suttungr vs the gods

Lo did Suttungr awake,
Near driven mad by the smell.
He lay facedown in a cowfield
His face puffy with drink, angry and hot
In a pillow of spew and cowshit. It
Was the dirtiest part of him
Besides his furs. The cows had come
Well past the noon of night
With their tongues out
To wash the cold off his
massive limbs. They had watched him
Stumble and retch, wrench himself
Out of the sky to lie groaning on grass
A giant wretch, near dead
With drink and in danger of
Waking up cold to the world.
He awoke among them
Well and truly licked by
Gifted beer and gifted mead,
Gifted too plentifully.
"Fuck,"
Said he. "I am hungover, verily.
Those motherfucking gods
Can really put 'em back."

Biography

I spent a year telling myself I should save it for later, that I was surviving my neighbors, that i would be alright if I just remembered to grip the taper and sip the vapors of the burning bible paper. After all, where there's smoke there's fire; but what i learned from putting the cart before the horse (of course) is that too much smoke makes it hard to see what stoked your ire. I finally got the hell out of Dodge by simply walking off the job, leaving the harpies of house and home to sleep in the bed they'd made for themselves.

Finally free, I met Mandy and put on a hot attraction via enfilading fire: I just kept shooting my load until the job was done in that shotgun furnace of a room, filled with sweat and stink and the closeness of camaraderie. In May I sucked up the flowery fragrance with both nostrils, let my fancy lightly turn. my grip loosened, the taper occasionally fell and voila! Autumn. The Fall came and I was still employed.

Sometimes I laid my head against the grey and chalky walls of my cubicle and wondered what it would be like to be buried underneath them; to be a stone column in my building 9 hours a day for 50 years and then to die at the end and have heavy slate piled on my head to hold me down. I would be more legible then, with my name and my death date the only thing left to tell about me.

Fear told me to live and so I did: that Autumn I found courage in cider and the time to roast pumpkin guts - found love in small titties and a big heart. I ate nuts and berries and Velveeta and beer and grew fat and hairy for winter, like a skinny bear with a slowly disappearing buttocks. Humanity joined me and no one saw us change like caterpillars in our winter clothes, no one saw our bodies under our stolen skins.

Prizewinner

Their smiles are all teeth
as they accept the token from the mopheaded degenerate
crushed behind his register.
But it is with arms like umbilical cords
And wiggly weak bodies
That they nervously tote their prize
until they can drop a firm hand
on the shiny red shoulder of their
first skeeball.

all the way down the lacquered wood ramp the ball is handed
deliberately from parent to teacher
doctor to priest
to the waiting college professor
who shines up a glossy red coat
on the ball that has felt sweat
and dead skin and moisturizer. And
he drops it in, into the center circle.
One hundred points (100). Bullseye. Jackpot.
Lights blare and music rolls
like a skyburst, inevitable but shocking,
as the led display shows the same old score
in bright red block letters:
HAPPY GRADUATION

the world of television and beds

no, i promise, it is still wonderful. in the world of television and beds
young people are not animals, never slaves. They are free.

Let me give you an example:

today you watched Futurama
from two a.m. to two p.m.
with a slight instinctive unease:
the stickiness of your blanket to your knees,
a growing warmth in your pillow case.
But you persevered
and kicked those school papers off your bed,
struggled mightily to continue doing nothing, kept your feet
from hitting the warm nut-jungle air
of your room. You stayed under your blanket.
If you think that was a good time
I think I heard your stomach rumble just now:
or anyway,
I remember that it's there.
Now:
a greasy tub of off-brand cheese doodles,
Totino's Pizza Rolls,
Hot Pockets
not Chinese food, because you will have to
get out of bed
and meet someone new.
You know what's good for you:
You'll keep your cheesy fingers off your crusty keys, partner  
You let those episodes roll along uninterrupted and

"mmmmm," how your nose will delight
As your stomach slowly roasts under your laptop battery.

