Queen Of This Realm

On Encountering Fouquet in the Circle
It's the heretics' gift to see what's far ahead
But never what is under her own nose.
But you may ask a question of the dead:

Yes, you are immortal; there are those
Who'll never hear of how the bishop lied
But only hear of songs that you composed,

And how, reformed, you joined the other side
To devote yourself to rid the world of ones
Who with the body said the spirit dies--

So kill their spirits, first, then kill their sons.
No, have no worries they'll forget your name
More perfect than the perfect on their tongues

(More than a thousand with me here are lain)
Or that your deeds might someday come to light
And you, as with your God, would know disdain--

Our tombs are open; yours is shut up tight.

Folquet de Marselha was a troubadour who had a sudden change of heart and became a monk. It was a fine career move, because he eventually became Bishop of Toulouse; just had to help kill off a lot of his former party pals to get there. The prompt for today from NaPoWriMo was to do a terza rima. I tried to work in some of Canto X, which is about chatting with the heretics and has a disputed line.

The Laziest Gal In Town

I missed a day yesterday, so I wrote myself an absence note. The altarpiece of the Albi cathedral depicts a last judgment complete with the Deadly Sins--except they forgot Sloth. So it's the Six Deadly Sins. Doesn't have the same ring, does it?

The Sin of Omission
How could anyone neglect sloth?
On seeing your altarpiece, I feel a flicker of hope
That this poor fool might dodge the flames on a technicality.
I confess to lapses from time to time in all six other sins,
But it is in sloth that I excel. At night, when others find peace
In their beds, I'm too lazy to do the same, and can't be bothered
To leave the table, or the fireside with the bottle, or the dance.

At best you'll find me on my back, with other sins having their way,
But still I won't have the gumption to lie down and pursue dreams.
Of sloth, I am a mason and a scholar and even a king--
By great industry I steer clear of plans and goals,
Letting the day take each of my songs where it may,
Singing what the spirit moves, and thus exploiting
Even the energies of the muse, but never, God forbid, my own.

The work of mending my pockets is too much,
So I am scolded for letting my coins fall to the road,
Where beggars pick them up. I can't stir my mind
To recall where I last put that bread or bottle down;
If you should find them, please take them as you need.

And fashioning an end to this song is more effort still
I will not make, not for you, though you might whine:
Fool, your song is endless, what is your point?
I won't trouble to leave a trail for you to follow my wit;
Sloth, now named a virtue by the priests, determines it.

Now, if I were brought before the Inquisitor, I'd be too
Indolent to answer a single inquiry, but would swat my hand
As at a fly and volley the questions back at him. Why,
I would ask him, have you chosen to curry favor with sloth?
You yourself seek your comfort, giving the truth
To my grandmother's proverb: For every ass there is a seat.

Any penalty you devise serves only to magnify
My indolence: Hang me, and you put another man to work,
With the earth itself pulling at my heels, and even
That last discipline, that of my bowels, relaxed. Burn me,
And a bigger pack labors, for the sake of the stake,
The ropes, the tinder and the cart. Have mercy,
And let this altered liturgy be your guide, as sin
Has guided me, and praise this fool now as a saint,
Pope Sloth the First the name that I should take.

Tower of Power

The Riddle of the Wall
What would they say if these bricks could talk?
They'd tell of the secrets sealed up by their strength
By its rosy reach and its wretched length
If these bricks could talk.

Where would they go if these bricks could walk?
They'd clamor and clump up the spiral stair
And pitch from the top of the bishop's lair
If these bricks could walk.

What would they ask, if they could desire?
Not to witness the evil that men conspire
But if they must serve, to avoid the fire
This is what bricks desire.

Image: Depiction of the building of the Tower of Babel.

Beat

Not so well thought out. Tough day.
Epic Man
Rock wall on your left, river on your right
Right hand full of vitamins, your jumbo
Coffee in your left. Rolling down the highway,
Steering with your knees, oh, Epic Man.
You may call me a train wreck,
But my broken scrap is going for more than your
BMW in this market. Epic Man wants to show me
Everything I've missed. I'd be raking it in,
Hand over fist. A romance for the ages.
I'd be in a granite castle now if I'd stuck with you.

