Revelation

By the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence
will predominate.–Ray Kurzweil

Are science and religion converging? No.–Richard Dawkins

Un-ring the bell? Impossible. It’s come,
Dispersed itself in every bronchiole
And office tower. Now the isotope
Of unknown metal bangs in every hole,
The slam of withered hand against a drum
Advancing like some crimson-slippered pope.

A lock of numbers. Law of propagation.
Our biology becomes a field
Of leapfrog, silicon evolving from
Petroleum. The softer senses yield
To matrices of predetermination,
Measured by a hand across a drum.

A rapture of electron retinas,
Robotic dreams, and sacramental math
Reforms the logos to a barcarole
That chokes the solace of our doubt. The path
Ahead is cleared and charted by antennas.
Silos rise. A fire in every hole.

Bodies®

It’s everything that made you stay away.
The band-sawed bodies, flesh become concrete
and peeled artistically from bones that play
at basketball or dance. A human meat
extravaganza: Sideshow! Science! Sales
receipts! The likelihood you’ll never eat
another ham. But apprehension pales
before experience, which I have gained
begrudgingly. I’ll spare you those details…
and tell you how they carved the heart and stained
the arteries. And thus you will experience
a human travesty, your views obtained
without a tad of morbid dalliance.
By this, my harrowing might come to good,
and yours not compromise your abstinence.

A moral question rises, and it should!
The casting call: A score of Chinese damned,
dissected, torn or simply milled like wood.
It seems the Chinese century has slammed
into the Seaport like a ton of bricks
as disregard for human rights is rammed
into Manhattan like the threadbare dicks
of these cadavers dangling in the light
of high-rent public space. The New York Knicks
should get this kind of play! It isn’t right.
Apparently it’s legal…in Madrid
as well as in Vienna. Gesundheit!
Just thinking that the pitcher may have “did”
somebody with the fingers squeezed upon
a pristine ball is messin’ with the kid!

We voice a strong objection and move on—
beginning with the basic skeleton
bedecked in musculature. Gone
the pliant skin and “exogelatin”
of anything remotely humankind.
The fat is out, the acetone is in,
which leaves us with a polyester rind
that resonates with monster matinees
and robot porn. Move forward and we find
the veins and arteries in lighted trays
of…could that be formaldehyde? Perhaps.
We seem to be beyond all EPAs.
It’s red and blue. Astonishing. These chaps
have laced a bloody galaxy of gore
together—valves and pipes and bubble traps.

And next the nervous system. Which is more
or less a snoozer in comparison
to all those brilliant tubes they had next door.
It’s gray, like the intestine… and so on.
Attention spans are merciful sometimes.
It all blends into one big Fulan Gong
of dancers having done their time for crimes
unknown, extracted from some hidden jail,
then plasticized and peeled like plastic limes.
The specimens, it must be said, are male
except for one—and there it is, all right.
an overlit, explicit piece of tail.
A temporary sign hangs to the right
suggesting that they may have gone too far
with fetuses ahead. An amber light.

And as we pull our heads out of the jar,
a bone of metaphysics come to mind.
We trundle to the subway or the car
to Jersey or Long Island in a kind
of disassociation, having seen
the mechanisms of our lives. Remind
me, though, exactly how this magazine
of shattered parts we viewed comes back together,
how the system acts when lights turn green
and how our bodies are a kind of weather
vane and metaphor for light, betrothed
and married to a single spirit. There
is little at the Seaport treasure trove
that speaks to me of bodies! That cement
is nothing like the flesh in which I’m clothed.

© Rick Mullin

“The Chelsea” from Aquinas Flinched

This is the sonnet sequence that closes my chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, newly published by Modern Metrics.

Video and Youtube technician: Roger Pitcher

Dream Gig!

I will be launching my new chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, published by Modern Metrics, in a featured reader spot at the Cornelia Street Cafe in New York on Friday night! Details here!

New Chapbook!

Aquinas Flinched, a book of 15 of my poems, has been published by Modern Metrics, an independent press specializing in “formal” verse. Find out more about the chapbook and the press and how you can get a copy right here.

Here’s a poem from the chapbook:

Manasquan
(for Steven Phillips)

WE crab the ruin rocks at Manasquan,
The Island of the Squaws, we Forfeit Boys,
Embraced by our paternal Grandmas on
A beach of Kodachrome and rubber toys

Where, as we tumble, adamantly tanned,
They come up bleached and ghostly in reel two:
Our fathers talking, standing in the sand,
Their pallid chests, long pants and business shoes.

A moment. Then they crack and fade to light.
We’re back to waving matriarchs against
the bank of blue and yellow clouds that shade
the field of skeletal remains, condensed
8 millimeter tidelines to a night
that pulls us to the lights of the arcade.

_____

I have my copy, and I can vouch for the physical quality of the book! Modern Metrics produces very fine books, indeed. The cover, by the way, was designed by R. Nemo Hill, incorporating a photo I took of the Tick Tock Diner on Route 3 in Nutley on the way home from a Bruce Springsteen concert. As for the quality of the poetry, well…it is published by Modern Metrics. But…you be the judge!