Now doze.
Repeat. Futurama is in it's third season
but what season was it in when you started?
your legs are swimming in sweat like dead porous whales
and the old urge to accomplish adulthood rises in you
like a lesser man's gorge at the sight of your bed.
can you overcome your self? can you overcome me?
it is your choice: no bell will ring to tell you to shower,
to eat, to sleep, to move, to achieve. You will have to do it yourself
no one can do it for you, and unless you ask no one will help. So,
why don't we compromise; you can compromise your health and I will too. Meanwhile,
compose an e-mail to your psychologist
the title will be: "I still can't go to sleep."

yeah

yeah, well the only way to live is to struggle

and i plan to be too dumb to criticize

so i guess i got that going for me

skald

i am suttungr the giant
and i am older than age

wrapped in skins i stitched
by hand, in it a club of gnarled oak braids

i have lived before glory
and known no heroes days.

now i walk in their meadhall
my horn overfilled, but no cup do i take

they call themselves gods
but god sits in another plane

and he is neither fair nor blond
but thick and fat and terrible plain.

a terrible mallet chained to his wrist
over the crystalline lattice of metaphors make

and he lets it loll over the gods
their halls, thrones, glasses edged in gold and scraped

clean by elders ken, by hammer and pick and
man and woman and child gone already to fate.

on a day i will wake up face down in a cowpat
cold and licked by cattle in a dranksick state

and look about me and see that the gold is in the ground again
with the old bones, and the clock's weight


and there will be no gods to question suttungr the giant
for i am older than age

bulimic sifu

within this discussion of elliot rodger i know you long for me to see myself as the cracker ratchet, popping caps with trigger snatches of the clapping gadget but you know not the direction of the erection so why so automatically evaluative? why expect me to admit truth? when you ask me why i say i hate white people i say that the truth of the matter is not the end of it, that the truth of the matter is a vomited mess whose penny-worth will come from the convincing lies told about its width, its chunky consistency, its terrible stench. male, white, middle-class, privileged, and a serial comma. a long and terrible argument, but it's probably not 50/50, it's probably kinsey. a spectrum of boring, meaningless good and boring, meaningless evil, spread from subject to period, from white to white. it's ugly even for oxford to discuss these multiple clauses; it makes a truly cruel and unusual sentence to try for a spectrum of whites.

but truth is never a spectrum, oh truth is hot and bothersome, holding truth, being right. sexy and frustrating, oh so frustrating. these are the words spoken today and the words that readers hear: frustration is sexy. sexy is frustration. being right is sexy and being right is frustrating. being frustrated is right. being sexy is frustrating. but writing can be very satisfactory, and a really good written lie is to truth what orgasm is to frustration; because frustration is complicated, and nothing simple was ever really true.

i imagine a monastery, a gathering of students and journeypersons and teachers and masters. a wise elder approaches, to general apprehension. a silence rolls through the crowd like the opposite of a wave, like the end of sound. wonder abounds: she has not imposed herself on the world so very many times. her robe does not flap. she does not leave footprints. when she reaches the chess set in the center of the room she astounds: there are two chairs set on either side of the chess set, but she sits in neither of them. her eyes are like dinner plates, her mouth wooden, lips closed. Her tongue slides out like the swift hand on a grandfather clock, swinging around pursed lips. Her latex-gloved hands pick up the first piece and she begins swallowing them whole, until the board is empty and her stomach is painful. She turns towards the students with pain and suffering in her eyes and vomits. this antsy kasparov, this rubber-gloved grand master, she picks up each sticky piece and wipes it clean until she can strip the gloves and bag the paper. the students applaud. her essay goes largely unread, but it sits on many bookshelves. on most copies there is a sticker on it that covers the first three letters of her name: it is the Pulitzer prize.

i ask without knowing the answer: why praise the falsehood of rare truth? why write as the bulimic sifu, who eats up truth and vomits it back in a gallant mess.  am i to imagine i am not imagining? is my body imposing on you its existence when my eyes make alchemy of sights seen? i hear your complaints like a pestle on wood. i feel you smash and grind the paste into me and make mention of my slowly appearing wooden specks, my imperfections that the paste did not ask for. perhaps your stick tickles the compound and tries to purify it in the disguise of your eyes, motes softly reflected as you add splinters with each swing of your axe, timber. reporter, reporter. see that the conversation between you and me should never be the truth. treat me like a societal problem and just let me lie.