Once Quoted

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative. --Oscar Wilde

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. --Salvador Dali

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends. --Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think. --Arthur Schopenhaur

Gnawing at this Polaroid Sun

fins of fish,
bone
scrimshaw

waxen apparitions

left
daunted
in ink-
water,

leavened bronzes
polarized

the eye’s
tromp l’oeil

flanking the roe
at high tide--

a barium froth
spurts

foam, this sea
between horizon

blurred

no home
the curtain drawn
upon

ashes, all

A Tattered Genealogy

The Rain, Cometh

under cobalt sky--dulled by emulsified stars--we trace the windowpane, blue-swathed, & point toward God [where most we fear a stretched hand will cast the sunlight out

where the droplets form silhouettes out of hollowed-out precipices, ogive shrouded in darkness & what disaster the sea churns, upon its torrent-belly, moons lacquered with albumen, oil * * * I am coming home to you, blue naphtha, fire song

leave your longing light on for the sailors who’ve lost their way like so many others before the tide, a menagerie of black-grays

Happy Days

The coolest book. Ever.

Sappho as a Man

& I bleed paradise
this moment

with thought of your tongue
& mine, what grace

enraptured



feeling signifies something

in the longing birth & conclusion of body in dew

& it puzzles me

how both can transcend perfection

prothesized in a Sunday without clothes, immaculated

by wanting & have of___


for
I’ve probed
the irrealism of your animality

the sea to settle

into the potential placement of my bones

in a wave of___

or, possibility extracts from the marrow
all & nothing

nothing &__for which
I’ve worked a lifetime
to perfect as “abyss"


you kissed me, created matter

the sweet instant of


this

Five Bodies of Work

Dreams of Corrosion




1/4 Pure




Paper Doll




[in] Corporeality




Coyness of Pearl

Publication News

Hot off thee e-press:

Counterexample Poetics

The Unveiling of Xerolage #43--Grapyrus

Here it is: http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage43/by/matina-l-stamatakis

With special thanks to mIEKAL aND,
Kane X. Faucher, Maria Damon
and John Moore Williams.

Visions of Finality

paint ravens into horizon, come out of view--then into--
do not reflect on endings that have passed, but beginnings that never
were

**

they reveled in their elements, or fought against themselves wholly
chiseled into immaculate
carvings

quite Fresco

with the threat of historical destruction, wear
of too many years

gracing the same wall

**

time has come to return to remembrances
with a new wisdom of the setting sun

or the reversal of tides; mend broken glass
& fractured herring bone

[do not tell me the differences between flesh
& pumice

we have rubbed up against
each other too much; revealed

humanistic flaw, only]

**

your teeth initiated the first speech
the one I saved for my mind when

dire was the need for rhetoric


a crowd gathered
to watch explosions of thought

the danger of
& hope for carnage

**

--there is nothing left, but nothing is something

worth mentioning

Victims of the Dance

[lyrics by Tuxedomoon]


Feel like Cassandra

Dancing

The last dance of the bones

Dancing

In spite of sudden death

As is at last

She knew in a breath

We'll all be dancing

On our own

With no past

With no regrets

But Cassandra had problems

She denied a god love

and he ruined her gift of prophecy

She could see it all

But no one believed her

No one believed her when she said

We are all victims of the dance

We are all victims of the dance

and seeing the future

seeing the future

Foreseeing the future's

Not for us

It's unimaginable


We are all victims of the dance

We are all victims of the dance

We can't see the stoplights

Can't see the stoplights

With no fore or hindsight

We just go blind

DA da da da da da

We are all victims of the dance

We are all victims of the dance

We met at a dance

Was it my dream or yours?

Who knows

It was so long ago

It hit me friday evening stained with purple mirth

The longer you stay away the crazier i get

Crowded at faceless parties so gutted and sunk

Winking at the warm bodies

Taking deception for granted

Trying to dance

Just an immortal ghost

and us?

What about us

Drink

Let's have another drink on the host

Cause we are all victims of the dance

Who fall and recover

Fall and recover

and fail to discover

First things first

With an unquenchable thirst

We drink

Nautilus Spirilla

L'inconnue de la Seine

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Inconnue_de_la_Seine)


driftwood & moss ballet slow-sifted in paper skin

spider-veined the faith of grasping silhouettes

from the strain of naked nape

a violin emerges

a moment bathed in martyrdom

stomach bloated with gibbous moon waxed

in surging calm-- vertical dance before

flecked grey

soft obelisk glyphs in knotted hair--

the foreboding crest of an awakened monsoon

then recession--solitude--the dull blue pebble

form