The Last Dream about Gay Porn I Will Ever Have in This Apartment

Last night I dreamed that I was watching gay porn, only it was a super tender one, and one of the men reached up and stroked the other man's mustache, and said, "On our first date, we didn't even make shiny cells together." Shiny cells! What an amazing euphemism for boning.

Happy Aftermath

Today I am covered in cat hair, either because a) I dried myself off with a towel that the cat had secretly sat on, or b) I am becoming a cat myself, which was totally my Christmas wish.

We’re moving tomorrow afternoon, so I won’t be posting any new drawings for the next few days. I’m considering keeping the Tennyson Pig Contest open for another week or two past the original deadline, since this month has been so disrupted. I’ll let you know. I'm also considering adding another prize, which might or might not be a gold-colored sow medallion. If this doesn't tempt people to enter, I don't know what will.

Quick, an Update Before My Fingers Grow Too Clumsy with Ham: Pig Contest Entry Number One

As of this minute, this is the first and only Tenny Tenny Alf Lord Alf Tenny Tenny Pig Contest submission I have received. It is a product of the mind of Elegant Choice, which is so fine that it delights in being freaked by ideas with some regularity and considerable roughness. I know I said I would display the entries all at once, but since I may not have a chance to post again before Christmas and had nothing else to post today anyway, I decided to throw caution to the wind--if I do receive more entries, I'll just post them as they come. This one is really too good to keep to myself any longer, though, so allow me to present to you Pig Contest Entry the First.
'O God-like isolation which art mine,
I can but count thee perfect gain,
What time I watch the darkening droves of swine
That range on yonder plain.

'In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin,
They graze and wallow, breed and sleep;
And oft some brainless devil enters in,
And drives them to the deep.'

from "The Palace of Art"

Here, Elegant Choice explained, was a picture of a brainless devil entering a swine. More literally, he added, here was a picture of President George W. Bush inserting himself abominably into Vice President Dick Cheney, and uttering a silver-tongued witticism as he did so. I found it to be extremely tastefully done, as well as a masterful illumination of the very lines that Tennyson, from beyond the bar, is at this moment thanking us for pressing into the service of the President and his pig-possessing cause. A round of applause for you, Elegant Choice, and I wish you the best of luck at judging. You're up against some tough competition.

When You Want Me, Sound Upon the Bugle-Horn

"I, to herd with narrow foreheads, vacant of our glorious gains,
Like a beast with lower pleasures, like a beast with lower pains!"

from Locksley Hall

This illustration is fairly literal: the beast on the left is experiencing some lower pleasure, while the beast on the right is experiencing some lower pain, both in the form of snakes attached to their wangs. As an afterthought, I threw in a few sheep with narrow foreheads that the beasts are expertly herding, but as far as I'm concerned they're just there for decoration. I made a half-hearted attempt to draw beasts of my own, but they were a total abortion, so when these guys came up on an image search I decided to run with them.

Allow me to offer my heartfelt apologies for the lack of updates--you will forgive me when I tell you that we're getting ready to move a few days after Christmas, because we are huge lunatics. Rather, Elegant Choice is a huge lunatic who drags me behind him like a rattling can. Also, remember that you still have eight days to submit Pig Entries, which could qualify you to win a hilarious prize and also to gain eternal esteem in my enormous eyes.

I Really Hope You Appreciate All These Sacrifices I Am Making, Part Two

This month's party is taking a strange toll on me. To be more specific, reading so much Tennyson is melting my own chimpy skills. Yesterday, for instance, I was working on a poem for my new manuscript Plow Me Deep, Plant Pumpkinheads when I ran into a snag: I wanted to use the word "sharpening" in the third line, but I would have preferred a word with one fewer syllable--I'm not writing in form, but the third syllable unbalanced the line. "Not a problem," I thought chimpily, triumphantly, "I can just use 'sharp'ning' instead." And basked in the glory of my resourcefulness for a full minute before I awoke in a reeking cold cell of talentlessness and idiocy.

O Take the Meaning, Lord

O my sons, my sons,

I, Simeon of the pillar, by surname
Stylites, among men; I, Simeon,
The watcher on the column till the end;
I, Simeon, whose brain the sunshine bakes;

from St. Simeon Stylites

Here is a picture of the sunshine baking a brain--St. Simeon's brain, to be specific, though I took no pains to make this information apparent in the drawing itself. I was far too busy perfecting my depiction of brain-steam and thinking of a suitable caption. My only regret is that I was not able to smear the baked brain with some kind of photographic frosting, but this proved to be beyond my capabilities.

