b a n n e d p o e t r y
heresies, lamentations and other infidelities
MICHAEL ANNIS—poet, writer, playwright, radio performer, founder of Howling Dog Press—has published many of the world’s giants of modern fiction, drama, poetry and art. His own forthcoming works include Brave New World Order [1994 CO Gov. Arts Award, Literature; revised/expanded 2015-2019; illus.by David Allen Reed], Howling at the End of the Wor)l(ds (collected poetry & meditations; NightWing Publications, Los Angeles, 2019), and The White Rose of Stalingrad (screenplay by Gregory Greyhawk & M.A.). In 1986, his full-length drama, Voices in Soft Sculpture, was produced on the national Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, starring actor John Savage. In 2007, he co-edited [w/ Mike Palecek & Whitney Trettien], designed, and published Cost of Freedom: The Anthology of Peace & Activism, featuring over 100 artists, poets, & writers from the US/Canada, receiving written accolades from Harry Belafonte, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn, Pete Seeger, Attorney Gen. Ramsey Clark, and Thom Hartmann, among others. Michael is the creator of the OMEGA series of online anthologies, including the forthcoming OMEGA8: Clan Between the Worlds. Since 2013, he's acted as Denver Metro Producer for the annual international literary/arts festival “100,000 Poets for Change.” In 2019, Michael will publish Quintet Dialogues: Translating Introspection a collaborative work by Felino A. Soriano, poet, and David Allen Reed, artist. Michael fronts the Ghost Ship Rats, an eclectic musical ensemble with Philo Sudberry, Katarina M. Pliego, Dani Harrison, and Tom Tilton.
M.A.'s Ghost Ship Rats, performing Michael's "Wolves at the Mall": Tom Tilton, percussion; Dani Harrison, bass/synthesizer; Michael Annis, vocals, Katarina M. Pliego, cello; Roseanna Frechette, guest vocalist; Philo Sudberry [behind Frechette], metal guitar. Mercury Café, Denver, 4/2018.
2019 02 20 ]fingerprints[
reincarnating from the walls of the caverns of Lascaux
dawn of man haunted by its past, this hauntology a demarcation between life and spirit
= whose fingerprints dabbed paint upon the rocky walls
= fingerprints of wings daubing the memories of your soul
this hauntology, craving the blood of the Chinook wind,
wrestling the frigid breath of god, its fanged but toothless grin
this reincarnation, fingerprints of the crime that is a poem for the dead of the dawn
= fingerprints that became animals shitting landsc[apes] on the walls
of the caverns of Lascaux
= whose midwifed carcass delivered the fingerprints of murder
mildewed flesh entrancing the enchantment of the unholy progenitor
vulvae of swans birthed unfolding from the cerebral cortex
to have flogged the sedimentary plates of the ancient evolutions
= whose fingerprints took form and shape, spirit and essence as ancient tombs
= whose fingerprints became the fingerprints of all that preceded the human soul
Upper Aurignacian Rorschach predicating higher consciousness
womb of the Earth, womb of the human psyche
blind fetus whose eyes were crucified upon the cavern walls
confessional of the beheaded flowers, whose blossoms are cloudbursts of blood
this language that is the crooked axis linking the polar caps of human skulls
where owls haunt the moons of the primordial skies
= reincarnating from the rituals deep in the caves
= these are the fingerprints of the rites of passage, life form to life form
where hands open dreams of opposing thumbs in novelties of music
where hands untie visions of opposing thumbs cut from the clay of inconspicuous consciousness
for Dionysian precessions into licentious feasts of the naked and the damned
= reincarnating into the same psychic imprintation
= humans reincarnating into their same fingerprints
from crepuscular wings the howl is carried unconscious through the jungles of Tao
