Mok Hossfeld Blog Poem

First Entry

Cilantro growing on the sill, the sky blows sweetly into the window.
I hear nothing but crickets and faint honks of television.
I am far from my birthplace and it is a Paradise.
All my memories come crashing on me
So at least I have something to complain about.

But no complaints about Québec.

For instance, there was a shiny metal doll on the footpath between apartment buildings.

The kids leave all sorts of amazing art in chalk covering
the stairs, the walkways, the parking lots –
spaceships, towers,
weird charts with names and acts
in pink, sea green, white and yellow.
They leave little blackmail notes by our door reading:
Put this string at apartment 13 or you will be VERY AFRAID.

No doubt it was a teenager who spray-painted on the street
JE T’AIME KATRINE kisses and hugs MUSTANG,
an icon that survives recent road construction.
There’s a lot of that going on in the neighborhood
including intriguing tags by SEIZE.

I love this Québec.
It is possibly terreotype curse
Tattooed on the necks of would-be Southron escapees.

The law poets are supposed to procure for us
Embossed certificates of Bad and Good.
My case (see Dona Juana) is being appealed.
My self-advertised perversion now something I’m ashamed of.
Who’d a thunk it?

Don’t ever stay on an Indian graveyard
Or just marvel when you discover where you are.
Living in the curse has its blessings

he only place I’ve lived
that, while built on an Indian graveyard,
Seems exempt from the dagu
And it’s hard to scrub them off. Speaking of which,
I often wonder why Los Angeles hasn’t yet surpassed New York
As the cultural capital, at least in popular perception.
Everything’s happening in California, for all the world to see!

But I could never leave the Eastut I could never leave the East
Even in this different country.

The movement that moved was suspiciously sudden.
I moved from Baltimore to Québec!
Fuckin strange, I’d say.
Opportunistic uprooting has been both an economic and ideological
Engine of American Imperialism
-- labor market and mentalité. Scrape me and do I not
Shed my varnish? Poke me and do I not
Get white flight on your ass?

I write this letter to Scotty because he allows me ample opportunity
To write we. I hope I write some lines
That only Scotty could understand.

So we Communists – there were Communists! --
Burned our funny suits and repaired to the garage to plot fashions.
After living your life like Thomas Jefferson
It had been refreshing to live among Africans who could have never been slaves.
I’ve always been marshmallow-marrowed on the subject...
For it’s sad that despite the pageantry
A conveyance to my own country
Was ever lost to me... Oh well!

The Emerald Diarrhea of Canaanism drips down the wall.
That’s better. Well, eunuchs are all right in theory,
even for successful monks, but the dreaming West
will never let them ride...
Ghost cheeks, vain hopes, straw and money...

Somebody was looking for Mok,
whose Master, the Rood, pushed the Devil
off a roof to be impaled on a Hammered Sickle.
Mok went out the entire day but then It grew -- too late!
It was a Leninist pronoun, no doubt about It.
Born and nursed in the mind, clothed like a carcass, It grew.
Mok went a-moralizing to the pampered butchers and out It popped from his head!
From the hole It rose like a vapor.
He sat up then inclined to consent.
His hollow tooth was a moderate burden, like a face.

Apothecary sunshine crawls up the apple tree.
Telepath children ride in the niches of similitudes, combed from the sky.
I hope I do not frighten.
Scaly flowers are the least combustible.
And of water we know there is fabric just as there are virtuous

And sonnets written by non-Italians.
Hardly divine, some songs still attain a higher strain of likeness.
Fear not, I sing of these strange underground techniques
Now brought to light. Ssh! Don’t worry!
Ghosts are afraid of worn little chapbooks packed with Latin.

Now consider this Kracked Kamp, a carrying-on to foreclose
the fine sight of subversion. It’s not so Krazy really
as the camouflage of mourning.
Summer and the part-time staff don’t like it., of course.
Freedom, I used to say, a flat position no one takes seriously.
I shot a rocket up to the sky, it fell down again and I said that was what I wanted.
I mistook cause for consequence, but maybe not vice versa:

Two brilliant red cardinals scoot down a branch
To snuggle against the trunk.
The sky, of course, looking down on the rotten planks of my shack, exhales a sigh
And vomits.

