The Crimson Scold

Seven cardinals
were in my backyard
             today after the rain

swift red swooping gliders
perching bijou
and red in branches

in the green December
wild brush trees.

Croatian: Spin-Off . An Anthology of Recent American Poetry

European type of surrealism is close to the poetry of Henry
Kanabus (the logic of dreams, magical landscapes, the conversion of linguistic
into pictorial, brevity and completeness, quirky
the American poetic statement)*

 

*Sibilia Petlevski

Prelude (Infant In Tall Grass)

I remember
a white horse
leaping over me
eclipsing the sun
and my mother scooping me
out of the coral
to her considered safety.

Who Can Like That

3.

Who can like that?

I must admit I dislike
seeing human life

compared to something smaller than itself

making love
compared to a comma

death to periods.*

*Ted Berrigan


Albert Mobilio, writing in the Voice Literary Supplement, observed: “Creeley has shaped his own audience. The much...diluted minimalism, the compression of emotion into verse in which scarcely a syllable is wasted, has decisively marked a generation of poets.”


Birth
Awareness
,
Descent
.

Dear Joan

I remember leaving Chicago

After not not sleeping
tossing random items into the Altima
escaping not moving

books and treasures
in the curbed dumpster
hated neighbors
scavenging within

dumpster-diving for computers
I took one from the hands of a father
and smashed it onto the street
with blue eyes vacant
and dead calm

Toys were another matter
I put them all on the red front porch
and the Spanish kids
swarmed onto them
asking “how much” their eyes wide
and hopeful

Its all free . I said
I was in La Raza
Lord of the Flies

So dangerous with generosity
strapped with a 9
and speaking
in tongues...

Lethal drugs
boiled like human soup
in the crooked spoon

A perfect rose
bloomed in the dropper.

Churched

I prayed in a church today
The poem by Jesus
Our Father who art in heaven

This couple was pleasant
greeted me and listened
to my triangular thinking
and Played and sang
Amazing Grace.

I was barefoot and strapped
left my beer on the Missouri gravel

It was comfortable inside
Newly paved Christians
on a one note
two hour crusade

I’m never going back

And A Father Man

(for Michelle)

“Curtain falls on the psycho play”
the audience leaves
hurriedly

mumbling obscenities.

Nick 
9/3/2015

Poet Henry Kanabus

Things I Do Every Day

(after Ted Berrigan)

Consider dreams
                or shake them off
Take 40mgs of Oxycontin
Don’t see a cat
Remove two pistols from my bed
Smoke a Decade Red cigarette

Drink two cans of Miller High Life
as breakfast
Think of Lucia
Wipe traces off my computer
                 from the previous day
(Wise Care 365 . Bleach Bit . Glary Tracks Eraser)

Enjoy the Rush of the OXY
smoke another cigarette

Go online . Change my IP to Europe
hit www.io9.com
Cyber on Imvu - virtual world
                 (can’t stand to be touched)

Write poems and forum comments
Check out the latest on Security sites

Take more drugs
Pause movies
Arrange my guns on the mattress
Reappear in dreams

The Marching Morons

Make up your fucking mind

who can like that

and who can’t

The great granite shapes

Hey fuck you
strip-mining your work

like some scam

like some sonnet

Recycled bullshit

is still bullshit

Rip off an obscure Western

and make it into a play

let Arnie direct it

You’re not 'notable'

he says

Neither impaler

nor impaled

Even Eddie grabbed a professorship

Fuck it

It is good . Absence

Sing wrote:

Sing wrote: I'm still laying here with wetness between my legs, my thighs are even wet, and the long slippery strands have managed to seep against my sheets, wetting them. My nipples are still hard, and my body hasn't stopped tingling yet. My legs are like rubbery limbs, weak around the knees for you. I can imagine you, tasting your wet kiss on my lips, and the sound of your voice thickly whispering dirty things in my ear as you hammer and pound my slutty little cunt, calling me names as you claim this pussy. Your hands are all over me, fingers calloused and thick rubbing my velvety skin, my clit aches, and my body craves for you, it never stops... and all I want to do is cum over and over and over for you.... surrendering to my darkest desires... gratifying our secret fantasies and our darkest fetishes. Mmmm ... till we meet again sweet Nick.

