Goodbye S.S. - Spike Milligan

Go away girl, go away
and let me pack my dreams
Now where did I put those yesteryears
made up with broken seams
Where shall I sweep the pieces
my God they still look new
There's a taxi waiting at the door
but there's only room for you

Spike Milligan

Go North, South, East, and West, Young Man - Spike Milligan

Drake is going west, lads
So Tom is going East
But tiny Fred
Just lies in bed,
The lazy little beast.

Spike Milligan

Feelings - Spike Milligan

There must be a wound!
No one can be this hurt
and not bleed.

How could she injure me so?
No marks
No bruise

Worse!
People say 'My, you're looking well'
.....God help me!
She's mummified me -
ALIVE!

Spike Milligan

Eurolove - Spike Milligan

I cannot
and I will not
No, I cannot love you less
Like the flower to the butterfly
The corsage to the dress

She turns my love to dust
my destination empty
my beliefs scattered: Diaspora!

Who set this course - and why?
Now my wings beat -
without purpose
Yet they speed..

Spike Milligan

Down The Stream The Swans All Glide - Spike Milligan

Down the stream the swans all glide;
It's quite the cheapest way to ride.
Their legs get wet,
Their tummies wetter:
I think after all
The bus is better

Spike Milligan

Contagion - Spike Milligan

Elephants are contagious!
Be careful how you tread.
An Elephant that's been trodden on
Should be confined to bed!

Leopards are contagious too.
Be careful tiny tots.
They don't give you a temperature
But lots and lots - of spots.

The Herring is a lucky fish
From all disease inured.
Should he be ill when caught at sea;
Immediately - he's cured!

Spike Milligan

Bump - Spike Milligan

Things that go 'bump' in the night
Should not really give one a fright.
It's the hole in each ear
That lets in the fear,
That, and the absence of light!

Spike Milligan

Bongaloo - Spike Milligan

'What is a Bongaloo, Daddy?'
'A Bongaloo, Son,' said I,
'Is a tall bag of cheese
Plus a Chinaman's knees
And the leg of a nanny goat's eye.'

'How strange is a Bongaloo, Daddy?'
'As strange as strange,' I replied.
'When the sun's in the West
It appears in a vest
Sailing out with the noonday tide.'

'What shape is a Bongaloo, Daddy?'
'The shape, my Son, I'll explain:
It's tall round the nose
Which continually grows
In the general direction of Spain.'

'Are you sure there's a Bongaloo, Daddy?'
'Am I sure, my Son?' said I.
'Why, I've seen it, not quite
On a dark sunny night

Do you think that I'd tell you a lie?

Spike Milligan

Bazonka - Spike Milligan

Say Bazonka every day
That's what my grandma used to say
It keeps at bay the Asian Flu'
And both your elbows free from glue.
So say Bazonka every day
(That's what my grandma used to say)

Don't say it if your socks are dry!
Or when the sun is in your eye!
Never say it in the dark
(The word you see emits a spark)
Only say it in the day
(That's what my grandma used to say)

Young Tiny Tim took her advice
He said it once, he said it twice
he said it till the day he died
And even after that he tried
To say Bazonka! every day
Just like my grandma used to say.

Now folks around declare it's true
That every night at half past two
If you'll stand upon your head
And shout Bazonka! from your bed
You'll hear the word as clear as day
Just like my grandma used to say!

Spike Milligan

A Silly Poem - Spike Milligan

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?

Spike Milligan

Biography of Spike Milligan (1918 - 2002)

Milligan was born in Ahmednagar, India, on 16 April 1918, the son of an Irish-born father, Captain Leo Alphonso Milligan, MSM, RA, who was serving in the British Indian Army. His mother, Florence Mary Winifred Kettleband, was born in England. He spent his childhood in Poona (India) and later in Rangoon (Yangon), capital of Burma (Myanmar). He was educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and St Paul's Christian Brothers, de la Salle, Rangoon.

He lived most of his life in England and served in the British Army, in the Royal Artillery during World War II.

Poetry

Milligan also wrote verse, considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense. His poetry has been described by comedian Stephen Fry as "absolutely immortal - greatly in the tradition of Lear". His most famous poem, On the Ning Nang Nong, was voted the UK's favourite comic poem in 1998 in a nationwide poll, ahead of other nonsense poets including Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. This nonsense verse, set to music, became a favourite Australia-wide, performed week after week by the ABC children's programme Playschool. Milligan included it on his album No One's Gonna Change Our World in 1969 to aid the World Wildlife Fund. In December 2007 it was reported that, according to OFSTED, it is amongst the ten most commonly taught poems in primary schools in the UK.

While depressed, Milligan wrote serious poetry. He also wrote a novel Puckoon, parodying the style of Dylan Thomas[citation needed], and a very successful series of war memoirs, including Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (1971), "Rommel?" "Gunner Who?": A Confrontation in the Desert (1974), Monty: His Part in My Victory (1976) and Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall (1978). Milligan's seven volumes of memoirs cover the years from 1939 to 1950 (his call-up, war service, first breakdown, time spent entertaining in Italy, and return to the UK).

He wrote comedy songs, including "Purple Aeroplane", which was a parody of The Beatles' song "Yellow Submarine". Glimpses of his bouts with depression, which led to the nervous breakdowns, can be found in his serious poetry, which is compiled in Open Heart University.

Death

Even late in life, Milligan's black humour had not deserted him. After the death of friend Harry Secombe from cancer, he said, "I'm glad he died before me, because I didn't want him to sing at my funeral." A recording of Secombe singing was played at Milligan's memorial service. He also wrote his own obituary, in which he stated repeatedly that he "wrote the Goon show and died".

Milligan died from liver disease, at the age of 83, on 27 February 2002, at his home in Rye, East Sussex. On the day of his funeral, 8 March 2002, his coffin was carried to St Thomas's Church in Winchelsea, Sussex, and was draped in the flag of the Republic of Ireland. He had once quipped that he wanted his headstone to bear the words "I told you I was ill." He was buried at St Thomas's Church cemetery in Winchelsea, East Sussex, but the Chichester Diocese refused to allow this epitaph. A compromise was reached with the Irish translation, "Dúirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite", and additionally in English, "Love, light, peace".

Universal Human Beings Week 1st March

As March is trying to decide whether it is coming in like a lion or a lamb, there is a decision that we have to make as well. Do we choose to honor the little known observance that could affect the whole human family known as Universal Human Beings Week?

The International Society of Friendship and Good Will sponsors this obscure observance during the first week of March each year, in hopes of inspiring men and women to break free from the shackles of their traditional groups, and reach out to the rest of the world in an attempt to form a global village.

The groups ideals are simple, and yet, terribly complex in the context of our world. They strive to encourage international understanding, education, and relations, to honor law and humanity, to put humans and ethical behavior above material wealth, and to support organizations that actively work for peace, friendship and good will. They also tout the use of Esperanto, as a necessity for international communication.

It seems like common sense, but these very basic principles generally get lost somewhere in the daily grind. During difficult economic times, there are two trains of thought: eat or be eaten, or all for one and one for all.

The choice is yours – do you sacrifice your fellow human beings to make out ok on the other end of the crisis, or do you reach out to those around you in hopes that the difference you make in their life will come back to enrich your own?

The ISFGW sponsors other observances throughout the year to help advance their ideology such as Peace, Friendship, and Good Will Week in October, Tolerance Week in December, and “Simplify your Life” Week in August. They have also dubbed September as Self-Improvement Month, just in case you need an excuse to execute your own personal goals.

Whether or not you’re ready to sign up for the International Society of Friendship and Good Will, it seems like reaching beyond our comfort zone for a week could greatly benefit the general public. But, before we can go breaking international boundaries, we need to start closer to home. Too many of us don’t know our neighbors, we don’t know who works down the hall in our building, and we have never taken the opportunity to say good morning to the people we see in the coffee shop each week. We are stuck in our own sovereign realms, and we never bother to venture beyond its borders.

Held on : 1st March

Universal Human Beings Week is observed annually from March 1st to 7th in various countries. It is observed to celebrate Humanity and to give primacy to the human and spiritual, rather than to the material values of life. Though as Human we all are far much intelligent than animals but we still suffer from greed, jealousy, anger, hatred, lust etc. We are at war with each other be it regarding borders of our countries or acquiring more wealth. There is a need for us to be at peace with each other at all levels. To focus on the path that we are Human Beings and that we should act as such, is the driving force behind this observance.