Image: From a really nice website about the gardens in Albi.

Mission of Burma

Today's prompt from NaPoWriMo is to write a Burma Shave poem. This is handily done from my phone and a good thing too, because the pay work is hell.

Contract Vehicle
"This plane's the bomb--
"You're dyin' to try it!"
I write these ads
But who will buy it?

Image: Me. Not making someone else do the work for a change.

Safety Is Joy

Encryption
They’re putting up a new tomb across the street;
It’s bigger than mine. They all are, these days. Good times!
Say the bearded boys as they clink their beer mugs.

While I can’t decipher the surveyors’ neon calligraphy on the streets
I do get the writing on the wall. It’s more than 10 feet tall.
One of those new pharaohs. He’d like to get us in there
But only if we make the cut. Bless his munificence;
He’s given the bums a new place to piss.

Old men, idling, speculate--
Guess how much bone is in each brick,
How many eyes wired into the walls.

For us women, it’s just another hazard.
A place to catch a heel, or bump your baby awake.
When it’s standing tall, and when it falls to ruin,
It’s all the same. It's another place to hide us.

Image: St. Cecilia, Albi cathedral

Jamalot

So I had in mind to write a country song. Maybe, if your country is Westeros. Verse, chorus, ran out of time. Back to worky work at the jobby job.

Fall
Building a castle to keep your sins
Stacking the bricks in the wall
Scaling your way to a lofty perch
You've only got farther to fall

Mighty and high is the rampart view
Keeping an eye on us all
But the number of backs that you climb upon
Are the number of miles you will crawl--
You've only got farther to fall.

Sufficient Unto The Day Is The Evil Thereof

Really sick today. Need some of the above. Left work early, and I don't know how I'll finish up. But I am keeping to my one-a-day pledge. Where are my priorities? How dare I write poems when I should be working for the Man. And if I have any time left, I should be serving someone. Who do I think I am?

But the truth is, poems are short, and this took about 10 minutes and likely shows it. I took the first words down the page of a book by the bed and shuffled them around.

I started writing poems instead of fiction because they're short. I could write them on scraps or on my phone while my child was playing, and no one would be the wiser. I hardly ever rewrite or revise, and I usually take about 10 or 20 minutes to write anything. Part of this is being an impatient, careless person, and part of it is having only scraps of time to work with. There are a lot of us in the same boat.

Tonic
Bordering the island, we made fast the preserve,
While eight gazed in such short formation,
Mobile but straight on this side. From
The deserted city to the cold brook wheel,
Gone, run down the blue winter road.

Image: Culpepper. British and from the wrong century, but rights-free.

Past These Mountains And To Seaward I Am Called

Warning: In days of old when knights were bold they had some filthy language. If that troubles you, the poem below just might be best avoided.

Me, I'm just going to watch the Blogger analytics hit the sky and tell myself it's all thanks to my irresistible poetry.

Courtly love was not much of either, but it sounds like it could have been fun. Here's a link to a lot of poetry about courtly love in English translation. Another thing the Albigensian Crusade did was put the clampdown on this whole elaborately drawn out system of fun and games. F the PoPo!

Denial Being So Fully In Your Fashion
Denial being so fully in your fashion--
It's the only way a woman's given
To direct and deflect the winds that push her--
I won't turn against the trending here.
If all say to close my ears to all entreaties (but their own to attend),
And I say this pierces my heart, but I am told
How it should not, and that I must improve my understanding
And feed not pity (but bring the dish to them), nor see your eyes that want,
Rebellion won't serve me, nor pass a glass to you.
Let's tie our hands ourselves and save them the trouble.
I will teach you as I have been taught. Repeat:
You do not want this. You do not want this.

Below is by Guilhen de Peiteu He was quite the Drama King. As the name indicates, he was from Poitiers, but he did a land grab on Toulouse and was himself a crusader. Lots of troubles with the women. Ezra Pound, that asshat, liked him.

