The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken I
1
An impossible inquiry.
And not because abstraction
poses an obstruction.
And not because a melee
threatens dispossession.
Scatter itself, lazy as it is,
is pure concretion.
A ceremonial fork
stands up
in the middle of the melee.
Wrench Boy himself
is master of abstraction.
Melee is a path
straight to the heart of Crystal.
Thus Wrench Boy
abstracts
from African Rattle
the scattering of its very white sonority,
the scattering of purple
petals of subtle violet.
Hammerhead, whose thoughts and acts
are always exact and concrete,
pumps up his own
capacity for abstraction.
What nature, then, makes obstruction?
What role plays Melee?
What is this reflection of Crystal
that Wrench Boy reserves
for his working of abstraction?
When you come to a fork in the loop,
do you cry out for Hammerhead
or scatter your chips through a gorge
or contemplate the workings of
some meta-cosmic bellows?
Black Lake must appear
from its own dream,
not out of some forced image in your thought.
A system of forks with five tines
stands up around it.
Hammerhead himself
performs the Great Release.
All things scatter before silence.
Melee jumps and dances,
aflame amidst happenstance.
Black Lake, in fact,
is inalienable.
Happenstance cannot ripple
the surface of its focus.
The Mother of Concreteness
is Black Lake
as well as release
from the ardor of Moles.
[]
Inquiry into the meta-stasis
of the bellows:
a tendency to scatter.
After scatter, the counter tendency:
existence qua a certain species of harmonic.
The bellows' suck and swoosh:
an inquiry of Wrench Boy.
What would he learn?
Existence as maze and as mole.
[]
A concordat with ghosts.
They have no concrete sense
of their own dispossession--
inexactitude, an odd sort of essence.
You cannot maintain pure harmony
with a forced system of forks.
It is but one sort
of existential desideratum
bandied about at times
in The Old Hotel.
It connects or disconnects
from Wrench Boy's concentration on Crystal--
her affinity for her own
abstraction.
[]
Another desirable thing is a pretty garden,
but its anti-type's
never
just melee.
[]
When things get stuck
in body or mind,
of course you call for release.
Otherwise one is content
to observe the activity of Moles.
[]
Existence might seem like an opal:
it gathers all scatter after
a well-timed release.
The Opal reflects freckled Melee.
All this a matter
for continuous inquiry.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
2
If you see a fork in your opal,
take it, Violet.
Put a bellows to happenstance.
Don't abstract your own release.
O Violet,
if a violet springs up in a maze,
a fork at every corner,
release it.
Hammerhead is building a maze,
and why not?
He has forks in his tool kit.
Melee, the sweet principle of happenstance,
happens.
Crystal forever
captivates her Wrench Boy.
Abstract forks--
a fork up your opal.
O Violet,
have you found your way to concordat
or more than that,
perennial discourse with Hammerhead?
His maze and its forks
are latterly devised
to foster our release,
did you know that?
Wrench Boy did--
he finds his Crystal
in a garden's silence.
With each advance
obstruction's up ahead--hence, release
is forever on the agenda
of any Wrench Boy.
Focus articulates happenstance.
Now a ghost
hovers above a
pretty patch of violets in the shadows,
threatening dispossession,
which may entail release, scatter,
requiring further focus
to turn obstruction
into dispossession.
Take an African Rattle,
pump the bellows.
You'll make it through the maze
of disconcerting inquiry.
Just follow Moles.
Expose your violets
to the concrete situation.
Obstruction is wedded to happenstance.
How much silence
does Violet require?
How much can we all
sustain?
Put a fork to your hammerhead--let it vibrate.
Focus is a practical matter
in the workshops of The Old Hotel.
Release your fork.
Follow your maze into silence.
This itself
can become obstruction.
Dispossess the very harmony with which
abstraction flatters what obstructs it.
The Old Hotel recedes, under such conditions,
to the advantage of Black Lake--
a position of another thought of abstraction
where release
plucks a fork
and Violet lights up the gorge
and scatters her fragrances and petals--
it happens:
The Great Release--
the smiling of Violets.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
3
The cat and mouse
are playing cat and mouse,
while the world they inhabit
and its absolute alphabet
is haunted by Jaguars.
Is release enough?
Can you make your African Rattle
sound like crystal
while silence takes possession
of every fork and focus?
Crystal must crystallize Jaguars.
Release must focus Wrench Boy.
Jaguar, once loosed,
must not tramp over violets
but take possession
of dispossession.
What does that mean?
It means that Hammerhead
will thread
his own maze--
all forks
be tuned
to a loose, ubiquitous release,
and indeed our African Rattle
sound pure crystal
in the ear of every Wrench Boy.
Follow your Jaguar--
but Release is the key.
