T HE C ENACLE / A PRIL - The ElectroLounge

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twining spasms of remembrance, chilling glints of smiling
mystery, out of mutual depth, have we yet begun, Beauty,
refracted, defined, slept into, seduced sacredly, seduced
musically, Beauty, obscura, today is never going to end,
courtyard of twisting breezes, out of mutual depth, love is a
mean, chanting, obssessed motherfucker & you are his favorite
song.
I was happy with this new poetry for it honored the lessons I’d
learned from Rilke & Dickinson & Rumi while communicating my
deeply-cherished beliefs about life, Art, & joy.
Among Joe Ciccone’s contributions was a wild prose-poem
“Almost a Thumbnail Sketch of What Seems Like the Part of the Story
that Always Seems Somehow to be Absent, or, A Veiled Recounting of
a Moment of Clarity” with its lead guitar howlings:
And the we grew tired but nonetheless we kept up, somewhat
more slowly now, but we kept up, such that all I could do was
bang the strings like a drum, and Dave’s voice grew thin, and
Paul’s harp blew down to a murmur, and we were no longer
running madly but dancing thinly until we were slowly walking
and the sounds became a memory as the moon pulled up and
we looked up to see how it had so strangely stopped itself in the
sky in mid-swing, and we all sat down, exhausted, and became,
at last, human.
In April 1999 appeared Cenacle 34 4th
anniversary issue with another color cover by
Barbara Brannon, this one tied to my poem
“Phantom Limbs (After Rumi)” which Barbara also
rendered in color. It’s a long poem based on 3
short poems by the Persian master. Rumi is, in
fact, one of the greatest poets ever & deserves far
more renown in the west than he has thus far
received.
Cenacle 34 also featured “Illogic, Signs, and
Aesthetic Relevancies Reconsidered” by Joe
Ciccone, his first contribution of fiction:
I open the door and she’s laying in bed, as I expect, with her
head stretched out over the record player, listening to the
Everly Brothers sing “All I have to do is dream-ee-ee-ee-eam.”
When she hears me come in she raises her finger from the
sheets and points toward the ceiling, signaling me to be quiet.
Always it seems to be like this when I come home; sense
appears to hold no authority. I rest my keys gently on the table
and watch her. It’s like she staring straight through her ears,
expecting some coded transmission that only she can decipher
to come at any moment from out of the scratchy recording,
The Cenacle / 50 / December 2003