Allen's "The Bookburner"

( Text 172)

The Bookburner: "I'll tell you a secret: that book is no longer here. I burned it."
"But you loved it!"
'”I burn one each month."
"Is it always the one you love most?"
"No, not always."
"Why though? Why? It was beautiful--"
"I burned it carefully ...page by page."
"Did it hurt?"
"Not while it was burning."
"Does it now?"
"That book is a beautiful memory, it's a part of everything I do now. To burn a book was hard, the first time, I cried, and I didn't even like the book, in fact disliked it. The second time I chose one I did like, not one of my favorites of course. It hurt. But gradually, after that, book by book, I did it more simply, ritually. Without thinking or feeling very much. Then: I burned the beautiful book. Only yesterday. We merged bloods in the burn­ing, 'fires of purification' if you wanta get gooey about it. Whoops--loss of voice there, come back. So. Yes. I burn books. But no one else knows. My brother preferred live things and burned ants in the sun, with a magnifying glass, large, large in my keeping...."

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

Allen's Text 3899

means is a a pocket of past
even this is cheating
but to sit down and
COMPOSE
your real, that’s something
think about it if you can

you are a little hunk
hung in a dark web
where certain lines intersect
one of your functions
(is that the unpoetic word?)
to do this, sit down and compose
your real

like a cat on piano keys
romping giant floors of dark

here you sit
while the comets whiz
not far away

jostling the web’s great lines
as the millennia go like seconds
my age come upon me like the hooves of long ago
pounding on a door someone had locked

so the sparkling electron
one could say this moment was
takes the page/with the wording
and it’s going on that does it/when you least suspect

it’s an easy mind
can follow no trail

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

Allen's Text 518

I hear a distant bell and children singing. Below the carpenters handle delicately a mammoth pane of glass, so clear it seems they carry a piece of the Invisible. The radio squawks and gabbles, tuned on an outlandish frequency. In an outer corridor a woman walks down stairs, confusing the walls into a white silence. Magenta and blue plaster, the city on the hillside sits patiently in the rain, rife with a stolidity learned of centuries (the sun will come again). It is the moon's day, incipient and wet. In the small black-bordered room (No. 37-A) at the back of brain I play solitaire with a deck of live cards, faces contorting in mockery, the vain reflections of a thousand mirrors. The skin is rubbery and unreal, the numbers and symbols in black and red profusion weave and cross - now there are thirteen where there were three, now two where once ten. The hour glass, brought from Arabia by camel, pours an endless stream of moments in a golden string. Suddenly an alarm sounds, the cards, are abandoned to their private vices, I rush from the table to the windows - the parade has begun. Slowly in spectacular file the myriads inhabiting the assorted rooms pass by. The day will end in a bloody sunset, despite the heavy promise of the clouds. Always a spectator! Always!

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

Ferryboat and Traveler

A Korean Poem

I am the ferryboat
You are the traveler.

You tread on me with muddy feet,
I embrace you
and cross over the water.
When I embrace you,
Deeps or shallows
or fast shooting rapids,
I can cross over.

When you don’t come I wait from dark to dawn,
in the chill wind, the wet of snow and rain;
Once over the water you go on without a glance back.

No matter, I know that sooner or later you will come,
While I wait for you, day after day I go on growing older.

I am the ferryboat, you the traveler.

©Han Yong-un

Catching a Bug

A Korean Poem
When I catch a bug in the room
All of a sudden
I realize that the bug is myself,
I open the window and
look into the distance.

A bird flies across the blue sky.
It flies to the branch of a tree.
sitting there it begins to sing,


Singing
In which I hear the ancient sound of crying.

When I catch a bug in the room
What do I grasp?
What do I miss?

©2006-Bong Bong

Allen's Text 128

Writing was on wall for Pompeii's citizens

POMPEII, Italy--Our cities may be overrun with graffiti, but they are barely scratch hitters compared with the ruins of Pompeii. The Pompeiian’s were past masters of the small talk that makes walls talk.

Pompeii's light-hearted scrawls, and even the many nasty ones, are now cherished leftovers from 79 A.D., when the Roman resort town died in a volcanic eruption.

Graffiti - literally meaning "scratches" - go far back into history. In Pompeii, they were the town news and gossip, in Latin or Greek, long before the days of newspapers or books.

Love, money and politics were the basic themes, and nobody hid their thoughts. "Salve lucrum" ("Hurrah for profit"), proclaimed a joyful inscription in a trader's house. And a lover wrote on a public wall, with Pompeiian zest: "You have never seen Venus? No need: look on my fair one, she is as exquisite."

