17/08/2026
THE MARGIE / AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POETRY DISPACHES: THYLIAS MOSS is among the most creative artists we have ever featured. More importantly, one of the kindest spirits in The Cosmos.
IRON MAIDEN POSSIBILITIES; ALSO SILO IN THE TIME OF SCURVY
the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.
[A. Einstein: The World as I See It]
+ Way back in the time of scurvy, explorers got to explore scurvy, and didn’t mean to, fringe benefit, came with the territory, I’m packaged with Ludlow’s Smoker's Palace, this is just the perfect ordinary habitat for murder, business as usual district, convenience killing, alley right beside Ludlow’s, packaged with it, packed with dumpsters, Ludlow’s back and delivery door, my murder is packaged with me, sandwich, monkey in the middle, me, way back when you had to deal with monarchs, when it was King Scurvy, Magellan lost eighty percent of his crew without losing sight of the Pacific, it remains something worth looking at, here I am, here it is, in the time of scurvy, Vasco da Gama lost two thirds of those voyaging with him to India, more than they bargained for, during raids on Spanish shipping, in the time of scurvy, the chaplain Richard Walter made the ravages of scurvy vivid for those who had to rely on words to see anything of it, it is not to be missed, dig in, other than the real thing of my murder, I love the vicarious, voraciously reading what Chaplain Walter wrote down: skin black as ink, ulcers, difficult respiration, rictus of the limbs, teeth falling out and, perhaps most revolting of all, a strange plethora of gum tissue sprouting out of the mouth, which immediately rotted and lent the victim's breath an abominable odour,1 the senses could not be controlled any better than the senses of the man who will kill me can be controlled when he sees me outside Ludlow’s, when he smells my pheromones, when he hears my footsteps, Geiger counter off the charts, frenzy of pops, but scurvy’s lack of sensual control was much better in the old days, I’m glad it happened so that these effects could be recorded, without them, I wouldn’t know enough about grandeur to be convinced, the ability to feel everything, for the brain to censor nothing, that’s what I need, what I have to imagine until my killer pulls it off, the feeling of unbearable richness of emotion, unbearable weight of poetry, so refreshing to know it happened, When sufferers got hold of the fruit they had been craving they swallowed it – said Walter – ‘with emotions of the most voluptuous luxury’. The sound of a gunshot was enough to kill a man in the last stages of scurvy, while the smell of blossoms from the shore could cause him to cryout in agony.2 to die from intensity of bliss from its expansion, more than the body was madefor, so heart explodes, brain, liver, spleen, everything internal ruptures, so bliss can expand beyond limits of organs, not much of it can fit in the appendix, less bliss fits than misery, which is also more than the body was made for, morereduction than the body was made for, systematic, one by one each cell becomes miserable, seems possible to live with, daily aging, so many believe that more isn’t going to be put on the body than the body can bear, measure for measure, gradual adjustment, massacre for massacre, but excess takes a toll, sum of accumulation, plus 1, plus 1, room for one more, one day a miserable straw, network of miserable gears making more misery, buildup, overload, misery replaces everything else, so the body doesn’t need more room, in fact there is excess space, a life full of misery can feel empty, a life full of misery isn’t full of life, obviously stuck in consistency, form of a rut of bliss for those who die with the bloodstream continuously delivering high goods, stuck in commitment, remember when Biafra was stuck being Biafra – which Biafra – do you know any Biafras – how many Biafras are there – how many Biafras mean excess – how much scurvy remains, even American slaves from time to time had oranges, depending on circumstances within their circumstances, sacks of oranges under a quilt sometimes let you get away on Sunday, Monday before the quilt was peeled back and there you were all citrus, not like that all the time, not excessive, not like what happened to the Ibo, only the Nigerian army openly liked what happened to the Ibo, the resulting ecstatic soldiers, civil war heroes glistening like their Kalashnikovs, what extension of an invention, scurvyesque, Biafra the rock star was born in Boulder, Colorado six blocks from where JonBenet Ramsey was murdered, it says so at the alternative tentacles website, the whole Biafra biography page reads like poetry, stuck in what it is, it must have been written in the time of scurvy, long live Jello Biafra, a child born in Biafra did not live