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Poems from Le Bestiaré: The Barber The Faggot The Film Goddess The Hitman The Prostitute
Poems from Le Bestiaré 2: The Actress The Indian Killer The Mothman The Satanic The Symbol The Toreador
The hairs on his fingers
do not curl anymore
like worms. They, too, are old
and arthritic as the fingers
themselves. Yet, together
they hum steel scissors
about many old heads spewing
stories of their war, their action.
And in his two chair shop-
only one of which is ever used-
he mumbles on in foreign tongues,
somehow coherent to his customers,
of his youth- his hazy past
lost amidst the others' vivid tales.
And as The Chairman croons smoothly
in the background a strobed siren streaks
by and off his front window barber pole
yet beaming the noonday glint of sun
so brightly that he closes his eyes,
momentarily, and is back in his village
during the raids. The sun burns
through his eyelids like an incendiary
fire which lighted his parents' cellar,
where he had hidden, from within
and he recalls the shadows of life
lost inside the brilliant glow
of mid-night bombings: the ash,
the noise, the heat, the used-to-be's,
the stench. In the distance of his brain
it is, now, almost comforting. So
when he goes to the window to draw
his shade it is not out of a fear
that he spurns the light, or the kid
shot and bleeding down the block,
but rather the growing apparitions
of evening crawling across the street,
like rodent remembrances canvassing
for fresh flesh, towards his shop
dwarfing ever-smaller to their scurrying
silent thunder:
and it is this simple act,
now, which unleashes the fires of life
from rock on a far away world
six hundred million years from now:
the complex genetic of beginnings
reborn from the simple psychology
of endings; as if invention,
or fear, or the cosmos,
really knows its own course.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
A video of this poem can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy1fGorCywY&list=UUN5kTfj5u8XcTBg51Z65EKw
Alien swishing at the root
of their fears. In the black
light of day he remains
a voyeur of night's white cover.
Is it cold?, he wonders,
Or is it just the neighborhood?
Vamping along the boulevard
he turns egret-like into the wrong
way down an alley. Hisses quill
his spine like nothing
since Anthony left.
From a shadow over his shoulder
In the mucilage minutes he bolsters-
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider THE FILM GODDESS
Over and again she was made like marble
Yet she was loved, truly,
There ten million men desired
But now
he senses the feline lumber of a pride.
Gleaned off a wet dumpster he catches
the hard bat of some lion's swipe.
Chuckling, their fear descends
like the sun's eclipse by skyline;
scattering like mice driven
off poopdecks. Rivering down
the nearest sewer's iron gullet
his blue heron blood carries
their laughter, their taunts,
and some porcelain plumage
into a vast crimson underbelly
fed upon by the roots
of silenced concrete sequoias.
Death is just death, not defeat.-
fearing both the fates of his rose Dresden china,
alone, and the trail of azure one beastly rat
will track through ravening black eyes, twitching
gray nostrils, ruddy hands clawing
sharply up decades of steel.
*for Sharon Stone
out in the others' pitiless eyes.
in a way, for the Nordic perfection
of her self controlled
as a mannekin behind glass.
her, deeper than a Cyprian king,
and repeatedly chipped away at her
to renew the beauty, slowly rounding
into realization, she delighted beyond
the regal cipher of her youth.
it is her age which splendors
her grace into humanity;
her eyes' harpsichord razor cuts
the cord of her ivory birth.
And now when she moves
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider Ten. Twenty. A few hundred or more.
He is anxiety itself. In the darkened house
Five years o'clock.
Into this drama
Twelve years o'clock.
The curtain rises, the lights are cast.
Seventeen years o'clock.
Days and weeks and months tick by
Now o'clock.
The audience has grown to several hundred
Another curtain rises.