There was so much electioneering on any available flat expanse--"Proculus, support Sabinus, and he'll support you"--that a householder worked his own plaintive message onto his whitewashed wall: "Painter, I beg you not to write anything here. If you inscribe a candidate's name, may he fail in the elec­tions."

When angry Pompeiians scrawled, "Let the wrath of Venus fall on any one who does damage here," it had nothing to do with love. That was a warning to passersby who might forget themselves and mistake the street or wall for a lavatory.

Thousands of these markings remain, giving us a keyhole view of Roman life. It almost seems as though any Pompeiian who had a passing thought felt compelled to add it to the groaning walls of houses or alleyways. Cartoonists burlesqued gods and gladiators, and there was no shortage of indecent sketches.

There was so much of this sort of thing that it inspired a favorite Pompeiian couplet found in a number of places: "I wonder, wall, that you do not go smash, who have to bear the weight of all this trash!"

The walls did go smash. Mt. Vesuvius wrote the last message.

--Field News Service --

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

Allen's Text 900

Well, then, the end of something, a station reached, the ticket is no longer valid. Discards litter all emergences, going from the train that carries us so quickly along the psyche’s rails. The green and red winking signals along the tracks are left in the nearer distance behind, beyond lies only an infinite plain, the unmarked countryside of the future, flat and smooth from this isolate platform. Yet already the lattices are being laid, the engines begin their slow mounting hum, over there a ticket agent, issuing the single billet printed for such travel. The swinging lanterns of the brakemen, orange eyes in the death dance of the present, thrust lines of glow, hook, catch, in their blatant rhythm, the moments fall and die like torn stubs, tossed beneath the roaring impatient wheels of l’Express! Boarding, one takes with him only a suitcase of memories, a small bag of alpaca visions, the dust gathered in the corners of 10.000 days and nights, stretching behind like so many pieces of rail, so many abandoned ties. Soon will come the day crew, the firemen, the torch, and the cinders will blow a grey fragmented storm against the sky. But you will not know or notice, always the future travels faster than the past, it is its business to do so. You will not know riding through the interminable honeycomb of days and hours, moments and years, in the amber coach of dream, for all those miles and hours, those forests of minutes, vast tundras of time are so much magic now, standing in the present, a moment unburdened, having finished whatever the something-now and ready to depart.

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

Wintersun in Ozland

There is nothing left but old cars and rock'n roll
because all the best cars have already been built
and all the best songs have already been sang...

Allen,s Text 4896

Sun breaks through I put the pliers on the floor along with the scissors
that’s so they don’t fall off the desk from all the typing
non violent placing is best when possible
the bottle of glue maintains a risk but it moves more slowly however, my little daybook is about to fall.
Coins I leave lying, for even if they strike the floor, the sound isn’t jarring
anyway there’s no guarantee they’ll fall

Pieces of paper float effortlessly, noiselessly, touch down with a distinctive sound, not exactly rustling, not shufflin, it is the sound of all their own, pleasing, it has little or nothing to do with words.

I have noticed it makes no difference / if the paper is blank
though that is not to say words don’t weigh
only that theirs is a different sound
entirely unrelated to the material they’re on
(when the big metal sign fell into the street
it wasn’t “Bijou” that sounded)

The streetcars are still horses in my window
they come so quickly this time of day
they don’t stop long
the doors open, people get on and off, usually anyway
sometimes not
even that is not predictable
that is its power, one of its powers, the scene
always changing and full of movement
noisy but one really hears the silence when it happens
and the sun moves in and out crossing the sky my windows face
the sun now shining

Carousel...

©2006-Richard Carlton

This is a lonely life, no matter how we try to push that fact away, how can we make it better? Only love can show the way.

Its the melody of laughter, the caring smile, the wit in some sweet stranger ‘s eyes that brings a glow into our days.

Yet in our secret hearts we know we’re all together all alone, and the comforts that we give each other, a touch, a hug sometimes a gift, a knowing glance that shows we understand, is the best there is…

Yes, it is the golden flame of friendship’s heart that lights the darkest dark, the harmony of friendship’s grace, friendship’s hands, a friendly face…

As the carousel of life goes round and round, the painted hours gleam and dance, the moments pass on music’s wings, the moment’s chance!

In our hearts true love sings with honest thanks, yes the jeweled hours flash away, and we may miss lost magic in forgotten hands… yesterday is far away!

The gleaming waves… the Sunhot sand… the perfume of the one you love… a laughing smile, that haunting kiss…

The fancies of the random breeze, a sacred secret ecstasy in Moonlight’s blue… the only real love you knew… This is a lonely life. ...