long in 1970, but the Igbo ruled the Kingdom of Biafr fifty thousand years ago, Olaudah Equiano in the time of Atlantic slave-trade scurvy bought his freedom in Britain, and wrote about it, first book about slavery in the time of scurvy, the Igbo have a calendar that worked in the time of scurvy, still works hard against scurvy, four market days: Eke, Afor, Nkwo, Orie, together these are a week, seven of those weeks are a month, thirteen months are a year, time passes according to scurvy, moon according to binge and purge, just like a young girl, even younger than JonBenet, keeping the best part of youth, resilience of the abused body, the eyes of scurvy see how good frailty looks, how good the skeletons, the trees inside good figures, but in famine caused and maintained by those in power, there is no return from scurvy, not when scurvy becomes your nation, not when scurvy is the honored guest of genocide, it won’t be scurvy that kills me, there is nothing out of alignment with the cosmos, what is not aligned with it is not in it, every conceivable kind of system, genocide a plenty, supernova as natural stellar attrition, supernova as form of stellar scurvy, heightened sense of luminosity ten to ten million times the luminosity of the sun, short-lived burst of everything brighter because of scurvy, how it explodes the senses, the flag of Biafra has a half-sun, the rays are spikes of explosion, it is always time for scurvy, everything tells me this, when he kills just me, there won’t be massacre, heightened senses, scurvy-mind, kills hundreds, thousands of Biafrans, hundreds of dead women, their breasts exposed as unlaunched grenades, little silos, children sucking breasts of their dead mothers, anchors, children left to suckle dud missiles, what else is there in the time of scurvy, better to put the children on big black train-dogs tracked into more darkness, pound, compounded, impounded, leave them locked onto ni***es, this is an event, even though I can hear3 so much of it, sounds of killing, sounds of dying, not quite the same as writing it down, writing it up, the event is the event, happens, the sound is part documentation; event and sound of it are not in sync, not in cahoots, not as adaptable as needs to be, Marabou stork of it all, Marabou event, how does that sound as so many in a state, in an event of Biafra, die? I can't stop hearing it; why bother to try? Moses got water from a rock, from a mother can come things deeper, in miserable-logic camps, in bliss fields, children come from love and r**e of the same woman, half brothers, half sisters, half-assed interactions, scurvy, all Biafran nurses shot in the hospital outside Enugu, their bodies a gift to vultures, Marabou stork bear a resemblance to dignitaries4, when they eat, nurses, children, attacking them because, like all things, these stork too have hungers, sometimes eating the very children storks are said to deliver, to bring into places of scurvy, places inhospitable to children, places of massacre, places of abortion, yes; that too, oh the sounds of killing fields --why not? happens-- that form of scurvy also, also, also, little adults, seeds of adulthood inside, they eat like dignitaries with scurvy, Ibo grace, just wait till the resurrection, wait till the return of scurvy, scourge goes hand in hand with purge, lucky couple, half-assed interactions, in 1945 northern Moslems in Nigeria kill hundreds of Igbo in Jos, no fallout, in 1966, slaughter of a hundred thousand, some Igbo descendants in Ludlow’s and by then in Woolworth’s at the lunch counter, drank Orange Crush, ice cream floating in Coca Cola, decaying beluga, decaying manatee, disappearing bottlenose dolphins near China already as white as the ghosts they’re becoming, almost as white as Klan sheets, whole suit on sale in Brighton, Michigan, auctions, group dynamics, death cycles, but I will be killed just for myself, we’ve come a long way, I have the right now for a death that is purely personal =
1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/captaincook_scurvy_01.shtml
2 http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/discovery/exploration/captaincook_scurvy_01.shtml
3 refer to Walter Ong (as in: http://www.ric.edu/faculty/rpotter/temp/ong_excerpts.html)
4 refer t
THYLIAS MOSS, MacArthur Fellow, 1996; Professor Emerita, 2015, works for Thylias Moss Writing LLC, author of ten books; #11: Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ RED DRESS Code, New and Selected Poems, September 2016, maker of poams & creator of “Limited Fork Thoery” offered in these websites: The Institute of 4orkological Studies; The Mid-Hudson Taffy Company, and Lexicon 97. Her video poam: The Glory Prelude will be in the “Ellipsis” exhibit at Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis. She has completed a sex-positive: book #12.