where memories inhabit the garbled breath of haunted dreams
= reincarnating from the walls of the caverns of Lascaux
= reincarnating in explosive oratorical teleprehension
beheld in the raga marshes of celestine consciousness chants haunt a des[p]ec[rate]d Lascaux
desperate for the desecration of poem and image
blissful Aphrodites and Madonnas, nomadic islands whose fingerprints are worshiped breasts of the sea
= reincarnating into the same fingerprints, those that hunt the past
= reincarnation with the same psychic mother, whose fingers are not yet your own
for the child is the motherprint to the man
ever reborn dread of goddess erasing her fingerprints on the phallic tower of dionysian malice
dawns irresistible to the dead open up flowers to the sting of the fleshly bee
belladonna of the caverns left clinging to the crypts of que será, será
= from dislocated fingerprints of ancient ritual, their passions trawling the waves
= from electronic fingerprints of future interplanetary travel, sleek & sterile
searching for my dead son, searching for the reincarnation of his fingerprints
searching for the casks of wine that will ease my agony, uncover the casket of his nakedness
= as he laments the death of the resurrected fingerprint who abandoned him
as beautiful as a Keats poem written in flowers,
their fingerprints cast upon an ocean wave
=[aussi beau qu'un poème de Keats écrit en fleurs,
leurs empreintes digitales jetées sur une vague océanique]
=[bella come una poesia di Keats scritta in fiori, impronte digitali su un oceano onda ]
where the living monolith stares out into the screen of his imprisonment
= fingerprints of his wheelchair silenced but creaking upon the barren shore
where imbalance bends the fulcrum's arrowhead that past and future crash in flames
= fingerprints whose dust is a lock of hair in a metal box thrust through my skull
searching for his fingerprints among the layers of cave bears, reindeer, and aurochs
= fingerprints fleeing from death across ancient shadows dancing in flames
fingerprints on fingerprints when I held your hand the night you died,
= fingerprints staring through me your eyes already within the turbulence of heaven
blindly received into your soul, through time & space, through sedimentary lives
= fingerprints of worlds whirling beyond and back again
where rebirth burns as a momentary arc upon the caves' walls
= fingerprints on your mother's bare breasts, your lips kissing pink blossoms
sucking gently tasting sweet fingerprints from within her
= fingerprints burned to ash when death became your liberator, your redeemer
& millennium after millennium this dark flash of consciousness in between
] for Dylan Micah Roy Annis :: 5 April, 1982 -- 28 February, 2001 [ [ Copyright © 2016-2019 by Michael Annis. All rights reserved.]
2015 12 12 ]unleashing[
"To the left of the Man, a rhinoceros with two horns—the only rhinoceros in the cave
—is shown moving away from the scene. ... The painting is clearly incomplete, for the
outlines of the belly, chest, and foreleg have been merely sketched in black line
and never filled in. Under the upraised tail there are six black dots of doubtful
significance, and slightly below them some black marks which may be traces
of the imprint of a hand." ~Annette Laming-Emperaire, Lascaux
Unleashing the monsters in a free fall of nationalistic disinheritance
Where mass disobedience recidivates endless spirals of civilizations past
Where Socrates and Thoreau are nailed to the chain links of fervordom
Where perspective & independence are putrefacted into the gratuitous stew of anger
A lone man locked in an artist's canvas covers his ears and screams,
The naked ape prowls between the sheets of love's caverns
Devouring passion, regurgitating the animus of psychic lust,
loading his weapon, flexing his bulleted cock at 70 raped virgins!