Once I Kissed a Woman and Nothing Happened #3

I remember
Once I Kissed a Woman and Nothing Happened

BUDDHA ON THE BOUNTY (by Ted Berrigan)

                                      for Merrill Gilfillan
"A little loving can solve a lot of things"
She locates two spatial equivalents in
The same time continuum. "You are lovely. I
am lame." "Now it's me." "If a man is in
Solitude, the world is translated, my world
& wings sprout from the shoulders of 'The Slave' "
Yeah. I like the fiery butterfly puzzles
Of this pilgrimage toward clarities
Of great mud intelligence & feeling.
"The Elephant is the wisest of all animals
The only one who remembers his former lives
& he remains motionless for long periods of time
Meditating thereon." I'm not here, now,
            & it is good, absence.

Blood Religion

Ram Fish

I'd kick the shit out of you so hard 
that the gerbils in your ass
would be transported to the future.

Thule and Afi . German Nationalist

WolfPunk at 2013-11-02 06:04 CET: 

@sistromo 'definitive work' by Bugliosi? Is that a joke? The same dullard who compared Charlie Manson to Adolf Hitler; yeah he's an Corner Stone. Manson, after being convicted by the Press, would have been found guilty if he had been Prosecuted by Bozo the Clown.

Cop Car with Bullet Wounds

We were scoring 
on a side street off Halsted
Flaco had come through
His flame tattooed Chevy
had circled the block twice
then stopped for the gathered junkies

We were heading back to 
our car
when a police cruiser
appeared like evil
and two plain clothed Hispanics
told us to give up our dope

Lil Jerry cut the talker
across the face
he fell and we stomped him

Those weren’t cops . he said

On the driver’s side
There were bullet wounds in the door.

Southern Vote

They came over

in good spirits

smoked some bud they brought

over I rolled some kif

adding Decade tobacco

explaining the thermodynamics

We talked of the Southern Vote

and how .guv buys the laws

with snatch-and-snap Riders

He knew about those

brought it up in fact

his old lady already drunk

from red scotch whiskey

(my house-keeper)

in a red plastic glass

We talked of Kennedy’s suicide

open-topped

down roads with

his head in cross-hairs

plastered on waring house walls

Head shot.

This Is Just To Say (by William Carlos Williams)

*illustration by Robert Crockett

German Painting . Girth of Goldfish

Lets do some civilized shooting on the paper
lets open the ninth gate

Here on this terrain
is fought a battle
between silence
and verbalization

I enter a room
as if I were a designer
and hang the syllables
in quick valence patterns

Its an airport canvas
and your mental settings
which we call master

I can always go somewhere else

Shopping In Arkansas

We piled into the van like goats

going to slaughter

There was a giddiness in the air

They giggled and laughed

their nearness to each other

proximity of bodies

all in work-clothes

some wearing slippers

others boots caked with red clay and mud

it had snowed

snow makes us all children.

We went into town to the mall

all dispersed to run their errands

Food in plastic sacks was laid

on old clothes and forgotten toys

there were some tools there also

The driver spotted the sheriff

in his official car

She withered in half fright

“I have no state plates” she said

“hope he don’t stop us”

I hoped so too

not telling her I was packing

a loaded automatic pistol.

They commented on my house being buried in woods

“can hardly see your roof...

almost missed it”

There was a brief goodbye

and someone helped me bring the food

into the fortress.

Tale of the Righteous Reverend (for Ted Berrigan)

(Restored fragment from The Canterbury Tales . Revised Edition)

He did a bad bad thing...

The blizzard is from God

to make the Land white

and cover our dark sins

til we repent

said the pastor of “His Place”

(no shit, for real. sounds like a strip club)

to the empty church

- the parishioners snow bound in tin cabins

on wheels

He liked the resonance of his voice

not muffled by the bodies

of trailer-trash

that constituted his flock

He continued:

The great white blizzard

(it wasn’t a blizzard . there was no wind)

descends on us like teats

weaning our lustful desires

He dropped 3 more tabs of Oxycontin

10mgs . Lily

washing them down with Communion wine

The blizzard thrusts snow flakes

the size of your grannie’s pie apples

up our anticipating ass-holes

He was inspired by the adulating silence

only his trained oratory

returning to his ears

The blizzard is like the sheet

covering me and the whore of Babylon

as we copulate in Revelation times

The Blizzard is like the cumm

of angelic alter-boys

as they swarm like cupids above me

Lines from ‘Howl” which he had

masturbated to as a child

during its ‘banned in Boston’ trial

spasmed through his head

The blizzard is the wrath of the Christ

snuffing fucking dopers

in the junk-sick morning

The church had begun to shelter

a few late believers

They sat in the oaken pews

drop-jawed more than usual

stunned by what they were hearing

He was oblivious in his reverie

his Rapture had come

he went on and on til he climaxed

.

