Mok Hossfeld Blog Poem

Sonnets for Harold

1.
My whiskers smell like an entire pantry,
But then again, I did open my mouth.
It would be very patrician of me
To let out smoke, draw in a preamble
Of thin air, unharness the verbal beast,
Drench my stale dreams in a whisky-fart South,
Belch out hopes that I become, post-mortem,
A ghost that nightly sucks at maidens’ breasts.
But I can’t pretend to be patrician.
I can’t fake the style Southern Resplendent.
I never put on (til now) a diction
Like blunt trees that dot a hilltop.
The one way out of this casteless present :
Gnaw at my roots and cough up a fiction.

2.
To fail fat-cheeked in place sure is homely.
Now that it’s done, write a hammy récit
All about the seven stages of blame,
The fleshiest allegory ever spilt
By pen or ink or mouthfuls of black bile.
A night there was, dark as an underarm.
A sniff from the seagrass : our soggy hero!
More antler than individual, he
Kept pointing himself out, scraping the brine
From his clotted crotch til he had unwrapped
The twine of his lineage, corkscrew hoops
Dangling confounded in the ocean night.
Somehow is many as the hero slid
Over sharp sand to the bog-side of dawn.

3.
A shining ant laps at my spilled ice cream.
It’s time for shame. I light a match. Revenge.
The ant, legs stuck, is visibly unmoved.
A lack of attention, a lack of flow
And a shake of the spent, blackened matchstick
Engrave the moment of nonconsummate
Fuckall on the vellum of wasted days.
I was brighter than a summer sidewalk,
Truer than the dull thunder of distant
Highways, colder than the first coin stolen
In America. The main proposal
And the fact that it rather interests me
Shows the irritation I have in it.
Emperor of Nowhere. Nothing. Exiled.

4.
No captive is freed, no bondage unlocked,
No basket in the bullrushes and you
Left. You crawled inside some miraculous
Cow, now grazing on the grazed inside.
None of us is responsible enough
To take your example and make the lurch
Of overdue course correction. The weave
Of our craft is too porous. We too spin
And sink. The cattails, the lukewarm currents
And the universal need to be hidden
From the panther keep us just as far from
Right, just as far from issuing warrants,
From chiseling out umpteen commandments.
We too seek the anus that will have us.

5.
Hundreds of notebooks filled with promises
Litter six continents of closets.
A rough, scaly throat croaks for truth-telling
But never about specific questions.
My flanks carpet-burned and hemorrhoided,
I thrust my tongue through a toothy sentence
Only to rashly scrape the veined butter
Off connotation. Mechanisms pare
Absences. There will be Extreme Manners.
But first put this big apparatus on.
On the basis of small component parts
Cities self-solder the Erector-set Age.
Rusty thicket of metals where ends are
To be spliced to millions of beginnings.

---

THIRD ENTRY November 2003 – February 2004

Assuming I’m not used or insulted,
I’ll never escape the fullest meaning.

A.

Doesn’t this break the rule? To take in hand
A planed surface only to distress it…
Why do bad poets love economics?
Empty of ideas and apprehended
Only in my festering book of Pound.
I mean it : my Cantos is swarming
And churning with gnawing nits and bibits.

Silence, exile and punning.

Not hungry, I’ll just have a glass of milk.
Experience doesn’t make people fat.
We surely do owe the honor of fat
To the sleep with which we stun the gnawing
Perkiness -- and we know that’s not a life.
We get so loopy and our impish skin,
Sometimes shaved, sometimes bursting bloody spew
In all levity, ha ha-ing at us
That we don’t know how to stop lingering
In this frail life.

In the dark times, will there also be curling?

Let’s find a beggar reading my sonnets.
It’s best to wait outside with the reader.
No disrespect to my mother tongue but
To smoke these days means standing in the snow.
Outside, shivering, pushing envelopes
Through frozen cracks. Back home, down South, you slip
Through pine branches before the veranda,
Overhearing the clink of martinis.
Even on frosty nights the crickets chirp.