Allen's Text 4900

Uriel Ruddock, Keeper of Lions, walked the beastesses to town and back, a lax leash, the sight of wayfarers on the highway, the delight of those on the low road: they marked the furniture, did the cats, with deliberate ease, ripping to shreds ancient inexpensive sofas, wide-winged chairs, leather DAVENPORTS and scrawling poems in the wood that only future lions could or would read: he was evicted time and again

“NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO HAVE PETS IN THIS BUILDING!’

--the relationship was scarcely that but Uriel knew the ears he must speak into, and so he simply moved in and out, smuggling in in trunks, refrigerators crates and giant sleeping bags the tawny females and one immensely maned roarer of a male, no longer jealous having had his good lot—only to be evicted when discovered, necessitating new charades until someone
IT WOULD NOT BE URIEL
stopped looking, stopped saying, and always he moved back in in graces: he was that sort, even with landlords: here, an old English lady. (Everyone of course knew she kept a secret tiger in the cellar.)

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

Allen's Text 21

There was a man going out to get water. He carried a wooden bucket squeaking an a bale. Who could not have heard? Darkness. Night birds were singing. An opulent star. The faceless moon was close. Where could he possibly have gotten to? There was a certain breeze. The trees shook their green fruit. One, two, thuds upon the earth, and the earth opened. the bucket, too was never found.

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

Eliot in Waste Land

The following is an excerpt from a 1923 magazine or newspaper:

Everyone interested in poetry is talking about The Waste Land, T S Eliot’s long poem published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, after first being printed last year in Mr Eliot’s new magazine, The Criterion.

Many cannot recognize it as poetry. It is a collage of quotations and echoes other writers, Shakespeare, Dante, St. Augustine and the Buddha among them, as well as sexual episodes, jazz-like rhythms, and Cockney vulgarities in a public house at closing time. It calls up a desolate picture of spiritual emptiness and aridity. It has outraged lovers of “Georgian” poetry as much as Joyce and Stravinsky have outraged traditionalists. Sir John Squire calls it “incomprehensible” and F L Lucas damned it as “one of the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry….

Eliot, an American with an English wife, works in a London bank (Lloyds Foreign and Colonial). He dedicates the poem to his fellow-American poet, Ezra Pound, who severely cut it before publication. Despite its difficulty it has become a cult among undergraduates.

Arthur's Text Game

Moef was delighted when Arthur made a game of the Unfinished Book in order to let her become involved in it. Arthur’s personal uneasiness about her reading his writing resolved itself imaginatively in this way. He decided he would let Moef choose any eight texts out of the several thousand that existed, all of which were numbered, Pythagoras was a reigning spirit in Arthur’s private pantheon. He would then ask her, indeed require of her, a written response to each chosen text. Who knew where things might lead beyond that?

Moef thought only a few minutes about the numbers she would choose. Fixed on “8” as she was, it was not very difficult. She chose: 8, 88, 888, 26, 1943, 71, 808, and 4888. that night, searching through his many boxes of texts, Arthur was continually surprised at how uncannily apropos their own circumstances her choices were. He was resolved to offer no commentary on any or the game itself until after she made her responses. Still, unknowingly he had thrust HIMSELF into an entirely new and unexpected relation with his own book, and he felt the chill if the vast spaces he had experienced so vividly during the first years of the Book, in Turkey. Was the “game” only a new immersion in the bracing waters of Created Time?

Bus Stop

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

Is that where I want to stop? One hates bus rides but finds himself just beginning to enjoy this one when suddenly the town chosen as destination arrives and one is faced with getting off HERE, knowing it’s not the place, that this travel cannot end here and that if one knows what is good he will stay put and, hunkering down, try to ride on unnoticed for awhile…

Allen's Text 954

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

I have not known such a cold moon. hung on a patch of cloud, full, white, unwrinkled: all the light of the sky seems drawn into it, and all that is in that light.

I have not known desperate men to ignore all signs natural and beautiful, even in a senseless slaughter: old sailors on wooden decks sighting the moon (such a moon!)--what was in their eyes?

I have not known beautiful women more terrible for their beauty than those condemn to plain things—a compensation, rather, the destruction by the beautiful.

I have not known books to end, nor dreams to end, merely because they were not attained, nor could be: rather, the being is the book and the dream. How can we cross unnecessary boundaries?

I have not known more days than nights deserving; nor minutes than hours: nor moons than suns: oh Christ! I have known the heart to fail forever.

Allen's Text 988

©2006-Allen Sutterfield

There is something inside, something in my breast, tangled among reeds, crying out for release—perhaps a white bird, lifting itself in a fluttering arc across a sea of infinite sorrow. A voice, a voice like a white bird, hovering in my throat, inching at the roots of my brain, aiming itself at the red roof of my mouth, wanting out, away, into…a real world, a real world.