The pastor was shut up

in a 3rd floor mental ward

proclaimed to be suffering

from sanctimonious insanity

and later convicted of 2 unsolved

sex-crimes that

had long been troublesome

for the County cops.


2.

The Tiny Poets

Groceries and lovers

on your to-do list

likes and dislikes

like a center-fold bio.

He loves these things

He is not thinking

Who can like that..?

Future Life . The Land of Mist

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

distraught by the death of his son

and his own advancing age

had his adventurous character

the explorer - Challenger (The Lost World)

convert to Spiritualism

in his 1926 novel ‘The Land of Mist’

“They are held to earth by pious memory...

for they die with unused vitality

which may be expended upon revenge.

That is why I disprove of Levity

The dead rich man pauses

before the lovely dwelling

Too heavy with matter to rise

above the earthly plane.”

In North America

Conan Doyle

clashed with Harry Houdini - the illusionist

argued that all spiritualists' tricks

could be duplicated by a competent magician.

Doyle insisted that Houdini himself

had ethereal powers, just didn’t know it

The magician dismissed him as a fool

“Sherlock Holmes famously disbelieved in vampires and spooks”

Doyle died of a heart attack at the age of 71 in East Sussex, on 7 July 1930.

Holmes, reclining on a French divan

taking a long drag from his church-warden pipe

injected a massive dose of cocaine

with a morphine chaser

and was heard to say to Doctor Watson:

“This House is no longer haunted.”

Going for the Golden Clasp

A mouthful of Fuck

and desert death

infantile women

tended by dolls

and love / hate families

with ties in bad anthropology

MK-Ultra self-shattering whims

of a Spaniard ‘shaman’

with no grasp of separate realities

“The nagual’s sperm isn’t human …

Don’t let any of the nagual’s sperm out,

It will burn away your humanness”

That seems accurate...

“Patricia Partin, Castaneda’s adopted daughter

as well as his lover, disappeared.

In February 2006

a skeleton found in Death Valley, California

was identified through DNA analysis as Partin’s.”

https://www.salon.com/2007/04/12/castaneda/

Girl in Magnolia Tree

Candy Cigarette by Sally Mann . Printed: 1989

The young Southern girl

dances to Elvis on the limb of the swamp tree

hound dog howling like a .45 auto fo sho’

You ain’t looking for a woman

you just be looking for a hoe

Cottonmouths birth from the tall grass

unpleasant and beautiful as they writhe

through great muddy waters

beneath her.

Boulder Revisited

Poetry Slams 

Were a cynical and vulgar attempt

to monetize Poetry

By promoters

who could barely

produce poesy

Gregory Corso - the great Beat Poet

(drunk and sucked into this sideshow)

lost a "Slam"

to a shipping clerk

who ranted about Poe's Raven and Coleridge's Albatross

having read neither

since grammar school.

Once telling me

that he never read Poetry

only Carlos Castaneda

and Ed

He had dropped

his jeans for a priest one day

when he was 20 years old

to see if he was Gay.

In Boulder, Colorado

at the 25th anniversary

of the publication of "On The Road"

he told poet Lewis MacAdams

that his major interest in 1957

when Jack Kerouac's novel was published

was Mousketeers Annette's

pubescent tits.

Drugi o Sveskama...

Poetry is the last sphere
of freedom in a world based
on mediocre values
and globally predictable messages.

Poetry does not sell
yet it continues to exist:
I write in different genres
poetry encompasses all my interests

It is theatre when I perform it
It is prose when I live it.*

*Sibila Petlevski

Colonel Burton C. Andrus (Jailer of Nazi War Criminals)

Mondorf Interrogation Center, Luxemburg . May 1945

There is power in his eyes

he is not afraid

“god bless our weapons” - Goebbels

Goering - “a soft sybarite

wearing rouge and dropping 40 para-codeine tabs a day...

