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?

Allen's Text 79

©2006 – Allen Sutterfield

Thoughts of actually beginning a novel - Reader, I’ll call it. An autobiographical fantasy (and learn how to type while you are at it.). If only I could. Write, that is. I can’t even write a letter, how can I write a novel? Here I am writing on the back of pages written months ago, and what is on the other side” Bunch of quotes from a novel! That’s me all over, Readetr. As close as I8ll ever get perhaps ( that’s I’ll, not I8ll ), goddamn but the energies are fierce this present.

A mouth tomorrow
devouring you
cause I don’t see you

I’d always goof it, like that, love poem getting in the way, instead of the really straight book, maybe a story even, I want to write, and then I’d double the jeopardy by saying I didn’t have any choice in the matter, which you are never supposed to say, especially if its true. But I can’t fool me that easily anymore and so I can only say I admire the stick to it craftsman national anthem of Completed Projects and disciplined honing of crude wood never lost sight of, else you can’t hone at all. So it’s an anti-writing writing I’d be for but unable to do, since I’m only a reader and not the writer I often fancy myself to be, too lazy for the real work of guiding words, I’ll just have to own up at all beginnings, no, no, just the one, that it can’t be done, what I’d like to do.

And is one never to be in charge of himself again? Or for the first time? Who can live forever between the lines? Where is there a body to steady the inconstant moon? Words flow so easy some hours, and tables rock with the weight of all that typing. But they go nowhere. Come from, go to. Go to, Go to. If you remember it’ll go down in pharaoh’s land, where some of it began. Chronicles in an old title. Someone drops a carnival of picks, running woman to his talk, he talks smoothly. How can I do it? Write the book I mean? Drift. Drift. Away from and towards the dooby self. “Don’t gild the lily!”

Words I read but it sounds like I heard them, I who never really heard anything beyond the usual things you are supposed to hear, in reading you don’t hear much, it’s a deafening exercise, impossible to talk to anyone while he’s reading ( or she’s too ) and if the reader’s always reading? There you are, or rather, there I am. Reader. What a fate. And discovered too early, rather than too late, for if I’d discovered it later, sing “ When I’m 64”, then it would have been too late to worry about it, if you wake late enough in the dream it doesn’t matter …as much. You’d still like to know how it would have worked our that way, but a good long rest is a positive pleasure, enough to make it alright that you have to get up afterall just when you thought you’d settled in for good. So you wake up at 64 or 76 or 89 or way up there at the century mark itself and you say, I’ll be damned! I’ve been asleep my whole life! But what a dream! Hmmmnn. No chance of getting back into it now, though. Rude awakening? No, no, it was gentle enough, now that it’s over and I’m up on my feet scratching my balls in the early morning sun since it seems I didn’t sleep with any clothes on, thank god. I would have wanted it that way, raw I mean, in the good old naked sense of the word. A hundred years old! Might as well have been a day, now I’m awake. But I am only 38, not even that, it’s my 38th summer, or should I say it was my 38th when I awoke? It’s such an awkward age, to wake up as I mean, because you are not yet old, old enough to have had the good bad long dream, and you are not young enough for it to be only one more beginning, the way it used to be, in the dream. No, you might have known it, you’re just 38 years, or not even that, and there’s nothing can be done about it, you’re up out of bed, there’s the curtainless window, one of three in your room, a bay jutting out into every day, the old cock stands up, rising to the sun’s occasion. though it shrinks down quickly enough once you hit the john. and there you go, your whole life has been reading! Read Your life Away! And all you can do is take a leak when you wake up at the fact.

Is love a project?
Is it even a question?
Is the world itself still possible?
What did happen to it anyway?

Or are these glass splinters all over my crushed body evidence of some beginning fall through a skylight?
...round smug hips in her fading jeans I still get a stir per sterns but alas, no assifaction. Joyce was the name of a cousin before I learned to read.
The reader is always in a dream, he reads his own life as he reads books and he never really knows if what he’s doing any moment is not merely something he’s reading sitting or lying somewhere in a book. For reading is the civilized cunt from which the modern sensibility—isolated in at least one case, gentle reader—keeps trying to be born, or extract itself in some other fashion. Though in words the reader tells himself it’s to get himself into a cunt I am trying for. in stopping reading. The other half is, turn it into (return it to) experience.

