Above the Tree Line

                         "Cada vez que abro los labios
                         Inundo de nubes el vacío."*

                                              Vicente Huidobro

Cold bitter roll

out of the sleeping bag,

flash of fire and a cigarette

frantically inhaled,

warm perch and hot coffee

in the golden morning sun--

                         nicotine, caffeine & bright light:

the animal arctic and addicted,

billowing with vapor,

ends another Ice Age night....

E. A. Costa

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N.B.: * "Every time I open my lips, I flood the void with clouds."

The Purple Cloud Of Gentle Doom (Mementos of a Polytonic)

                     “...and beneath the flag, stretched right across the house,
                      was the thing which spelled, letter by letter, in letters of light:
                      and it spelled two words, deliberately, coming to the end,
                      and going back to recommence: Drink ROBORAL"* 
                                                                                                          
                                                                                                     M.P. Shiel

Canoes:

canoes

aloes

foes

archfoes

floes

felloes

does

hoes

joes

roes

sloes

hammertoes

tippytoes

snowshoes

gumshoes

horseshoes

overshoes

& shoes

but stilletoes emphatically stilletoes even as high-heeled blues.

Undergoes:

oboes

buboes

heroes

antiheroes

superheroes

tomatoes

potatoes

throes & woes

but undoes noes and yoes.

Foregoes no-go's so:

haloes

hoboes

zeroes

viragoes

gigoloes

mottoes

flamingoes

tornadoes

tuxedoes

tobaccoes

piccoloes

buckoes

(which looks too much like backhoes in them thar hills)

bravadoes

renegadoes

desperadoes

commandoes

filibusteroes

magnificoes &

manifestoes

Yet echoes with echoes or echos, vetoes vetoes and never banjos banjoes.

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man,

when was the Great Vowel Shift

& should there be a comma before the and?

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa     October 24, 2016   Granada, Nicaragua

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N.B.: *Alise Bulfin, “'One Planet, One Inhabitant': Mass Extermination In M. P. Shiel's

Purple Cloud" suggests plausibly  Roboral—otherwise unknown apparently--was some 

“fraudulent tonic”. It might be pointed out that Shiel was a Socialist and the name is an

anagram of “laboro”, “I work” in Latin, which works either in regard to Shiels or to some

contemporary patent medicine peddler having the very name of the tonic avowing that it works.

NW x NW: Antiode to Alfred Hitchcock

                                   
                                      "In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
                                      Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
                                      Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
                                      We shall encounter, counting, face to face...."

                                                                                 Stanislaw Lem

Every image arises from a field

of possibility and having risen,

rises another field between

meaning and unmeaning:

       Two in and out of twilight

       hand in hand, dark and bright

       in the ballet of left and right...

               tragedy & comedy

               laughing and crying chiasmically.

Is the fruited field polysemous?

                               jupe de jeter

                              à travers de l'espace  

                              jupe à jeter

                              tutu-à-terre

As things stand aren't all worlds

AMBIGUONS winging through two

or more images at the same time?

What a post-predicament:

               flying planes can be dangerous: rat-tat-tat

              the jet strafes North by Northwest: pan-pan cul-cul

              it is a Naval Factory N3N Canary crop sprayer

              with four on the floor by Rolls Royce

              Cary escapes with a prayer and a little shrapnel

              in the κεῖσθαι of his featherduster

              the pilot a marine from Quantico

              is convicted of being viciously orange

              locust run amok

              no wheat or maize are sown or grown

              what can a poor poet do except plant potatoes?

..............................................................................Q.E.D.

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa       October 23, 2016     Granada, Nicaragua
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N.B.: κεῖσθαι: the lie, being in a position (Aristotle)

Dreams Of War Among Orangutans

                             “En ces temps difficiles, il convient d'accorder notre mépris

                             avec parcimonie, tant nombreux sont les nécessiteux.”

                                                                                                  Chateaubriand

Let scientists tell in precisest terms where

reside dreams of war among Orangutans

and what kind of war it is:

Is it war to control bananas,

food of the wise, by the likes

of Great Ape United Fruit?

Is it war to monopolize the best routes

for brachiating through branches

of jungle and over the shortest airlanes

between trees to trapeze across?

Is it religious war or war to colonize and exploit?

Is it nuclear war, chemical war, economic war?

Is it a war of terror? Is it racist or genocidal?

Is it war for profit or war for the sake of war?

Is it no war at all but a still sullen nightmare

of a long-armed guerilla blowing strawberries

at under and over men logging, mining, and burning

the small green planet of just another less than human,

more than human forest kind?

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa   October 11, 2016  Granada, Nicaragua

Haiku Informaticus/ Haikú informático

This is no window.

This is a computer screen.

Behind you—the world.

E. A. Costa

Haikú informático

Esto no es ninguna ventana.

Esto es el monitor del ordenador.

Detrás tuyo—está el mundo.

Tr. EAC

E. A. Costa     October 13, 2016    Granada, Nicaragua

Antinicanor

                             "Qué es un antipoeta...

                                     un pequeño burgués?

                                     un charlatán?

                                     un dios?

                                     un inocente?
                                     un aldeano de Santiago de Chile?"*

                                                                 Nicanor Parra

I do not say that Nicanor Parra is not my mistress

or that when he walks, alive or dead, he treads not on earth

but in an otherwise empty set of air.

I do not say he is not a venomed dyssocratic serpent of wily irony,

like Kierkegaard, slithering on null feet and zero reason.

I do not say that he is not a poet nor antipoet, nor bard nor antibard,

nor self-styled porcupine from inner space.

I do not say that he is not an ersatz and belated Marcel Duchamp--

blind, retarded, and at least a hundred years behind the times.

I do not say that he is not an imbecile or that he had nothing more to say

after poetry or antipoetry or unpoetry left him uninspired in 1962.

I do not say that his Ars Poetique is not a Reader's Digest abridgment

mocking Paul Verlaine, ignorant of Horace and envious of Vicente Huidobro.

I do not say his antiverses or unverses or contraverses do not equal

pettier ones of Jorge Luis Borges or that physics by rote does not match the other's fiction.

I do not say he is not an adolescent poet advising himself that

in poetry null and void and not at all anything goes.

I do not say that he never leaves a blank page better off from having soiled it

or that he was not unutterably persevering and reactionary in his beshitting.

I do not say he is innumerate and cannot multiply the word imaginary

times 25 in 27 lines to the unplayed melody of the Beatles' Nowhere Man.

I do not say that he is not too bright nor excessively stupid nor that he did not

get on well with Mrs. Nixon.

I do not say that he does not consider Augusto Pinochet, 

taking tea with Margaret Thatcher, the savior of his country.

I do not say that, strictly logically, an ironic double-dealing retraction

cannot not be, like papal infallibility, retracted or unretracted.

I do not say that he is not the Chile that has fallen and still can't get up.

Yet his lips are not lascivious coral nor does he reek of finest balsamic

vinegar, nor is he Ezra Pound.

After all, he was on the so-called winning side.

Is he not then merely a traducer of Shakespeare and his life's lazy antioutput,

fat and apophatic, no more than the down and dirty mimesis of Sonnet 130?

E. A. Costa

E. A. Costa October 1, 2016 Granada, Nicaragua

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N.B.: *"What is an antipoet? A petit bourgeois?A charlatan?

A god? A naïf? A villager of Santiago de Chile?"