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider She remembers mama's calls of "Le-na!",
In the blurring tides awash within
The girl would cry, alone in her room,
Outside, the crisp waves of leaves from foreign branches sang to her
Now, in an older mirror Distantly, he says,
Laying naked, in a bleak white bed,
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider THE INDIAN KILLER Silly subjects, like lassitude, never came up
In the cave there remained, for the young boys to see,
"Ya see, old Queho was a gimp- with a bum leg-
a big bully from back on the reservation.
manhunt, which should'a been easy, considering
it looked like he was gone for good, he killed again-
twenty-one more years before Queho would be seen
the buildup of movement, unmoving in Henry,
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider A video of this poem can be found here: THE SATANIC Indulgence
Breed the way o tired world there was that time at Stonewall Existence
Vital aloneness is an avenue in Albany New York Wisdom
Cocksure and Minneapolis Kindness
It is always the imaging here you are with Tsvetovat in Minsk there you are with Lolita in New Hampshire here you are with Basho in Seattle your glance recreates the night I remember we stayed three days in the seedy place you called paradise off of Long Island Sound your stockings dripping over a moldy shower curtain rod where you opened a five-by-nine album of photos you would not share with anyone not even me in your mind I became the only tangent to these words as you were beyond Whitman and Watergate the Ayatollah and Dynasty you had the greenness of Puerto Rico wrapped in a bandage you knew as photographs I would venture on a sandy road a quarter of a mile from the saltwater and fling things to the heron irised in your gaze forever detached from the love of another woman you rued me into a monster you made me better you made me want to be better than the moment you filled with tears of fright you saw the comings and dyings of yourself Charlotte Kathee Francine Danuta Irene Ingrid Clarissa Lily Shawn Tricia Kristin Lisa Anna Chrissy you have me thralled to a time I am yours I am yours I am yours this is a lie it is always the murder Vengeance
Guten Nacht and Mr. Stallone and the shears guten Morgen Responsibility
In another place a narrator would intrude Dan Schneider Animal
Who is Leif Ericsson let the universe mumble let OPEC shake the continent let Led Zeppelin corrupt Wisconsin whose is it to lose bound to an irreversible sun does not apply to the girl in her vaguely arabic shawl how loosely hangs the cold about her to know her is Vinland Sin
Don Moss never knew the Muslim girl nor LaVey the Enochian it is Hopper's Sunday Morning it is night at a restaurant it is that pug I saw at a wrestling match at Franklin K. Lane High it is a dreaming to end your poem the church Satan High wind betraying say it again the day into with more feeling a Hampton daydream one last time some fool labels Hell Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider THE SYMBOL
"There is the world dimensional for
For a time it turned
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider THE TOREADOR
Sanchez, too, hid his cheer
he could never pronounce. She once spoke
without the refracted Maria's bedroom.
it was not what Maria had feared. It strode
where Sanchez was when Maria smiled,
Copyright Ó by Dan Schneider THE APOSTLE The sun crumbs that feed a world are nothing Who would contain you? Everywhere Here is where you know you own us. Lost In this time the wooing commences. Again Copyright © by Dan Schneider THE FINN
Who would understand the remote dream of difficulty
into the star, equal with its temperaments, stung
The importance of all this is merely the eloquence
And does the goat understand it is dreamt, by the girl
It seems natural as it is. The girl and the beast,
It is moments as these which recall her abandon,
In the torpor of her fingers she senses union, and thinks
Copyright © by Dan Schneider
in the passage of dreams,
And now when she feels
in the fruits of the prosaic,
it does not all fritter away-
as if something easily disposed of-
into the unknown eyes
that unclothe her, still,
it is that which made her,
this votary of Venus,
now dizzy- for the first time
in a life undefined- and giddy,
simply, with the notion.
He has lost count of the notches
in his brain. He knows nothing any longer
of the world beyond. This small theater
is all that is left of the drama.
each creak of the backdoor is taken
for a cheer. The stage is set:
a dingy saloon, a lone fly buzzes about.
Gray mannekins people the scene. The clock
marks time in years of age- somehow appropriate.
sits an audience of one: Death.
An appreciative fellow.
Suddenly, a body materializes; the face
is indistinct yet familiar: unformed
yet like every man's he will ever do.
slowly. The stagelight burns. The body
ripens into his own lush with maggots.