Comrades, I have had so many bad receptions
that I cannot do without singing and grieving about it;
however, I don't want people to know my business in many things.

And I shall tell you my opinion about this:
I don't like a warded cunt nor a pond without fish,
nor boasting of base men, as if there weren't records of their actions.

Lord God, who are refuge and king of the world,
why didn't the first cunt-warden drop dead?
Because there never was service, or watch, worse than that.

Therefore shall I tell you the Law of the Cunt,
as a man who's done badly and has been repaid worse:
if other things dwindle when you take of them, the cunt grows.

And he who will not believe my teachings,
let him go see by the wood, in a reservation:
for each tree people fell, two or three grow.

And when the wood is cut, it grows back thicker
and the owner doesn't miss his profit, nor his income:
one complains wrongly about the loss, if no harm is done.

It is wrong to complain about the loss, if no harm is done.

Image: Courtney Love photographed by Paola Kudacki for the Fall 2013 Garage magazine. Yes, that's her today.

Secret Supper

I'm so demanding. I want to know everything.

Interrogatio
He said: Ask me anything. Ask me
Who will betray me. Ask me
How good he used to have it,
And how he liked those fancy clothes.
Ask everyone how much they owe me.
No, him, him too: Ask him how much.
Ask him what he does when he has no hope.
Ask him what he thinks he's doing,
Turning everyone against me. Ask me
Where he went after I threw him out.

He went off and he built himself
A whole wide world, and through
All that time, no one
Asked any questions.

Then I asked him why people
Talk the way they do, telling
No account stories. And why they act
The way they do. And I asked
How long this would go on,
And what it would be like.
I asked him why people believe
All those lies, and why they won't believe
What he says. And then I asked him
If love is always like that,
And I asked him when all this
Was going to be over.


Image: Can't track the sucker's source down, sorry.

My Heart Is Cold

Not a good day, health wise. Not a lot left. Still a lot of paying work to do.

I am babysitting two girls who just made up a poem over their pizza:

My heart is cold
Because I left it in the refrigerator
I'll heat it up
And eat it later.

I would like to claim it for my own, but that is not the poem of the day. The NaPoWriMo prompt is a lune. I hate lunes.

Little Ice Age
In the warm
Years, the wheat grew tall.
So did shadows.

Image: I have no idea where it came from or if it's even real. I liked the stars.

Let's Hear It For The Heretics!

Most think of troubadour lyrics and imagine songs of love, but political satire, or sirventes, were also popular. This might have had something to do with the troubles.

Routiers
I'm not qualified to talk
Of our Emperor's mighty forces
But I'll give it a try. He drives such
Droves before him, and with such
Eagerness they go, that they are often
Several counties ahead, while he surveys,
With the eyes of eagles, from a vantage
Sometime thousands of miles away.
Overlooking their homes, their children
Who turn the dirt and throw stones,
In eager practice for the day,
If they live to see it, that they
Might join the next crusade.
And know he keeps his forces
In fighting trim; no fat duck,
No boar, no honey for them. Our Emperor
Reserves these to his table,
Thus preserving the sharpness
Of their palates for blood in battle.
The wisdom of Our Emperor is clear:
Just look at the numbers that advance him!
See them teeming forth in such abundance
That it goes unnoticed when some fall,
Drunk, trampled in the roads, or fall
Mad with fever or the flux, or fall
Upon their fellows with their knives,
Premature to war, and kill their own,
Or adorn the trees at the end of a rope,
Or scatter their bones on the mountain crags.
Nevertheless! Their remnant marches strong!


The Song of the Cathar Wars is a puzzle in itself. The epic (written in Occitan in Alexandrines) detailing the conflicts of the era has two distinct authors. The first third is attributed to William of Tuleda, who took the point of view of the Crusaders and the Pope, a prudent if still contemptible choice. Then, two-thirds through, an anonymous author hijacks the manuscript and turns it around, and the rest of the story is told from the point of view of an author sympathetic to the people of the region invaded.

