Superscendance.

And what the hell - I have a lot here.
Here's the deal. Top 3 contributors get a $25 Barnes and Noble gift certificate. Seriously, and we work it out later (i.e. I mail it to some random place - you take it and spend it). This is random and subjective - cause top three contributors is a value judgement (i.e. Mine), I guess - but -- and hey - what the hell.
~Will
AKA - thoroughly daft.

wands
of the world

shaking, taking
striking the wonders
into the world

matched, unattached
surging joys
have grown bolder

Yeah dude - nice comment. I will sit back and think about how she fits into the next stanza. I am still writing this - but I want this to be co-inter-laberative - hense my willingness to pay (since the last thing I need is more books!).
Sweet.

can the sprout of a seed
invigorate,
integrate you

the creamy secretions
use as a balm
or to incinerate me

luxuriate my fate
or into a piranha pool to berate
----------
exceptional handling
so few errors
left dangling
or
exceptional handling
only inconsequential
left dangling
or
exceptional handling
inconsequential
left dangling
-------
all cross-bone styled, and
blood throned righteous
consciousness thwarted

or possibly,

all cross-bone styled, and
blood throned righteous
my conscience thwarted

Effrontery views with hates
Façade of masked piracies
Gangrened garrulous fakes
Hypnotize all as fallacies.

Yells of agony in this society of ceramic
Zooming we are still by black magic.

Excellent - but i need more input from people - this thing is itching to be written - and I want to see if Gather can must. Hell - might as well Spam people.

if white is the new black
then dry bones balls dust
dust to fall, fall away
fall away from mirror senescence
reflections of who we thought we were
wished we were
were once we were once upon a time
when time was green
back in our salad days
and we had world enough and time my dear
back in our evanescent senescence
before white the new black
turned bones balls dry bones balls dust
and labia folded witherd upon itself
withered away with dry bones balls dust
to labor away in our evanescent senescence

Well anyway, you evoked some strange response in me, today, Will. This is all your fault !!!

insanity inches
floating dangerously near
or
is it sanity
wafting way?

Yes, Katherine. About time for all of us to step outside ourselves, and co-lab-o-write. If I could, I would wish this all away, you labor and our evanescent senesescence, but damn our Eyes, sweetheart, you didn't feel that way this morning when I bleed my heart on the floor.

Pain is necessary dear Will.

when white is the new black
this can't be
my crystals need recharging
they fear the black;
surrender only to white light
lead my days
keep my nights with passion untold
recharged they'll be
as will I and you, boxers or not
feelings deep and certain
tears streaming down frozen faces
and wind hurting eyes
fingers numb with feelings
mouths fused closed.

Sure is, Kathryn, "all" his fault! I really didn't want all of you to know I'm nuts too!

dueling silver points
cunningly taste
the edges of their shiny
deceptive clarity
no proof in the blood even
shed for unfair advantage
no tangible rules always
for in the imagination's duets
only colors soothe
when the night torments
with black obsessions
who strike lines in skin
to endlessly divide
the dark questions
into living possibilities
of another day of Light
perhaps disarmed
but still posed
for verbal assaults
that might soothe or
confuse, but the dead
will never hear their
silver points
scrawling out hope
on reverberating walls
when the windows rebel
and the doors open
their torturesome invitations
to try again
to make sense
of the insanity

the offended syntax error commands

you into the blue screen of death..

gingerly you eat the sugared ludolf,

athiest, satanist, syncopath

encompassing

the ludolf consumes you,

enveloping, enterically, ischemically

with each bite you feel the pain.

or should I masquerade
and take the frontal pose
without complaint
compliantly seduce
the words and their meanings
into writhing harmonies
slashing curves into the night air
as she whispers more coercively
of new postures
to assuage grief and longing
the love, ah the love
again maligns the blackened contempt
of irrefutable mass manias
dancing for our decisive postures
to lament and prioritize
sheathing the swords,
posing purpose and intent
for love, more than anything
more than everything
more love
to strip us of silken shirts
and satin boxers
a rematch of naked heart
remains unchallenged
but waiting its turn
to heal

if not for the plague of mind
would the veins flow
more successfully
faster than hate
or anger
or disease
spent in the conflict
satin and silk &
finely tuned cotton
textural relief from the
jagged edges on the soul
that permeate every dream
with some saccharine armor
but more dementia
waging intimate embrace
on the unfettered senses
so innocently they pose
their inconsistent disarming kisses
while scars are streaming
down the neck of the beloved
Truth and Love are suffering
how can we heal them
with our meager words
the tumorous threats
that leave such
tearful hearts
lonely and questing
reason

