Without dying, the closest anyone will ever get to death is life. Life is the first and most important step towards not-life.
F I R S T C H A P T E R
... begins simply enough, with a clipped catalog of men, and then blossoms into something at once lyrical and menacing. The story accrues only gradually, the situation subtly transforming as it develops. For me, it shimmers in that space between sense and ambiguity that keeps a story humming in your skull long after you've finished reading the words.
Close to the universe you begin to see mouths in everything. Wide red lipped things with ivories to shock little boys back into bed. Instead of horror, I have found safety.
It became a game, counting the rows of teeth possible in a tiny trap.
Ernst Spengler used to listen to people talking on the street and try to make sense of their words without tuning in to any one conversation in particular — joining something that a man with a tie was saying to a colleague to whatever a nearby adolescent was saying to two friends. Ernst wanted to keep himself from getting too interested in the details of these individual lives; he wanted to link or weave the entire city’s conversations together, so that it would seem to speak with a single voice, seem to speak a simple command.
Touching outside involves less god.
I was inside a living room, somewhere in an apartment I didn’t recognize other than smell, and my roommate, again alive, next to me on a couch. Across from us another couch with an anorexic woman petting a large black dog. The dog was over a hundred pounds and had gray hairs along its mouth. Its hands resembled human hands, with long claw nails, them clear and gripping the side of the couch.
The anorexic woman stared at us.
She said—I am an anorexic bitch. Which one of you will fuck me—She said.
My roommate said—We didn’t come to fuck we came to watch you die.
Grab me by the back of my neck and slam me facedown on the desk, so my cheek is against the slick wood surface and the desk corner juts into my stomach.
This is going to make you come too fast. Rape is always too fast. Over too quickly. Leave me leaned over the desk. Zip your pants and go. I’ll have to rub one off so it’ll be worth it. Then I’ll go home check my Facebook.
If I were to die …, she said. She left it at that, measuring the table with her arm, ribs to fingertip. He considered that future: like tall grass never stopping waving.
I hump the graveyard so bodies fizz. Their stains grow inside me. Exhaling into the corpse dirt above each grave, a lick of something molded dry inside my thought. I kill the hot end of a cigarette on my nipple, leaving white scars dividing the pink like a second nipple failing to begin. In a minute the world can turn your crucifixion runny. My scraped tits bobbling clay, retarded putty sucked by all. I want to get my gang rape on. Fill up a small closet with my blood. Comb it out of me, enough to paint a house.
Suffice it to say that my husband and I returned from an absence to find our tan-and-green house subtly altered.
I could detach from myself again, when I could hover in that space above reality, and this time, I would like it, I wouldn’t struggle at all, instead, I would just allow myself to see what was really there, down below me.
We crawled in through the sewer. Came up out of the toilet. Snuck into the parlor, where Billy sat in front of the tv puzzling over his Bible, the commercial selling a fast car to nobody. Lenny sneezed…
Billy slammed down the Bible. Jumped up. Saw us.
His spine iced.
I thought I was sleeping so I grabbed a rifle from a man standing next to a horse and put it against my throat. The man asked if I was crazy and I said no that I was just having a bad dream.
We hadn't really the time to paint the fireman. Nor paint to paint him with, but we did have him there, down in our basement, and he was sitting there on our couch with the funny-looking grin he always had, with his helmet under his arm, and though we prodded him, we couldn't get him to tell us what we needed to know, which is where to get his wife, nor what we could do to her once we found her, because the fireman was chaste, though we found that he had masturbated. We found that he had masturbated all over the inside of his boxer shorts as we were adjusting his pants, and this is when our mother was trying to find us. Scratch that, it was when we were trying to understand how it was that he had put on the pants, because they didn't seem to have an outlet of any kind.
One child glues herself to another child with super glue. She glues her palms to the other child’s palms. She glues her lips to the other child’s lips. She glues her knees to the other child’s knees. She glues her eyelids to the other child’s eyelids.
When I was 14, I'd hide in bed so many days my skin would stick tight to the sheets— in the end it was the sleep that tore me open. It was soft sleep that ate my brain. I met so many men in folds of nowhere— ones I'd found or fucked or scratched the skin on or ate or was eaten by or swam with through the ground.