History - The International Society of Friendship and Good Will, founded by Dr. Stanley Drake in 1978, is dedicated to the time-honoured principles embodied in its name. To encourage and foster the advancement of international understanding, better human relations, friendship, good will, and peace through a world fellowship of men and women of good will. The idea for an international organization to foster international understanding, better human relations, peace, friendship, and good will came to Dr. Stanley J. Drake on his 60th birthday, March 8, 1976, when he was contemplating retiring as president of Fort Lauderdale University. Dr. Drake discussed the kind of organization he envisaged with his internationally minded friends in the United States and corresponded with others in Europe, and two years later, on March 8. 1978, the International Society of Friendship and Good Will (ISFGW) came into existence. The Society sponsors and promotes 22 events and observances including the Universal Human Beings Week

It is not a public holiday.

Two poems - Frank Stanford

evening the priest

let three rivers flow
and a woman sing to her child

I am afraid a woman
Will burn my hair


Frank Stanford

Source: Approacheth the Ship and Wonder (Unpublished Collection, 1964)

The Last Supper - Frank Stanford

from The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You
I am afraid after reading all these so-called initiation books that some
cortege of boot lickers will enter my room while I am sleeping and suck
my eyes out with soda straws they will be older men and women much like
the amanuenses with bad breath in the principal’s office who call
up and tell on you the Unferths of the world better beware
I know Jesus would have kicked your teeth in you couldn’t pull that shit on him
he was telling his buddies one night boys I’m glad y’all decided to come on up
and eat supper with me I hadn’t got much there’s a few things I’d like to say
at this time Matthew says to Simon I sure as hell don’t know what he’s got us
here this time for I’m beginning to wonder you talked to him lately
yea I was shooting the shit with him on the mountain but I want to tell you
this Matthew don’t never come up on him when he’s alone he jumped on me
I thought he was going to kill me he was just walking around just talking
to himself waving his arms like he does he’s worse than John
Jude put his hand up to his mouth and said down the table I think Jesus is going
off his rocker get Simon to tell you what he asked me
Simon says he didn’t want to talk about politics or dreams or nothing he just said
Jude next time y’all are over in Mesopotamia why don’t you pick me up a few
bottles of that wine they make over there
sure thing Jesus I says
well now the boss is talking he is saying I asked y’all up here because frankly
I’ve been feeling a little sick lately and I want to make sure y’all know what
to do in case anything happens I know one of you is going to do me in I know
that but goddamnit y’all know those people in town are after my ass
the other night I walked down the streets in a disguise and I seen a couple
of you messing around and drinking with the soldiers what’s going to happen
if one of you gets drunk and lets it slip where I’m hiding out then I’ll
be in a fix you know if they was to find me they going to cut me y’all ever
think about that and Peter ain’t you ever going to get it straight what you’re
supposed to do give me one of those biscuits Judas and go outside and take a
look-see I got you Jesus Judas says
John leans over he says been catching any fish Peter
oh well I been getting a few of a morning they ain’t biting too good now you know
on account of this blamed weather nobody is even listening to Jesus he’s just
talking to himself like he was crazy Matthew says I believe he’s been hitting
that wine a little too hard don’t you reckon
Jesus says another thing I told all of you it’d be better if you didn’t get
involved with women
now just listen to that little two-faced bastard James the Lesser says
we all know what he’s up to shacking up with all those town girls
the other night he was dressed fit to kill and drunk as six hundred dollars
a rolling around in the mud like a hog kissing that whore’s foot why shit
I wish he’d let us in on what he really does
Thomas spoke up for once he says I know what you mean the other day Andrew
and I asked him about some scripture he said leave me alone I don’t know
nothing about that shit and then we seen him cussing out a priest over at the
temple he knew more about it than the elder did
another thing Matthew says I wish he’d start writing what he wants done down
and do it so I can read it you know as well as I do that damned Peter can’t
keep it straight he won’t get anything right
Bartholomew says don’t make no difference atoll cause Paul is going to tell
it like he wants to that’s for damned sure
all the time Jesus just mumbling to himself wine spilt all over his robe
the rest of them chattering and cussing trying to figure him out
John the Baptist about the only one Jesus can count on except for crazy John
is banging his goblet on the table he is saying now ain’t this a sight
spitting in the lord’s face at his own birthday party I’ll swan
Brother John why don’t you tell Jesus what the real problem is
the crazy one says everyone of y’all is chickenshits you are afraid to look
those elders in the eye and tell them what you think ya’ll get up on a rock
to talk and you see a soldier coming and you say anybody seen a stray mule
Jesus is saying to himself I’m going to pull those temples down if I have to
get me a rope and tie it to a pillar and a jackass and do it myself
wake up Jesus Philip says
Paul who hadn’t touched a drop gets up and gets his paper out and says
the nature of the problem Jesus is this the people don’t believe you
those fellows in the temples have got it all organized all they have to do
is send out stooges and hire a couple of rednecks who make out like they’re
crippled they have a big gathering they say the same things you say they
pull off a fake healing the redneck’s wife stands up she says LIE he ain’t lame
he’s just drunk and so all the people go home saying those christians what a
bunch of wind see Jesus they are using your material but they ain’t coming
through so that is making you an enemy of the people we just got to get
organized as is proved here today by your followers carrying on as they did
so I’m getting sold down the river by the elders and their hirelings uh
that’s right Jesus ask anybody here why I didn’t think they’d do that he says
I told you a long time ago not to keep talking with them temple people John says
you should a know’d what they was up to ain’t nobody going to understand you
why you ought to know that when we first run on to you we had second thoughts
we thought you was crazy there’s probably still some sitting down here right
this second that still thinks you are a crazy one but Jesus you should a known
we been through a lot together we go a long way back you should a listened
all they wanted was you they liable to get you yet then they won’t have no
competition they want to keep feeding the hogs the same slop
they the ones that want to get fat man you listening to me Jesus
he says ok if that’s the way they want to do things at the temple
I’m going to change my tactics I going out after these chillun more than I have
been they’ll know I’m telling the truth I still got a few things up my sleeve
left what’s that Paul says
I’m going to do a few things can’t nobody follow
we could always go back to biting the heads off fish and chickens Peter says
why don’t you let us in on it for a change Paul says we follow you around
like we were a bunch of sheep picking up your tab bailing you out of jail
coming up here all the time for supper and what do we get to eat nothing
why can’t you have a little faith in us Jesus
ok this is what we going to do he says hold on who is that walking up the steps
it’s just Judas
how does it go boy Jesus says and the other one answers just fine Jesus just fine
and John the Baptist turns around he says to the one who has just slipped in boy
didn’t I see you talking to some white folks the other day
here endeth with a chord on the guitar that’s how the men did Jesus like he was
old like he was young just like Elvis did to Big Dad Arthur I know
just like another blind singer the men come down to see with their equipment
they get his song they pay him twenty dollars and he don’t hear from them ever
again except sometimes in the mail on Christmas when one of them might send a
five dollar check there won’t nobody cash oh tell me brother how do the old men
feel who were young as purple flowers from Hawaii once when they listen to their
songs coming in over a borrowed radio tell me don’t they take up a notch in they belt
don't they tie another knot in they headband don't they wring that sweat out
have mercy Jesus deliver me from the lawyers and the teachers and the preachers
and the politicking flies can’t you hear them buzz can’t you hear them bite another
chunk out of me oh brother I am death and you are sleep I am white and you are
black brother tell me I am that which I am I am sleep and you are death we are
one person getting up and going outside naked as a blue jay rolling our bellies
at the moon oh brother tell me you love me and I’ll tell you too I want to know
how do they like it when the ones who sung shake they leg on the Television
I want to know Jesus don’t a blind man count no more some by signs others by
whispers some with a kiss and some with a gun and some with a six bit fountain
pen whoa lord help me and my brother help us get through this tookover land

NOTES: lines 3001-3199.