[]
More than method is the means here.
Focus will find the maze--
but to foster dispossession
of every concrete situation,
while ghosts
saturate your opal?
Don't get me wrong--focus is behoovely.
Travel your mazeways
beyond all beckoning harmonies,
but only The Great Dispossession
will bring you to Black Lake.
Possession by a quality
that is no quality at all
at the very heart of Crystal,
at exactly the point of transition
between suck and swoosh of the bellows.
There, violets wildly proliferate,
but no one takes possession.
Catch a glimpse of Wrench Boy
handling his fork
with consummate focus.
Faced with obstruction?
Call in your Jaguar.
Land in the middle of a melee?
Stay centered, relaxed, alert,
but watch out for the sleek vibration
and wildly hurtling forks.
Unaccountably, Jaguar
is Master of Harmony.
Many things just happen.
A fork may proffer falacious harmonic;
Crystal catalize erratic scatter;
a fork in a mountain
make Jaguar see ghosts
as they swarm in his opal
just after being loosed
from the Great Gorge.
The work here is not so much abstract
as furtively crystalline--
a secret harmony controlling
what occurs in the Gorge.
But why this impatience of Crystal?--
as if her garden were threatened by Jaguars,
her affiance with Wrench Boy, a bit too loose--
she calls a ghost from the Gorge
to animate the silence.
She places her Jaguar at the gates of The Old Hotel
and covers all Being
with an attitude of Crystal.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
4
Focus requires its melee.
The spirit of Hammerhead--
to smash or to join--
devises the regimen.
A ghost it is
that is expressed through Bellows.
Release anticipates harmony.
Hammerhead deploys his hammerheads judiciously
as he marks the several chambers
of The Old Hotel.
His focus maintains him.
His harmony is a maze of coded chambers.
The Old Hotel
holds its focus so well
that the place itself seems tight as crystal.
[]
Given the Last Proposition,
what use is there for Bellows?
But perhaps it's no matter of use.
Who would use such a bellows?
Well, possibly Wrench Boy.
Jaguar breaks
the code of the chambers.
His loose focus
is all he needs
to focus Melee. She
eludes
the astringency of Hammerhead
and produces herself in all irony
as his consequence;
the logic of which
is the maze
that is The Old Hotel.
[]
Focus motivates harmony
and conversely.
[]
It is an interminable matter
if not to define
then to determine our terms.
Jaguar under current logic
circumambulates the Last
(that is the latest)
conflagration
and sees to it
that the bellows
abstracts itself
to guarantee the autonomy of the flame.
There is true use for Black Lake.
Its effusions rise as gray mists
suffusing the white susurrus
of an African Rattle--
such harmony as Jaguar finds
no reason to scatter--
the point being
that the duality
of the suck and swoosh of the bellows
prove no obstruction
and the racket of ten-thousand hammerheads
open on silence.
[]
Much of what we must do here is mark time
but at interminably various chronotopical strata
whose crystallinity is n-dimensional, get that?
You cannot circumscribe, thus, the suck and swoosh of the bellows.
The mazeways re-articulate whatever has been loosed.
[]
Harmony is not necessarily hidden deeply--consider Violet!
Consider the fresh breath of Melee!
And Bellows is not the only
rhythm to guarantee Harmony.
Remember the Fork in the Opal.
All these were tools:
bellows, rattles (out of Africa),
instrumentalities of silence.
But deep dispossession
long had ridden Hammerhead
of his inward scatter and melee.
The Old Hotel was his possession now--
the transparition of its harmonies.
He could foster the scatter of happenstance
as propaedeutic to release;
convert it all to the pure exuberance
of an African Rattle;
relieve the scatter of everywhere--
Hammerhead--the Master of Harmony--
Wrench boy--confederate to Hammerhead.
A Fork in the sound of an African Rattle: Harmony!
Hammerhead--the harmony of the Abstract--
Hammerhead the Host at Black Lake--
Black Lake, for Hammerhead,
concrete site of dispossession--
[]
Here, at this joint
in the narratological catalogue,
this elbow between strata
of an n-dimensional scatter,
is Hammerhead truly
The Master of Harmony
or Harmony the Master of He?
Wrench Boy walks the maze of The Old Hotel
and summons the Ghost--the geist of Metacosmic Bellows.
He blows silence over the garden
and the Ghost of The Old hotel,
is itself the very Gorge
of ten-thousand Hammerheads . . .
First Interval
Being itself
is covered by the gods.
What god
does Being cover--
what topology?
We begin each day again to break the bowl
to take the pieces from the sky
to find the empty hovel
where cat and mouse once plied their homely hazard.
We toss the coins or scramble the tokens
and bide the shining shards
and where the broken cipher falls
the argument must follow.