Seven rhetorics, smothered in glass:

1. On a bus in the rainstorm, a teenage girl
Gives up her seat for me, the doddering old man
Spilling his groceries.

2. Ants gather lentil-sized ayatollahs in the parking lot of the 7-11.
Great maples kidnap the Houris from Heaven.
The writer made a very vague gesture in the vicinity of his nose,
His finger then directly pricking
that steaming swamp of the Holy Spirit in whose depths lie the land of the Moors.
God is great and easy to feed!

3. a.) There is no object to morality, complained the Senator.
But I still have to feed her to demote her.

b.) This is our norm, opined the copper
Next to the bronze stroke
Against the orange-tinge
Of the ant’s carapace
Atop the Coke bottle
On the beach.

4. Whose bright middle shakes the bus stop?
Whose strawberry and yogurt visage glitters up the sidewalk?
Whoa, dude! I’m unbuckled and drooling!

5. I went to the Chutes de Montmorency on a field trip with my class of Francisation (Frenchification – what the government of Québec makes happen to all non-francophone immigrants. It’s wonderful, a regression. Field trips!). What ever was the provenance of the Falls or Chute, the bare rock-face just across reminded me that Mammoths used to live here so one ambled by. Almost the size of the cable-car pylon I stood under.

6. The American press still thinks
there are anymore Watergates possible.

7. Sherbrooke being a traditional landing-place for traitorous Americans
No one should be surprised to find a fallen golden-boy, Boo Hoo.

---

Second Entry (08-11/03)

The working class is that class composed of humans who sell their labor, their living time,
For a wage.

The shrouded kaddish-monger touches Holy Water and fizzles.
He is the Marked Man.

a.
The sun winks at an oasis. There’s nothing that can touch it.
The other day on Rue King my soul grew a heavy top.
I turned onto Wellington to buy some comics.
The woman in the store was so beautiful I bought something I had already.
Lighting up outside the store, my soul was raking up the sidewalk to get going.
I hopped up to the Hôtel de Ville, past the cathedral and walked to the library.
They have the most beautiful collection of comics, bandes dessinées.
A beautiful comic from Portugal, on the history of Portugal.
Devilled Eggs for a snack in the afternoon.

b.
So the Colombians (my classmates in francisation) said I should get this
Cheap computer from this Québecois man and I called him and we met and I think
He thought I might be a cop since he was making and selling computers from his basement
And I’m always so fucking paranoid – Is this guy a cop?
What will I have to do for the Colombians?
He thinks I’m a cop.
He’s going to put a virus in my computer.
Why is the only Colombian expression I know : El Tacano, which means cheapskate
(with a tilde over the n but my clavier can’t front it -- Then, one makes a fist with the left hand and slaps the left elbow with the right hand, etc.)?

But as he drives up to our neighborhood in his car
He’s driving too slowly.
Looking for the cop van.
Checking everything out like he’s in Southwest Baltimore.
His wife in the passenger seat is sweating and yes it’s hot
And the air conditioner’s blowing
Her oversprayed hair and I have dark bell curves on my T-shirt and I wave to them
But they don’t speed up to park by my house.
They get even slower

And as we’re taking up the computer I notice him exhale in relief and I wonder what it could be But then I realize it’s that he has finally seen me for what I am,
Someone so completely harmless one can smell my resentment of my condition from my sweat.

Full of my breath, unbearably full of myself.
Shut up!
You are a witness to this good fortune! This open and peaceful land!
These ridiculously friendly people!
You, Mark! You’ve seen this for yourself!

c.
I dipped my hand in the Lac des Nations, looking over to the beaver dam.
Had a conversation with an old man with a face like a ginger root.
Neither one of us understood a damn thing.
Barrelled over a small brick fence looking at a pretty girl.
I would like to be a boat in the next life.
I am very happy about our new kitchen table made of dark cherry.
I am very happy about the painting I made for Rupert – a martini glass.
I am happy to commit tenderness these days.
Ten years have been pulled out of the top of my head.
Cold, cold water and lots of it.
A city with a falls in the middle of it.
The moon framed by high clouds so close to the small mountains.
My neighbors are all friendly and nonshrieking.
The little boy upstairs lowers a narrow string of urine.