Frank Stanford

Man is so afraid - Frank Stanford

Man is so afraid, he look down at cock, long ago many
centuries ships land on the enemy’s beach, take down
mast in the dark, climb up cliffs in the fog, ram
enemy’s door, do bad things in castle, oh yea, man
go crazy play in blood like baby with duck in bathtub,
man think about favorite dog, got worms in heart, takes
dog to field trial, dog sniffs out man’s lies, point
at fool in frozen water, fool man, dead dog, man look
at leaf frozen in pond, man think about woman in new
cabin beside fire, walls bleeding rosin, man forget about
dog, man want son, boy strong, call boy elephant, man
cannot sleep right, have bad itch in butthole, man think
cancer maybe, man wake up beside woman, moon come
in window, man glad he has no city, city can die for all
he cares, man smells fingers, smell bad, man gets up
to wash fingers, man steps on broken glass, sits down
on commode and sucks his foot, man thinks about God,
man says to God If I eat right will You take away cancer,
God no say, man flush pot, man decides go to India,
study other God, other God take away cancer, bring back
dog, make women go crazy, man go visit little
naked man on mountain, man give him all his money,
little naked man say go back home, stand on head with
fresh egg in asshole three times a day, man does what
he says, oh yea, man think about troopships, man is so
afraid, man take chill, man get old real quick man nobody,
everything dark, man spit in papersack, man look at medicine
on table beside bed, man look at TV, Tarzan movie already over,
so sad so sad, man call doctor, say to make him young,
doctor look at secretary pulling up panties, say oh yea,
take man’s money, man get young, man decide go to
Africa, man think everything swell when he get back
home, put many heads on wall, many skins, first night
wife run off, fool man, so man read book, man like,
so man read another book, soon man read book all time,
don’t care about money, don’t care about woman, only
thing man remember is what he read, on weekends
go to old cabin, look at pine knots, think about what he
read, think about history, look down at cock,
man learn, once was another man become king, but king
had no sons, king get old, get sad, king get so afraid, look
at his cock, oh yea, one night king run everybody out of
castle, have private dinner, just with family, and favorite
dog, tell daughter to hop up on table, king takes pheasant
gravy, pours on daughter, rubs daughter’s thighs with
gravy, picks up dog, tells dog lick daughter, king tells daughter
not to be afraid, not be sad, tell daughter be strong, daughter
strong, daughter looks at mother, says watch, daughter
takes dog by the mouth, breaks jaws, king says daughter strong,
man know lot about history, man afraid, man go crazy on
street one day, man go jail, man call lawyer tell lawyer shoot two women
save my life, man give lawyer lot of money, lawyer go out
to eat, talks about man, man get out of jail, oh yea
man like imagine too, man like to clip cut back of magazine,
man like sendoff, man also like guns,
life strange,

Frank Stanford

You - Frank Stanford

Sometimes in our sleep we touch
The body of another woman
And we wake up
And we know the first nights
With summer visitors
In the three storied house of our childhood.
Whatever we remember,
The darkest hair being brushed
In front of the darkest mirror
In the darkest room.

Frank Stanford

What About This - Frank Stanford

A guy comes walking out of the garden
Playing Dark Eyes on the accordian.
We’re sitting on the porch,
Drinking and spitting, lying.
We shut our eyes, snap our fingers.
Dewhurst goes out to his truck
Like he doesn’t believe what he’s seeing
And brings back three-half-pints.
A little whirlwind occurs in the road,
Carrying dust away like a pail of water.
We’re drinking serious now, and O.Z.
Wants to break in the store for some head cheese,
But the others won’t let him.
Everybody laughs, dances.
The crossroads are all quiet
Except for the little man on the accordian.
Things are dying down, the moon spills its water.
Dewhurst says he smells rain.
O.Z. says if it rains he’ll still make a crop.
We wait there all night, looking for rain.
We haven’t been to sleep, so the blue lizards
On the side of the white porch
Lose their tails when we try to dream.
The man playing the music looks at us,
Noticing what we’re up to. He backs off,
Holding up his hands in front, smiling,
Shaking his head, but before he gets half way
Down the road that O.Z. shoots him in the belly.
All summer his accordian rotted in the ditch,
Like an armadillo turning into a house payment.

Frank Stanford

Weariness of Men - Frank Stanford

My grandmother said when she was young
The grass was so wild and high
You couldn’t see a man on horseback.

In the fields she made out
Three barns,
Dark and blown down from the weather
Like her husbands.

She remembers them in the dark,
Cursing the beasts,
And how they would leave the bed
In the morning,
The dead grass of their eyes
Stacked against her.

Frank Stanford

Wanted - Frank Stanford

Luis Buñuel

A white bull, a cassock, an antique mirror
The famous ones have passed hours in front of,
A midnight blue tuxedo, a fainting couch, a key
To a box of lewd photographs, a swastika,
Twelve bales of hay, three grave plots, a statue
Of Christ holding a heart pierced by a dagger,
A black patch, all kinds of utensils for the sick—
Including thirty-nine feet of catheter tubing,
A houseboat, a dog, a baby grand, an oar
Said to have been carved from a lovely river
And a woman’s hat by Alfred Jarry, a mattress,
A shotgun, a diving helmet, an essay on The Art
Of Taxidermy and a clitoris mounted on a ring
Like quartz, a crescent wrench, a bulldozer.

Frank Stanford

Transcendence of Janus - Frank Stanford

I am not asleep, but I see
a limb, the fingers of death, the ghost
of an anonymous painter
leaving the prints of death
on the wall; the bright feathers
of soft birds blowing
away in the forest;
the bones of fish and
the white backs of strange women;
your breathing
like the slow thunder
on the other side of some river
as you sleep beside me; old
dancing teachers weeping in their offices;
toads with bellies as quiet
as girls asleep in mansions, dreaming
of saddles and pulling the sheets
between their legs; fireflies
going to sleep on moonseed flowers
around a plantation gazebo at dawn;
a girl sweating in bed; hawks drifting
through the moon; a woman’s hair,
the flavor of death, floating
in the fog like a flag
on a ship full of ghosts,
the ghosts of soldiers
searching for the graves of their mothers; june bugs
listening to Leoncavallo;
christ weeping on Coney Island,
inevitable, like a fissure
in a faggot’s ass; a widower
with no sons, a lonesome janitor,
a worm in the sun, the dusty sockets
of poets, who have lost their eyes, their

Frank Stanford

The Wolves - Frank Stanford

At night while the dogs
were barking
Baby Gauge and I crawled under the fence
with knives
we made out like the rattlesnake melons
were men we didn’t like
the new moon ones were wolves
I would cut a belly this way
he would cut a belly that way
the flies
came around the sweet juice
it was blood to us
we tasted it we licked it off the blades
we decided not to kill the wolves
we wanted to be wolves
we stuck the knives in the ground
the moon shined on them
we turned the pilot caps inside out
so the fur would show
that way when we crawled
under the bob wire
a little piece would get caught
we wouldn’t though
we wanted to leave trails
but no scents
we tore the melons open we licked the blood off our paws
we wanted to be wolves
and in the morning all those dead men
with their hearts eat out

Frank Stanford

The Truth - Frank Stanford

Nicanor Parra

I’m not going to lie
Through my teeth to you
Like the poets from Minnesota,
The South, and the West,
And New York City.

Most of all in life
I would like to fuck a thirteen-year-old again,
And I don’t have any hesitations
About saying I’d rather be Marlon Brando
Than I would T. S. Eliot, etc.

I have more respect for Muhammad Ali
Than any other living man.
Of course I’ve tried Esquire,
But my shoes aren’t platforms
And I don’t know shit about canoes.

Although I can’t prove it,
Most poets work for the highway dept.
There are more of them than there are
Flies and engineers.
And I stink like a dead mule under an overpass.

