End of the Year

Well, we've just about wrapped up our first year here at Butchered Switch, and as we calmly survey the offices--the weeping interns, the wretching accountants--we know that everything has gone better than could have been expected. We've had it all, laughs, tears, withdrawal. And our commitment is firm--to continue our legacy of producing the most, best poetry read by the fewest and the craziest into the next year. Salut!



EVERY THING
Did absolutely everything
Wrong
Only in my head Had it goin on
As I did so it happened to me
and I did not speak, was not spoken too.
There were tears running down the street great fancy
Painted circus curtains many murals do contain
And the head of hair of the fray
And the inconvenience Intrusion by the old-man friend
This being me everything jumbles
Coffee rumbles from the shudder
Spilling onto the wood-box top Our table
The spot light splashed they were rocked in a pod-
Cast tone in bronze
Bell
Back to back tech technology
Somebody shut those puppets up

Parable of Hope/Mountains of Madness

I know I know what your thinking; isn't this just a bit of plagarism? I mean, this poem is just the text of Mountains of Madness, the H.P. Lovecraft novel. That position overlooks the edits and alterations that have been made to the text. Perhaps the biggest job was cutting out the second and third adjectives and adverbs cluttering the text. Think what you will about Lovecraft's racism, as a writer he had a vivid sense of the motion of a text, and the affects that could be achieved by that motion. He also either did not trust himself, and tarted everything up with unnecessary flourishes and 'color' or he was a big windbag.

Bob Ducca is a very inspirational man and if you google his name I'm sure you'll find some fitting introduction to his wisdom. When I hear him reach his poetry my head swims and for a moment I feel I am back among the smoke and street-cars of 20's Paris.


Parable of Hope for Bob Ducca from H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness

Arranged by Michael Newton


I

We had risen Gradually

Flying over the higher foothills and along

Towards the relatively low pass

As we advanced We occasionally looked down


The terrain the crevasses the glaciers, wind-bared passes,

and the other bad spots


mystery beckoning in the sea of sky

archaic myths the winds swept in

the omnipresent and resonant cave-mouths

the touch of evil glimpsed betwixt their sound

as complex and unplaceable

As any of the other dark impressions.

no human eye had ever gazed those mountains of madness.

Unable to speak behold that realm

Disbelief in senses Finally saw

fiendish violation of known natural law


II

long before we had passed the great star

and reached our plane

these foothills black, ruin-crusted slopes reared Against the east,

reminding us of those strange Asian paintings

And Nicholas Roerch;


We could not face without panic

The prospect of again sailing by

Those cave-mouths where the wind made sounds


Keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch We made takeoff Over the nightmare city The primal Cyclopean masonry spread

as it had done when we first saw it

and we began rising and turning


The ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things


I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me,

And stared at the reddish farther sky Betwixt the walls of the pass,

Wishing I had wax-stopped ears Looking back,

Ahead, sidewise, and upward Began shrieking

Mad Close to disaster


(What final horror made him scream so insanely?)


III

Hinting that the final horror was a mirage…


Single, fantastic, daemoniac glimpse

Among the churning clouds


Memory had chance to draw

black pit, cavern rim, five dimensions, windowless solids, nameless cylinder, elder pharos, Yog-Sothoth, primal-white jelly, in darkness, out of space, wings, eyes, moon-ladder, the original, eternal, undying,


When fully himself he repudiates all this,

Attributes it to his curious and macabre reading…


But the higher sky was surely vaporous

And swirls of ice-dust do take strange forms,

And Imagination can sometimes be reflected,

Refracted, and magnified in

Layers of restless cloud,


But he never could have seen so much in one instant.


At the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word.

Serial poem: Sad America pt. 2

III.
The strange hatred for the salesman stems
The pliant stems
salesmen
from rivers
innumerable
spring


IV.
Did plants ever really understand the salesmen?
The salesmen did not understand plants, that’s for sure.
Old earth biddy flinched, brought the heat
Ice compacted the population
But where it was hot was all desert
Rocking, picking dead skin off her big toe,
Sitting at the crossroads.
Then a lonesome guitar realization sissy
Spacek terrence malik affair, bad lands
Bad Lands sheen of stones in a wind
But this was not losing. ‘Plants’ had it planned out,
Super long-term goals, out schemed the schemers as I said.
But I don’t know nothing nor
can sympathize with the plants
about that…

v.
you know
you have ants
when your house’s radon test comes up positive.
They hide it
In your wall and yor roof
And your floors board
radon bits in their shit.
They eat batteries. They eat poison trash. 
That’s their diet. Diffuse the effects through their hive soul.
And eventually they will consume the house
With help
from carpenter bees and worms and termites.
Ants have as much bio-mass on this planet as humans. I’m just saying.
What if the earth has already begun to rebel against us,
secreting oil, jelly-fish, and slime?
Planetary Age
very different scale
billions of years, and even that’s just stupid
human
measurement.

Vi.
My voice is not human.

VII.
Your not
like the others,
we like the same things.

serial poem: Sad America pt. 1

I.

Nature making

our

difficult mind

the objective

truth,

aroused

the dead

salesman,

II.

plants spared America…

a breach, let Fall

winter depths

a horse installed

as puppet king…

in a state

wandering the streets

little food,

frequent dates,

acting class,

14 children murdered and decapitated.

This strange conflict

the best example

why

the rainforests motivated

finally focus on total

destruction,

only way to

control the company.