The first thing I noticed

was his painted fingernails”

“To their eternal shame

he was wined and dined by American air-force men”

Eisenhower told them to treat

Goering “as the gangster and criminal he was”

During the Nuremberg Trial a two hour film was shown

of death camps

Goering protested, saying the footage had ruined

a perfectly pleasant day.

The true unpleasantness of war

is all the fucking dead people

                                      staining the steel and glory

                                      with rivulets

of tainted blood.

Ernst Röhm's Wet Dream

Arkansas . A Citizen

Tourism in this town
is a myth
spun by the town council
to make its populace
feel important and interesting
enough to visit.

The “mudding” events the old resident said
bring in a lot of people

I’m sure they do -
rednecks who like to see
mud splattered onto the blouses
of their fat girlfriends and wives

a pick-up truck variation
on a wet tee-shirt contest
only dirtier.

At night they liquor dream
of sow women
wrestling each others clothes off
in rope-a-dope styes 
as they toss pork rinds.

and erotically kiss the ‘nigger hanging tree’
on 4th street and Vine.

Check the tires
on your house, lady
I think you’ve got a flat
unbalancing your beta-wave incites.

A citizen.

Southern Belles . Alarming

On the way to the closed

free clothing store

in an old van strewn with empty ‘sodie’ cans

and diapers

the two sisters spoke of their brother

seeing a woman in another small town

who had argued with her

about her husband being in jail

for abusing animals

Not knowing she was married

he hit the road

to call one sister

to pick him up

at night in winter

on the black-top  highway

When she got there

he was back at the woman’s house

and they had settled their differences

As I flicked my cigarette 

out of the vehicle’s window

both sisters said simultaneously:

“but we won’t gossip about him.”

Cat Post

A calico cat
sleeps on my roof
in the sun

I call him Jesus
cause he's
                   above me

HEROIN

I remember my best friend David

coming to my apartment

on a Tuesday morning

junk-sick

He was a good looking kid

of 20

worked for an ambulance service

wanted to be a medical technician

and then a Doctor

One problem only - he loved heroin

I gave him 20mgs of Methadone

from a 40mg ‘wafer’

I had gotten at the clinic on Broadway

in New Town

He went to score anyway

with “Bear” (Big John - who was later to

murder “Snake” with a Bowie knife in the car

where Snake slept)

I should have copped for David

but it went down like this:

John knew the dealer

David paid for John’s hit

John gave David a bag

then left him alone to shoot it.

Laura (David’s girlfriend) found him

sea blue in a sofa

Dead from an O.D.

At the funeral his mother

gazed at us

not with rancor or contempt

but with pity . almost sympathy

as if we were already dead

like her young son, David.

I walked up to the casket

didn’t kneel

looked at him and loved him

He had been so bright

we had stayed up all night often

playing chess

and talking

about History and antiques

He had a brass bed, which Laura loved,

and a porcelain wash basin

with a matching pitcher in it

on his Victorian night stand.

I put a new syringe (a 27)

along with a folded foil bag

of China White heroin

into his vest pocket

occulting the gesture with my body

as I kissed his forehead

-A morning hit

for when he awoke
                                  in Rapture.

Jim Nightshade

I remember staying up all night

reading a Ray Bradbury novel

before I saw it at the Portage -

a movie theater in Chicago

I sat in a maroon

plush velvet chair

watching the film three times over

And hearing that he had cried

at the screening

of his “long awaited novel”

made me uncomfortable.

Black Meat (Redux)

I remember getting 100 copies

of CARAPACE

and losing most

                   in a Polish flood

www.HenryKanabus.blogspot.com

I remember Little Jerry (a charismatic kid

and Park junkie)

ripping up the copy I gave him

then asking for another

two hours later

I last saw him in a transient apartment

shooting Mexican Mud with his son

his wife had left him

for a “queer” he said

as he passed the outfit to his boy

Peter, a young friend of mine,

was made to pan-handle on street corners

for Jerry’s dope money

not to be shunned

and homeless.