Frank Stanford

The Snake Doctors - Frank Stanford

for Nicholas Fuhrmann
I Pig

I was in the outhouse
I heard somebody at the pump
I looked out the chink hole
It was the two fishermen
They stole fish

One man gave the other one some money
He flipped a fifty-cent piece up
I lost it in the sun
I saw the snake doctors riding each other
The other man said “You lose”
He took something else out of his pocket
It shined
They had a tow sack
I thought they were cleaning fish
I looked up
I saw the snake doctors riding each other

I took my eye away
It was dark in the outhouse
I whistled

I heard the pump again
It sounded broken
I looked out the chink hole
It wasn’t the pump
It was the pig

The guitar player cut them out
The midget helped him
“Pump me some water, midget” he said

The pig ran off

The guitar player washed off his hands
The midget washed off the nuts
He got a drink
My eye hurt

He laughed
He cleaned the blood off his knife He wiped
it on his leg
He started singing
The dog tried to get the nuts
But the midget kicked him

The guitar player picked them up
He put them in his pocket
The dog went over to the pig
He licked him

I pulled my pants up
I went outside

I got the pig
I walked over to the pump
I said “Don’t you ever lay a hand
on this pig again”
The guitar player laughed

He asked me if I wanted the nuts back
He took them out of his pocket
He spit on them
He shook them like dice
He threw them on the ground
He said “Hah”
The midget stomped on them

I had the pig under my arm
He was bleeding on my foot I said
“Midget, I got friends on that river”


II The Acolyte

The men rode by

I passed them on the road
They smelled like dead fish

The one in front had a guitar on his back
The other one had a chain saw

I was riding the hog
He weighed three-hundred pounds
I called him Holy Ghost

The midget flashed a knife
He thumbed the blade
He smiled at me
He called me “Pig Rider”

I rode over to Baby Gauge’s
I was on my way to church
I had to get the red cassock
I tied the hog to the front porch
Baby Gauge was swinging in a tire
Born In The Camp With Six Toes was sleeping in the icebox

Baby Gauge said “Be at the levee at three o’clock”
I put the robe on
I said “I almost got drowned last time”
“Going to have a mighty good time” he said
“Going to be an eclipse” Born In The Camp With Six Toes said

I rode the hog to church

I took the new shoes off
I lit the candles
I changed the book
I rung the bell

I was drinking the wine
I heard Baby Gauge yell

I ran down the aisle
I saw the men at the trough
They were beating the hog over the head with sledge hammers
It was like the clock in the German pilot’s shack

One of his eyes was hanging out
And the trough was running over with blood

They held his head under the water
He was rooting in his own blood
He pumped it out in a mist
Like a buck shot in the lung
It was black

He broke loose

I ran down the road yelling
I stepped on soda bottle caps
I ran through sardine cans
I tripped on the cassock

The hog was crazy
He ran into the church
He ran into tombstones

I said “Somebody throw me something”
Chinaman threw me a knife

I ran after the hog
He was heading for the river
I jumped on his back

I rode the hog
I hugged his neck
I stabbed him seven times
I wanted the knife to go into me
He kept running
I ran the knife across his throat
And the blood came out like a bird

We ran into a sycamore tree

When the cloud passed over the moon
Like a turkey shutting its eye
I rowed out into the slew
Not allowing myself to sing gospel music

I woke up in a boat
It was full of blood
My feet were dragging through the water
A knife was sticking in the prow
And the sun was black

It was dark
But I saw the snake doctors riding each other

I saw my new shoes
I put them on
They filled up with blood

I took the surplice off
I threw it in the river
I watched it sink
There was hog blood in my hair

I knelt in the prow with the knife in my mouth
I looked at myself in the water
I heard someone singing on the levee

I was buried in a boat
I woke up
I set it afire with the taper
I watched myself burn
I reached in the ashes and found a red knife

I held my head under the water
so I wouldn’t go crazy
It was some commotion
I rowed the boat in a circle with one oar

A hundred people were in the water
They had white robes on
Some of them had umbrellas
They jumped up and down on the bank
They rowed down the levee
They were yelling and singing
One of them saw me
I saw a horse with tassels

I put my head under the water
I thought I was dead
I hit it on a cypress knee

Two Negroes came riding through the river
They rode towards me on the moon-blind horse

One of them was drinking soda water
“Where are you going, boy” Baby Gauge said

The horse swam back to the levee
I was with them
The boat drifted away
A man said “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego”



III Hambone

They tied his hind legs together
And hung him in a tree with a log chain

I saw them
I was on Baby Gauge’s horse
I threw a knife at the midget
So they hung me up by the feet too

I saw them break his neck
I saw them pull his legs apart
like a wishbone
I wished the dead came back

The midget stood on a bucket
He reached up in the hog’s throat
And pulled the heart out

The dog was lying on the ground
With his mouth open

It took all day to butcher the hog
I got dizzy
I saw the snake doctors riding each other

They turned the bucket over
It filled up with blood

They made a fire

The guitar player beat his hand over his leg
He put some meat on the fire

They tried to make me eat it

The midget spit a bone on the ground

The other one picked it up
He put it on his finger

He went over and got his guitar
He tried to play it like a Negro
There was too much grease on his hands
He got blood on the guitar

The midget danced around the campfire
I wanted to cut his throat

The dog bayed at the moon
And the blue Andalusian rooster played with a snake
I was bleeding out my nose

The fish bandits loaded the hog on Baby Gauge’s horse
They threw blood on the fire
And filled the bucket up with guts for fish bait
When they rode off I yelled “Peckerwoods”

I dreamed I saw Holy Ghost walking around the campfire
He was a wild hog with blood on his tushes

Along about midnight I heard a boat
but no rowing
Somebody short came walking out of the woods
With a light on his head
The light went out I couldn’t see
He drew something out of his boot
He grabbed me by the hair
I saw a knife in the moonlight
“Sweet Jesus” I said

Born In The Camp With Six Toes cut me down


IV Chainsaw

The man cut his hand off at dawn
I heard him yell
I set up in bed

He ran past the window
“Don’t let the dog get it” he said

I got out of bed
I had the long handles on
It was cold
I threw some wood on the fire
I put the dime around my ankle
I put my boots on
I put a knife in the boot

I walked out to the road
The blue Andalusian rooster followed me
It was dark

I heard the chainsaw in the woods
I heard him singing all night
He was cutting firewood
He was drunk

The dog quit barking

I drew the knife out of my boot
I looked for the midget
I saw the blood and I tracked it
I saw the sun and the moon
I saw the snake doctors riding each other

The hand was in the sawdust
It was moving

The hambone was on the finger
It was morning
The dog didn’t get it
I did

There was blood on the chainsaw
I told the blue rooster
“He thought it was a guitar”

I walked around the hand seven times
I poked it with a stick
I sung to it
I picked it up like a snake
I took the hambone off the finger
I put Holy Ghost’s bone in my boot
I put the hand on a stump

I danced on the hand
I peed on it
I broke a wine bottle over it
I threw it up in the air and a hawk
hit it
The dog licked the blood out of the dust

I saw the fish bandit’s guitar
The blue rooster pecked it
I beat the hand with it
I threw the guitar in the river
The snake doctors lit on it
It floated away

I went down to the bank
I got a pole
I put a hook through the hand
I washed it off
When I touched the wound with my knife
it rolled up in a fist

Somebody came by in a boat
They held up a big fish
So I held up the hand

They jumped out of the boat
They thought I crossed them
One of them said “That wasn’t no hoodoo, was it”
It was Baby Gauge
I said “No, it was the guitar player’s hand”
They swam to the bank
I told them how I came by it
Born In The Camp With Six Toes said “It won’t
Take another fish off my lines”

I asked them “You want to shake it”
Baby Gauge said “No, I want to spit on it”
We spit on the hand

They left

I wrapped it up in newspaper like fish
I took it home

I put it under Jimmy’s pillow
and he knocked my teeth out
I put it in a cigar box with a picture
of Elvis Presley
I took it to town

I walked over to the dance hall
The guitar player was bleeding in the back of the pickup

I gave him the cigar box
He passed out

The midget pulled a knife on me
I picked up the hand
He ran off

On the way home I ran folks off the road
When the truck came by the house
The guitar player raised up in the bed
He said “Give me my hand back”

When it was dark
I tied fish line to it and hung it
in the outhouse
I sung to it
The moon shined through the chink hole
on the hand

I took it down
I threw it in a yellow jacket nest
I stomped on it

I took it to the palm reader
I said “Sister, read this”

A lot of evenings I listened for them
I knew they would come back

When a stranger got a drink at night
I thought it was the Holy Ghost
And sometimes a cloud went by like a three-legged dog
And the thunder was someone with a shotgun
Letting him have it

Now the moon was a fifty-cent piece
It was a belly I wanted
to cut open

When the flies got bad
I kept the hand in the smokehouse


V Swimming at Night

The midget ran his finger across his neck
The other one said “Give it back”

I waited in the outhouse
I had a sawed-off shotgun
The men rode off

In the afternoon they sold fish
They cleaned them at the pump
The scales dried up on their faces
They loaded the meat on stolen horses

At night they rode up shooting pistols
I slept with an ice pick under my pillow

One night they rode up drunk
The midget was sitting in the guitar player’s lap
He said “Come on out”

They tied a bale of hay to Baby Gauge’s horse
They poured coal oil on it
They set it on fire
They laughed

The horse with the moon eye pranced around them
He galloped home

I carved wild hog out of a cypress knee
I made it the handle
I made four tushes out of the hambone
I used the blade I brought out of the fire
And sealed the pig with
It was the blade I put the burning horse to sleep with
I called the knife the Holy Ghost