…blue as robin’s egg, the turning mind
in and out of world, and words…
Afterall promotion is the linch pin and Ed’s Big Machine, and there are a few handfuls of words to stuff down glib craws always yerking for grainy tidbits. Caricature act. Then there’s always a love story to read as well.
I don’t know.
It all seems possible, this minute, may stay so long as I stay here in the New Harmony Bar but my beer’s been drunk and it be time to pay pee and mosey, ‘scuse me.

“Where you comin’ off from?”
“Just south of nubbin’, little lady, if you must know. And yourself?”


Sex in April gales of snow and chill.
Against a tree in the park, in the dark.

The Stinging of Bees

Eros, the primeval son of Chaos hadn’t notice the Bee sleeping among his favorite roses, distracted by the appearance of a graceful nymph, her skin soft and scented as the roses’ velvet petals.

It was not the thorn of the rose but the sting of the awakened Bee that struck his little finger as he reached to brush the magic of a nascent flower.

Lamenting loudly he ran, then flew above the rose bushes howling at the heavens, crying for his beloved adoptive mother, Aphrodite:

" Mother, I’m undone, I’m undone and soon shall perish… It was a snake that savaged me, a little tiny snake with wings, the beast the farmers call a Bee…"

He hollered and sobbed until unmoved the love-godess answered: “If the sting of the Bee hurts you so much, Eros, think you not of the pain suffered by those stung by the arrows of your bow?

Adapted from: The Anakreontea

Allen's Text 42

©Allen Sutterfield

A man carries many lives within him. They are of necessity limited, however encompassing any given one might be, because each is a separate burning light, the man himself being not merely these lights but the darkness that contains them.

Birth of the Butterflies

A Dreamtime Myth

When the world was new, all the animals and birds had one common language and there was no death. One day a young cockatoo fell from a tree and broke its neck. All the animals and birds gathered around but failed to awaken the creature they thought was sleeping.

There was a meeting; the wise-ones speculated and then decided the spirits had taken back the cockatoo to be changed into a different form. Everyone accepted this as a reasonable explanation, but to prove the theory the leaders asked for volunteers to imitate the dead cockatoo by going up to sky for a whole winter.

During that time they would not be allowed to see, hear, smell or taste anything, in the spring they would return to relate their experience to the others. The caterpillars offered to try the experiment and went up in the sky in a huge cloud.

The winter passed and on the first day of spring a pair of excited dragonflies announced to the assembled animals and birds that the caterpillars were returning with new bodies. Soon more dragonflies arrived leading back into camp myriads of white, yellow, red, blue and green creatures --- the first butterflies; proof that the spirits had changed the caterpillar’s bodies into another form.

The butterflies clustered on the trees and bushes, everything looked so happy and colourful that the wise-ones decreed it must always be so, and so the caterpillars spend winter in cocoons preparing to change into beautiful butterfliesat at the first sign of spring.

A Martyrdom

©2006 – Allen Sutterfield

And given over to the guards She went silently, the dark Hood dull in gleam of axe Stood still with eyes only:

Wood planks reflected steps Towards a doom, resounded As in a hollow room her quietness, Paler than moon her face

Took the gazes unsmiling And aloof: the sun watched, Played on the sparkling blade: People watched suddenly afraid:

One clean swish through air Tight with unbreathing and wish Of high men severed the sun In clotted fact: dead: done.

Allen's Text 64 - Part 1

©2006 – Allen Sutterfield

On the plain, bare, ugly brown covers of the Journal Volumes Winter had left him, Arthur had pasted various colored pages, each the exact size of the cover. The first of these was a Tibetan mandala from a tantric book he had long ago cut up.