When at first I took my pen in hand…

They think anything true can be scraped off
A verdant mountain side. How they did beat
The ground with leafy branches, chasing snakes
And swatting beetles! Sip a little bottle,
Wipe the dewy brow and whup the backside
Of this dunghill Nature. Just fuck it up
And that’ll settle its hash. I well know
What will be the end of our pilgrimage.
But I have a lot of ground to cover.

A dream of something.

Every hour what we do to her door
Is at first cold then cutting then my life
Before my worst fears were forged.
Instead, stranger, how could I have possibly
Been so stupid as to snatch that purse
Full of charcoal…

B.


It would be just our luck. There is no one
At the helm and now the steam of the falls
Rises before us. How often have I
Dreamed of this moment, never thinking it
Could come to pass.

Righthand-word idling in front of the sea.
Darkly, in its mind, phraseology
Reminiscent of « scissored ecstasy. »
Other times its shame that curious blood
And womblike murmurs of the ears stand in
For the sea -- waxy, dirty and placky.
It lay down at low tide and was withdrawn.
I gave him the grave much too easily.
I walk in his sleep. The start of engines
Just beyond his neck, his plaid shirt, his beard.
I enlarge the immense looking back and
Lose sight of each fat, unaccounted fold
Of the horizon, of the gray and green,
Belle-lettristic, that-which-you-can’t-swallow.

If I’m not wrong, the knifepoint stars living
Through currents of whistle -- dark neural luck --
Make clean sweeps of Hell. Bellyfuls of blind
Unskirted daughters now summon their breaths.
The thin, plastic, temporary carport
Is studied by plump, moist, green, blinking eyes.
At all costs, we must not slow the machines.
One hundred little pages, three bright nails.
If order is a direction, light splits
At its arrow, marking bodiless work.

Her name set adrift, it was already dreamt of
And bore down upon America. Frogs
Had already partied with it. Ours do.
Talking hens, ants and birds experience
The best shock straining towards death. They fidget
Up until then. Her framed name drew pagan
Brain cell lexical entities forward.
With the leg raised from the ground, the just-laid
Egg rolling like an eye in boiling soup,
Her name considered this bare fairy tale
Nativity. The ox knows its Master.
At what point can a tree follow its peaked
Fluttering leaf and, Jesus, how can it
Refuse?

Introduire un circuit faux dans un ordinateur
Serait de la folie, puisqu’il serait necessairement
Découvert.

The United States is only vast. Each
Millimeter is immortal. I saw,
With carrier-pigeon vision, what trees
Were the hideouts of hawks. I saw haunted
Rooftops where the specters were sunbathing.
I pried open water towers from raw
Necessity. I swallowed the paint chips
From the scrawled name of the town. I dribbled
On the Hardees. The hem of my long coat
Brushed over pine trees but I won’t be late.
Many a parking lot will be dented
But because it’s America at least
A decent cult will spring up around them
And flavored snowcones will be sold to help
Maintain the original crater-site.
The United States is only vast. Wolves,
Thick with ill-gotten winter fat, stagger

In my wake as I cause causes and rate
The Stucky’s dumpsters up I-95.
I mean no murder, it’s just natural
That passing through on weekdays means broken
Traffic patterns. To whom it may concern :
The United States is only vast. All
Collateral damage will be sacred.
I applied to be a branch manager
In the gulag. My size is an asset
In the intimidation department.
I can watch a whole camp just sitting down
Eating a peanut butter and jelly
Sandwich. I notice constellations now.
I killed a small river pissing in it,
Gazing up at Orion, whistling
« Mama Talk To Your Daughter. » My steam skunked
The county much worse than a paper mill.

Long and lovely, there is the alarm clock.
You hear things and start to make the coffee.
You talk to the Italians in your head.
It would have been cool if Giotto had done
Your apartment. So what would the kitchen
Have been like? A sturdy table no doubt,
With a plain white cloth, raw legs underneath.
Hand-fired coffee cups, thick for good holding.
A big, flat butter knife and a round loaf
By a bottle of balsalmic. The oil
Would be in a large ceramic tureen,
Dull green and decorated with orange
Flowers and fatted calves. Bright yellow eyes.
But I don’t want to wrong the Italians.
It’s not like they’re exotic birds or something.
I make an improvised stew with garlic
And whatever meat, vegetables and stock
And marinade the apartment while reading
Félix Leclerc.

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