All attend
by strict orders. "Science! Tolerance!
Unity!" they chant; fine footage
and vital to the cause, not for its truth,
but to protect the people's conscience
as we take it upon ourselves to serve
the accurate quota of firmness and mercy
so difficult, always, to explain.

.........I asked, "Well what is going to happen to those people we can't reeducate, that are diehard capitalists?" And the reply was that they'd have to be eliminated.
..........And when I pursued this further, they estimated they would have to eliminate 25 million people in these reeducation centers.
..........And when I say "eliminate," I mean "kill."
....................Larry Grathwohl - No Place to Hide: The Strategy and Tactics of Terrorism

[PClem]

Always nice to encounter your finely tuned cynic's voice. The Spokesman, I think, captures the desperation, confusion and cowardice inherent in the crumbling of an empire.
The Beam and the Barrel - love the scripture behind it and the grim realism - that baby, the scholars arguing a point of law, the dead donkey, all of it.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

6th – The Detour

In this minor town which success has passed over,
which has survived the intrusion of a half-hearted mall and an upscale medical center,
a place one never seeks but only passes through, headed elsewhere,
which registers on GPS but not on the map of the mind,
nostalgia and longing have taken possession of me
and a litter of lazy demons stirs from sleep
to sneer at my unlived life.
I've often offered to cast them into a poem,
but they settle and say: "Leave us alone, we're legion."

You seem to be on a masterful roll this year. What I read earlier was superb and you have continued the quality with the later piEces that I have read. I love "map of the mind" and much more--the whole conceit is powerful, right up to the conclusion with "leave us alone, we're legion".

I will have to stop again to read more, as I have time constraints and bad connections which prevent me from doing so now.

BrianIs AtYou

[cookala]

heya Larryette!
Easter Weekend - I like the theme of rebirth in this. running roll of sky and weeds swivel like pilgrims in chlorophyll bliss are awesome sauce. good sounds, diction and imagery. me likes!
Beam and Barrel - I like the madness and mayhem of this, chaos put to order in the telling (or rather, showing) you've a gift for describing dominoes and inter-connection of events.
Detour - yes. exactly. I feel this way from time to time myself, more so now since the cancer. so many things I want to, so many places to see, and so little time now to accomplish that. legion. exactly.