The Sublime and The Beautiful Revisited

Ascending even lower

into the empyrean of autonomy,

believing one’s own lies, the beauty

that should only be seen

through somebody else’s eyes.

A pointless exercise,

no purpose does it serve:

tracking one’s moves, getting

on one’s own nerves.

But how can life otherwise be lived

without these airless flights:

descending ever higher

into the abyss

of self-conscious solitude.

—John Tottenham

Jimmy Komma’s Seven-Part Fire Diary Part 0

Yea, I will be speaking on the fires but first
I need to visit the pale parts of them,
still untouched by the toxic sun, to breed
with them under uninhabitable ozone layers
of our westside sky.

Yea, before I pick up a pen,
I need a lop-breasted angora sweater
in a South Pasadena jazz bar
with the crazed eyes of one who just moved here,
who has never seen Casablanca,
who has no connection to Calabasas,
who plays bass, has a worked-on face,
and sits now across the jazz bar,
under the red lights of my Last Unburnt Los Angeles Place.

I’ll get to the fire, yea…
Shit, I even know who lit the match.
But first, I need to secure some South Pas snatch.
And failing that,
A double-double at In-N-Out,
STAT

—Jimmy Komma