Jose-Luis Moctezuma

Leaving Castle Jim (for James Castle, the deafmute printmaker)

I
Mute, tho not to cognizance, deaf –

tho to sound not untoward – a halo

oscillant w/ sunspokes & dumb notes:

laconic birds squat on electric appendage=

music corded w/ a shock of lightning

unceasing yet listenable, tenable

tho ‘uneducable’ – the autist expelled from sight

of the true-illiterate & blind

@ the Idaho Institute – expelled as well

from kin’s commerce (the post

office / the Boise ranch / the local goodsstore) –

exiled to a silence of circles

reducing the lament of space to encomium

(the dreamtof Loft Jim chored)

the constraints of outer limits circumscribing

the ‘Man o’Signs’ = Garden Valley

Sage = St. Cyril’s successor; whose slavlettering

supercedes the miniscule

comprehensiveness of books; wraps round

the zen of Idaho [a hex? A gram! :

a modicum; = collaged by calendar charts &

astral graphs. Littlely, like

a ‘still small voice’ – the clockface murmur –

enlightenment’s daily toilet.]

“[ ]zen Idaho”  Pyramid (arched Imperial)

Shaped like an Unspeakable

Word ((words need none of noise to

tintinnabulate.)) Just

the Nonce. Just the Boisterous ranch,

its peculiar zen. Of screendoors

& squat birds on wires. Of pLace &

“Polishing” [words in a persist-

-ance of forms, of shapes unshaped to sounds

tho plain as lace woven

on a bare leg, salient as the Morton Salt

Girl umbrella-dancing

to the patter of salt – to the rain-beat –

as tangible as salt on the un-

wound wintering on the sediment, as quantum.

Of a syllable, on the verge =

clangour, electric + limbre;

= papier-mâché convulsion – ]

II
Jim builds a Castle calls it Jim

a silence of circles encircling

the Boisterous ranch, raises

walls round the zen of Idaho,

bricklays the nonce & idiom

only mute members ponder:

inner landscapes luminous

w/ tangential matter: unheard

ply-words / crisscross devices /

tractors’n’trees / roads thru

trunks (lofty like totem poles) /

humming wires / 4 cardboard

thresholds / tumbleweed brush /

gLooming bottles / paper ducks /

hen & geese punched & stapled /

beds checkered in wallpaper made

of mail / sideviews of doorknobs

rendered alien by repetition /

portals to material language im-

material to use, but prescient w/

a codification [of the world-at-

-large] in the small perception

of orbs small & large – no Thing

not Within the Castle Jim built –

no thing but One: { }

patterned w/ folks patterned

in plaid, argyle, + argot –

folks no better than furniture

blent with organs & wood /

nerves & splinters / fingers &

fabric / emotive planes cut thru

by princely Jim’s sceptre:

the soot+spit pen

(when they took away his crayons,

the chimney tar

& his boyish spittle partnered

a means toward a meaning:

his unsyllabic spit

the ink to the imaged vocable

improvised by utterance

& victuals)

built a castle in airiness

III
Schoolboys at davenports scribbling

heads like desks on which hands scribble

words that rupture into sonorities unspoke

letters dim + curved / pliable signatures /

statuesque characters to be carved / chip-

-ped / halved / spliced to sizes tangible &

interceded with divine Inference for form

(slips Reg Manning’s plastic cacti for show beneath

his davenport, fingers a-tremble, a porno-

graph of potential dispatch

– broke,

broke-n, / breaking –

the pedagogue’s

hands crumple Jim Castle’s comix)

the deaf boys smile at what

their eyes tell them:

[the Abecedarian a.b.c.ing

fool Jim’s brownblockhead

with a rolledup letter-apparatus]

their hands trek thru bubbles

of plasticwordpuddles –

letters cemented by tactile factual

tread of fingerprints – words & words &

And its unrival[led] /

By its perfect /

Most beaut[eous]

Afterschool – in the icehouse upstairs –

princely Jim pieces conjunctly a corrugate

bridgegate strung with turkey packaging & parchment:

recommences the construction

of his Castle, the establishment of which

recreates the macrocosmic according to the equivocal:

winebottles belittle aluminum towers / furniture manufactures

the faces of townsfolk; fold into pictureframes:

dresserheaded farmers

take their purple chairheaddaughters in a purple mobile

to the purplish steeple – the road the horizon in league

w/ barns in league with tennessee jars empty of jam

holding forth everything and no Thing unkept by Jim’s

castlehalls housing that glassiness that giveth of fowl

& fauna their foundness as objects, as modal

fodder for Jim’s medium:

paper creamcoloured & collapsible = the backs

of postage memos at random, and correspondence

w/ the exterior simulacra [farm panorams]

/ interiors

shafted w/ light & ornament, musical

as underwater minnows

lamenting their tongueless speech,

except peopled w/ the warmmemories of stiff oak chairs

& the yearning of doorframes

to be closed shut on a lidless unblinking eye:

Kaleidoscope [chimney soot Libbey’s corn beef hash carved wood popsicle sticks nails nutshells Delsey toiletpaper pencils posterpaint paperwads Challenge Butter label – the Stag – lady’s makeup kit Cutter’s Cravats glass shards cloth-wrapped cotton jar-lids feathers cardboard envelopes saliva] Symmetries

When they took his crayons away,

he puckered up & spitshone the mantelpiece

formed a Letter or 2, found

the found object supreme:

the soot+spit pen

by the blood of his pinky;

transacted the world apiece

IV
Jim never left his Castle:

a reminiscence of the world as a Thing

overlarge w/ trifles & stuffed like a roast turkey

never occurred to him:

looking at a family album – he reckoned their ornery faces

so unknown to him as people of voice

& character – he heard them as he heard the letters

in mute stubbornborn books – as

ocular symbols in a calendar, as fevereddays

in a week whose fervor was a labor at simulation

(of the farmers’ starchclothes, their sullen jests &

tokens – of plaque breath & pipe;

the women’s pantomime of the earthly precincts =

the girls’ ritual of linedance, afore the schoolbell clamor)

in the Boisterous (sightful) fields & the stores stocked full

of delectable grammars – he fabricated

facsimiles of photo albums

commingled with comic strips &

the consummate order of Ads – their symmetry

a history of the human mechanism, thoughtless gratuity

made thoughtful in his ‘uneducable’ hands: Thought

the lesser of the nugatory deprivations,

that schools the unschooled, self-regulates

the self-heard – a chronicle of an openplained

tho no less insane globe

turned literate – turned inner/outer – to its fortification

its numinous bulwarks

(the zen of its locality) – carnal alphabet

loosed on the descendents of Adam – (its peculiar silence like a scabbard

for the mind’s sceptre, encircling, ensuing – )
[& Jim’s Castle;

that taketh dominion

everyplace]

Jose‘s father’s name is Jose, and his father’s father’s name was Jose too. Hence, ‘Jose-Luis’; which gratifies this scrivener’s sense of self-worth in a world filled with Joses, famous and none-too-famous. To his friends, he is Jose, and to one very good friend, it is ‘Josef’ – others may refer to him as ‘Joe’ or ‘Yousef’ – yet no one calls him ‘Pepe’ because he still is (bless him) ‘Pepito’. His father is a poet/metaphysician, a pater-in-spirit published; and his father’s father was a boxer, a dragon given to drink & toxicity. So proceed the events enchained by the recurrence of a name – variations on a theme lost in a conspectus of what JHVH increases – a genealogy as yet unwrit, dim-seen… The present Jose(-Luis) resides in Illadelph, PA.

contact: the_3underground@yahoo.com