To make me go crazy
I took all my clothes off
And jumped down the hole in the outhouse
I grabbed the yellow jacket nest
And held it over my heart
I pumped cold water over myself
And wallowed in the mud
I walked through the snake den barefooted
I swam the river at midnight
With the hand and a blue feather in my mouth
And the Holy Ghost around my neck

And the hooks caught in my arms they caught in my legs
I cut the trot lines in two
I saw the guitar player stealing the fish

I was swimming beneath the shack
Under the sleeping midget
With the fish bandit’s hand in my mouth

I climbed through the trap door
I crawled under the bed
I cut the hooks out
I believe I was snake bit
I put the hand in the slop jar
I reached up and tickled his nose with the feather

He got out of bed
He turned the lights on
He let down his pants
He reached under the bed for the slop jar
He took the lid off
He screamed
I brought the knife across his leg
I hamstrung the midget

I swam under the water
With the hand in my mouth

I came up near the guitar player’s boat
He was running the lines

I swam to the other end of the trot line
I put the hand on a hook
I jerked the lines like a big fish

The guitar player worked his way down
He thought he had a good one

I let go of the line
He saw his left hand
He screamed
He fell out of the boat

I swam back through the river
I buried the knife in the levee

I was sleeping in the Negro’s lap
He was spitting snuff on my wounds

Born In The Camp With Six Toes cut me with a knife
Baby Gauge sucked the poison out
Oh Sweet Jesus the levees that break in my heart

Frank Stanford

The Pump - Frank Stanford

There was always a lizard
Or a frog around the pump,
Waiting for a little extra water
Or a butterfly to light.

Jimmy said the pump gave him the worms.
I got the worms under the slick boards.
The pump would bite you in the winter.
It got hold of Jimmy and wouldn’t let go.

The blades of Johnson grass were tall
And sharp around the pump stand.
I had to hoe them all the time
Nobody filled the prime jar, though.

One time, I cut the tongue
Out of a Buster Brown shoe
And gave it to the pump.
It made a good sucker washer.

Sometimes the pump seemed like Jesus.
I liked bathing buck naked
Under the pump,
Not in a goddamn washtub.

Frank Stanford

The Light the Dead See - Frank Stanford

There are many people who come back
After the doctor has smoothed the sheet
Around their body
And left the room to make his call.

They die but they live.

They are called the dead who lived through their deaths,
And among my people
They are considered wise and honest.

They float out of their bodies
And light on the ceiling like a moth,
Watching the efforts of everyone around them.

The voices and the images of the living
Fade away.

A roar sucks them under
The wheels of a darkness without pain.
Off in the distance
There is someone
Like a signalman swinging a lantern.

The light grows, a white flower.
It becomes very intense, like music.

They see the faces of those they loved,
The truly dead who speak kindly.

They see their father sitting in a field.
The harvest is over and his cane chair is mended.
There is a towel around his neck,
The odor of bay rum.
Then they see their mother
Standing behind him with a pair of shears.
The wind is blowing.
She is cutting his hair.

The dead have told these stories
To the living.

Frank Stanford,
"The Light the Dead See" from The Light the Dead See: Selected Poems of Frank Stanford.

The Intruder - Frank Stanford

after Jean Follain
In the evenings they listen to the same
tunes nobody could call happy
somebody turns up at the edge of town
the roses bloom
and an old dinner bell rings once more
under the thunder clouds
In front of the porch posts of the store
a man seated on a soda water case
turns around and spits and says
to everybody
in his new set of clothes
holding up his hands
as long as I live nobody
touches my dogs my friends

Frank Stanford

The Arkansas Prison System - Frank Stanford

Is like a lyric poem
with seven basic themes
first the cottonpicker
dragging behind it a wagon of testicles
a pair of pliers which can fill in
for a cross in a pinch
then there is the warm pond
between the maiden’s thighs
next we have some friends
of yours and mine
who shall be with us always
Pablo the artist
the pubis of the moon
Pablo the cellist
panther of silence
Pablo the poet
the point of no return
and in case of emergency
the seventh and final theme
of this systematic poem
is the systematic way
death undresses in front of you

Frank Stanford

Riverlight - Frank Stanford

My father and I lie down together.
He is dead.

We look up at the stars, the steady sound
Of the wind turning the night like a ceiling fan.
This is our home.

I remember the work in him
Like bitterness in persimmons before a frost.
And I imagine the way he had fear,
The ground turning dark in a rain.

Now he gets up.

And I dream he looks down in my eyes
And watches me die.

Frank Stanford

Poem - Frank Stanford

When the rain hits the snake in the head,
he closes his eyes and wishes he were
asleep in a tire on the side of the road,
so young boys could roll him over, forever.

Frank Stanford

Play in Which Darkness Falls - Frank Stanford

Raymond Roussel
Two girls runaway from the Home. They have a revolver
in their possession. The Sisters Of Our Lady have given up
looking for them, returning in the night with soft candles.
The sleek clouds have thrown their riders, and the bees
are returning to the honey, the clover at the edge of the
cliff black as eyelids, damp as blue mussels flexing at the moon.
The girls look in the stolen mirror, then throw their shoes
in the sea. They take off one another’s dress, posing
on the rocks that jut out over the faded water of the last days.
The clover beat down from their splendid feet, the clover
quiet like a vault. Nearby in a ship named for early death,
I drink wine like a city. Anchored far off the continent of love.
Strange, but bees do not die in their own honey, and how the dead
are toted off, how the sweet moons are deposited in the catacombs.
The clover at the edge of the sea like a chemise, place
where animals have lain. They help one another with their hair,
their dresses blowing back to land. They look over the
cliff, spit on the beach. Birds I have never seen going by.

Frank Stanford

Planning the Disappearance of Those Who Have Gone - Frank Stanford

Soon I will make my appearance
But first I must take off my rings
And swords and lay them out all
Along the lupine banks of the forbidden river
In reckoning the days I have
Left on this earth I will use
No fingers

Frank Stanford

Pits - Frank Stanford

We go on and we tremble.
God says we can screw now.
God says to give up all your lovers,
Time to die.

When I was younger I drove a Lincoln.
God said to trade it in.
A tad lovely, then, and terrible,
And sick of my own kind,
I wanted to become a woman.
I wanted to wash the feet of other women
In public, I wanted his eyes
On me, olives on the ground.

I gave you my hand,
Now I go around with my sleeve
Tucked in my coat.

I climb no trees, touch
One breast at a time,
Hold no hands myself.

I go on and I tremble
With your back in my blood,
The clap my mother left me.

With me no more, and now,
And forever, and even always
The dust of my feet
In the desert
I give you stranger my sign,
My peace,
But God you remember
You fucked me out of my hand.

Frank Stanford

Living - Frank Stanford

I had my quiet time early in the morning
Eating Almond Joys with Mother.
We’d sit on the back porch and talk to God.
We really had a good time.

Later on,
I’d sort baseball cards
Or look for bottles.
In the afternoon I’d shoot blackbirds.

Jimmy would go by the house for ice water
And make the truck backfire.
Oh, I really liked that.
That was the reason he did it.

In the evening the cottontails ran across the groves.
I shot one and put him in the backseat.
He went to the bathroom.
Jimmy said I knocked the shit out of him.

At night we would listen to the ballgame.
Then to the Hoss Man.
Jimmy liked “Take Out Some Insurance On Me Baby”
by Jimmy Reed.

Frank Stanford

Light Blue - Frank Stanford

The white clothes on the line put the man to sleep.
He was sitting on a soda case
Leaning back on the porch.

He rolled down his sleeves with his eyes shut.
He could feel the sun going into the trees.

He wanted to catch the evening ferry
And meet someone across the river.

He dreamed about her
Putting polish on her nails.
He was in the woods and many women
Were walking around him in a circle.
He thought about crosses in their blood.

As it got to be night he could feel the heat in his face.
He was going to open his eyes.
And look up at the moon.
It was like the light blue handkerchief
She gave him to go with his dark suit.

That’s when he felt the hot salt all over him
Like broken glass.
He was afraid to open his eyes.
He wondered if he could use any words on it.
But the big woman in the black dress
Was already in the backseat of the car
Rolling the window up with one hand
And making a sign on him with the other.

She was in the car, too.
He saw her biting her nails when they pulled away.