A standing ovation from fleshless hands.
He bows, but sensing something long discarded
he turns to run but in all directions
is stage. A mist of thick flies now blots
the limelight. At this moment he realizes
his life is not his.
in applause. A tap on his shoulder.
No one. A gun now lays on the bar.
He grabs it and puts it to his head.
The dark cloud buzzes gratitude.
He squeezes.
billowing down the block, for supper, and seeing
the soup steaming their kitchen windows-
behind its warm mist lay sustenance, life,
and the swan: at once her pet, her protector,
her lover.
she recalls the perfection with which mama laid out
herself in the dinnerware's placement. Each utensil
in its own parameter. Always four settings: for mama,
herself, her little brother- long passed
by the silence of sharp feather upon wrist-
eating, with real fork and knife
but with phantom manners, the swan- he hates
mama’s ceaseless screeches. She would clean her plate, always,
so good she was- unlike her bad brother the swan ignored-
then his beak would nip at and taste
for her. His neck's silken advances glimmering
with dew.
Love is pain.
Blood just its price.
as the swan's wings covered her tensions,
wanting to enswan her
in love, a silent blackness beneath white
feathers caressing some whiter flesh.
as they swept against her bedroom window. The moonglow, off her
mirror,
evaporated her tears. Beyond, the swan’s coal eyes, one with the
night, always
shimmering....her hair
so golden, long and lovely.
she combs it, still
golden, long and lovely.
Behind her, in reflection,
grins Sammy- haloed by the neon glow
of the sign, the strip, the streets outside.
"I'll always be with you."
Yet she knows he cannot protect her
like the swan- she is still
his little girl (she still has his scars)-
his pinions spreading darkly
as the tides of trees whip through the signglow
crashing onto unfamiliar windows where another
strange bird's plumage awaits her
for a price Sammy owns.
a weird mist steams through the ceiling,
like mama's used to; only this one is cold-
eternally so- and while she lays
helpless as frigid feathers
grope and stroke for her goldness
she quietly floats up into the mist
where she thinks she hears her little brother
at play, closer, towards the other side
of dawn; and after passing through it
so happy and assured, from far above,
her face now deigns a smile.
*l943, El Dorado Canyon, Nevada
as Jose and Henry climbed up from the river,
to the cave where Queho's body was discovered
by the prospectors who, on a gold mining trip,
hung on the seep of the past,
freed the state from fear, at last,
of that crazy old Paiute's evil, forever.
knickknacks of his victims, which by then had begun
to rust and molder, decay and stale, go rotten
as his soul, which always fascinated Jose,
as the boys pawed through the things
of the dead flesh of seasons,
who told Henry it all began in 1910:
and for years kids on the reservation would jerk
him around about his limp, till Queho could take
it no more, and ran away. He refused to beg,
like the others, at the white
man's knee. Instead, he would fight
back. That's when he ran into this Harry Bismark,
They argued over lots. They never got along.
So, Queho got his gun and shot him dead. Bang-bang!
But, no one cared at all, till he killed a white man
with a two-by-four. He beat
the shopkeep to death, and beat
it to the canyon, which began a decades-long
his limp made his tracks so easy to spot. But, then,
nothin's ever easy as it seems. Something went
off in his brain. He went loco- began killing
like mad: many prospectors,
and down in Arizona
a family of seven was gunned down. And just when
this old woman, named Maude Douglas, shot in the back,
in 1919- with nothing left but the tracks
of a gimp. But, nothing would happen until when,
a couple of old miners
were both butchered and blinded,
they offered three grand on his head. But, it would take
again. That's when the prospectors found his mummy-“
"Aw, Jose, do ya really think I’m a dummy?
Fallin' for one a' your tall stories, sight unseen?",
as an Indian coldness
merged with the wet young tautness
of one of the boys' fears, drifting to infusion,
who knew how to play a bad hand well, and within
that cave played his as well as Queho's, and began
to deny Jose's tale, "There ain't nothin' ta see!”,
a star that casts a coldness,
as the small ball of nearness,
which leapt to his face, and the refracting within.
