Joel Chace

Time-Rhyme Excerpt For the truth is, that no man who goes to war with you or any other multitude, honestly striving against the many lawless and unrighteous deeds which are done in a state, will save his life; he who will fight for the right, if he would live even for a brief space, must have a private station and not a public one. She says, “If I lived like this, and wasn’t happy, I couldn’t stand it.” Unorthodox, a strange warrior, without grace, stiffly, relentlessly he fights. He learned his moves alone, in waste spaces where only wind roared approval. In piss-soaked straw -- terrible clangings, fire eaters, beggars, whores -- continually visored, he unhorses one after another, in dusty heat. Until, finally, he faces an older noble, also untoppled, a lord who refuses to fight an unseen foe until he at last removes his helmet. And the father, now facing his banished, ugly, hunchback son, reclaims him, tearfully. Voices bleed from one darkness to the next. The charged kaons are mesons which have a quark composition of up-antistrange for the positive kaon and antiup-strange for the negative kaon. They decay in about 10-8 seconds. These outbursts were painful to me. Up to now my virginity had always seemed a glory. It never occurred to me that all good, even this too, is relative and that he was only blurting out what many think who secretly wish for "an experienced woman." That I certainly was not; and so we tormented ourselves not from love so much as fear of love. His recording of The English Suites: there, here it? Floating above the lines, his falsetto hum, just slightly off the unison, rising on the edge of each note, searching its own air. A palm hulas above his head, the postmaster on the beach: in his hand, a small packet of letters bound for the interior. Harpo redoes Harpo, fixing Harpo in brains; Laurel improves Hardy to a fat, perfect star. An exposure, another, a billion angles; energy streams from a rock as we commit it to memory. Frontiers fly. Stilts. Syme doesn’t rhyme. I shall never forget the grandiose and festive air which so completely belied the hollowness of that occasion. No one spoke, but angry hostile eyes followed every movement I made. And when I wanted to sing of sorrow, it turned into love. And so I was divided into love and sorrow. He sometimes throws the dice where they can’t be seen. Menu from Hell. He holds his emptiness like a real man. She rests back with all her might, pebble in a hard-drawn sling. Make your Adversary a Fornicator, that is, having past yourself a little way, and the other’s Ball being hardly through the Port, you put him back again, and it may be quite out of Pass. Pegasus quivers in his fixed place, jetting at some ridiculous speed, to pull beyond the sextant and the charts. Who will pegase to Pegasus? Ringlets to serpents, men to stone, the winged steed rises from the Gorgon’s blood. Anything to anything; anything from anything. There have been greater days. Chastity and bad luck breed separate nobilities. Dr. Bebop thought he’d set a flea in mine ear. If it should at any time happen, that on some other evening the child should see James instead of Simon, he will, on the following morning, associate with his imagination of evening sometimes Simon, sometimes James, not both together: for the child is supposed to have seen, at evening, one or other of them, not both together. His imagination will therefore waver; and, with the imagination of future evenings, he will associate first one, then the other -- that is, he will imagine them in the future, neither of them as certain, but both as contingent. Spooky action at a distance. It is better for fools to be ruled than to rule. It is hard to be governed by one’s inferior. Our age sits heavy-arsed on myths. Painful, oh, to see that they are faster in Limbo than ever. Over and over, this. Over the moon she’d gladly go, out of the cave, away from the peacock-monster and the fly, and rectify the time to a cow’s thumb. Y: “I left it eons ago, when radiation started to leak.” X: “I left just now, but Ted is still back inside.” Z is the entanglement of all three. After men persuaded themselves that everything which is created is created for their sake, they were bound to consider as the chief quality in everything that which is most useful to themselves. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; — because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom; and therefore I asked myself on behalf of the oracle, whether I would like to be as I was, neither having their knowledge nor their ignorance, or like them in both; and I made answer to myself and to the oracle that I was better off as I was. Information loss paradox. No drama at the event horizon. Hip and hardened birds of passage, salt on their old tails. Somewhere in hills around this city, an occasional great bear gluts himself, his taut vigors relaxing to fat. Sum of the stings of cancelled goals.

Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as The Tip of the Knife, Counterexample Poetics, OR, Country Music, Infinity's Kitchen, and Jacket. Most recent collections include Sharpsburg, from Cy Gist Press, Blake's Tree, from Blue & Yellow Dog Press, Whole Cloth, from Avantacular Press, Red Power, from Quarter After Press, Kansoz, from Knives, Forks, and Spoons Press, and Web Too, from Tonerworks.
 
 
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