My son’s first-grade teacher doesn’t shoot heroin anymore. If her pupils are dilated now, she says, it’s with wonder. The children are supposed to have infected her with it. Maybe, I don’t know. At dinner, anyway, my son wears long sleeves, to cover the ball-point pen track marks they all do to be like her. His breath through the baby monitor just five years ago is still so clear to me.
For a shopping mall to be silent, there must be blood! Everywhere! Otherwise, what are we even talking about? In a nonviolent hostage situation, such as ours, we find it impossible not to chat each other up. Jack Twig, you know what we are. The pregnant woman is Margaret; she works as a dental receptionist; her eyes are hazel, actually, not brown or green. Tomorrow is Friday; Teddy heard that it might get up to thirty degrees. The young man in the wheelchair appears to be afflicted with some kind of palsy. Our captor wants us to Shut up! Shut up! and my wife smiles knowingly and I pat her powdery hand. The young man in the wheelchair wets his lips, as a signal to me. Oh, yes, we are all bleeding, absolutely.
The reader creates the film of the story as he or she reads, a private cinema. This requires a release of the imagination if the book is not to remain forever closed to the reader… [T]he fact that the image is born of the power of language alone means that it is not only an image, but also a thought that creates meaning.
I would like that to be my revenge as a writer, at a time when we are entering into a culture of the all-powerful image, which threatens to kill literature: to invent a language that would be capable, by liberating the vital forces of imagination and thought, of resisting the images– seductive, manipulative, stultifying, alienating – that invade us from all sides.
To make this film, the 24 year-old Baldwin would run into movie theatres with his super-8 camera and shoot what he could off the screen, pre-dating the current practice of bootlegging feature films with camcorders. This was as much performance art/action as it was any kind of film document, and the piece, though perhaps extant, isn't in circulation like the rest of Baldwin's work. The director himself describes it as a kind of prank – interesting for the implications and the direction of his development more so than as a film in and of itself.
Be your own dictator – turn him on his side so his phantom limbs don’t get phantom bedsores. Ask yourself while you watch him look like a sleeping baby. Will this shriveled baby outlast us all? How will this jaundiced baby last with us all gone? Is this phantom tired or is it another unhappy trick? Tell him you were not talking to yourself. Tell him you were talking to your corporeal sister. Tell him you do so have a sister.
Be the only dictator – turn him on his side. Don’t think about the cold, rubbery feel of his baby body. Don’t look at all. Don’t look back. Do what you want for a while. Sit in a chair at the kitchen table and think what you want. What do you want? Do you want an unhappy family? A family is happiest when it wants what it has. This family has any number of phantoms. Which phantom is angriest, the chicken or the egg. Go be a chicken or an egg. Take another vitamin if you’re chicken, but go do it. Do what Dad wants. Think what Dad says. Don’t look at him. Don’t think about how his skin glows jaundice in the dark. Stop thinking.
Lets bleed our century. Tourists are painted black as baby seals. Somebody is on the verge of a nervous breakthrough. You didn't understand what I meant when I said, "You say nothing in your letters." Do you consider the latest CD you bought a devastating insight into your love of parking lots? How did you tame my strychnine? How do I sew the seams back together? Do I use fists or stilts? How did the roof get so funky? Did you buy that CD I told you about? Do you still smoke parliaments? Make every day Meat Day! Make your mouth taste like a bicycle! An expert told me you have an eye called the Eye of Hours, that your fantasies are bright as TV. My retina comes from Nebraska. My soul comes from a card game with a retarded god who didn't understand the rules. I make up the creepiest rules. I invented last year out of cigarettes and a frightened vision of space. I invented my snares just before I figured out that I was the only prey in the woods. I invented a pack while I was running, and a fall while it was dark. I haven't invented perspective yet. This poem makes my past look like a highway leaking out of my head. It makes me look like a floor. I'm rewriting this poem. It used to be sweeter. Now I want to give you barbwire and rashes. I want to dress you in a sweaty sweater and matching pants. I want to insist. I want to trade in my torso for new obstacles. Maybe I'm writing to the wrong address. Maybe Egypt is extinct. Maybe I'm laughing as I write this. I have a Maoist sense of humor. The last few nights I've been hearing a child cry "don't please don't please don't," but it's not quite a child. It sounds partly like a cat in heat. A friend of mine read this poem and said: "Johannes, you're a sick twisted fuck." When did you get so interested in lamination? Fat pigeons are fluttering through this poem, crapping and shuffling their folds. This poem is ticking, ticking. The rich own the rackets; the poor play with wrists. What's wrong with this picture? I don't make corsets out of charred gloves. I'm sitting in a Starbucks at 3rd Ave and 94th Street. I don't want to nail my arms to yours. I write with my asthma. I want my feathers ruffled. I want my pigs squealed. I have a hysterical aesthetic. Those snips you hear - that's just me inventing again. I'm trying to make an out, but it's turning into an in. Bees without wings - that's my next project. And after that - orifices. Don't let my skin fool you. This is a game of chicken. You've got the wishbone, I've got the beak.