*for John Keel
where fearsome angels cower, the Mothman
glides soundlessly above illusion. The moon
is something that cannot fly, and you cannot see
the moon, below him, as he spreads his terrible wings
his red eyes become the billion-year bloat
of giant stars dying into the useless night of eyes,
yours, folding in to the unremarked of realms.
comes, clearly, those who witness him rise above
those realms of plastic and styrofoam. To be human
is to disappoint- so the Mothman never does.
He is the summit of unknown and unbroken expectations,
and the inquisitor who asks: "What is the fallen
in you?" He cannot understand the onlookers
of life, the unmoved at Jericho's tumble.
of inemotion, righter than left, and three winks
from Magonia, he rises, now sounding mechanical,
as if an early helicopter chopping its way
to your comprehension, the full breadth of his wings
spreading, as if to say, "I, too, have form!"
Yet, he has no head, nor mouth, nor nose, nor ears,
just huge glowing eyes in a gray-brown skin.
to earth, leaving the now of your wonder,
as if to instruct the mortal of their poor restraint.
Gently, gently he dares to shaping the odors
of your dreams, disnebulous as your remembrance
of him, filling the emptiness that springtimes do,
at times, distilling your denial into a tear,
singular as a day, but ten times as salty.
dissolve in to a crane, an owl, or a bugaboo
of dismission that underlies comfortability.
But his is not there. He regards it a disease
that the earthbound must overcome. He does
it by looming over the American night, the consensus
universe that you construct. Sometimes, he watches
you as you whistle by the wonder he swallows whole.
looking at you, be very afraid. Not of him,
nor some grim intent, but because his eyes will curve
in to you- hold your eye up to his eye, it is all
blood- a deep placidity no human can share, nor bear,
cool and pure as the scent of a stark dry thing
the wet of an animal's nose remembers, the mist
of a thunderhead's calm, the drum of rain on umbrellas.
*for Anton Szandor LaVey
bleating from the swill of mechanized might
the unmeasured war the computer-fed viral infestations
which seem ancient to those bereft of fresh religion
you have remained simple you have riven piety
to the white haired white brained white god
of Europe rimming past the gazelle of most modernity
papal infernal antiquities residing in the nectar
of choirboy's asses entering and confessing
a thousand volume sin for the master freeing
the confessing for confessing's sake
I give you poetry for the morning
axioms for the unfed maws of computers
rivers of empire subsumed to the grand mouse of everything
glitching their prose existence into you
cyberneticacatalogicaeroticaexperimenticapornographicanihilismasanctica-
religioticaneurotica beast that feels
at the daymare lost to the assorted demandments
of a passive god only to you do you think
I read of in a William Kennedy novel once
where drunks and baseball playing children
pass the noon over and again as the Depression Era
wails muffled themselves to the Coca Cola signs
impingence on things located somewhere everywhere
between Bangor Maine and San Diego California
you talked to me of hidden afternoons
in western Pennsylvania when Gramps would tell
you Great War stories and the Great Trinity
church bells ringing along some mystical Rue
it is midnight now
the whole of denial collapses into a chapel
again the sound of a single bullet becomes
the garnet glory of an unbroken field of Christ-like figurines
running and screaming of Boschian adorability in the face of
intransigence
for one as you is the assimilator of Verdun
and Madison Avenue Ironweed and Mallarme¢
Stieglitz and Arbus recall that book
of 1960's retards she blew you away
with each photograph you recall the maggots
acling to your armhairs as you toss meat department refuse
in that summer job you hated a linger of this persistence
of breath honoring the steep gallows of eternity
infusedly internal as that Christ's-eye from the Dali
singing you are here in the hypervoidal with me
in the twentieth century from a nowhen
Judea Anatolia Mongolia
it was Genghis Khan the voluptuary
who first decreed the offal of knowing
the beauty of knowing it
show me the wool
and I shall spare you the lamb the sky
filled with swifts and bats and owls and gnats