SUPPRESSED BALTIMORE SECTION
Jesus! The Jack-in-the-Box day would greet me every morning in Baltimore
And not even that could keep me smart!

SUPPRESSED BALTIMORE SECTION GOES HERE

I lost some lightning since awhile ago.
But in compensation I got the walls knocked down.
No need to duck it, my brains are like kelp.
But the French side, kept in Dr. Phibes’ suspended animation, is waking up quite fine thank you. I don’t know much about the nightlife, but the mid-forties are OK.

I doubt I’ve been here before.
You said I was at Père Lachaise one time a long time ago
And I was, but without the Buddhist premonition.
Listen to the droopy television and hang on for the big surprise.
Too much oxygen and the windows automatically shut.
I poked at the hot olive oil before I threw the meat in.
What kind of yellow-headed ghost have I become?
I remember one rainy day at Edgar Allen Poe’s grave.
Baltimore is the decaying Queen of Bad Faith on rainy days

And therefore makes us wish we’d never become communard mummies.
It is only vile to be a communard mummy under the sign of Baltimore
Because only the most pitiful sap could see Baltimore in the light of the Revolution.
Baltimore is purely Drag Queens and the empty sperm of shoeless criminals.
Each rowhouse is thirty-percent eggcrate.

Let us go back in time and plant what we just found.

That rainy day was a blur of betweened airports.
I think at that time I had perfected being floated along.
I don’t know who was there with me yet I am sure I was there with someone.
I’m holding a beautiful girl’s scarf.
There’s the rose and the bottle per tradition.
Armfuls of syringes glisten in the gutter.
Someone suggests Sip n Bite and I get drooly at soft crab sandwiches.
Smug and insatiable, I presumed upon Poe to be someone to hear me.
You can get there without a car but it’s better to take one.
All the cabbies found eaten by dogs in one of those neighborhoods were old Spanish Loyalists
So, Christ, the rest just got the Hell out.
I have ruled out windmills, Economics, my Plans for a Second Moon,
The Dutch Spring, the terrible condition of Fashion, the fact that I have no real quarrels,
Flaming mercy – yes, it happens, so fast Americans want to throw money at that too.

The meek of the earth still gnaw on carrots and smirk What’s Up Doc?
Communists gnaw their nails, disdaining the carrots.
The meek of the earth hire stenographers while the Communists tie themselves to the mast.
It just means they like to worry.
Communists are atheists so they have to Auto-Prometheanize
But in a simonized kind of way.
They collectively Defy and Punish themselves and the Loyal among them
Give up their souls for Satan!
Woo Hoo!

Hey! You dig my sliding scale?
Sliding scale of random capitalization.
Each episode introduces its own element.
Ever increasing frame, infinite foreclosure.
And yet the flimsiest crepe paper will suffice.
Even less – it’s accounting.

There’s communication and there’s gold.
Morality cannot be individualized, but Ethics must be collectivized.

d.
Just a floating moon over the sculpted clouds.
I’m awful unappalled by the quiet from all seven dimensions.
No hoax this tranquility, no hoax my tear and my smile.
The Universe may be overcrowded or not, but when humans can live together so peaceably
(that means Québec)
I know hope is not just a pious fraud.

I think there are trees that listen and smell and taste.
Maybe that’s why in my dream I was naked but for leafy branches I had woven all about me.
I was promenading down a street in Vicksburg, MS,
Playfully smacking people with my branches,
when two hillbillies pointed rifles in my face.
I wasn’t particularly worried or remorseful so I woke up.

I’ll draw my costume from the dream for you. It’s good to feel able to present.

Parenthesis :
New York is dark and my poor brother is alone in his apartment.
I would be very unhappy.
The images of all the pedestrians taking over the streets is very lovely though.

And I was sent on.