The red-lipped consumables sitting on the table, right next to the eggshells and the WILD YEAST FOR BRAINS, are actually marzipan vaginas. Also, I hope you enjoy staring at the sun's genital rays as much as I do, since it is impossible to do so in real life without becoming blind, both because of the brightness and because God is punishing you for licentiousness. I did not intend to shove such a terrible abstract pornography into your eyes, but after I noticed it I decided to leave it in, as it strengthened the picture's genital theme.

REMINDER

You still have two weeks to submit your Tennyson contest entries. As of right now, the number of submissions stands at exactly zero, which makes me feel extremely unpopular. I'm not too worried about it, though, because as I previously warned, if no one submits anything at all, then I will enter THIS drawing and it will automatically win!

I’m Late to This Party, but Fuck It: Rebut This, You Crumble-Toothed Whore

I read Christopher Hitchens’ latest Vanity Fair article with great interest—I was hoping he might start talking about the moist cave of my mouth again, like he did a few months ago. Delightfully, "Why Women Aren't Funny" addresses the subject of my mouth in even further detail: curving naso-labial furrows, full horseshoes of lovely teeth, etc. On the whole, I found it full of arousing insights about my own condition. And since Mr. Hitchens used poetry so persuasively in his own article, I thought I would respond in kind.

The Children-Squirters Is So Grumpy

Me brain so soft like hammered infant,
Milky smelly, biscuit chompy;
Me face-vagina stretch with laughter,
BWA, BWA, BWA like noising goat!

You smart comediennes, me think
Your pussies sewed shut all the way
With silky pubes of crafty lesbos.
Paula Poundstone make me giggle,
Tie she wears make me want kisses.

Pretty husband gnaw me eat-hole,
Suck out all the funny knowledge,
All me jokes fall down me cleavage—
Rutty husband, scoop them out
With diggy penis shaped like trowel!

I tried to make the first letter of every line spell, “HAVE SEX WITH ME CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, I DON’T MIND ABOUT YOUR SWEATING” but failed at this in a number of ways. I was also unable to describe the euphemistic goat as being “slot-eyed—with lapping seas of golden water around those slits where Light goes in,” not wishing my credibility to be undermined by disparities in tone.

Back to Basics

A tongue-tied Poet in the feverous days,
That, setting the how much before the how,
Cry, like the daughters of the horseleech, ‘Give,
Cram us with all,’ but count not me the herd!

from "The Golden Year"

I am aware that horseleeches are real things, and that daughters of horseleeches are also real things, but it was much more fun for me to reimagine the concept this way. Behold the luscious lips of her posterior and anterior suckers! Doesn't she look like she wants to be crammed with all?

It's interesting to note how horses have been a theme with all the poets we have celebrated. I am doing my best to carry on this tradition in my own way: as most of you know, I am hard at work on a manuscript tentatively titled Whinny with Both Pairs of Lips, O Ponies, which I hope to illustrate with drawings in the same tradition as the one shown above.

CONTEST!

If you've been following the comments, you probably took special note of Cuchulainn's confession that he holds in his possession a framed print of Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott, and is willing to sacrifice this treasured possession to the Tennyson party as a grand prize. You've all proved to be too clever for my "Guess What Line I Am Depicting in This Sexual Drawing" contests, probably since the drawings I offered up in their service reeked so fully of precise meaning, so this time around things will be a bit different. After considerable deliberation, I chose a few lines of Tennyson's that I believe are bosomy with artistic possibilities; the person who submits the most articulate and inventive interpretation of these lines wins. Here is the excerpt I have chosen:

‘O God-like isolation which art mine,
I can but count thee perfect gain,
What time I watch the darkening droves of swine
That range on yonder plain.

‘In filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin,
They graze and wallow, breed and sleep;
And oft some brainless devil enters in,
And drives them to the deep.’

from "The Palace of Art"

I will be accepting submissions all month long, and on the last day of the party I will post all of the entries and ask an impartial judge to pick the best. I badly want to cast Elegant Choice in this role, mainly so that I can see him wear the little wig of powdered sausages, but I will probably end up choosing someone who knows a bit more about art, considering that most of Elegant Choice's favorite paintings are of photorealistic cows. I am not kidding.