and beasts of the fraternal convergence
I see you
to you it is you
the art of the grift
its cut
is this then decline
are the signs of arrival
inspect closely the one for the other
I will always be because I was
a shameless proposition from a foggy mirror
on a car on Nicollet and Lake
driving
rain
is the intended notion
the delicacy on a mountainside
shriven of meaning and Japan
is a place of wind and neutrinos
so balanced as an Apollinaire critique
of your inmost paintings
I met a singer a few months ago
cute and red and fucked-up beyond belief
she reminded me of the others
cocksure in her insecurities
Minneapolis is not Japan
the grasses sway forty miles from the Foshay Tower
as Wright chuckles
o boy from eastern parts
hiding your strengths in runes
and there is a raccoon in a sewer
crawling through the midnight lampglows
rain
and familiar propositions
I end
which denies passing and happiness
you are dead
which sanctifies
bloodlessly about the child's head
waiting to fill an odorless room
rarefied and Jewish as the man with the moolah
in the corner ay Stallone will'ya finish de kid
one man carries a blue handkerchief
in his hand moist with a dead week's relief
as the other has a tambourine in his hand
and bangs it when the two winos outside
go at it again this is America
1962 the two boys one a former mental patient
from upstate and the other an insignificant mulatto
try out many things they find in the garbage cans
wigs last swigs of a warmed out beer can Piels
it is morning it is almost when
the vagrants will engage in their nose-pulling
contest that draws all the saints from Skid Row
to place their bets on who will pull cleanest
there is a scramble blunted fistic beauty of alcohol
breeding an alcoholic intuition gone bupkus
in the aftersounds of a memory the mulatto lays
crying mediocrely to the morning only the mediocre are always
at their best the victor dreams of magnums and Sally Beddowes
it was toe-to-toe nose-to-nose grind-to-grind as they
charted the dead suburbs of notice the boy in the barber's chair
looks outside turns inside with one eye as Stallone smiles
and chants Sicilian hosannas or something
and passes out lollipops to the fresh-trimmed boy
and the loser on the ground with the intense scar
under his right nipple it is a shame the winner
is shunned this is Mr. Stallone's world
this is his
or demand attention
here it is me
to question things
it was P.S. 81 that was the nidus
where the flocks of Jews and Negroes Caucasians
and Catholics first found America
on a planet on a planet
where ground was ground
now the sail moves
a phantom guide forcing revisions
and instinct anew
when the word always
who reads from a book mumbling
things like blasphemy vengeance and meatloaf
sucks
no matter I did I do
and am alone
that guides me to the desire
it is twilight on a veranda
School
W.W.F. Baron Scicluna and Stan Stasiak
without desire it all comes back
your hand unheeded
as particulars become a cock
pressed inside her virgin walls
lifting falling moving
the groans you wrap around existence
my pen
calls forth you
was it you
Migdalia
was it him
Mr. Stallone
was it you
me
that obscured
*Isabella Van Wagenen (1797-1883)
those untwisted by the love of things
irreconcilable...."
-For The Marriage Of Faustus And Helen, Hart Crane
within. This fact of being
more than flesh and blood
to many. Beyond her
is the woman she is:
proud, strong, free, black.
She remembers the shine of autonomy
beckoning, as if some gloaming beyond
reach, the beginning of her autumn
estrangement from miracles.
“To preach"
is what it called her to do. To imbue
the white minds of the chatteled masses
with not the fact of her,
but with the fact of truth.
It is her existence which deifies,
it is her existence which reifies,
yet both have permeated the rose
of her being. The truth
can wait for the sojourner
to discover. It is in the smile
of the four year old white boy
sitting shyly with his parents
at an abolitionists meeting,
yet smiling. To the adults
her eyes gouge like gossip.
To him it is all a game.
Each time she glances down
his smile ends. Each time
she turns away it reappears.
First gone. Then there.
Then gone. Then there.
And just as she feels
it will go on forever,
she fakes him out,
catches its beam burnt into
her mind, negating decades
of the world's negation,
and is spent on its hopeful play....