THE POINT IS EXACTLY HERE: IT CAN’T BE INTERPRETATED. THERE IS NO MESSAGE IN WORDS, OTHERWISE I RATHER WOULD WRITE A BOOK. I SHARPEN SENSES. THATS ALL. SEE, MY VEGAN FRIEND DAVE PHILLIPS PUTS TONS OF MESSAGES INTO HIS WORK, SHOWING HIS ACCUSATIONS AGAINST ANIMAL-CRUELTY ON SCREENED VIDEO, AND THEN HIS CHINESE AUDIANCE TELLS HIM: "I LIKE BRUTALO MOVIES TOO!".
I ADMIRE DAVES POWER TO SCREAM OUT LOUD HIS MESSAGE. BUT IT WON’T WORK UNLESS YOU OPEN-UP PEOPLES SENSES FIRST. THAT MIGHT BE MY JOB THEN.
What are some of the most successful techniques to opening up people’s senses?
PUTTING ’EM INTO AN EXTRAORDINARY SITUATION. NOISE ALONE CAN BE CONSUMED JUST AS POP. DISTURBING BEHAVIOUR - YOU MENTIONED - CAN BE CONSUMED AS A CIRCUS-NUMBER. YOU’VE TO BREAK ANOTHER BORDER. SEARCH AND DESTROY THAT BORDER. SEARCH BECAUSE THAT BORDERS ARE ALWAYS HIDDEN. SOMETIMES IT’S JUST TOO SIMPLE!
IF NOTHING WORKS, TAKE A SLEDGE.
What are your favorite films?
JODOROWSKYS. NO QUESTION.
CHECK OUT "DAS GESPENST" FROM ACHTERNBUSCH: A NUN DOES HER ONANIE IN FRONT THE CROSS, HER MOARNS WAKE UP JESUS. SO HE COMES DOWN THE CROSS AND TAKES A JOB AS BARTENDER. TWO COPS COME INTO HIS BAR SAYING: "GIVE ME THAT SHIT". AS HE CANNOT FIND BOTTLED SHIT, HE TAKES TWO GLASSES OUT THE BAR, WALKS WITH STILL OUTSTRECHED ARMS - YOU SEE, HIS MUSCELS ARE SURE BIT STIFF AFTER SO MANY YEARS ON THE CROSS - HE WALKS THRU THE VILLAGE CALLING AND ASKING: "GIVE ME SHIT! SHIT FOR THE POLICE! SHIT! SHIT FOR THE POLICE!" THAT WAS JUST THE BEGINNING.
I REMEMBER CHRISTIANS TRYING BLOCK THE CINEMAS DOORS. GOT A PAMPHLED TELLING: ALL ONLOOKERS WILL GO TO HELL. WELL.
BUNUEL. HIS SON TOO. JAPANESE DO GREAT MOVIES THESE DAYS - ABSURD HORROR. THE FIRST GIRL IS CRUSHED BEFORE YOU EVEN CAN SIT DOWN TO WATCH.
What would you like to do that you have not yet done?
CONDEM THE POPE TO DAILY PUBLIC MASTURBATION.
The Nigerian boys who kidnap me must think I’m like them. While I’m white, blonde, 33, a Peace Corps vet, I’m also 5’2”, 129, little peach fuzz, soft skin.
They teach me to shoot at cans, dogs, small bodies, larger ones. I nod often; I sever hands, a foot; I plot escape.
I am rescued, debriefed, believed, transferred to DC, given a cubicle near a window, handed a Peace Lily, told to log human rights violations.