You can see how this chunk of the Songs (trans. Jan Shirley and posted on the amazing Midi-France website) does that turnaround even within itself. It tells of the death and remembrance of Simon de Montfort, the crusade leader whose actions included burning 140 people at the stake. It refers to his original tomb in the Carcassonne, where up to 20,000 people were slaughtered.

"The epitaph says, for those who can read it,
That he is a saint and martyr who shall breathe again
And shall in wondrous joy inherit and flourish
And wear a crown and sit on a heavenly throne.
And I have heard it said that this must be so -
If by killing men and spilling blood,
By wasting souls, and preaching murder,
By following evil counsel, and raising fires,
By ruining noblemen and besmirching paratge,
By pillaging the country, and by exalting Pride,
By stoking up wickedness and stifling good,
By massacring women and their infants,
A man can win Jesus in this world,
Then Simon surely wears a crown, resplendent in heaven."

Image: Discontinued, but I bet you could get it on eBay.

Nice Red Uniforms

The Language of No
I'm standing in the square
And I'm thinking, there must be a way
I can game this.
Even a child knows what they want to hear.
Even a child knows that old trick, too:
If you just tell the truth
You won't be punished. If yes,
Then penance. If no, penance,
And where is your brother.
Advance to the second round.
No child can point and say
Look, he has no clothes--
This time, they have stripped us.
This time, the square is smaller
And the sky is the top of a box,
Coming down. If yes, death.
If no, death, and where
Is your sister. The sky
Is a stone slab.


The Albigensian Crusade saw the development of the systematized, capital-I Inquisition, with sets of rules that could be applied broadly and were designed to ensure any action on the part of the accused or not accused would be a losing move, and the Inquisitor would always win. The invaders first came in and asked for simple public confessions of heresy; if you confessed, you would receive a minor punishment, but the punishment for a second offense was death, and refusal to confess as well as refusal to implicate others was an offense. Pwnd!

And it was all, of course, quite unexpected!

Will leave you with a found poem of sorts, from the translator Jan Shirley, also apparently the only translator into English of the Song of the Cathar Wars, a poem with a whole backstory in its own right. Maybe tomorrow. This is from "The Inquisitors Guide," written by a professional inquisitor, Bernard Gui, who plied his trade about 100 years after the crusade.

"There are some among them,
As fraudulent as they are cunning,
Who in order to mask
The truth and conceal themselves
And their accomplices
So that their error and falsity
Are not discovered, give ambiguous
Or obscure answers, reply
In a general and confused way,
So that no clear truth can be gathered
From what they say. For this reason
The inquisitor must use energy and skill.
People like this can and must be forced,
Compelled, to respond
Clearly and to say
Exactly what their answers mean."

Image: Wiki Commons, Expulsion of the Albigensians from Carcassone in 1209. Image taken from Grandes Chroniques de France.

Well, I'll Be Damned.

I'm STILL pissed about the Albigensian Crusade.

Albi
Brick is the characteristic material
Of the bishopric. They stacked that shithouse
High and millions strong,
The buttresses submerged in its mass.
Every effigy he could order
Stood up like fence posts against the walls,
But dig as you might, the Tarn won't
Shake loose one useful stone for your purposes.
Lots of jobs in erecting that fortress,
And still no shortage of fortresses
To storm. But you know,
He couldn't get anyone in to paint it.
Had to send pretty far afield
For the anonymous masters to conjure up
The torture scenes for the walls.
These parts had seen enough of that.

Poor Cecilia, sweet fake saint;
They say the stroke of the sword
To your neck birthed harmony.
What a laugh, your castle, what a big
Joke! 8 million bricks, and it's not over yet.

Here is the song she sang for her supper:
She would meet the angel in secret,
At night, on the road, meet him
At the third milestone, but she will not wed.

The inquisitor clicks his castanets.
You're like every daughter
Of this county; he will have you
Sing for him too.

