Al Buono Special Feature


Al Buono Eight poems from the previously unpublished work *Sprezatura* Neotony Emasculation, premature evisceration, puerile castration, infantile his forefinger pointed his thumb cocked back across the table so inveigled, the little girl did waggle too violent an act this vile attack of finger and cocked thumb "it might go off! was the safety on?" said principal unprincipled missiles rained on Baghdad bombs fell on Kosovo children who remember closely their last death cling not so tenaciously to life Empty Empty empathy and pain anguish of thrice-gilt refrain nightly anamnesis fraught with disdain reflection, oneiric introspection, never to awake again kenosis the way, the tao the Buddha's Now, path to enlightenment yet, how Runaway What you are running to is what you are running from the cycle ever turns upon itself what is to be already has been done She Half a century now had passed She, in dank oblivion, in abject misery bleached bones of carrion picked clean of visions once pellucid of missions now obtrusive long ago surrendered her self her soul to He why? who knows? not She perhaps it was her destiny spirit penury doomed She as Sylvia, ineluctably inexplicably to a life of death Vampire Unfanged and uncruental she extruded love from twixt his shoulder blades retracted fingernails drew down the window shades Sartre's Wall Copse of corpses thick and dank and green neither light nor life between illusion and reality perception and banality yet such persistence of existence rooted in the mother seeking ever for the father copulation and coagulation sanguine yet uncruental strangulation incremental within ritual sacerdotal butterfly awing pinned clumsily upon a board The Fall Grace did plummet from Dante's summit into form, was born torn from her mother's distended womb grace did tumble ajumble, for whom intended? Life impendent death suspended from a spider's web dread the cockscomb thread Worm Worm, uroboric Worm, theanthropic androgyne myopic grandfather to the father mother to the son from one, all from all, one worm, chthonic embryonic chlonic hadean race fingers trace someone else's face


When I was a kid growing up in Philadelphia, long before I had ever head of Arthur Rimbaud, I had already begun to think: 'I is somebody else.' Not that I had been adopted, left in a basket on a doorstop, rejected by biological parents; but that I had somehow been poured into a mold of flesh and bone and blood that had originally belonged to someone else and not to me. Lobsang Rampa would have called me a ‘walk-in'. He might have been right. The nuns and priests who taught me through high school and into college would have had no idea. So I never asked them. And all my life I've been running away from who I am not in search of who I not am. From college into the Marine Corps and to the Far East, searching bars and brothels for something that might stir more than my libido. Then, into the advertising business for fame and glory and money and coming away with the Hollowness that Eliot wrote so well about. And now, when I write, whatever I write: prose or poetry, my writing always seems to be just a by- product of this never-ending quest. Al Buono Email: sonobono@juno.com

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