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
5
Harmony, well-desired; but desire itself
scotched to get at it.
Violet skirts the outskirts.
She follows the divisions
contracted by Wrench Boy.
Together they limn Black Lake, great silence now.
Great focus.
Together they mark out the scatter.
Wrench Boy takes her as Wrench Girl (and conversely).
To the others it appears
they circumambulate a gorge.
Their concentrated clatter
distracts, thereby protects
harmonious matter.
Above the miraculous scatter
a sky that is Jaguar.
Above the Gorge,
the sound of the rank harmonica.
Hammerhead sucks and blows
dividing the silence.
The silence grows quite maze-like--
the sound in the kitchen of The Old Hotel.
You do not focus your harmonica
but propagate raucous harmonies.
Violet is Wrench Girl.
She sits on a stool
observing celestial Jaguar cover the Gorge.
She too sucks harmonica
pretending to catalogue scatter.
The Old Hotel hides silence.
An obstacle fork
multiplies its tines.
Melee of scatter.
[]
The Old Hotel
is open to happenstance.
Whatever you please
may happen there.
[]
Silence Prepares an Opal.
Wrench Girl Welcomes a Ghost.
Theses are headlines:
stories to follow.
[]
Crystal, understandably, stood aloof
from Violet's funky music.
Silence reigned between them--
relationship, for the moment, a scatter--
remorse for prior harmony.
Ontologically inconsequential, surely,
but the sound of an African Rattle filled the gorge.
Crystal had no possibility
but to maintain her focus.
The gorge was the situs for happenstance.
The music itself was like
the tedious pumping of a bellows.
Happenstance catalogues silence,
but no catalogue hazards an essence.
It is the higher harmony
that Wrench Girl contemplates in Jaguar--
the harmony that mazeways mediate in melee: Release!
And the gorge is crystal,
the gorge the altissimus of harmony.
Erase Remorse.
[]
Does Melee enervate Silence?
Surely not.
But the essenceless ghosts
scatter the fracas of forks,
shifting the fields of happenstance.
[]
Wrench Girl calls back her ghost,
enraptured by Jaguar.
Shall she play Violet now
and bring back to The Old Hotel
a sanguine silence?
In dispossession the Concrete
must first find focus,
transforming Melee's harmonica
into a haunting song across Black Lake,
no gorge of mouth-sucked notes,
but quiet time in a garden
to catch the ear of Wrench Boy.
Second Interval
Beyond the body's
infinite
concreteness, chaos, and complexity,
the hyper-continua of "the rest of it" :
The Beyond Itself -- The Body --
release the unfolding configuration--
the thing imposes on itself
the empty oxygen
of conscious space
that takes itself up qua Being
without syntax -- Drop the "qua"!
The mules have climbed their mountains,
dropped their loads,
realized the point of their obstinacy --So have YOU!
the light in the eyes of two strangers
converge in an instant
the mole shakes hands with the mountain
The Mouse Eats Cat Food But The Cat's Bowl Is Broken
6
Scatter the particles of crystal
through a putative maze.
Therein lies the obstacle.
A ghost that plays the harmonica.
Happenstance, the Mazeway,
the Mazeway, the Garden.
Scatter happens.
Existence is like an Old Hotel:
come wind to its garden,
scatter seeds and petals.
Wrench Boy / Girl / Boy Girl
pretends there is no ghost--
Existence is no ghost.
There really is a jaguar
prowling about the gorge. Queer.
The sounds from the harmonica
scatter Scatter.
Crystal comes together
out of the maze.
The Old Hotel is happy in its garden.
Scatter mere happenstance.
Deliver to its gorge
the ghostly hunger.
Complete release.
The opal tinged with violet.
Existential happenstance,
a gorge of dispossession--
that's a good thing.
A ghost in an African Rattle.
The maze dissolves as Black Lake.
[]
Explanation begs its silence.
You can't get there
playing on your harmonica
a scattering of homely attitudes.
That's why there's ambiguity in the garden.
Bad feeling scatters the violets.
Skinny-eyed focus
opens the maze
making an obstacle
of the garden's concrete barrier--
you can't get in there. Or if you can--
Only in the maze are you truly loose
if the garden is
an abstract one.
A garden of forked violets
is no random happenstance,
no innocent scatter.
Scatter itself
cannot commission such a garden.
Even Black Lake
if it drink down Old Hotel
makes of garden
melee merely: insidious
hortus conclusus
this is not.
For such a garden
the old, unregenerate Hammerhead
might perhaps be requisite, if insufficient:
a garden of dispossession,
not in a good sense.
But the bellows blows and you are empty (in a good sense).
And the garden is simply a garden.
You recover your own dispossession.
The cat's bowl is broken.