From the here and now of eternity, the far side of catastrophe where darkness
blooms invisible the sun also rises—it's religion's world now! where hope is
blessed into a 10-headed gargoyle of faux piety, where
the earth shudders, undulating seductively in its final death
throb, the air unbreatheable, the water undrinkable
the soul of the planet rooted out and carried off by dogma;
Where fingerprints of humanity mutate as hieroglyphic symbols of slavery
Where children's minds are forced down under the booted asp of civilization
Where animals explode, insides out, in the friendly fire of climate cataclysm;
Where the ancient rhinoceros stands weeping into the lens of the camera
His horn lopped off by poachers, flies devouring the bloody meat of his wound
Dumb legs collapsing under the scalpel of rhizotomy quenching paralysis
In the rites of passage of the new world order his spine dangling
Under the codpiece of greed in the dissonance of disinheritance
all living things donning the priestly robes of victimization
His manifest destiny first chiseled into his own pelvic bone
43,000 years ago, carbon dated & retooled, renewed & rekilled
he is a voiceless engravure upon a dollar bill, a specie
regenerated within black market value, reinvented for drugs & alcohol,
his image antiquity a potion of magic, his horn first conjured
a lance of shamanism, a spear thrusting rites of passage
now harvested by moneytenders for bullion & pain
sacrificial lustmord of his offsprings' hauntology
Dying sphinx of the present tense whose wailing horn is emasculation
Whose emasculation is not only of gender, but of the primacy
of species, a brutal scarring of the dignity of essence
of life & being alive, this hauntological neutralization
of male principle, this castration of male deity,
Whose layers upon layers of Paleolithic worship, engraved a graven image
in the ancient caves, where he made war upon
his own kind, preserving genetic supremacy
this day a murdered beast, human eyes staring, impoached King of Terrified Confusion
His agonized horn wails out into the deaf maelstrom of capitalism
where all living things perish under the moneybelt of power
To have done with the judgment of God!, screams Artaud,
black hooded, scowling, abandoned in a burnt-out farmhouse
drinking his memory into a blur of semi-consciousness
His eye drinking in the dim light, roving the desolation, woefully
watching the rueful high notes like pink rhinoceri dancing mid-air
Each war to end all War swinging the shining scimitar of righteousness
To have done with the indulgence of corporatism! he wroughts his lines,
its power centers reeking with the stench of patriotic
bestiality, its zombies pressing forward as masses
of bereavement, blind, hungry, merciless
quelling the questioning of what
is to become—after the groundswells
begin sweltering with crimes of their collective past, as fear, squelching
the present tense, gives up the ghost of what is now into always to be,
years as ancient pachyderms crossing the anguish between then & now,
tenebrae upon the rock face by shaman's spear, sealed by hand print,
sexual personae hanging as animas brutorum from his umbilical,
exchanging vows with violence to begin taking care of things, dutifully,
perhaps as soon as
tomorrow
[Copyright © 2015 by Michael Annis. Revised 2017. All rights reserved.]
2016 03 03 ]surge[ [ Copyright © 2016-2017 by Michael Annis. All rights reserved.]
O tragedy of dismember without vein, devoiding the blood of innocence
where the dust and ashes of acquiescence thrive on the inkblot of ignorance
O tragedy and my back breaking from the wind of corporate tyranny surging
the ancient days razed to the earth in the flames of incessant profiteering
the wolf howl of quantum information searing the tender nipples of the sky
where women undulate under the songlines of diamonds and convertibles
beyond the borders of psychic death, monks invoke the chalice of mayhem
the whorl and force of similitude disinherit the frontal lobes of rebellion
telepathy brands the human backside in symbols of recalcitrant speculation
non- communication desposes the future in the fetid ashcan of dead matter
in the invincibility of regression human consciousness walks the tightrope
dreaded doppelgangers of past lives reinvoked through the prism of the present
messages of love abandoned to the four directions of sidereal reincarnation
under the shawl of the old woman, rib bones cradle nipples in her fear of nothing
her terror flows across the Ouija, the winds of her fingertips blinded to any future
each destiny from each preceding decade blockaded by this present moment
where holy wrath and injustice of life decompose her youthful beauty cell by cell
O my children's childhoods racing fireflies in the steaming august night
All is Kansas while the full moon sheds tears in streams across the moment
the milk of their future dyslexic to turn sour as reptiles, injecting toxic saliva
quivering under their ambling steps across the desert wastelands of tomorrow
vigil of captives in jars, asses blinking coded messages storm the waning glow
sidereal straining outward toward the conquering holocaust of the inner eye
O tangled forests of wrought iron, this blackhole consumes the dread in innocence
arching inward the glass aching to parse the present from shipwrecked future
their life rafts leaning froward drift, leaking hope upon a distant shore where eye
awaited their deconstruction, their continual drowning, each morning died the sun
bouquets of their hands roping gently, delicate small fingers weaving, spiders entrap
the flesh of light, the blistered moment of metamorphosis where life renounces
its future, and forgets the great grey owl sharpening his talons in the twisted trees,
surge of destitution, latent beak, abscessed wilderness of subconscious howling,
the apparition of the wolf lapping stanzas from the nocturne of the cavern floor.
~for my sons, Dylan Micah and Brennan Thomas Annis