There was a dead snake on his shoes.
He knew there would be a circle
Of little beating hearts in his bed,
And before he could get home
They would be dry and still.

Frank Stanford

In Another Room I Am Drinking Eggs from a Boot - Frank Stanford

What if the moon was essence of quinine
And high heels were a time of day
When certain birds bled
The chauffeur is telling the cook
The antler would pry into ice floes
Swim with a lamp
And we’d be shivering in a ditch
Biting through a black wing
There would be boats
There would be a dream country
The great quiet humming of the soul at night
The only sound is a shovel
Clearing a place for a mailbox

Frank Stanford

Friend of the Enemy - Frank Stanford

The yolk went down my leg
Like a beautiful snail without a shell,
Went down the hill
To the skillet of water, to the nymphflies,
Into the lips of pond minnows,
Down the long belly of the gar – the hellbenders
Having dived and lost, then into
The paw of the lame panther
Who loped back to her lair with it.
As for the white, it stayed with me,
Mark of the beast, birth, and trade.

Frank Stanford

Source: Last Panther in the Ozarks (Unpublished Collection, n/a)

Flies on Shit - Frank Stanford

To the gentlemen from the south
to the tourists from the north
who write poems about the south
to the dumb-ass students
I’d like to ask one lousy question
have you ever seen a regatta of flies
sail around a pile of shit
and then come back and picnic on the shit
just once in your life have you heard
flies on shit
because I cut my eye teeth on flies
floating in shit

Frank Stanford

Source: Smoking Grapevine (Unpublished Collection, n/a)

Faith, Dogma, and Heresy - Frank Stanford

It was Sunday, before dinner.
My uncles were listening to the opera.
O.Z. and I carried my brother in
And laid him on the table.
The women started screaming.
My brother raised up on his side
With dried blood on his hands,
We killed those goddamn Canale brothers
And nobody is ever going to touch us!
The men shut their eyes and danced.
We drank until morning
When everything was quiet.
They wiped their eyes, kissed us goodbye and left.

Frank Stanford

Source: You (Lost Road Publishers, 1979)

Everybody Who is Dead - Frank Stanford

When a man knows another man
Is looking for him
He doesn’t hide.

He doesn’t wait
To spend another night
With his wife
Or put his children to sleep.

He puts on a clean shirt and a dark suit
And goes to the barber shop
To let another man shave him.

He shuts his eyes
Remembers himself as a boy
Lying naked on a rock by the water.

Then he asks for the special lotion.
The old men line up by the chair
And the barber pours a little
In each of their hands.

Frank Stanford

Source: You (Lost Road Publishers, 1979)

Dead Orchard - Frank Stanford

Raymond Radiguet
Like seven birds sleeping on the plateau
Overlooking the shipwreck of love, mystery
Of the drunken visitors wandering off
With your wife, men who talk with a bad accent,
The condemned the abandoned, one day of silence,
Two days of silence, dreams shattered and protected,
The more the blossoms the more you suffer.

Frank Stanford

Source: Automatic Co-Pilot (Unpublished Collection, n/a)

Crest - Frank Stanford

I Or Your Woman

The night was a bad one.
I only saw one other person out:
A big black man on muleback
Riding along the levee, marking the water.

There was a lantern in his hand
And what you could call a grim smile on the lips.
I shifted down gears,
Rolled down the window, turned the radio low.

And said, “Say there, man, how goes it?”
But he couldn’t hear me for the rain
And the song on his transistor radio.
“I don’t know,” he said, “but it’s raining,

Raining to beat hell.”
Said I, “Do you think it’s going to quit?”
“Friend, I couldn’t tell you.”
When big water will, you call everyman friend . . .

We said our goodnights,
Went on, by mule and flatbed truck, wearing black
Rubber, cold to the bone,
Like divers from different ships meeting below.

All you can do is nod, some of the times.
At least, we spoke, knowing that living
Anywhere near the river
You speak when you can; the only thing you try

To hold is your liquor,
And we had none, that bad night on the levee.
Always down the road, I looked up
In the mirror. And I’m sure he’d a done the same.


II Midnight

I almost slid off, once
Imagining this cloud was a pall
And the moon was a body.
I don’t know who put coins over her eyes.

When I got to Rampion’s Ferry,
I thought I was the only one there.
I mean it was quiet,
Except for the current, the cables, and the rain.

I got a piece of rope
Out of the back of my truck, and wound it
Around the generator
Engine; it kicked right off the first pull.

The yellow bug lights came on,
And I saw a body move under a purple blanket.
He cussed me out
For waking him up, pulling his old self up.

There was some kind of fish
In the weave of his poncho; other figures
Of snakes and birds, too.
I didn’t mean to wake the awnry fellow up,

I wonder if I did.
A strange odor came from underneath him
When he dragged out his towsack.
It didn’t smell of something burning, but of

Something that was singed.
Like the rain, it didn’t let up.
“Are we going crosst it, or not,”
He told me in a voice, half-blooded song.


III Some Past Twelve

Someone with a light
Rode up before I could see what all
He was pulling from the burlap:
Blue calling chalk you find in pool halls, ivory

Tusks, a stringer with rotten heads
The good book and another I couldn’t pronounce—
Just as worn,
And one of those paperweight crystals that snows.

He had strummed the mandolin twice,
A couple of sounds blue as a fox in trouble
In a snowdrift on a ridge, like weeds
Burning underwater, a few licks of silent fire.

When I recognized the lookout
The ferry wasn’t more than a few feet off the bank,
So the mule made it aboard, easy;
Its hooves on the planks like a mad, rough carpenter

Nailing driftwood together.
Oh, we made it across. We didn’t exactly
Hit the dock on the head,
But we floated on down to Vahalia’s Landing.

We had a good time.
The foreigner played the mandolin, the river
Reached its crest,
And the man on the mule and I drank way into the morning.

They heard us, the ones on land.
“We’re a floating whorehouse, without noun women.”
And in the dead of night,
Rain and all, we motioned them on.

Frank Stanford

Source: Mad Dogs (Unpublished Collection, n/a)

Circle of Lorca - Frank Stanford

When you take the lost road
You come to the snow
And when you find the snow
You get down on your hands and knees
Like a sick dog
That’s been eating the grasses of graveyards
For twenty centuries.

When you take the lost road
You find woman
Who has no fear of light
Who can kill two cocks at once
Light which has no fear of cocks
And cocks who can’t call in the snow.

You find lovers who’ve been listening
For the same roosters to sing
For twenty centuries
Roosters that have swallowed stones
Out of each other’s tracks
But have never met
Anywhere on the road.

When you take the lost road
You find the bright feathers of morning
Laid out in proportion to snow and light
And when the snow gets lost on the road
Then the hot wind might blow from the south
And there is sadness in bed for twenty centuries
And everyone is chewing the grass on the graves again.

When you get lost
You come to the moon in the field
The light all lovers soil
The sheet no one leaves clean
The light cocks are afraid to cross
The same moon woman danced under
For twenty centuries
With blood on her face.

When you get lost on the road
You run into the dead
Who have broken down stones
In their throats for twenty centuries
I saw two little crazy boys crying
Because it was morning
And when morning comes it comes
In the morning and never at night.

I saw two security police taking out a man’s balls
And I saw two little crazy boys
Crying by the road who wouldn’t go away
But two has never been a number
Because it’s only legal to pass one at a time
It’s only a drum you can carry but you can’t beat
It’s the evidence they need to make you disappear.

Frank Stanford

Source: You (Lost Road Publishers, 1979)

Freedom, Revolt, and Love - Frank Stanford

They caught them.
They were sitting at a table in the kitchen.
It was early.
They had on bathrobes.
They were drinking coffee and smiling.
She had one of his cigarillos in her fingers.
She had her legs tucked up under her in the chair.
They saw them through the window.
She thought of them stepping out of a bath
And him wrapping cloth around her.
He thought of her walking up in a small white building,
He thought of stones settling into the ground.
Then they were gone.
Then they came in through the back.
Her cat ran out.
The house was near the road.
She didn't like the cat going out.
They stayed at the table.
The others were out of breath.
The man and the woman reached across the table.
They were afraid, they smiled.
The other poured themselves the last of the coffee.
Burning their tongues.
The man and the woman looked at them.
They didn't say anything.
The man and the woman moved closer to each other,
The round table between them.
The stove was still on and burned the empty pot.
She started to get up.
One of them shot her.
She leaned over the table like a schoolgirl doing her lessons.
She thought about being beside him, being asleep.
They took her long gray socks
Put them over the barrel of a rifle
And shot him.
He went back in his chair, holding himself.
She told him hers didn't hurt much,
Like in the fall when everything you touch
Makes a spark.
He thought about her getting up in the dark
Wrapping a quilt around herself.
And standing in the doorway.
She asked the men if they shot them again
Not to hurt their faces.
One of them lit him one of his cigarettes.
He thought what it would be like
Being children together.
He was dead before he finished it.
She asked them could she take it out of his mouth.
So it wouldn't burn his lips.
She reached over and touched his hair.
She thought about him walking through the dark singing.
She died on the table like that,
Smoke coming out of his mouth.