is it fortuitous to awaken
or but a curse
of undeserved clarity
that screens out
the shadows
and forces
self to take a stance
black or white
the conflicted blades strike
out, without resolution
questions neverending
their wars and plight
to advance the front
crave the fight
win something, somehow
without merciless suffering
resonate with
the dawn
as she carves new pathways
through the deftly laid fields
of acute awareness
which strides to assume
ascend or descend
for doubtful outcomes
only tease answers
their fondled designs
yielding serpentine nullification
more incessant queries
to take the unreal forward
into the embrace of the sunset's glow
the mistress of moods
wafting her curtains
masking midnight's decision
on who travelled further
or arrived first
to advance the quietest quest
with more heartful intent
to invade another day
with surprised revelation
that only the sun
sems to know

and what does she know,
the sun,
of mortal plights
her comforts never shining
on battlefields
of wounded hearts
begging relief
from the endless struggles
to assume some pose
of affirmed right
to be heard and loved
if but for a deceptive moment
of her wavering bliss
have we not learned
how to shine correctly
but mimicking the temptation
probing with beams
like blades of assumed right
to time without plight
forging new edges in every moment
ascribing false definition
and restraint on will
and fantasy
seeking inward reclusive escape
from the bright edges
the only sign of life within,
dreams and spirited sorcery
in telltale reflections
mirroring the inner days of self
uniquely shielded from delay
or demise, except
when accosted by self
to its own recriminations
that deny the joy
of simply playing
within the tempting warmth
of Light, blanketing
as she diffuses horizons
for endless perspectives
of perception
that cannot perceive
the end
or the eternal plea

Break time......you can breathe now.
I love word dancing with you, Will.

Oh, My God, Laura... I knew there was more in you than the few poems you honor us with. You are an ocean of word and I am but a drop.

new words are shared
through sun- sweetened airs
the morning's pursuits
seeking tactile diversions
lips impulsively wander
Benedictine or A La Russe entryways
for the Muse challenged to dessert
as thighs venture forth
to mimic the knight's blades
scissor-striding the doubts
with deflective sheen
silencing voices
sating thirst
with jovial jousting
the metaphors laugh and wait
wafting in the aromatic bliss
breaths braving to beguile
a temptress willingly manipulated
divisive worships
uncloaking every desire
melting into the silken madness,
the wounds mesh safely
mesmerizing displaced angels
with daring thrust
swords challeng the goddess
to release her secretions
for the conjuring
of empowered sight
through the winds that ravens course
after the feast has merely fueled
the repressed hunger, the pangs
that forever probe and pulse
pretending to pleasure
always with new anguish
fending off the last moan
that torments
with its inevitable last heaving sigh
merging silenced into One
forgetful moment
of absent-mindedly relinquished
ecstasy
to capture a kiss of forever

the satin gifts
having discounted all
measure of their threads,
do not enumerate
the moments they activated
pleasure, nor do they compare
their glow with the moon,
knowing every star dancing
only because envisioned
by upward glances
escaping the earthly crust
concealing completions believed
residing in ethered clouds
bathing so effortlessly
in blue mirrors
awaiting synapsing journeys
to encircle every dream
remembering back
to its first cry
for air and water

feathers of thought
resting
pure white with hope
upon
the breast
of my
beloved
the softness
permeates
my flesh
and transforms
the silken ear of a swine
into a
tender purse
filled
with
pleasureable
senses
I faint inside
and kiss such perfect grace

born and reborn
grace through baby's breath
dreams of wrinkled crevices
etched adventures
of the mind and soul
skin stretched to enscribe,
witness choices enacted
through circuitous routes,
tasted extensions,
elongations of time
posings within the infinite,
cells containing release
for reflective nurturing,
the only constants
the never-ceasing more
beloved sparks
permeating the senses
with perfection

I will silently slink away
and leave this forbidden plain
to those whose poetry
fills the soul
and nourishes the spirit

OH ORGIASTIC POETRY HERE !

OH ORGIASTIC POETRY HERE !

