Four Poems From Octopus
Is “How many chickens are not crossing
the road?” the same question as how many Dolly Partons, burning bushes, Captain
Nemos or hadrons? How many infinite sets contain the set of all infinite sets?
How many times have I not French-kissed Frank Sinatra on my grandparent’s
twilight couch? French-kissed to Frank Sinatra. It’s a theory of self:
eye-covered wheels within wheels. The many-eyed ones that never sleep. Any
visible light reflected by the self is observed as self. Case study: Duarte’s,
birthplace of the “hefty hoagie.” Nimbus of Latvian song. Halos of migraine
vision. Lepidoptera in light bulbs. Chickens lined up along one side of a
motionless Barton St. That’s not mortadella it’s Ophanim. A shimmer
between integers, the fractious camouflage of the universe within the universe,
the self within self. El Pulpo Mecanico as irradiant pulp fiction of the
mediated self, the cingulate gyrus, metadata for fire, oblate episteme of
knock-knock, who’s there? All of us notional chickens combing the fine grains
of the bathypelagic like dusk on the wings of pelagic opisthobranchs in the clade
Gymnosomata within the larger mollusc clade Heterobranchia. Carnivorous sea
angels feeding on butterflies. At the threshold, the hymn is bones.
There is no place for chickens,
crossing the road or otherwise, in the hierarchy of sea angels. Werner Herzog’ flat-brained
cockerels - mobilis in mobili. In the shimmering of a shark’s breath, Captain
Nemo appears on a chesterfield from another dimension. The sea does not
belong to tyrants, he says. The sea is everything and I am no one,
swimming through the ichor. Ah, but dear Kapitän, have you tried looking a
chicken in its many eyes? These are lessons in darkness. The universe at its
most chaotic. We must always end and begin with the Zisurrû. What can you,
Herr. Regisseur, know of the eight colour states of gluons and octopuses, the
matryoshka universes in the gleam of a hen’s eye? The Enochian swoon of Frank’s
baritone. Those are not kisses, those are the wings of questions being
asked. A voice-like presence in the nimbus of messengers, between ciphers,
querying. There are no birds, ,flightless or otherwise, as verb or noun,
in hamartiology. El pulpo is everything, I am no one.
Cloud brain. Thunder brain. Lightning
across Marianne Faithful. Ducks. Ellipses. A hairnet. The manifestations of sin
include salt and glaciers. Galician. 20,000 dalmatians and a heresy of
cumulonimbus Irish linen. Ashkenazi herbalism and time as a distal tentacular
club, suckers on the ventral surface. Eight arms and the truth. Faultlines
through the tectonic Corellian banshee. A surfeit of euphony while the central
acetabulum is permitted. Buccal freehold mysticism in the timespace memory
hybrid. Prepositional logic in the ethical system of elves, each leafy wound a
new possibility for vascular flame. Peel the cosmos like an egg, an over-easy
haploid with a side of home. The obsidian chalkboard of deep space. Child of
hapax legomenon, I am hapax legomenon, Nemo of my own invention, calculating
mortality with the poise of a rowboat and the certainty of seafoam.
If a person has two heads, on
which should he place his tefillin.
That the frequency of any word in a
rowboat is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table - there are no birds in the skiff.
Something said only once still exists, if only in the euphoric yolk of memory.
If we peel the cosmos like an egg, the mathematical logic of seafoam
becomes an Irish clothesline. The fundamental unity of all things - ellipses
and Mariannes. O hidden life, preposterous life, there is no octopus higher
than the truth. O, great cheeky banshee, sweet botanist of the verdant seas,
give us back our childish sky. We are the offspring of logic and Duke
Ellington, a hybrid geminate forged in the vascular fifth brain of a salty
Kabbalist. A tsveykepik Nemo in their own likeness surfing across the
tentacular waves of reason.
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Lillian Nećakov is the author of many chapbooks as well as il virus (Anvil Press), Hooligans (Mansfield Press), The Bone Broker (Mansfield Press), Hat Trick (Exile Editions), Polaroids (Coach House Books), The Sickbed of Dogs (Wolsak and Wynn), Midnight Glossolalia, a collaborative poetry collection with Scott Ferry and Lauren Scharhag (Meat for Tea Press), Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye, a collaborative poem with Gary Barwin (Guernica Editions). She lives in Toronto.
Gary Barwin is a writer, musician and multimedia artist and the author of many books of poetry, fiction and essays. A frequent collaborator, Take Rain, written with Elee Kraljii Gardiner, will appear with ECW Press in 2027. Barwin and Lillian Nećakov have previously published the long poem Duck Eats Yeast, Explodes; Man Loses Eye (Guernica, 2023). His new novel, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead is due from Book*Hug in Fall 2026. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario. garybarwin.com