circe, a chapter

eRIC DAVID HELMS

from the“Circe” Chapter of Ulysses

Ora vides Hecates in tres vertentia partes,

servet ut in ternas compita secta vias.

1.
Bloom for bloom. Out of true.

The little story of a day.

In a concave mirror's slack,

The blue door we found

Convex

By cause of its causes,

Out of tune, bound

By Pythagoreans

To open up

To drains, clefts.

The yellow-black

Engines of cesspools

Where, among other things,

The plump outlying green grin,

Though diminished, is still unstuck.

A branchless Maple

Waving in Japanese

To an obliging face

Or digital system

Of faces may think

(In the month of Hell)

Otherwise, or as with

The puddle, the surface

On which the image

Of such waving

Shrinks to the moist

Gordian stain of nôt . . .

Though it's the seminal neck

Belonging to an Elm

That will harbor

A sailor like Popeye.

Yes. A sailor

Like Popeye who,

Having climbed

Beyond the half-

staff of 'never-more,'

Will find

The long dry

Quip

Of himself at the rocking top,

Wavering like a dusty red

Kerchief--quite laid out,

Becalmed--in a stultifying zone . . .

Not so much Homer’s Odyssey

Or White Teeth's fang-

loaded glare,

But for

The 'mull'

In mulligan

Do the missed

Trains of thought

Steer out from the self-

same tunnel

And, as a top

Might spin,

Out to blue sky,

yellow sea--

At dawn. Off Hickory's dock. The yolk in the sky dropped every morning

Is left to fry. All the King's horses and men (with hammer's knock & little squills)

Are quite in the throws, off Hickory's dock, trying to put Humpty back together,

Again, into some sort of sorts; and have most recently lost their senses, singing

The corpse a favorite bed-time lullaby. Gold splinters rain off the crown of Allah,

Fall soft as snow 'round a dead rat's eye plus one purple rubber-glove turned chew-

toy. At dawn. Lvcyfvr. Lvcyfvr. No evil star pinned above the flat drifting barrel

Of tedium's dream-fog in which in which in which in which 1 drop, 3 times,

Of mercury will reverse if not save the weatherman from his daily poisonings

As he further conceives the real & actual world painted by the sleep talk of a mime's

oscillations.

West of the beehive. The mime again. Is screaming, ''Mulligan," Chewing on the cud

Of the bone as to what it might mean to 'mull' around, grinding the verb to a fine powder That this mime will send up the rail yard of its nose, somewhere far off, on a carnival's putt-putt wayfarer course, and now in the itch of a sandtrap, closing in upon the cake of whatever Van Gogh's ear might have scratched. 'Mull,' a term that if one works steadily enough Without accomplishing much will tip the more curious reader into the very unease of Pessoa's tedium & disquiet as a cow freshly tips over, & over the moon, out the image, Where the Arthritic crossroads ripely hath been stapled to foreground, for such Dada focus--

Notwithstanding how the reader as he or you or she or even I retie their double-strapped Mental tourniquet before diving off, altogether, the board. Into my next brain pool-

puddle of farts.

For 'closest possible birdie' I'm screaming 'par,'

And with only one putterer, 'par! Again!, par!'

A play on 'parlet,' which may let a gang of snarks

Know that, by King David's slingshot,

I've retrieved the parrot on stage

But only to realize he was me.

In hindsight the parrot was me

Attached by shoelace string

To rosy dawn's rooster

As she yawns and yawns

And walks her crooked,

Straight lines like the first

And second hands of a put-

back-together clock.

For 'closest possible birdie'

I'm screaming 'par,'

On a course known

By both brain & heart.

The heart of Nietzsche,

A candy apple heart

Sawed for jigsaw,

The puzzle which

You're still ironing out,

For fun? Life. It goes no-

where. Life. It blows

And blows and blows.

The short distance left behind the page's final cleft

On which a snail hangs ten, slowly pasting its meaning(s)

Into a rhapsodic pulp. That her trail of slime shows

No consistent finish must mean something pertaining

To the glue of any giant gorilla or elephant clue left behind.

XI.

The first sea tortoise ever to needle her neck past a dead-man's float

And from the surf's chalk outline nods back to the start of this very

Marathon for which sly hare & fox are still quite boxed-in, left behind.