You have three weeks; get cracking! I expect great things. And if no one submits anything, then I will enter this drawing and it will automatically win.

Tennyson: The Lordening

'O boy, tho' thou art young and proud,
I see the place where thou wilt lie.

'The sands and yeasty surges mix
In caves about the dreary bay,
And on thy ribs the limpet sticks,
And in they heart the scrawl shall play.'

from "The Sailor Boy"

My inaugural Tennyson drawing depicts a sailor boy lying dead in the surf--you will have to suspend your disbelief a bit here, because the sailor boy in my picture is not an actual boy, but instead a superbly wrinkle-faced newborn doll. The limpets stick to his ribs, and the scrawl plays in his heart, as you can see from the totally bad handwriting I used to write FUN TIME large across the misplaced organ itself. Yeasty surges roil above him--you can tell they are yeasty because representations of the chemical composition of the fine product Monistat bob up and down between them, going quietly about their cunty work.

We Interrupt This Tennyson Party to Announce: Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes Loves Radish King

We love Radish King so much, we drew a picture of it. More specifically, of the lines:

You are a pea & thimble man
On weekends you perform
psychic surgery on children

from the poem "There Are Unclean Spirits." In my version, not only does the pea & thimble man perform psychic surgery on children, he performs it on his own children--his own tiny pea babies who are raised aloft with the power of his mind.

Happy Radish King Day, Rebecca! I wish it could have been a whole month, but Tennyson grows restless.

My God, Look at His Princely Beard--Men Don't Grow Them Like That Anymore

My introduction to the poems of Alfred Tennyson came at the hands of Lucy Maud Montogomery, who was given to portentously invoking "crossing the bar" as a euphemism for "dying of old age," and whose Emily books gave me the notion that real poets wore diaphanous gowns and acted like tranced-out manic-depressive seeresses when they weren't busy being total cockteases, an idea which held poisonous sway over my mind until I was at least twenty, and which the legacy of Alfred himself did little to dispel.

As I previously mentioned, I memorized a few Tennyson poems when I was a hot thirteen-year-old--I mean, I never hung a poster of "The Lady of Shalott" in my room or anything, but I probably would have if I had thought of it. Come to think of it, I never hung any posters on my walls at all, which is testament to the inborn poverty of imagination that plagues me to this very day. At any rate, Baron, your party begins now.

Biographical Resources

• Tennyson: An Overview
• The Tennyson Page
• Brief Biography
• More Biographical Trivia: "Tennyson suffered from extreme short-sightedness -- without a monocle he could not even see to eat"
• Tennyson Portraits and Illustrations--the number of Tennyson portraits floating around on the web means we have no excuse not to insert his floating grizzled head into every single picture we draw

Poems

• Selected Poems
• More Poems
• Speaking of Seers--Yet More Poems

Farewell, Hart Crane, Your Depths Were So Nice to Plumb

Hold it in a high wind. The fender curving over the
breastplate, and all in high gear. I watched to see the
river rise. The forests had all given out their streams
and tributaries. When would the bones of de Soto come
down in the wild rinse? And when would Ponce de Leon
remember Hammerfest?...

Thou art no more than Chinese to me, O Moon! A simian
chorus to you, and let your balls be nibbled by the flirt-
atious hauchinango.

from "Supplication to the Muses on a Trying Day"

What's that you say? I should have posted this picture of Ponce de Leon dreaming of Hammerfest (both the city and the sweet party that is the man himself) while huachinango nibble the balls of the moon, and a simian chorus sings aloud a masterpiece lyric--I should have posted this picture yesterday, in order to give Hart Crane a proper goodbye? Well, I couldn't, I was way too busy drilling these agates like a badass with my new flex shaft!


My God, I feel so full of power. In further heartening news, Tony Williams has decided that the poet we will be celebrating in December is none other than Alfred Tennyson--or, as I like to call him, Tenny Alf Lord Lord Tenny Tenny Alf Alf, because the Lord part confuses me so deeply. Stop reading my mind, Tony! How did you know that I had "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal" memorized when I was a dewy-faced tween, in order that I might recite it silently to myself when I felt the black bile rising? I will be posting many links pertaining to Lord Son Tenny Tenny Fred Alf Alf tomorrow or the next day, so look forward to that; in the meantime, dozens of Tennyson's poems are available online, in case you want to get started on your costumes early. I am sad to see the Hart Crane party cease, as I feel I devoted some of my best work to him, but I am hopeful that I will receive a few more submissions in December, so that the constant stream of my monotonous obscenities may be interrupted from time to time with your own refreshing interpretations.