Image: Albi Cathedral, Wiki Commons. Big boy, huh?

Time Is A Flat Tire

What happens is I can either lie in bed from 4 a.m. until 6 a.m. thinking about how my prick boss and half the drivers on the Beltway treat me like I'm a paper bag full of old lady germs and cataloging my health problems and insurance bills, or I can write a poem every day of the month of April as part of NaPoWriMo.
It's a ritual. A big, bad, fuck you ritual that ranks somewhere above sitting at my cubicle whistling the merry CeLo song and somewhere below quitting.
All respect, I do love you guys. PJ sez: you're not rid of me. All it ever takes is one word of encouragement. Let us hope that one word is not "regret."
I was going to say, there's nothing stopping you, too, from participating in this ritual, but that's presumptuous of me. For all I know, you could be trapped in an abandoned subway tunnel wearing a Cthulhu hat. But there's the link, if you wanna.
I'm not sure if I can do it. My brain is not functioning like a product of the divine clockmaker these days.
But I'm still running. Whenever I can get the aforementioned motherfucker to stop piling the work on, or when it's not as cold as Appalachia up in here.
Somewhat anticlimactic, no? You were hoping for something more cosmic horror? Next time.
Image: True Det, Bro.

Lion, Lamb; Farmer, Cowhand; Me, Gnostic Overlords

I haven't wanted to write much of anything for more than a year now, ever since I went to this editorial speed dating event sponsored by a literary magazine and one of the editors, a young woman, told me rhetorical questions in poetry are passive-aggressive and another editor, an older woman, told me how wonderful it is that I have "an outlet."

I get discouraged terribly easily. I was conceived unwanted, and things have improved only slightly since.

So I pretty much stopped everything. I've been thinking of telling various people and crying and such over the loss of writing but I just stop and think, you know, nobody gives a shit whether I'm writing or not. This is just something I'll have to try to accept with grace.

This morning I was lying in bed playing with my phone and I visited the Bibliomancy Oracle, an oracle device that uses lines from poetry, and this came up: "Do you relate more to the dove or the snake?" from the poem Form by Louise Mathias.

I thought: "Oh lord, neither," and then the rest of this poem happened. I've been obsessed for years with wondering whether the universe wants me to do any one thing or another, and it is pretty obvious that the universe does not want me to write poems, because as I was writing my daughter's shower caddy fell off the wall and my husband came in looking annoyed that I was still lying around in bed, and someone I'd been having an email dispute with buzzed me. I am also kind of an awful person (but not for any of the reasons my resentful stalkers think). But this still happened. Passive aggressive rhetorical questions, BAM!

The Dove or the Snake?
Oh lord, neither. They say they were once
The same thing, anyway. Every last animal
Presents an imperative: I will be here.
And I have no such thing, no such
Thing. I must excuse myself
For every fraction of an inch
My ribs rise with every breath.
The birds take everything:
I tell the pigeons in the parking garage,
Shitting on my grocery bags,
You do not belong here,
These are not your caves,
And the swallow flittering, scattering his lice
Above the salad bar at the Whole Foods:
Will no one put him out?
Must everything poison me?
As for the snake, agonizing over his skin,
Oh snake, nobody cares what you wear,
Nobody cares what you look like or
Whether you even show up.
Maybe a boy will poke at that
Yellowed translucence you shed,
Because children aren't afraid
Of garbage, what gets left behind.
We don't see that they've stopped
To examine it, and that shames us,
Both their license at picking at it
And the way that we walked on,
Talking, and almost lost them, again.

Here's the full Matthias poem.
Image: I stole this from an evangelical site. I don't understand why all the references to a verse about "sheep among wolves" are illustrated by pictures of a wolfj among sheep.

Dazu, Bless You

I like watching people I love when they're asleep.
Does that sound creepy?
Don't answer that.