Frank Stanford

The Life and Work of Frank Stanford - Article

CONSTANT STRANGER - by Greg Bachar

"Really, I visualize the dead as well as the living. I visualize you who I will never know. We are constant strangers. I imagine you, I stare at you when I write."

Frank Stanford is a writer whose work and legacy now sit dangerously close to the edge of oblivion. Of the 11 volumes of his work that were published both during his lifetime and after his death, only two are in print today: a collection of short fiction, Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away, and a slim volume of selected poems issued in 1991, The Light the Dead See. The rest of his books are "widely unavailable," which might lead some to believe that his work is neither important nor deserving of a larger audience. Among poets and writers who have discovered Frank Stanford's work, though, just the opposite is true, as they have kept his writing alive by tracking down and sharing the rare volumes of his poetry, volumes that actually represent only a portion of the manuscripts he put together during his lifetime. For many who stumble upon Stanford's words for the first time, there is a mixture of responses--inspiration at the scope and magnitude of his work; curiosity to know more about his life; and frustration with the fact that the thousands of pages of poems, stories, essays, film scripts, and letters that make up his literary estate have, for the most part, languished in the 20 years that have passed since his death.

On June 3, 1978, Frank Stanford committed suicide by shooting himself three times in the heart with a 22-caliber pistol. He was 29 years old. His death left an indelible absence felt to this day by those who knew him, and the body of work he left behind makes his passing seem even more poignant to those of us who can only know him through his writing. The perpetuation of a Stanford "mystique," in some circles, has allowed his life and work to take on an almost mythic quality. Caused by the tendency of some critics to mistakenly point to his death as a way of understanding his writing, and by the steady disappearance of his books, this mystique has disguised the fact that, in his lifetime, Stanford was an active participant in nearly every aspect of his chosen craft (writing, publishing, speaking on his aesthetic ideas in interviews and correspondence). The Stanford mystique also does not acknowledge the fact that he did not die an unknown poet--much of what he wrote was published while he was alive by editors who recognized his talent. In addition to poetry, Stanford also wrote short fiction over the course of his life, and translated poems by Vallejo, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Follain, and Parra. If one considers the fact that there exists today, in his literary estate and the private collections of those he knew, a treasure trove of unpublished work, it becomes obvious that Frank Stanford's legacy deserves to be championed by those who would like nothing more than to see his work back in print.

Although much of the published criticism and analysis of Frank Stanford's work has been positive, some of it has wrongly suggested that his early death prevented him from finding his true writing voice and that, as a result, his work is undeveloped and immature. Nothing could be further from the truth. A close reading of his available writing--poetry, letters, fiction, and essays--reveals the presence of a confident, original voice and a personal aesthetic that was not only limited to literature, but also incorporated a deep understanding of painting, music, philosophy, and cinema. It Wasn't A Dream, It Was A Flood, a documentary made about Stanford in 1974 by him and his publisher Irv Broughton,won an award for experimental filmmaking at the Northwest Film & Video Festival. It shows a charismatic writer with a haunting voice in full control of both a flair for the dramatic and the great depth of seriousness that is at the core of much of his writing. We can only speculate as to what might have come from Stanford's imagination had he survived the demons that led him to an early exit from this world.

In an essay titled "With the Approach of the Oak the Axeman Quakes," Frank Stanford wrote: "When the poet is young he tries to satisfy himself with many poems in one night. Later the poet spends many a night trying to satisfy the one poem. My poetry is no longer on a journey, it has arrived at its place." One hopes that this statement might one day be fulfilled with a Collected Works of Frank Stanford on the shelves of bookstores and in the hands of readers who might be moved or inspired by the words he left behind.
THE GROSS AND THE BLENDED VISION:
THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU - by Brett Ralph

There's no reason, really, why you should have read this book, published 20 years ago in a limited edition and long out of print. Even if you could get your hands on a copy, even if you're already a fan of Frank Stanford's poems, you might be daunted by what C. D. Wright has called a "542 page poem without line integrity, punctuation or even space to facilitate breathing and eye movement, much less narrative clarity."

Still, there's every reason you should read this book and hope, as I do, that it's reprinted. By turns earthy and incantatory, down-home and harrowing, The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You is also funny as hell and, to quote one of its nearly 20,000 lines, "sadder than the sea." A narrative crazy-quilt of porch swing yarns, deadly reckonings, and sexual misadventures, it could be called one of the masterpieces of Southern literature on the strength of its characters alone--narrator Francis Gildart, a 12-year-old clairvoyant; Jimmy, his hell-raising brother; Jimmy's running buddy, Charlie B. Lemon; Count Hugo Pantagruel, "the world's smallest man"; Vico, the deaf-mute who signs in his sleep; Sylvester, whom Francis calls the Black Angel; Bobo, Baby Gauge, Mama Covoe, and Tangle Eye, with cameos by Sonny Liston and Jesus Christ. It just might be our Ulysses and, were it not a poem, might justly be considered for the Great American Novel. There's certainly nothing like it in 20th-century American letters.

This is not to say Stanford's work is without ancestry. Stanford characterized his as "a vision not too unlike the ones Whitman, Blake, and the singers in the Bible had." Certainly he echoes all three when Francis prays for "the scoundrels and cowards," of which The Battlefield has plenty, constituting what our hero calls his very own "songs of the gross." Gross, most obviously, in the word's colloquial sense: vulgar, indelicate, even obscene, but deliciously so--as when Francis discovers an "electric toothbrush" hidden in the bathroom of a married woman's house; after she has seduced him and accidentally knocks him out, he awakens "naked and shivering on a large bed . . . / she was groaning and squirming around on me with that electric toothbrush / crammed up inside her." And there's the gypsy girl, the true object of Francis's desire, masturbating in the backseat of a car at the Drive-In while he, Jimmy, Charlie B., and Tangle Eye watch through binoculars from a hillside, having been denied admission because Charlie B. and Tang are Black.

These gross songs can, likewise, be graphically violent, as in the book's many incidents of retribution, like the one where the excluded foursome avenge themselves, demolishing the Drive-In with a bulldozer as the movie plays on, its ghostly image projected on trees. Yet this sordid saga is shot through with images that rival Lorca in their hallucinatory surfaces and symbolic depths ("chance the wise snowball that bleeds when I kiss it"). There are also incantatory passages on a par with Christopher Smart's "Jubilate Agno," as well as an unchecked flow of cultural touchstones as varied as Beethoven and Beowulf, Chuck Berry and Charlie Chaplin. While such an appetite can result in material which is sometimes gross, taken with the poem's variable textures it reveals a vision which is itself a "gross" in the other sense of the word: an undivided whole.

"The gross and the blended vision," then, points both to Francis Gildart's "God given powah" and Frank Stanford's visionary stance. In his employment of overlapping narratives, interpolated tales, fantasies of sex and revenge, dreams and waking visions, Stanford defeats time through the sheer audacity of his chronological disregard. Francis must face a similar foe, as the astronomer predicts: "you will do battle / with the notion of time you will allow your person to plumb it so your / ship may pass through it again everything has already happened." Elsewhere, Francis likens himself to "a pursued man" hanging "on the hands of a lost clock." This "lost clock" refers to the heroic past Francis longs for, a moral system seemingly absent from his era. But it also heralds the loss of time itself. It is in Francis's battle against time and, finally, death (that clock whose ticking never ceases), that his story attains epic proportions.

Francis claims that his "dreams [are] without dominion," and the text of The Battlefield bears this out. His dreaming and waking lives conjoined, he steps out of time: "my past is simultaneous with my present." Earlier, he describes his life in language which explicitly obliterates time: "I live out my past so presently I can live with the pressure / like a diver has in his ears like the hourglass in the saddlebags / with the broken crystal." When Francis says he is a "blood brother of the fuse," he doesn't just mean the force that drives the flower or the spark that fires the machine, he means what Whitman meant when he said, "Who need be afraid of the merge?"