I remember Snake

a Paregoric user

opening a package of meat

wrapped in tin-foil

he had received from an old lady

He opened it proudly

on a green park bench

All waited to see what the fortunate man

had been gifted

The foil tore open

white maggots fell to the concrete

having festered

                            in the black meat.

Snake was stabbed to death

a few month later

in the car he had slept in

I knew who killed him.

(the killer died of an overdose two years later)

www.heroinpoems.blogspot.com

On Not Going South (for the Winter)

A crested wren
alights on a snow laden branch
                                     ungracefully

it raises its wing
to the West and preens
the hard snow from its feathers

clutching the elm tree
to be perfect again
         in the wrong season
         in the wrong latitude.

Coat of Arms (The Clan)

A Short Summary of Origin

  canabee  ,  canavos  ,  english  ,  kanabes  ,  kanabos  ,  kanabu's  ,  kanabus  ,  kanabusowka  ,  kannavo  ,  laskaris  ,  ανωχωρα  ,  βυζαντιο  ,  ιωαννης  ,  καναβεικο  ,  μυστρας  ,  ναυπακτος  ,  νικολαος   

Article by: Benoît Kanabus

I try to summarize the scattering of our clan, according to the history I know. Please add or emend information according your own family archives and knowledge:

- From 10th (990) to 15th century (1453), the well-known Kanabos noble lineage lived in Constantinople, around Blachernae area (northwestern section of the city) where is still the church St Demetrios Kanabos (also called St Demetrius Kanabus in Latin, Kanabu's in Turkish, even "Canabée" in French...W).

- In 1204-1205, after the Sack of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders and above all the assassination of Nikolaos Kanabos (or in Latin Nicolaus Kanabus), a few Kanabos went to Greece and ended up at Nafpaktia and Mistra.

[- Nikolaos Kanabus was, we know well, Sebastos (to render the Roman Imperial title of Augustus), then elected Emperor of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.  (It's the last known act of the Roman Senate founded in 753 BC...). Nikolaos would be a relative of the Angelos Imperial dynasty, founded by Konstantinos Angelos from Philadelphia (1096)…]

- In 1453, after the Fall of Constantinople and Ottoman occupation, the Kanabos family left Constantinople to go to Greece.

- But… the last Kanabos living in Constantinople was the Prôtégoros (Lord Mayor) Laskaris Kanabos (1454), a relative of Laskaris and Kantakouzénos Imperial dynasties. His wife was also a relative of Constantin XI from Palaiologos dynasty, the last Emperor of Byzance.

- In 1683, after the Battle of Vienna, lost by Ottomans, won by the Polish King John III Sobieski, the Greek private I. Kanabos was a prisoner of war in Wilanow (Warsaw). He had descendants, the Kanabus (Latin form of our surname because of Polish administration) living actually in Poland. Family estate near Wilanow call “Kanabusowka” - exactly the same name as the estate “Kannabeiko” in Ano Hora/Nafpaktia (Greece).

- In the 18th century, some Kanabos fled Ottoman persecutions to Italy where one district of the Reggio Calabria city is called in Calabrian Greek “Kannavo” (phonetically transliterated) or "Cannavo" in Italian. (Warning: I personally don’t know this part of family history and I am curious to get more information).

- In the 20th century, some Kanabos (phonetically transliterated Canavos) immigrated to USA from Greece (1930), from Poland (1945-1949), and to Belgium and France from Italy and Poland (19??)…

- So, Church St Demetrios Kanabus (Constantinople), estate Kannabeiko (Greece), estate Kanabusowka (Poland), district Kannavo (Italy), yes, we will be proud: our clan across the universe.

The Red WheelBarrow (by William Carlos Williams)

*illustration by Robert Crockett

The Event Horizon

"The Disobedience, eyes, anyone who has read History, is the Principal Virtue of Man.  From
disobedience is born Progress.  Disobedience and Rebellion are one.

Disobedience, in The Eyes of whosoever HAS read history, Is the Cardinal Virtue of Man.
Progress is born of Disobedience; all great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience as well"

Pagans

He got tired

of being afraid of fear

afraid of god when there was

No god

afraid of fear

when he was alone

(which is ridiculous)

“we got guns, we got guns

                              mother fuckers better run”

Huge granite shapes of anguish

out to snuff your dumb lying ass.