I found a way to introduce gray tones to little drawings I scanned into my machine.
I made the webcam work.
I took naked pictures of myself to email around the world.
I thought better of it.

What are you, they asked, at large on life?
Are you asleep at the feel?
I am all eyes.
It may look funny but I wonder now that science has all but ignored me.
They nightly leaf through tomes on blood, the Freak right in front of their t.v..

But I cannot give my popular poetry of his to the masses.
The Bearded Master’s notebooks have yellowed.
« A rash quip flourished for sheer dare leavens gist. »
Sounds like a palindrom

It is easily separated.

e.
Gently, gently, sordid tales get told to sleeping girls.
Seraphim fetch the tales to Dream and wrap them in oily leaves squeezed out to shed worms. Girls like the dark flush of doppelganger they get as the tales unfold.
Years later the girls find humor under their skins and by the dark laughter are exposed
The intrigues of their organs.
They remember from their dreams that late at night clever plants flee approaching herds,
Their roots moving by deliberate strokes through the incommodius currents of soil,
Gravel and solid stone.
They learn that they are the pin to pop the boundless balloon.
But meanwhile they forget they already know of burning kisses and loins wrung dry.

This is like a wonderful present glued forever shut.
I want to soak my voice in it, paint with it, roll it around in a glass to leer at its legs.
So long I was the cribbed convulsionary, but now I belong to the Jello Lodge.
I lived in Charles Village long enough to know when I’m about to become
A communard mummy lolling crusty and naked in the street.
Jargon, the pearly plunk of a lute, non-alcoholic beer and salmon cakes renounced forever! Officially an apostate, I suppose.
At least that seems to be the gist of the engraving.
After all the Québecois have more socialism in life and culture than I ever thought I’d see.

f.
Why would anyone have done anything
Long before anybody else except as a result of boring temporality?
Why is this rock in the bed of this gorge and not another?
Why did Marx do it and why not someone else?
Poor Marx, his compulsive graphism, his malicious tongue,
His inability to avail himself of his own teachings to make the greater discovery :
That he wrote literature, not science.
Yet the Europeans gave us such godlike failures : Milton, Michelangelo, Marx…
We Americans keep everything except weapons of mass destruction
At a level we mere mortals can live with.
Our big shots are rather obviously narrow in comparison.
But at least we have more fun.
I invite everyone, with pride, to recall that the Ramones have risen
To the American Pantheon and all is right with the world.
I also invite all readers to remember that for many years I had fond feelings
For Communist Parties.

An Apostate Communist Manifesto.

A pleasant afternoon searching for Indian food in our new supermarket.
It is closer on foot than the other ones, but it is farther by bus.
It’s a pretty walk through the apartment blocks.
Every now and again there are little inappropriate outcroppings of rock that should
Beckon sculptors.
But soon we could see the supermarket’s orange roof.
Just across the street from the supermarket is a huge expanse of rolling hill country.
We never think how close we are to the end of civilization because downtown is just over there. The new supermarket is better because whoever’s in charge of produce displays it better.
Garlic, onions, peppers – red, yellow, green – sprouts, carrots,
Frilly lettuces, corn, taters, squashes, spinach and little pale roots I can’t figure out.
No Indian food.

Plus, I have all these big plans for fluency.
In french I mean. Right now I’m in the trench of repetition.
But for later I can only imagine a long, beautiful Moebius drawing.
Such is my ambition
My oblivion.
I doubt it will be the story of a Knight like in those books that clerks had typed in olden times. Stories that older poets had put in rhyme
To read, study and use to train the mind.
But while learning french I can’t speak of such things.
Except to change the government.

I would suggest to what few revolutionary Communist Parties are left
That they should stick to the principle of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
At all costs so you can openly reject it.

See here, Revolutionaries have a duty to be honest.
They should also, openly in their party program,
Give themselves a limited time to accomplish revolutionary transformations
And the shorter the better.
What are the workers gonna think if the Commies can’t give them a schedule?
What they think right now, quite correctly.
They should also be clear about the character of this dictatorship.
All workers, without exception, shall continue to enjoy the democratic rights
They have achieved through struggle plus whatever’s left over.
Only the political, juridical and economic elites of the capitalist system,
Defined by income and control over others,
Will be placed under a regime that can truly be called a dictatorship!
Ha ha! Ha ha!