Pterosaur rises like a spectre
From the gaping cracked earth
Crystal jar drops gently from his talons
Into the warm ashes
Inside the jar raves a rabid raven
Clinging to the outside rim
An alabaster owl stares into space
While a banshee screams in the distance
The sound pierces the endless ebony night until
Purple lightning crackles the horizon

the burning aroma of roasting coffee
wafts through raw silk curtains
tickling his nose and arousing his waking senses to another reality
rolling over he scratches his shoulder on the sharp edge
of a gift certificate
perfumed with lilac and embossed with the print
of wine stained
lips

quislings quizing
tearing, knifing through
forgotten hearts
and toys

Lost among the rotten embers dying to be lying
on or about the floor

evil dreams call silent mothers to steps that babies take in stride down corriders of lofty saints betraying all inside

Tomes of tomcod tales weigh bitterly on my soul
a loss of driven instincts loves another desperate ploy
the scores of lords and hoards tied up in cords fall on their swords
and boys with balls shamming slamming jaundiced Erklings
across the fields of play

Neonates and neophytes
Born
to be
like nematodes
of the next nepotistic joy

too volatile to verify,
gawking neurons
revel in the eruption,
extending its sentence
to cast even more dispersion
on the plight of the simple
merit in forced couplets,
never straying into menage
or menacing the undefined,
pacifiers will awaken first
weighing in on rights
to everything feared,
sanctified, and insured
perils so many face
without compensation
salvaging tears
without paying for solace,
silence celebrating the remnants
yielded without ownership
never keeping count
or blinking moments too long
without feeling
the pulsating alleys winding
through every mind
inviting a few stray breaths
to stay the night
that never seems to awaken
without Light
pounding on the pane
of missing windows
with suspicious volition
forcing sight
to conjure
a multi-hued glimpse of self
that only a cup
of sugared Ludolf
can brush away.

Ludo, you beau
Where did you go?
Upstairs? Downstairs?
Did the wind blow
Your mind to unbind
The sash on the window?
I know the rainbow
fashions your brain so
Your colors like rain flow
Brushes with paint glow
Ludo you know (whoh!)

Will, judging by all the above, my contribution doesn't fit in at all. But I'm not going to waste it - I'll develop further it myself. So, consider it withdrawn. If I think of something else to contribute, I'll come back and do so.

I love these lines from Amy George:
" Seduce me in red
while I deduce in blue
The light is fading
The song is ending
I have transcended nothing
Wake me to my sleep
Feed me your poison
And I will smile
While I die in the arms
and on the lips
of your cybernetic criticism"

Those are hot.

Yeah - so it was so hot I had to add Laura into X and Amy into XI. This thing is getting HUGE! Can you feel it?
We might have to branch off into other screens.
Oh - for those contributors - this thing is completely - totally, open source. What does that mean? Your words are yours, mine are mine - but we all can reuse - edit, expound, and amplify. Till your heart is content. So take me and reuse me - please.

White is the new black,
darkness merged with light;
we two,
separate yet one
your seed planted within me
my sanity in question
as you take shape within
my splintered soul,
and as I fall into your coffin,
we fuse together
and breathe deeply
of our demise
as we pray for breath
and angels
White, black,
merged into one
time holds us in
perfect balance
and all
that once seemed real
is now illusion.

tussled hair
rubbing
tired i's
am
y
late?

the core
of the fruit
tossed asunder
with the heart
the radiator flooding
the morning's chill
with steamy solicitations
as the lovers tomb
swells and is opened
indecently awakened
to the flooding of sentience
dripping in rivulets
mimicking the truth
like a clown praying
for balance
on a tightrope spun
from tussled hair

Grabbing at beams of
radiooactive light, inducing
new glow into the arching abyss
the eunuch in costume
paints the fool's horizons
with deviating hues
from the nuances of norm
diverting all creative possibility
into anonymity with contempt
as murmurs from the sun
might steal time
otherwise employed
in his script
breathing as if
life itself knew
the story's conclusion
and corroborated
its fallacies.

dawn's pearly gates
only opened a sliver
to smirk
then cappucino cherubs
haloed in frothy mirth,
passed their warmed lips
over the bursting clouds
to kiss the raining sweat
from God's brow
and theirs
overestimating earth
yet again, nervously
far-removed from its axis
closer still to the axe
that felled the apple's feast
before the coring
opened the wounds
the juice flowing deceptively sweet
like a cup of Ludolf
langoursously absent
sipping Will's secret desires
effusively gathering
every wanton whisper
tasted by any captured world
into an anthem of words
wrapped seductively
in altruistic alchemy
hypnotizing the seers
that a Sunday let loose
on the random steeping stones,
teasingly aromatic
& haunting hyperboles.

