the purpose of the pharoah is to be divine

And I’m saying to you that writing, not just poetry or even not just writing but even language and thinking, even the mind and maybe the body too, certainly the feelings and the soul governing what the body does and the spirit which sends it all messages from the writing and language and all the rest of it outside; I’m saying all this has to be wrested and torn from the dead grasp of commercial leisure reading and spiderworked masturbatory doing, stripped out of the clichés or plundered from the box of vocabulary being pissed and dipped into with greasy fingers by every songwriter and sloganeering bullshitter; I’m saying that it should be put back into the ears and guts maybe even onto dat ol' street because we gotta break out of all this dreaming once more. Did you ever notice sweetheart that it’s the assholes at war and mayhem that make the myths from lovely Orpheus to Cowboy Joe? To cover it up and say oh my look at tragic us. But groping the pony at the same time. There’s 2000 novels a minute and a million poemz and they all spin the wheels on the beach until they connect with the otherside. I’m writing from the otherside witnessing the first Armageddon in which the divine is getting real assistance from the animals. That’s what I’m gonna do. Thats what I’m saying.

Rules of The River:

1. Only a corner, a certain limited size of great horror, can be grasped. 90 bodies, not 600. One sinking boat overloaded. Two burning cars. Stained newspaper.

2. Even then you look to dream (the wrinkled blue robes, crushed cellophane, a humming sound).

3. The purpose of the pharaoh is to be divine. To bring a logic to a rhythm, flood seasons, incest, insects and the ducks rising noiselessly above the river.

4. A sleeping dream is rational. In doing it brings an absurd logic to feelings and sensations recollected or feared. The associations are rational. It follows the laws and above the natural. It is not the real world which has broken the laws. They have rotted here.

5. All life seeks to dream, to associate itself with a new size and speed easily grasped. To encompass everything. To connect differently. To feel right through.

6. Dreaming comes faster than making sense. All the men wear armbands (they don't). My loved one is crying (no). They fired at children (but the fathers did do that).

7. Dreams collide, individuals, nations, epochs. With each other. It is a storm of dust.

8. No one can read hieroglyphics (the frauds!) or old ideograms. The new ones haven't arrived yet to be buttoned into the brain. We're detached.

9. Catch feelings and logic in a folding, speeding structure, beginning middle end, not that it is a dream explained, or death of dream let alone reality. Plot, character development, fear different sleep. Forgetting in the morning.

10. Then there is the not dream, the awake! Stunned passive or embracing dream detached. Stunned white light.

Law of Lek: everything fights back

11. Non-graspable things (as chaos). Fathers shoot children, the walls collapse on the pilgrim, non-story things outside reason —outside god-making leak from my dreams.

from a bektashi cookbook

From a Baktashi cookbook:


It is amazing how you think your children are more probably doing wrong than right.

It is amazing how you think your old friends have led wasted lives.

It is amazing how you consider only silently that somehow guilt is shared.

It is amazing that you become passionately independent when others notice things you do badly.

Making dinner is to cooking as misquotation is to scholarship.

If you want to break eggs ask a tyrant for an omlette.

Farces repeat themselves, the first time is history.


Cheat: Cooking for the Distress will appear at some point in the future, published by Blue Orange Publishing.