It was Leninist substitutionism that allowed Stalinism to happen.
If the workers are sovereign, then workers must never again be put under anyone’s yoke.
If a worker decides to become a reactionary, tough shit.
This is the result of the actions of the capitalist
World system on his soul.
If a worker decides to become a revolutionary, good for her.
This is the result of the actions of the world
Capitalist system on her soul.
Both decisions are not decisions.
Neither the reactionary nor the revolutionary is free from base motives.
Neither the reactionary nor the revolutionary is any less a worker.
The working class,
Despite bourgeois and communist propaganda to the contrary,
Has never been a voluntary association.
Reactionary ideology, unlike the poor, will be with us always, like drunkeness.
Communists fight the condition of wage slavery, the world capitalist system,

Not bad attitudes.

But I hear Uncle Joe chiding me – The bourgeoisie, dear comrade,
Will stir up trouble among workers using the democratic rights
They achieved through struggle!
Yes, Uncle Joe, they will.
But the Communist dictatorship will put them under strict supervision,
Including the Communist politicians who must abide the dictatorship.
Everything will proceed according to a set-in-stone plan
That leads to the Communist government’s resignation
And submission to the justice of the next government.
In the meantime,
A definite, democratically accepted time,
The bourgeoisie must be stripped of every last vestige of power,
Be purged from every institution,
Rooted out of the earth they’re destroying.
So I hope the Communists stick to their guns,
Those Communists who still speak with their hands.

By which I mean in sign language.

Perhaps if I rivet a small door to my forehead you can get in and out as you like.

g.
But all you’d find is a cluster of muscles pimped into motion by my invertebrate brain.

The three-pronged Constitution of the Communist Calhoun.

But the porno is too joky for the chaffing crowd.
They’re all out before the crooked shoes creak.
A Dutch busker lies in wait along the sidewalk
Singing orisons implying leg-length ejaculations.
He gets buckets full of tips.
He’ll buy all the shirts I ever slept in.
Naturally, in the years to come,
Spanish Eurocommunists will love his disco.

For it is better to be a Communist with nothing sacred
Than a Communist scared of Uncle Joe.

Uncle Joe has a stave of polyps.
Uncle Joe has a patterned plonk.
Uncle Joe and the flies from vomit
Freely blow where the stink done stonk.

Let Communists coalesce around a core of minimal agreed programs.
Request to Castro : Host a conference of n’importe quoi Communist parties
And collectively search for a minimal agreed program.
Request to Communist parties : Can you survive very long
If you regard everything different as your enemy? Set aside Leninist theological peeves!
Make a long-term plan of organization you can use for maximum expansion of power.
How long will it take,
What kind of organizations must we cultivate,
To make a world socialist government in 100 years?
What kind of temptations to short-term gain must we avoid?
How do we take into account and overcome the effects of institutionalization?
We would be much better off as a part of a world-wide, flourishing, working class party
Than as we stand.
Your particular ideological raft would be floating in a sea of recruits.
If you organize effectively you stand only to gain influence and power.
There’s only a downside if your party is a cult.
But the Cult-Left prefers working with the Right anyway.
How do you write La Dolce Vita anyway?
I thought it would have been fun to be a newspaper man.
He thought it might be fun to be a newspaper man!

h.
I am so grateful to my computer man for my computer
I will honor his excellent work for me by not mentioning his name.
The frame gives a sense of reality to the whole.
Drunkeness ending in a sermon.

The second oak, the corn-starched darkness.
Tricking the clock to tell the last tale.
It’s great matter though dull : deep reading runneth over a gentle heart.
My private law of memoir is that winter be anticipated and forgotten.

i.
We can do that by putting something else first.
We can be actually, not affectedly, democratic.
That Communist Party never showed me the stars were out.
But they are now because I want to show the Party.
I am thick in the head hearing grand piano.
No wonder it always sounds so good.

continued on page 2