The fuse, the merge--whatever one calls it--celebrates the thrum of existence while signifying death itself. The body of work Frank Stanford left behind amounted to a lifelong quest for the "great poems of death" Whitman had called for a century earlier. Nowhere is this interrogation of death more substantial, and more sophisticated, than in The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Indeed, the entire book can be read as the visionary flash that, as legend has it, attends the death throes.

Like Stanford the poet, Francis cites death as central to his song: "all I am," he says, "is a song sung to the dead by myself all my days." Soon death is no longer someone to be sung to, but a very real possibility: knocked unconscious by two men he caught stealing horses, Francis finds himself tied up "in a boat full of snakes." Rope also binds his mouth like a bit, flooding his mouth with blood; he surmises he'll be "dead in another hour if somebody don't come along." Bobo, a fisherman, shows up, ushering in a horrific and hilarious battle with a 200-pound catfish. One expects him to discover the boy, yet the passage ends with Francis still bound, the boat adrift now on the river.

Though his liberation is never mentioned, the narrative abandons the snake-filled boat for a "stray mule" which Francis mounts, his ride a motif that will recur as the poem rolls on. The beast belongs to a man called "Dark," and the ride his mule affords Francis is a singular one: a symbolic depiction of the deathward journey Francis undertook when he was placed in the boat, bound and gagged, where he has remained throughout the book's countless ecstatic episodes. Francis had foreshadowed this, saying: "I am the rider called death / I sit in the saddle with Dark the Negro / and his crazy blues sinks down like a diver into my belly of dreams."

Francis will receive, it seems, one last chance at rescue, nearly 450 pages after his plight in the boat is last mentioned: he is meditating on Charlie Chaplin (who he's convinced is his father) when suddenly Charlie B. says "untie him." Either this is mere fantasy or Francis has traveled death's trail too far to trace his way back: "I'm talking about / the other Charlie," he says, "goddamnit leave me alone I figured it out / it come to me in a dream." The dream, of course, flows on unabated; Francis has "stowed away in the ship of death" that is at once the boat in which he is left for dead, Lawrence's Stygian ship, and the fragile human body that dreams this dream and sings this song: "a vessel of death a gospel ship."

If I'm wrong--if our hero doesn't die as his hero Beowulf did--the poem remains a tour de force of imagistic power and experimental storytelling. But I like to think that, even at 26 (his age in 1974 when he first submitted this manuscript), Frank Stanford would have been dissatisfied with a book that does not reveal an architecture as remarkable as its material. His formal ambitions succeed by making death his prevailing theme and death the event that fuses this sprawling marvel into solitary fact, at once ephemeral and never-ending. This synthesis elicits a song of unparalleled breadth and beauty, one that, faced with brute mortal fact, somehow remains hopeful. "All of this," he assures us:

is magic against death
all of this ends
with to be continued
CONDITIONS UNCERTAIN - by Greg Bachar

Most, if not everything written about Frank Stanford's writing and life has been about his poetry, about Frank Stanford the poet. The truth of the matter is that he possessed an equal facility in the writing of fiction. The 11 stories in Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away (Lost Roads, $10.95) are proof that Stanford was a writer who was able to bring poetic moments and images into his narrative writing as easily as he was able to bring a sense of story, character, and place to much of his poetry.

A character in one of the tales tells us "I plan to leave behind a book of essays dealing with the imagination." Conditions Uncertain is just such a book, for each of the stories in the collection--some just a few pages long, others approaching the length of short novellas--are filled with not just an interesting assortment of strange characters, narrators, and situations, but with language-rich descriptions of the reality these characters inhabit, making a claim for the argument that the perception of the kaleidoscopic and hallucinatory nature of reality is also the most honest way of depicting it in writing. In one of his letters, Stanford wrote: "I'm off my bearing, maybe, but you understand: you know what real is, so you don't have to describe what you don't understand as surreal (like others do)."

These tales go beyond the surreal by weaving the twisting and bending webs of their narrators' stories with a chiaroscuro of dreams, nightmares, paintings, music, and stories within the tales themselves. In "McQuiston's Tale," for example, the narrator visits a blind man named Shing who claims to have a ventriloquist son with a dummy named Arimathea. Shing drinks a bottle of tabasco and, even though he is blind, likes the color blue. In "DeMoss's Tale," the narrator is taken by Silent Night, the ice truck man, to have his hair cut by Rudy in the icehouse. He puts a frozen minnow in his pocket and goes to the carnival to see The Devil. "Ansar's Tale & Luper's Note" is the story of an astronomer who goes blind and, while being taken care of by two young boys with an interest in the stars, remembers the stranger who arrived in his town when he was young and left books for him to read in his outhouse. "Merton's Tale" out-Lynches the strangest moments in a David Lynch film, as a man whose only possessions are a tape recorder and his collection of classical music spends a few delirious nights stranded by a snowstorm in a strange town.

Stanford's characters are consumed by the weight of their dreams, memories, and experiences, and the reader isn't always sure if their perceptions of reality are the right ones to hold on to. As a result, his stories are like those dreams we sometimes have that are filled with very strange people whom we have never met, but who inhabit the world we often toss and turn through in our sleep. His fiction reminds the reader that memories are as real as the experiences that shaped them, and that dreams and nightmares are experiences that can also shape or bend our perceptions of the past and present. With lines like "I felt the watch ticking against me all night like a grasshopper nailing a coffin," Stanford taps into a reservoir of surprising and jolting images and similes to create fictions that are at once disorienting and exhilarating to read. In Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away, he has successfully fulfilled one of his own character's statements: "I worked and worked the ore of my dreams until it was a fine radium."

Biography of Frank Stanford

Frank Stanford was born August 1, 1948, in southeast Mississippi. In 1949, he was adopted by Dorothy Gilbert. In 1952, Gilbert married A. F. Stanford, a levee contractor, and the family moved to Arkansas. Stanford grew up in Memphis and the Ozarks of Arkansas.

In 1963, his father died and he began to attend the Benedictine Academy and Monastery in Subiaco, Arkansas. He entered the University of Arkansas in 1967, where he studied civil engineering and became involved in the Fayetteville literary community. His first poems appeared in journals such as Ironwood, Field, and American Poetry Review.

Stanford married twice. He and his first wife, Linda Mencin, lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas. In 1974 he married the painter Ginny Crouch and they moved to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where Stanford worked as a land surveyor. In early seventies, he and his publisher, Irving Broughton, made a film about his life and work, It Wasn't A Dream, It Was A Flood. The film won the 1975 West Coast Film Festivals Best Experimental Film Award.

Stanford returned to Fayetteville in 1975 and lived with the poet C.D. Wright. He founded Lost Roads Publishers and continued to earn a living as a land surveyor. Between 1971 and 1977, seven volumes of his poetry were published, including The Singing Knives (1971), Ladies from Hell (1974), Field Talk (1975), Constant Stranger (1976), and The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You (1977).

At the age of 29, on June 3, 1978, Frank Stanford died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Stanford's powerful imagination has been praised and elegized by many poets including Thomas Lux, James Dickey, and Franz Wright.

The Life and Work of Frank Stanford

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

The Singing Knives (1971)
Field Talk (1974)
Shade (1975)
Arkansas Bench Stone (1975)
Constant Stranger (1976)
The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You (1977)
Crib Death (1978)
You (1979)
Conditions Uncertain & Likely to Pass Away: Tales (1990)
Light the Dead See (1991)

Photo Exhibition

Apology - Amy Lowell

Be not angry with me that I bear
Your colours everywhere,
All through each crowded street,
And meet
The wonder-light in every eye,
As I go by.

Each plodding wayfarer looks up to gaze,
Blinded by rainbow haze,
The stuff of happiness,
No less,
Which wraps me in its glad-hued folds
Of peacock golds.

Before my feet the dusty, rough-paved way
Flushes beneath its gray.
My steps fall ringed with light,
So bright,
It seems a myriad suns are strown
About the town.

Around me is the sound of steepled bells,
And rich perfumed smells
Hang like a wind-forgotten cloud,
And shroud
Me from close contact with the world.
I dwell impearled.

You blazon me with jewelled insignia.
A flaming nebula
Rims in my life. And yet
You set
The word upon me, unconfessed
To go unguessed.

Amy Lowell