Garden Abstract

The apple on its bough is her desire,--
Shining suspension, mimic of the sun.
The bough has caught her breath up, and her voice,
Dumbly articulate in the slant and rise
Of branch on branch above her, blurs her eyes.
She is prisoner of the tree and its green fingers.

And so she comes to dream herself the tree,
The wind possessing her, weaving her young veins,
Holding her to the sky and its quick blue,
Drowning the fever of her hands in sunlight.
She has no memory, nor fear, nor hope
Beyond the grass and shadows at her feet.

Hart Crane, White Buildings

Tomorrow marks the last official day of our Hart Crane party, which has been splendid in all respects. I will be posting a farewell picture sometime during the day, and as soon as I hear from Tony Williams I will announce the poet we'll be celebrating in December. Fingers crossed for William Topaz McGonagall!

Strange Gratuity of Horses

Back at the erstwhile house
We shoveled and sweated; watched the ogre sun
Blister the mountain, stripped now, bare of palm,
Everything--and lick the grass, as black as patent
Leather, which the rimed white wind had glazed.

[...]

For I
Remember still that strange gratuity of horses
--One ours, and one, a stranger, creeping up with dawn
Out of the bamboo brake through howling, sheeted light
When the storm was dying. And Sarah saw them, too--
Sobbed, Yes, now--it's almost over. For they know;
The weather's in their noses.

from "Eternity," unpublished poem

The ellipsis indicates a strophe about steaming mules that I was forced to omit, because I had no room to squeeze them in. Anyway, here are some horses with weather in their nostrils; here also is an ogre sun licking the mountains. You probably thought I was going to give one of the horses a penis, didn't you, since that would have been so gratuitous! Well, I managed to restrain myself, since I figured we had had enough obscenity for one month. But it turned out I couldn't help it, and I drew the penis anyway. However, I ultimately made the decision to censor the offending part, but instead of writing CENSORED on the little bar I wrote PENIS, so you would know what it was. You're welcome!

I Am Feeling Some Power Bud in Me Right Now

The Moth That God Made Blind

Among cocoa-nut palms of a far oasis,
Conceived in the light of Arabian moons,
There are butterflies born in mosaic date-vases,
That emerge black and vermeil from yellow cocoons.

Some say that for sweetness they cannot see far,--
That their land is too gorgeous to free their eyes wide
To horizons which knife-like would only mar
Their joy with a barren and steely tide--

That they only can see when their moon limits vision,
Their mother, the Moon, marks a halo of light
On their own small oasis, ray-cut, an incision,
Where are set all the myriad jewelleries of night.

So they sleep in the shade of black palm-bark at noon,
Blind only in day, but remembering that soon
She will flush their hid wings in the evening to blaze
Countless rubies and tapers in the oasis' blue haze.

But over one moth's eyes were tissues at birth
Too multiplied even to center his gaze
On that circle of paradise cool in the night;--
Never came light through that honey-thick glaze.

And had not his pinions with signs mystical
And rings macrocosmic won envy as thrall,
They had scorned him, so humbly low, bound there and tied
At night like a grain of sand, futile and dried.

But once though, he learned of that span of his wings,--
The florescence, the power he felt bud at the time
When the others were blinded by all waking things;
And he ventured the desert,--his wings took the climb.

And lo, in that dawn he was pierroting over,--
Swinging in spirals round the fresh breasts of day.
The moat of the desert was melthing from clover
To yellow,--to crystal,--a sea of white spray--

Till the sun, he still gyrating, shot out all white,--
Though a black god to him in a dizzying night;--
And without one cloud-car in that wide meshless blue
The sun saw a ruby brightening ever, that flew.

Seething and rounding in long streams of light
The heat led the moth up in octopus arms:
The honey-wax eyes could find no alarm,
But they burned thinly blind like an orange peeled white.