The Sleeping Buddha
Such envy the pale segments,
Those eyelids, inspire,
Such peace, little slices
Into the dark and day, what they
Shut us away from, your dear dreams.
Would I were there in those waves,
Sweet sleeping one, how I would
Venture. Your serene lips, lids, closing
Me from your visions. Where do you fly,
Sweet baby, so late all my own?
What tugs the edges of the skin at your eyes,
Your mouth (I helped form them),
What happiness am I outside of?
All this about you is only mine
To marvel over this night.

Cargo Cult

I've become one of those people. The kind with a zombie blog.
Hello Russian women. Put on a balaclava and we'll meet secretly at the airport.

On the Box
After you drowned, your life
Was magical for a while, wasn't it?
Sexy portents, synchs, a couple
Of events some called miracles came
Easy as every breath. I could swear
I even heard a soundtrack. I know,
I was there, front row at the luau,
Picked from the tourist audience
For the cultural exchange demonstration.

Now it's all back to daily fucking bread.
And the chief, drunk on washed-up hooch,
Doesn't always remember to throw
Even that much out on the rocks for us.

You won't be happy until it happens again.
So you stack up your scavenged crates
And climb to the top and stand there.
All your calculations say
The big wave, it's on its way.

Photo: Poor, but Kathleen on the head of Shiva from the 1976 The Last Tycoon.

Paging Dr. Zhivago

Blogspot gives you all kinds of baby analytics now when you just push a button. They're apparently just wild about me in Russia. Hi, girls--you're cute! Wanna get gay married?

Unbidden
Determined to run even
A ridiculous slight distance,
And here it is: An argument
Conjured out of mud and shuffle and breath:
Poetry. Proving the mystery of art
(And love) mechanical, after all:
Insert the right amount of change
And that weird candy bar,
(Laced with synthetic vitamins and essential acids)
The kind they can't sell anywhere else,
Pops out.

Queen Bees Knees

Taken almost three months to get through Kathleen Spivack's "With Robert Lowell and His Circle." It's just a thin thread keeping me attached to somewhere besides work bed work bed work. The book is terribly in need of an editor; full of redundancies and cliches next to astounding observations. And hilariously funny in many parts. I love it; you should read it.

Despite an acutely rendered scene of afternoon tea with Mr. and Mrs. Hughes (the big dark brooder stuffed himself with tea cookies and the two carrying on a muffled Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-ian vaudeville), she's one of the few who has some sympathy for Sylvia Plath. Here's one of those artless and absolutely on-target observations: "Sylvia had no sense of humor. Ever!" That's about the size of it.

You know what Spivack gets here, she gets the money thing. She gets that Sexton used her grant to put in a swimming pool and that she caught a lot of crap for it, but that swimming pool probably did more good to more writers and artists than any fucking Intensive Program. I'd do it if anyone ever gave me a dime, which they don't, and I'd call it the Sexton Memorial Pool besides. She gets the money thing:

"According to Anne Sexton, Sylvia was paid $50 by her publishers as an advance for her first book, The Colossus. But follwing her death, several publishers advanced prospective biographers more than $20,000 each, an unheard-of sum of money in those days. So suicide increased Sylvia's worth, much as she could have used the money in her lifetime."

She gets the exhaustion, too. At a certain point, you'd just do it to get some sleep.

Golden
say what you will about her making her own bed
and making her own bread and lying
how she was so mean she wouldn't get stung
by her own bees when she yanked their honey
right out from under their bobbling asses.
she sure could have used that money.
i will tell you that money damn well does
serve to keep a woman alive in winter
with the diapers and the rashes and
her head full of pus. that money,
once, it meant coming home with her hair
fresh golded and twined goddess and
yes, he'll see me, he'll see, he'll see,
crossing paths with him, and that
as much as you'd like to say poems
and clean living and keeping an even
keel and as mad as it makes you to be
above it all like they tell you you should
even when you're on that floor that will
never come clean and as ashamed as it makes you
to admit it damn you new clothes and
smooth hair and money yes the money
yes the money would have kept her alive,
liar, it would have taken nothing more,
and that fact doesn't make her less.

Image: God knows. Her father was a bee expert, you know; she raised her own honey.