Two bodhisattvas, one in either upper corner, extended benevolent hands, one left, one right, downwards towards the immense circular mandala that, Arthur guessed, was the world itself. The mandala was composed of five circles, each varie-colored; in the centre of all the circles was a square, inside of which were rectangles, inside of which were triangles. At the very center was another series of circles, three of them, inside the third of which was the nine-petalled lotus, the ninth petal itself being the exact center of the whole mandala. There were strange little umbrella-shaped objects, both surrounding and inside the inner circles, and one of these was at he centre of the ninth petal. He had no idea what they symbolized, they looked alternately like soft brushes and ceiling lamps. There were ten outside the square containing the inner three circles; there were five inside the square, four at the cardinal points, the fifth, top downward, in the center circle.

The picture’ bright colors were faded, scuffed by years of wear and tear, so that Brother Antonius could get only an imperfect impression of the original beauty. But as with all things once truly beautiful, enough of the original force remained to powerfully set off this journal among all the volumes. He had paused a long time before even opening it, the cover gave him pause, and seemed to open up a new dimension in this whole peculiar fixation Brother Antonius found himself unable to escape. The papers that had fallen to him literally from the sky, the two lives involved so erratically yet relentlessly, the strange power of what he assumed to be unpublished writings, which had given him such unexpected pleasure and pain, and which were eventually to led him far away from his desert retreat, came to represent, in spite of himself, a whole “other world” he seemed to have known but could not in any way consciously account for. Of course reincarnation immediately suggested itself as a possible explanation, but initially he dismissed this possibility as unacceptable, it was either romantic fantasy or the limits of ordinary logic.

Allen's Text 64 - part 2

copyright2006 - Allen Sutterfield

In twenty years he had read through the whole lot innumerable times, some parts perhaps a thousand tomes. Yet, when he finally gave all of them over to Alfred and Marcia, he knew then as one work, despite their randomness, their beguiling impenetrabilities. His brilliant memory gave him exact recall of the myriad incidents recorded there, and he could quote whole passages of words qua words. He was however unable to finally determine which of the two incidents or words—was the primary focus of the jumbled mass.

“The only way I could possibly do it, is to have ALL the pages, notebooks, journals, scrapbooks out and visible at one time, in one big room—Scrooge in his money bins—and even then, to have several years, or say an INDEFINITE TIME PERIOD available, and other needs (if not WANTS) taken care of who knows how, leaving me full time for concentration: then, with that only as my life, my work could be written. It will never happen. It could only happen in a novel, a bad novel at that, and sothat work will not, con not be written. Even if “LIFE” provided all the externals, ”LIFE” can do nothing about the internal quirks and quarks. But simply because it cannot be written by me does not mean it does not exist. Great books always happen like this, they are impossible for decades, for scores of years, dreamed of and began and abandoned by writer after writer—then suddenly, someone LIVES THE DREAM BY WRITING IT and the work of genius appears, with no one the wiser as to how such works “come into existence."

For the true artist, the genius, does, in himself, satisfy exactly the conditions I ask for above, fatedly as it were, to the extremities of asylum, deformities, cork-lined rooms, blindness and the overdeveloped ear: not from posturing or petty defiance but because the work requires it, since the work is what is being lived, and not the life of the artist. Others live that. You, me, others. In my case I am close enough to it to it SOME MOMENTS. That is how I know. But I do not live it enough, and so I am taunted and haunted by the existence of the Work, shy of its fulfillment. Yes the Work has taken leave of me, its possible fulfillment through me THIS LIFE has been abandoned, and the Work can do this, for it has eternity, not time, on its side. I m left to be the butt of its great laughter.”

There appeared to be mountains below the mandala but stiched with white flowers, as though their lines were in fact seams in the visible world. Another time they looked like the roof lines of mountain temples, but in either case they were stitches. the three “items” in the center, directly beneath the mandala, Arthur never did decifer. The mandala itself, on this background, was framed, first in flowered darkwood, then in scrolled in goldenwood. Beyond this was the narrow border of the journal cover itself, in appropriate dark flowered brown, with a final red edge—the spine. The edges had been worn away all round, giving a certain quality as the final effect.

On the inside cover, in Winter’s hand: “Address for this volume: P.K. 180, Gaziantep, Turkey.”