Ah Will ... I started writing something for this contest but I didn't think my contribution would quite fit with the others, so I published it separately. As usual I went off in my own direction, down a different path. But here's a link - inspired by your photos and the theme you created, my piece is called: Inspired By Will

ah, the sweet scent
throbbing leather permeates
as the papier mache melts
the bodice hides the beating
but not the secret
or the why
the words dangle so objectionably
when the trussed qualifiers
uphold no particular virtue
or lament
time wielding expletives
crossing the lines
seeking the new ruins
of tomorrow's yesterdays
in unfathomable discontent
huddled cozily in the aftermath
geometric garble
the warbling of the wise
never surfacing
through the fractal abyss
just looming as they coil
serpentine essentials
hissing their way to stardom
leaving no venom for the victims
their own chosen demise
interprets only the signs
coiled crop circles
echoing the infinite question
promoting the maze
as meager solution
the endless fractures
in the mind and heart
mere rampant flourishes
of desperate faiths
avoiding their own truths
encoded for forgetfulness
with solemn pride
and garulous greed

the whirlpools gurgle
spewing forth flirtations
fondle their foamy resonance
as all stones ever thrown
tossed into their sucking mouths
remove the wounds
leaving nothing
but a naked paradise
to offer again
yet again and again,
another invitation
from the goddess
again
for all to show
only their highest moves

Boo!

evolving into sparkling gems
of every color
flashing, dancing, floating
at each other
crying, laughing, screaming
no grace here
total liberation
peace in utter abandonment
cut me with that diamond
let me feel the emerald
wrap the amethyst round me
tell the sapphire to let GO
and go find that ruby
in the house of forever
with lights of black and white.

the facets do feel
their hues conspiring
tactile yet tempestuous
they access every invitation
and wend their auras about
the black and white growling
at their sensory discontent
with withheld definition
outlining palettes
with territorial wrath
the colors bleed out over them
dripping in paranoia
oozing through the descent
ashes of bent bones
glide into their carbon graves
oil-slicked and gurgling
garish pools of unspent grief
prisms flickering on every horizon
a dance of conspiring facets
snuggles next to gemstone stars
no tales yet
to offer any conclusion
only the mysterious throbbing
infinite escapes
into the wizard's imaginative hoaxes
the frenzy perpetuated
designing infinite playgrounds
for the children of the maze
who create without caring why
their colors never mimicking
the history of word
revel in their mystique
mirroring all
that has blessed
to euphorically glow
in celebrations of nothing
but delighted qualia

pulling pools
of androgenous amoeba
to adroitly ascertain
a better way to replicate
the rapture of the multicellulaar
misconception of time
their walls discreetly
bearing no human colors
circumnavigate the test
with ardently disguised fluidity
mastering every nuance
before it hatches
swiftly ascribing futures
to the most daring
who seem not to know
the past's demise
flagellating in frenzied array
new plights for future gasps
wriggle therir way
into a consciousness
not posing
mass integration
or Darwinian disturbance
to interfere
in their essential
and formidable succession
to the wasted emptiness

no microscopic duet
rhyming verse, only you and me
in the mud-perjured gene pool,
naked, wrestling to the death
tendrils wrapped about essences
flaunting like vorticella
feasting on extended offerings
uncoiled into random waters
latent sustenance expending
primal breeches of future faith
enigmas for the posing
with no closing constraints
no mingled confusing lapses
bearing translatable witness
to the creedless deed
only tadpoles
yet to be discovered
frogs without kingdoms
seeking a goddess
to please
without a perfunctory kiss
ascribing attention
or useless meaning

Seems like we have reached the end? Amy, this is absolutely luscious...you should publish it.

Reading this long colllaborative poem and all the incredible work that followed in comments felt like bathing in champagne. I feel a warm glow...

Amy is luscious - and I need to fold in some things back - and figure out my top 3 contributors.

Incredible, yes, I see this as a publishable epic.

After Will pulls all the comments from his contributors into a whole, what do we have.
One take.

Pre: Evans starts his anthem poem in playful gnomic fashion, the image of swords points to the Tarot, to the pouch of symbols, and finally to the play and tension of both the Wittgensteinan language game and the card game itself, and its aleatory consequences.

