This afternoon I'd like to publish Joseph Milford's selections from his epic Tattered Scrolls and Postulates, the first volume of which is composed of 100 ten-lined prose poems. He is currently working on the second volume of this epic. As he explained to me: "[b]asically, I intend to use it as a vessel for narrative and experimentation for many years while I write other projects and prose. It is based upon a man, initially, who was going through a divorce but was suddenly, or possibly, abducted by some alien force and returned to his reality with visions and a an all-encompassing knowledge of Southern folklore, history, science, alchemy, spirituality, philosophy, astronomy, and so on. The book deals with the tensions of knowledge and power and knowledge and helplessness in an attempt to pursue ultimate wisdom through internal and external exploration." Below are three of Joseph's prose poems.
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| Photograph of Melora Creager by Simon Law |
24.
i
found a cello of you in a cave and played as hard as i could and died and then
you anteloped.
you
made pottery when the empire burned. you burned fiddles under the cairn for the
kiln.
i
was swallowed whole by a whale-wasp. i asked if it was a god or goddess. it
fucking laughed.
i
had so many paths attached to me--like i was a broken sewing machine clogged
with thread.
she
walks by with a strategic strand of her hair dyed like a DNA braggard. she
evolves upfront.
i
killed all of my heroes. we were all Odysseus. listening to the same old
gorgeous roaring oars.
no
machines allowed. no humans. no
seltzers. we coiled into new furs. we ignored all the stars.
being
torn sideways is nicer than being torn wideways. they recover violence. a great
pear grows.
most
of us quit hoping. we ate value meals. a pegasus flew from a super-sized meal
and ate gods.
you
pickle things. we all do. put the vagina in a jar with salt. a way of aborting
fruits for men. eat.
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25.
how
many times will a judge snort his Scotch while a young hot woman knows his weak
wife?
overheard
a student say she could "suck a quarter out of a traffic meter";
walked back to office.
in
the belly of the elephant was the birdcage in the cage was the fear of raptors and
rodents.
a
mite crawling along the spine of a feather would taste cat's blood later on
whiskers of a dog.
SUV
hemoglobin pumping assholes into urban organs cellphone calls in ballet around
skylines.
mode
on node off to annotate otherwise certification for the Promethean holograph
mech-tech.
rain-splattered
gazebo in parking lot students negotiate pot tempting K-9's and camera mounts.
falling
through flipcharts into pixels down through molecules and bubbles the guts of
crystals.
I
had majic orca eyeball for oracle but dropped it in fryvat it sizzled
prophecies in terrible rasps.
a
green-spotted horned slug covered in slime glistening crawled over the opaque
slug of lead.
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| Photo by MrTinDC |
26.
collapsing
corrugations and jumping from vaporizing peaks they disentegrate into
pulverizilles.
i
had enough grease in my hair to get out of the ligatures and crawl to the canoe
to tail you.
i
once sprayed some lizards at my uncle's house in Florida with bugspray to watch
them die.
dropped
from high altitudes into deep waters to be spit from geysers and ride on the
zephyrs.
interested
as he was in secret pentagrams and circles he was easily and discreetly
disposed of.
secret
doors were under his tongue where languages lurked like virgins upon sacred
grounds.
wild
boar are not to be tampered with for death lurks here in Arcadia and the babe
has a fever.
waiting
for you is leaf in the drying cement during your parents' divorce it changes
everything.
we
wallow in this material instead of creating places for heavenly wallowings. of
sleaze i sing.
a
fearless core. we just want to be core. we are more like zucchini blossoms. we
become fruitious.
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Joseph Milford is an English Professor in Georgia and his first collection of poems, CRACKED ALTIMETER, was published by BlazeVox in 2010. He is also the editor of Rasputin: A Poetry Thread and the co-founder of BACKLASH PRESS. He has published 100's of poems in a myriad of journals and hosted The Joe Milford Poetry Show, a radio podcast, where he archived over 300 interviews, between 2006-and 2013, of Canadian and American poets.
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My husband is in the front room, working and playing Ornette Coleman's The Shape of Jazz to Come, so I'll post a couple of selections from that CD.
First is "Focus on Sanity": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxUXu8GmUC8
This is "Peace": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJULMOw69EI
I have to play some Rasputina as well.
This is "The Olde HeadBoard" complete with cellos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVsF2whuzIM
Here is "1816, The Year Without a Summer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxeXHMHOcqQ
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