Thanks for checking it out.

Across the Grid of Streets

Quincy Lehr, a son of Oklahoma finding himself in Galway, Ireland, via New York City, has published his first full volume of poetry with Seven Towers, Dublin. It is called Across the Grid of Streets, and it’s available in hard and soft cover. There is also a companion chapbook.

Quincy is well known in the world of formal verse, though he is fluent in free verse as well. I have read much of his poetry and it comes highly recommended.

WHY THERE IS NO SOCIALISM
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

At 4:15 AM, the city bus
Had pulled up to the curb, its silhouette
Marked dimly by the light that crept through grates,
Fencing in empty stores. I paid my fare
And squeezed beside a sleepy Barnard girl.
She moved a centimetre to her left—
Away from me—and twitched a pinkish nose
Below grey, narrowed eyes, accusing me
Of something, so I leaned against the glass
And stared at greasy, distant streaks of light.
Each one of us was tired, pissed-off, and bored,
Angry at the hour and with those pricks—
That fat-assed bitch, who muttered at a cell phone,
That rat-faced airline worker at the front,
That punk-ass hoodlum, glaring at his feet,
That stuck-up twat, that sad-eyed brown-haired schmuck
Gawking at New York’s predawn, backlit blackness.
And if we were united, our disdain
For every dumb-shit creep—in short, ourselves—
Had fused our isolations into one.

~Quincy R. Lehr ©

The Holiday Season

–Westmoreland Bar, Westmoreland Street, Dublin, September 12th 2006

2-14

All around the world,
every boy and every girl,
need the loving.
The humble and the great,
even those we think we hate,
need the loving.
Soldiers of the Queen,
all the hard men that we’ve seen,
need the loving.
Babies at the breast,
those in power and those suppressed,
need the loving.

Andy Partridge (XTC)_____
Image: Patricia Wallace Jones ©

Just Talkin’ ’bout Shaft

It has been approximately one year that I have returned to writing poetry seriously, and in that time I have achieved…

The following name drops:

Caroline Kennedy, Pat Matheny, Louis Armstrong, Ernest Borgnine, Mark Twain, Garrison Kiellor, Leo Kotke, Danielle Steel, Ray Kurzweil, Victor Frankenstein, Richard Harris, Rich Uncle Pennybags, Parker Bros., Charles Mingus, Cormak McCarthy, Carl Djerassi, Ebenezer Scrooge, Miles Davis, Jacob Marley, George Rouault, Rembrandt, John Coltrane, Ephraim Bueno, Buddha, Rochmaninov, Jesus, Russ Tamblyn, Ahmad Shah Massoud, Rudy Giuliani, Poco, Cheap Trick, Bob Dylan, Yoko Ono, John Sloan, Sid Viscous, Virgil Thomson, Thomas Wolfe, Brendan Behan, Paradise and Moriarty, Vincent Van Gogh, Tony Soprano, Fluke Girl, Charlie Parker, The Clash, Fernandel, Wilco, Marylyn Monroe, Thomas Aquinas, Sir Isaac Newton, Isaac Hayes, Thomas Hobbes, Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber, Padre Pio, Dr Jekyll, Mr Hyde, Chaim Soutine, Max Beckmann, Monty Python, Joe Louis, Lena Horne, Oscar de la Renta, Vera Wang, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Gauguin, God, Za Zu Zaz, Duke Ellington, Jim Harrison, Joan Didion, Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Richard Manuel, MacBeth, Rilke, H. Bosch, Edward Hopper, Alfred Hitchcock, John Pellecchia, Roy Orbison, Winston Churchill, Junior Soprano, Jorma Kaukonen, Federico Fellini, Charles Darwin, Rick Santorum, John Shaft, Mickey Mouse, Krazy Kat, Ignatz, George W. Bush

The following product placements:

Google, Monopoly, Guinness Stout, Newark Star Ledger, New York Times, Financial Times, Rexall Drug Stores, El Quijote Restaurant, Sodini’s Restaurant, Fender Precision Bass, I-Pod, Pfizer, Exxon, Coca-Cola, Chevy Cavalier, Field and Stream, Chock full o’ Nuts, Book of Jubilees, National Public Radio, Playboy Magazine, Polaroid, Pabst, Ford, Eisenhower, Buick, Garden State Parkway

The following spelling errors:

Listen, time is money.

The following classical references:

Echo, Narcissus, Ganymede

Thank you for your continued support,

Your Old Pal.
____
Cultural Note: Microsoft Word allows the spelling Santorum, but no Fellini.

Alzo Sprach der Surgeon General

(A found poem)

Rauchen kann die Spermatozoen schadigen
und schrankt die Fruchtbarkeit ein.
Not only that, but
Rauchen kann todlich sein.

Pushcart Nomination!

My poem Shrine to Satan is among the six nominated by Shit Creek Review for a coveted Pushcart Prize! I’m honored to be named along with Mike Alexander, Rose Kelleher, and Dave McClure, and I will Google® Pushcart Prize very soon!

Thank you, Shit Creek Review!