And the torrid hum of great wings was his song
When below him he saw what his whole race had shunned--
Great horizons and systems and shores all along
Which blue tides of cool moons were slow shaken and sunned.

A little time only, for sight burned as deep
As his blindness before had frozen in Hell,
And his wings atom-withered,--gone,--left but a leap--
To the desert,--back,--down,--still lonely he fell.

I have hunted long years for a spark in the sand;--
My eyes have hugged beauty and winged life's brief spell.
These things I have:--a withered hand;--
Dim eyes;--a tongue that cannot tell.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to post in its entirety the worst poem ever written by Hart Crane, since this website is all about honesty. It's so awful, you guys--with the tissues and the pierroting and the fresh breasts of day! It makes me giggle like a baby, so it is a particular favorite of mine, and has exerted a huge influence on my own writing. In response, I have drawn a picture of God stabbing out the eyes of a moth with a realistic knife. The moon is depicted as a tiny statue squatting to give birth, and the sun is drawn directly opposite, gyrating and shooting out all white onto God's hand. Bonus points if you can spot the fresh breasts of day. Also, do you like how in my picture, it is both day and night at the same time? Do not apply your feeble intellects to the problem of how, just trust in my supreme artistry and encyclopedic knowledge of scientific phenomena.

P.S. Alas, the poem is so rich in insanities that I had no space to include the hot octopus made of light, which I would very much like to have done.

My Fingers Are Too Fat to Draw, So I Offer a Poem Instead

Paraphrase

Of a steady winking beat between
Systole, diastole spokes-of-a-wheel
One rushing from the bed at night
May find the record wedged in his soul.

Above the feet the clever sheets
Lie guard upon the integers of life:
For what skims in between uncurls the toe,
Involves the hands in purposeless repose.

But from its bracket how the tongue can tell
When systematic morn shall sometime flood
The pillow--how desperate is the light
That shall not rouse, how faint the crow's cavil

As, when stunned in that antarctic blaze,
Your head, unrocking to a pulse, already
Hollowed by air, posts a white paraphrase
Among bruised roses on the papered wall.

Hart Crane, White Buildings

Teat-Squeeze Redux

Euclid Avenue

To be or not to be--?

But so to be the denizen stingaree--
As stertorous as nations romanized may throw
Surveys by Maytimes slow...Hexameters
Suspending jockstraps for gangsters while the pil-

Bland (grim)aces Plutarch's perch. And angles
Break in folds of crepe that blackly drape
The broken door...Crouch so. Amend

Then; and clinch.

Sweep...
Clean is that cloven Hoof. Then reap
Strain, clasp oblivion as though Chance
Could absent all answer save the chosen rant.

Stop now, as never, never. Speak

As telegrams continue, write, strike
your scholarship (stop) through broken ribs; jail
(Stripe) answers Euclid. Einstein curves, but does not
Quail. Does Newton take the Eucharist on rail
Nor any boulevard no more? I say...

For there are statues, shapes your use
Repeals. Youse use. You're prevalent,--prevail!
Youse
Food once more and souse, like all me under sail.
My friends, I never thought we'd fail.

That dirty peacock's pride, once gory God's own story:
It didn't belong no more; no, never did glory
Walk on Euclid Avenue, as didn't Wm.
Bleached or blacked, whichever t'was. What milk
we've put in blasted pigs! I says...O, well--

But I say, what a swell chance, boys. No more
Cancers, jealousy, tenements or giblets! Death, my boys,
Nor blinkers either--

Four shots at who-knows-how--how

Many-it-was unsupervised

Grabbed right outa my mouth that final chew--
Right there on Euclid Avenue.

I'm on a roll with these squirting udders, you guys. At first I thought I would go a more conventional route with this one, but at the last minute decided to continue to explore the dangerously edgy theme I introduced yesterday. The pig, as you can see, is extremely blasted, and the disembodied squiggling teats of out-of-picture cows have decided to come to his rescue with their milk, which they spray forth with their inerrantly-aimed hooves.

Announcement!

I meant to post this a month ago, but I am so forgetful: when you aren't sending beautiful drawings to me, you should be sending them to Stacy Elaine and her kidnappers, who call themselves THE IMAGINATIVE ACTION REGIME, over at the Los Angeles Project. It is a neverending source of delight for me, and I mean to send the kidnappers something soon--you should too! What do they want? Your childlike solutions to adult problems, of course.