Allen's Text 1803

©Allen Sutterfield

hard part is getting yourself to the point where
there is no stopping
long enough to say something, anything at all will do
in that most literal of ways
you know what I mean
Stranger?
but it’s hard, peeling off the outer layers
just so something inside
can tan awhile
in the light if eye

Allen's Text 80

©2006 – Allen Sutterfield

Chapter two: Some Months Later

The nearest I can say is,
I haven’t really been myself
but it doesn’t sound the same on the page as when I read it off in my head just now, Reader to the end
but I know for sure
(the calendar tells me so)
It’s been all of ten months since leaving off and oh, the reading I’ve done since then ( as you can see, hardly any writing, in fact, none ), the reading, Dear Reader, the reading! I managed to ensconce myself just about as firmly as one can, all things concerned. Or is it considered? No matter. The table at which I work is not a table for dwarfs, nor is it the same table ( I believe it was a desk, if my memory serves this tiny platter ) at which I typed before, this being the after of the famous comparison. You tell me if it looks any better, I’m not at a loss. And please forgive my casual directness, it’s only the familiarity of readers, that we are both readers, indeed we are can you would you deny it? it’s that we are both readers sustains us, I know it’s a curious certainty , and I’m less subtle than a European being primitive, but it’s the only bridge on which we walk, hardly oblivious to the obvious pitfalls.
They darken away on either side. All the faces that rise up in this strangely isolating act, on either side I mean, out there in the airless gulf, not even a river of blood separating us, from them I mean, there is no separating us from each other, sanguine as we persist in the sheer face of ink and industrial marvels. far back as Johannes Gee at least, linked in ink little wonder we feel for each other, the best we can manage, feeling so rare here, on our make believe bridge and groom in uncalculated doom, wedded in the instance forever, passing, missing as we do everything on every side of the bridge. Ah, anyway it’s only a metaphor, don’t let me get you down, not that easily anyway, true, it’s not a very long bridge and yet we never seem to get to the end of it, nor remember when we first stepped on its swinging. Bridges!
What a concern. I was hoping, as I’m sure you were, that there might be something more. Perhaps there is, perhaps we just haven’t come to it yet, and afterall, who am I to be positing we so gamely? Maybe I am wrong, or misinformed simply, to do so, I don’t know, It’s probably just my experience speaking again.

But I Have always felt part of an act, you know? Like the Vaudeville Horse. Some writers wrote and I read, Naturally I was at the ass end, since reading follows writing, however blindly, but then I stumbled one day upon (or it could have been one night, it’s always dark there midway in the Horse ) a disastrous discovery, to wit, that just because I was the ass end of the business didn’t mean I didn’t lead, and actually come first, now and again, this being when I discovered that Mr. Horsehead Writer ( my to what point better half ) had himself been a reader first! I sat down immediately and the complete works collapsed on top of me. First the audience laughed and I just kept sitting there with the head scrambling and tumbling all over me and then the laughter died away and then the awkward silence and then the hooting and yelling and real clamoring, well, I realized finally what a pickle: which end was up?
Obviously my own as a horses ass, pardon, rear, and was I out of a job? However shitty? It seemed so. The Head was no help at all in this mess. Finally I got to my feet, ignoring the Head, let it do what it could, whoever my partner was up there ( for there was no intercourse between us really, though naturally the outside looker could not know that ), and just started running each way for a little space, agog wit the my realization and just taken with the sheerness of it, having discovered who and what I really was at long last, i.e., a reader and that, far from following, I might have even this minute be stomping out the tune by which some other would be surely lead ( the ever ambiguous silent partner ) whether I knew it or not, since I was now moving and thrashing about and, still the Vaudeville Horse, could hear the audience settling down again, and sure as shooting someone else was in the Head, cavorting with me in the maddest of japes, doomed to find out ( if he or she as it just might chance ) that I in the end no longer knew my way about, had no place where I had to be at any given time, no pattern to follow or to lead, and thereby neither did he, could she, would it, have, either: only road open was this clomping bridge to hide our naked ingot . ignorance of what we were about.

Cerro's Love

©2006 - Cerro

Lately I am tripping all over; I am falling in love again!

What kind of love is it… You asked…

Passionate… burning with longing? Pure… gurgling like spring water? Secret… hidden between sheets? Open and free like the flight of birds?

My answer is:

You are tickling and poking with words like a master craftsman using his tools!

What kind of love? I would say… at the moment… pure and gurgling like spring water… with a promise of all the above mentioned to come… in addition to compassionate and unconditional on my part… I lay down all my cards… and I love with all my heart!

Foolish or brave? …I have nothing to loose, why should I be afraid?