XII.

That all of this might read for getting hit by the same red door, twice.

And speak for such a fat lottery draw of footnotes.

Meanwhile, I've been trying to think with both pinch & bite,

To hear the very thunk of Joyce’s aspiration

For his flock

To see 'all of it.'

XIII.

But through a chink in the slot.

To see 'all of it.'

A flock of roosters

Busy with waking each other

Up & up & up?

XIV.

That there 'ought'

To be a place

‘Where the eye can think,
The mind read'

Carries me yet

To ground zero

Of my next outpost

In an eagle's nest

Of dead screws & bolts,

A few lightning rods

Scrounged from God-

knows-where.

XV.

Convexly.

Otherwise,

Perversely,

Another

Nod

Joke

Amuses

As it is

& was with

Murphy--

With thou hands clapped

To thy head, to thy feet.

To thy stomach

Where the urine still runs.

XVI.

After counting

Every marble

In an audience,

The hoche-prunier

Will come to us

As a tech-laden

Zacharius,

Biting into a plum

Below a smart cloud,
Its holy tenth-

Century pillar of rust--

XVII.

Meanwhile,

Popeye plum-

lee shakes

Up the bag

Of a balding

Tree.

Apples,

Bananas,

Plums,

God' candy

Falls

From

The skids

Of Eden's organic [sic]convine .

The breath tightens her throngs.
The butter baths in the sun.
The song sours, being too fun.

XVIII.

By swallowing the fact, ‘if we had no body, we would have no mind,’

We merely moisten the mad hatter's tongue
As he tightens the handcuffs that grip the porcelain

Of our wrists

And so fasten us into the Helter of another bleeding bind.

IXXX.

As to why and for how long, by both penny & dime,
The stylus hath been weighed--I plan on the audience

Being ready to receive through ear

A Mike Tyson punch.

That you might hear one final nuclear scratch

Before the 'holy crunch'

Of a gymnasium door coming bright

Off her hinges.

A gymnasium door coming bright off her hinges

For which we all keep scratching our heads

Like Biden in front of his own tele-prompted world,

And even after we've all been belayed into the dirt,

To keep scratching our heads at the gymnasium door

Means even that I've bailed without clew or 'ball of yarn'

To trace any reliable grasp of distance--deciding

For my higher purpose, in the meanwhile, to take

The raw football header that should make for 'all exits.'

XXXI.

As for my next fit of disquiet
I’ll hammer my own thumb
To the chopping block
Of this poem and plead

To Thoth as I trade smiles

With another alarmed crocodile--

In hope of ‘a plummetly plum-plum,'

In hope of knowledge, Eve's first

Little scarlet bite?’

XXXII.

The balding actor does not hesitate,

Does not scour, tumbling off the south

Of the stage, into an Orchestra’s pit,

Branded by Nathanial's scarlet letter.

XXXIII.

A black swan stage dive that turns to sound the kick drum

That all the while was waiting for such a homerun pitch.

The balding actor does not hesitate, knowing how vinyl

Will skip and scratch and skip like south Florida' s sour

Patch of surf, her salty waves of dumped plain facts

Still rehearsing a bleached sense of foreplay in the brain's

Sheet of rap.

XXXIV.

Some lists go on. Some rabbits, silly or false, stop at nothing.

You take the elevator 2,000 stories down. Then exit the door.

You take the elevator 2,000 stories down. Then wake up.

Pull the pin like a grenade from the alarm clock and yawn.

You wake up. Somewhere north of the Nerbudda,

Inside the Wonka pages of a pop-up book

Wherein each page centers around the same clench

Of shadow's stalk, the same clench of shadow's stalk

For which the knuckle-white mind flashes back to Neary

And his quip of wise crack--about life being all jutted figure,

All sagged ground on one's contested bird path to find home.

Some lists go on. The ox-hide drum of one Energizer Bunny

Stops at nothing, Bang!, Boom!, announcing the comic-

Book punches of a masked Bruce Wayne. Bam!, Boom!, Bang!

Somewhere north of the Nerbudda, 2,000 stories down.

The demented pulp of some Beach Boy's pinball smile popping up

By the lick of her black tongue, from my own fictive ground.