*outside San Diego, 1868
of death, much like Maria Garibaldi,
his greatest fan, who- after each
kill- would give him a flower
of her grandmother's mirror, and its numbness
she would inhabit. When gazing within
she would fear the mirrored hallway
Always, she was uncertain of an entering
spirit, a thing she could not resist
prying into. When, at last, a thing entered
strongly into her bedroom, circled a few times,
and onto her bed, and pried backward into both
Marias' spaces. This was, then,
again, fr
became circular motions. The bull
is released. Sanchez too.
*Julia Roberts
in light of the glaze that resonates and woos us
through you. Even as some bird of paradise,
you are not, ascending through our upturning,
we forget you are a creature too. Not suffering
as we, flung into the opened light of intimacy
dying, it should be us, no more totally, unseen
in the seats, awakening parts of ourselves to woo
you, and grow you in the warm ardency
of the familiar emotions your smile tells us
are a part of this entertainment’s cost.
the thin housings of self intensify
and multiply the promises affirming
yes, as we wake in our seasons, grasping
your reward in our beds, warm and nude,
as the dreams of all movements must be
to succeed. We keep you in our heads,
fragment of you, changing you
even as you, yourself, remain forever
where you have always been most
intense, in patterns of idea cast open
on the infolded black of a full house
approaching you. In the emptiness
we call for you to mend us to your side,
in intensities blessed, yet surpassed
by the act of watching you breathe.
unto you, you grant us a being, we
who are equal to you only in our passing,
while your veins effervesce with the external
hopes, forming and formless, perceived
as a part of you, resented that you are
drenched in it from all of us who perceive
you as greater, disinherited from humanity,
an unstooped angel whose shining teeth
point us to your ceaseless vision, striving
to demur this is the cathedral of want.
such currents swirl, as shadow leaves
in the undead fall, filling with direction
downward. We accept our oneiric selves,
the body as the brokedown home of the thought
of you, who remain in front of you, there
and defenseless. Still. Wooed and wooing
from where we sit, created and broken
from uncertain evenings in which we return,
timid children, to follow you where we know.
*Sari Sotamaa
save the dreamer? Sailing in to her body past
a single moment of sky and sea made one,
under the violent pastiche of indigo and sun, which will not set
this time of year, in the saltless ego made
an instrument of space, pressed into the flowers
she bears. She glares devoted meaninglessness
into orange and violet hues her eyes gather phosphenes
from the singular suffering of and, and its lack,
as she dreams behind the rote blue of her computer
screen, circling about the world, breaking
into fragments, motions of springs replicating
away, as she hacks into universes where gulls circle
over dead buffalo husks, and gophers swim free
in some Baltic Sea. Identical to a dream
she once had, when her name was unworn by years
or bones, when she was six or seven, or not.
in which she skips to the barn, and strips
to her self, at the center of the blue-tinged eye
of a goat. She becomes one. With the roll, in the pass
of time, all things align in the dream and the real.
in the dream, as it bleats or brays or makes
some kind of sound, in tones Neolithic
as its breast baring heat into this pile of meat it meets
remembering a time when it was flesh and more?
as they lay in the sun, as she used to lay
on gravestones when young, to sense the power
of death, terrifying and breaching ethics with fragility,
postulated arrangements of bare whispered presence, the dawn
unmentioned with her own hard kiss into living with this flesh,
this beast under the sun's demure hands slowly heating them one.
by father or mother, or other such things, as she wakes
from the seem of a mind, pressing the fresh darkness
of her face into the void, the meaning of beginning,
and the questions therein, abandoned and undone
by not one instance, as the computer flashes, her mischiefs
sing of flowers, and malls, and things European, under it all
alone as a lion in a drought-filled land, plagued
by hyenas, as this rogue imagining, and its absence
of fear through indigo flares, the sun, and the union of all things.
of the moonlit reunion of the thing and the thought, the keys
of a half beating whole, rising to be her emissary
to brilliance, till the other calls, in its bray she is comfort,
on her knees she writhes, vertebra becoming constellations
made flesh. The rim of her moon curves her shape into its.
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