Saturday, October 25, 2008

The Toastmaster: words by Michael Cisco, images by Stepan Chapman.



I've been a toastmaster for years.

Toastmaster Two



This morning, I really had a breakthrough with the toast. Simply the most perfection I've ever managed to introduce into a piece of toast. Fine grained. Light crumb. Evenly but not monotonously browned, with a subtle variability of embrownpoint traversing the surface with a series of elusive transitional shadings. I had arrived.

Toastmaster Three



Crowned heads of Europe stop me in the street and say: "When are you coming to make toast for me?"

I say: "I have no time."

I open my notebook and say: "Look at my timetable. You see any time in my timetable for you? I have no time. I'm toasting everywhere. I am booked."

Now they see I carry a piece of toast with jam and bite marks on it and everything in my hand, and they say: "Please, may I taste it? Let me only have a taste."

I say: "No."

I say: "NO."

Toastmaster Four



They say: "Please, a bite from that back corner there."

I say: "That corner is the best part! I've been looking forward all day to eating that part! The whole point of the process of toasting is to cultivate that very corner, to make it the succulent end point of your journey through the toast, to give it final delectableness!"

They say: ""Well, I don't care if you bite it or no, let me have a taste from the end you're eating then."

Toastmaster Five



I say: "NO - this toast is not for you. Everyone gets their own toast. Different toast. I made THIS toast for ME."

Toastmaster Six



If you want to become a toastmaster, you must understand that there is no technique. This is the first illusion you must disabuse yourself of, if you are to go on. You cannot make advances if you are weighted down with this Eurocentric concept of "technique."

Toastmaster Seven



It is in the spirit that the answer must lie. You must make toast as a whole human being, and not as a human being divided in intentions and of unfixed concentration.

Toastmaster Eight




A true toastmaster like myself can make toast out of anything, can make toast anywhere. I have made stone toast. I have made nourishing toast of air. You may eat a slice of fire toast that will give you power to race up steep cliffs. I have spread bitter tears on the toast of teasing. I have made toast from verbs and abstract nouns. I have eaten the supernal toast of beauty and justice. This practice is the best practice. It is to this practice you must look if you are to find the toaster's way.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

8.10.08

masulisch 16 grotesque it "the kingdom of heaven means nothing


shrouds

-ere

the dashing rage of cottaged clouds

in bewildered atmosphere


weightless mountains loom


monument swells fall

to rise in musical fury of cyclones again

a white chaos from the moon


Like thin, false hands balled up in shrouds

That shred as they appear,

it snakes along the breakers’ backs

taking any water for its tracks

the black water crawls like lava


and plummets down the glassy slope

a locomotive on a rope of smoke


-eads

the firemen with wolfhound heads

and black and brawny hands

shovelling charge

the bellowing hearth

-ands


hurtle on like a comet without need

joyous in wild nightmare of speed


incurable dream of illness,

voluptuous and insane.


perch ministers, like spiders and owls



plunge

like a pendant over heaving breast

the reckless engine dangles

down elastic eversion of their triangles

-est




Or a man about to drown.

Braids of foam, a hollow column,


acres of green hood


they lean far from the windows

when they reach

the reeking bottom of the waves

the cars bristle in nervous rows

of long boathooks and nets on staves


they look to see what chance will bring them

in eerie moment before the rise


one crazed fisher lunges so far his friends

must batten on his coat and arm to drag him in again


mow the reeking bottom of the wave

to bid on the briny armor


baleful moonlight

whose lividity embosses

pinions of raven albatrosses

with women’s cries borne forth on the blast

the howls of furies ring out like brass


cleats


by the train’s flanks in great gouts he breathed,

in mania rolled, in spume enwreathed,


the (whale) which even archaic name outspans


projects

the cyclopean trunk of his sex


by mistake or - who will say? –

the monster couples with the train

mad amorous altercation flung in disarray of

the sharp clouts of titan heart’s pulsation


the people hilarious


the tempest

of power unencircled




The engine garlanded in sperm

laved in unliving alive witch light -aved


Moon - delirious


Sky - demented


Sea - depraved