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Six Sonnets and Some Wild Words Resurrected from the Last Century

by swampmessiah

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    Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app.

    Six Sonnets and Some Wild Words is an EP of voice recordings performed in 2014. The set includes a PDF version of the original chapbook produced in 2001 plus CD art should you choose to burn a disc.
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1.
White, listless streamers, fat clusters of snow streaking the air in random, confusing isolation. Like the dead sky, the snow gives no consolation. The dimness robs from us contrasts and shadows, laying a frigid blanket on the earth, from which grows no hope in its mixture of mud and corruption— no buzzing insects, no flowers, no green eruption— just a dull, white chill too painful to know. In you I find a similar season, a bleak smile descending to coldly cloak my vision and art. My radiant muse! yet you would have me daring nothing, feeling nothing, making nothing—while seeming so fecund; the pure embrace, the free heart and tender lips, the wet, tropical illusion of caring.
2.
Seeds 01:00
North is the last thing you want—vast and dark, you become like the lichens and cling tenaciously to the rock and scraps of soil, a stunted mystery of respiration; festering like a chance remark, you come to crawl around like bugs under the bark of short trees; ugly and bleak, moving morosely as from swamp to swamp and smiling limply like a creature missing the subliminal spark. We find peace in strange places—you and I, in preparation each night, take a deep breath to dump out the suffering held in every breast; with transformation, we put talismans in the sky; anxiety is put to rest; the immanence of death is lulled, snugly wrapped in a warped cedar chest.
3.
Fetish 00:49
In strange uncertainty I strain to speak of my confusion and the gravid surprise now spiraling behind my reticent eyes— discovering that words are fatally weak. Crooning fingertips and lips give your cheek and indolent throat diversion from the rise of my intention, disrobing my disguise of indifference, lured by your primal mystique. Your loose, twisting hair of quiet brown obscures the hard white shoulders I need, and the soft, swaying breasts of my desire— my tongue dips lower, where your scents conspire to enrapt, then to inculcate this profane greed to always reap the secrets beneath your gown.
4.
The Moment 00:40
Opening one hand to pacify and spreading another to titillate, as though either one could rectify, justify, alleviate or compensate— for the fingers of both hands digging up from an opening line. Both consume the erratic strands as fingers twine. Both claim to combine moment and the moment’s hesitance into an unlimited gesture almost as ancient as the hand’s silence. Each articulates love before love’s lost. And, in closing, both hands feel their touch makes everything real.
5.
Eagerness 00:58
The vernal equinox erupts with an illusion of plenty, but no gray bag of shit is a contender. Our eyes awaken before their skin’s resurrection. Confronting such life, we old dry men surrender our ambition. The sleekness of them leaves our sagging abdomens quaking and obese and helplessly wasted. So our balding sheaves of voyeurism, praying for that timid release in darkness, the prime hour of existence, sunset, when girls wrap themselves in shreds of cotton and clouds of smoke, prancing down streets beset with eyes, are worn down by waves of temptation— eyes so empty and distant, eyes below the water, eyes rising back to the surface, lacerated by laughter.
6.
You look shyly at the pale woman on blue sheets, melting her open-ice eyes of desire and innocence. She shimmers and flickers a faint smile that greets your awkward glance with her own hint of reticence. Can you do this, can you love without explanation? There is a kindness in your eye that grooms her face. She blossoms into a full white shadow of invitation. The essence of your mind flows into the liquid grace of her breasts, a whirlpool around quickening nipples, descending to luminous abdominal planes, sinking lower to the black forest—your tongue sending dark ripples with each dart to the purring folds of her lips—laughter of the cells, convulsions, burning fluids and sighs pour out as you lose your head between her thighs.
7.
Birds without feather bleed the sky, bright blue is draining toward black and all the false stars hover over the city in the distance. The ditch grows without frogs, the weight of their desire spent and no longer pressing down on the mud, the tadpoles sucked up and re-ejaculated like live ammunition in a fast-action porn flick, the hollow swelling between roots and rocks, selling its mutant algæ to city fishermen as bait for river nymphs, limnads and other titillations that’ve gotten away— each sportsman wants his rod to be ready this time. All along the road where forests threaten civilization, heathen are nailed to trees by the unknown judges of the road. Until they die they eat dust and rocks thrown by spinning tires. They drink the liquid excrement of birds. Their hair is long and dirty and tangled into deceptive stories. Their robes are of black wool begging for fire. Sap mingles with blood and urine, draining the ditches dry as it flows through the rocks to the center of the earth, freeing the snakes. The moon hums radio jingles while priests cry under the street lamp and nuns run in circles, naked but for their pastimes. We’d join them if we could but it’s a sacred ritual reserved only for those whose undergarments have been blessed for public examination— no skids, no pee stains, no menstrual blood, no wasted cherubs who leaked from his holy dick after last Sunday’s confessions, no nocturnal impressions stretching the cotton. Telephone wires grow taught from distress as we tell our friends the news. Every one of us speaks as a prophet to announce the new polycarbonate age about to reshape our coffins and beds so we forget death’s a transition from prime time to late night— until the wires overheat with the resistance inherent in every inevitable apocalypse. The trees give rhythm to the moon’s song, like plantation a capella on every beat, ignoring the heathen pleadings from below, with a chorus of mad brahmin hanging in the branches by their toes— ugly bats to add high harmonic drones, it makes even the weekend pederast hum along. Wires snap free! dancing in worm twists like all the goddess’ arms swaying chaos and it’s the end of the world because it’s the last time you’ll ever get close to her— she’s mad now and smiling like Kali— strangling the heathen billboards— nailed to the burning ash— forcing vowels from their erratic mouths, songs gracing their orifices like a symphony of flatulence outshining the moon… until King Sodomy, sixty feet tall and a red pecker the length of Cadillac hearse loping in front of his sagging paunch, dances over the hill just ahead, legs bowed, eyes green and rolling— if you don’t adore him he’ll poke your eyes out and shoot hot semen into the sockets. On either side, a train of quadriplegics being towed for his amusement… A carpet of red and black laughter spreads from under his magnificent feet to cover all lands in every direction— choking heretics and saints with scalding jizm down their throats, giving life to whores and their resplendent cunts, blessing them as we should all be blessed, leashing on the world the mythological slut, the great dream-beast of every man… and to gigolos learning their trade. Fire! Fire! Light his ass on fire and blow-dry the heathens for next christmas! We want them toasty and clean! Night screams for release! A small beggar laughs and only a puddle remains in the road, water bugs crawling about his toes, and wild telephone wires protruding from his ears, dancing.
8.
They gave her lady lips and a tea set. Now she’s seen in large bathrooms with a whole in her wallet, sobbing that Edward is her doom. It had been years since he last touched the fur on her shoulders— the sable wrap she always wore. She is tedious, like a dream, yet we’re drawn to her, she’s like a sunset or a forest in flames— we think the ephemeral is weak and gives us a hard-on. Those bathrooms are man-made traps.

about

This is an experiment in multi-media publishing, to release a download audio album and PDF booklet rather than an interactive PDF. As of early 2014 the interactive PDF is not a universally supported medium and the audio will not play in all devices.

credits

released March 30, 2014

All poems, drawings, and performances by Michael Myshack. Recorded and mastered in St. Paul, Minnesota at the home of Michael Myshack in March, 2014.

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all rights reserved

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about

swampmessiah Saint Paul, Minnesota

I was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1957. I've been drawing all my life and painting since about 1975; I started writing poetry and rants in, maybe, 1976; since 1996 I've been recording those poems and rants, usually with a "musical" backing.
I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota. My partner and I have two children. I have a day job that is in no way artistic.
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