I. Experience precedes language, speech transformed as "ink released/ as a final line/ of defense."
II. If the knowledge base is flawed by linguistic overdeterminism in a century of glibly motivated and misused "signifiers", then the entire edifice of learning that the speaker has pursued is erroneously 'constucted' and "this screen is a cage." I particularly like the mi of the abstract with the personal here, where Evans brings in the autobiographical detail of his university jacket.
III. Here we get into an extreme closeup of a kiss, seen through the parallax view of a consciousness abstracted by itself as it strives to map in a new way, that impossibly recalls with Borgesian flavor prehistoric cultural measurements of Sumer, "divided by sixty sumerian units….all cross-bone styled, and blood-throned righteous
IV. Another moment of consciousness re-enacted and mapped with novelty from the speaker's life: Here taking in, processing another's thought, disagreeing with the other mind in the midst of reflecting on the problem of other minds, all happening virtually, in "no space", as a way of somehow getting beyond ideas that have contaminated both, but all happening with the freshness of invisibility, anonymity, appreending the new thought before even getting to know the way the other felt about the old way of thinking….
V. The speaker ponders his own text as perfume, as essence, yet finds it wanting, and sarcasm breaks out, insecurity pours forth, but the "malignant script" cannot be stripped because it has been presented as 'pre-reading, a "vernissage" in a web blog, and the words can't be taken back, even though boxer shorts can be given out sardonically….
VI. More self-abnegation arises, as consciousness gives reflex rise to the old postmodernist self-conscious pose, self-mockery as a performance gesture, but now seen for what it truly is in clarifying and brutal honesty, a terrible belief of the old self, "the picturesque failure, me…
VII. To get beyond language, Evans has to see it as analytic object, as numerological symbol, as phoneme, all standing for "con" because of the sense of self-fraud which speaker is addressing, hoping to transcend, the sense of entering a Simulationist state with just a binary set of alternatives, where religious yearning has been replaced by sucking off the machine or taking the "Matrix pill" in Baudrillardian fashion to regard the limits of machine, code, language. (A recursive striving.)
VIII. A playful allusion to a pre-Sim founder and fellow artist Ludolf Grolle de Rochefort strikes a deeply personal note of humor and pain, as once again the faux Evans speaker goes beneath the words themselves to try to give us the nonverbal narrative of the experience of consciousness while digesting words (and images, in Ludolf's case) in virtuality. A person becomes an concrete noun for the experience of his works. The awareness that one must map an icon of identity for another person in this new sim interactivity through his creative impulse expressed digitally is made patent
IX. And in the process opens up a whole vision of all the stereotypal possibilities of another's work, from godless to disobedient demiurge, while also noting that as one reads (eats) one is in turn absorbed into the writing itself through the interactive exchange of author-to-author—"the ludolf consumes you,/enveloping, enterically, isochemically,/ with each bite you feel the pain."
X. Here Evans' alludes to the speakers' fractured state as he comes close to insanity, brought about by the battle between day and night, dark and Light, all limbically charged with excessive meaning. By trying to break into the New to rapidly one is subject to one Prigogean "bifurcation point" after another. And all "to make sense/ of the insanity.
XI. Recognition of this attempt to bivouac at silence's base camp as a failure, because the words are pulling downward from their meanings, and an invocation to a sleeping lover to offer a pharmikon of pleasure/pain to annihilate the senses, because the thoughts rn on, "these countless challenges", yet the words remain filing themselves, even to the point of pairing as "sixth coins placed over eyes."
XII. The speaker alludes to his undercover activities as a dawn poet as a "clipper ship lost from shore." The mind has loosed from its dock, floating on "an emergent blood sea", trying to map it.
XIII. A quick moment of despair about the possibilities of a real virtual movement when collaborators seem so far away, and the divergent paths of thought not seeming to ever trod the same common. Evans employs the haunting image of a late night carnival shutting down to convey his sense of futility at the possible failure of his cherished enterprise.
XIV. But then his spirit arises in his auditory sense and he sees possibility in the other pre Sim way of thought different from his, he lifts himself "spurred to further observances.
XV. Interesting plays of words "Jawbone/ jinxed/ linked to skittish jitters/ figment out of pigment" speak to his feeling incapable of speaking into the work of others.
XVI. And now this playfulness with language that began the poem ends it, with a jump into Genet-like categories, "a burglar, clergy, madman" and in so doing talk of getting beyond the preciosity of language's surface, "of Nabokov's longing" to one's own theatre of the absurd, of false consciousness.
XVII. The speaker addresses his intense pain again: The pain of old ways of thinking, of being. He wants out. "Released releasing relapsed/ and forget." He hasn't found it yet. The way out, that is.
XVIII. Now the script is done, we've made it from Sunday's shame to Tuesday's ode, looking for the palindromic "pool's pull" of the poem in a glitch, trying to remember how the speaker navigated himself into a loop—"So I might find this circle's cycle"—of words, of ideas, of living in a relentlessly maudit fashion, of still swallowing the Romantic 'despair' meme. In this coda, the "End Transmission" marker is leapfrogged to get to the final lines beyond the self's recursive trap: "Or not." There is hope for the pre-Sim speaker of the poem yet, to find new meaning to life, to his virtual friends, to his praxis, to hope itself.