Everything around him had to be rough, inhospitable, and miserable. He wanted to bear and endure some thing, and ordered himself to do so. And that, nobody had told him either. All alone he had the idea that it would be good for him to order himself to bear hardship and malice in a friendly and good-hearted manner.
Smoke’s billowing up all around us watching how far we can fly. An old man with bright orange hair. An old man with no hair. Horses in a field specked with bright pink flowers. Like a man tortured for weeks. One’s gold-orange, another purple, another white——all rising up in dazzling, muscled color. Under blue-gray mountains, a couple’s walking. Snow falling.
The Earth is scheduled for dismantling at 8 AM. The architects spend a lot of time preparing for 8 AM. Their blueprints are comprehensive. Their blueprints are beautiful. The architects make a lot of sacrifices to produce blueprints that are comprehensive and beautiful. They sacrifice meals, sleep, organized work spaces, family time, grooming habits, and clock-watching activities. Without clock-watching activities, they deny themselves the pleasure of counting the ticks until the end of the world. The architects are looking forward to the dismantling. They will finally have enough time to do all the things that need to get done.
It’s one of those nights I’m drinking alone in my basement studio; snapping polaroids of my hemorrhoids, bending over backwards to allow time all the time in the world to kill itself.
AND IN THAT FIELD are rows and rows of tomatoes growing on radio wires, the wires twisted into vines and leaves and tiny buds, each plant leeching life from the dark dirt to suffuse the copper and lacquered cotton braids with something more, something rising above the materials of its construction. Moments after you enter the field you’re unable to see its edges, but do not believe that you have reached the middle, that you have gone as far as you need to go. You are surrounded by nothing but wire-stalked tomatoes as far as the eye can see, but still there is somewhere further, something up and over. Keep moving.
In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird
but everyone did not have the name Larry Bird
& this was confusing. Everyone had a headache
& walked around with furrowed brows. Headaches
hadn’t been invented & when people described the pain
they said an angry Larry Bird stands on my neck
& my head is Larry Bird after missing a layup.
Even the babies were the size & shape of Larry Bird.
Since everyone looked like Larry Bird they avoided
extravagant events. All the clubs shut down, no one
could watch a Larry Bird dance without understanding
that they danced like this, pursed lips, flagellum legs,
arms like wild fire hoses. The real Larry Bird retired
to his basement. He wore magnifying goggles
& built watches of smaller & smaller dimension.
He built watches so small that he needed a microscope
to affix the springs & levers in the right places.
He built watches so small that he called them cells.
He built watches so small that he called them atoms.
If interested in this future absurd encounter, blink once.
You are lying on your back three feet above the floor. You are resting on a poorly-made table that I’ve pulled into the center of the dining room. Above you, there is a chandelier, but it is not on. Around you, I sit at the head of the table; your daughter, not mine, sits at your left shoulder—watches you through her glasses, which came from her real father. Our son is at your right shoulder, licking his lips and banging the table with the end of his knife. Your father sits at the other end, across from me; his white sideburns reach down his neck and loop beneath his ears. And his new wife sits beside him and beside your daughter. Your father’s hand is on his wife’s knee; she is younger than me, but just barely older than you. You are lying on the table in between us all.
Some friends were talking about things they’d owned that looked like breasts. One person had a lighter shaped like a female torso that when you flicked it, LEDs lit up the nipples. Someone else had a heat-sensitive mug the clothes would come off the side of. We’d just used a bottle opener shaped like a female torso to open our bottles.
i don’t understand space
in terms of, where things are located,
in relation to each other, i am so alone,
there is space around me, unending.
the moon has me in orbit. i haven’t seen a man,
or an animal, i have seen space,
i haven’t seen a baby, i have looked down,
and seen myself, i know i am here for now.
Two brothers. Running. Over San Francisco hills. Climbing high-rise scaffolds. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Like the antelope. Boundless and airless. Grace working in their joints. To the west you can spot the Pacific. An ocean neither brother will ever cross. Nor lay eyes on again. There. The older brother. Chasing after the younger. Intent on doing him bodily harm. A hammer with a red wood handle tucked in his belt. The younger brother is empty-handed. Defenseless. So he flees. They run nonstop for weeks. Between traffic stalled cars. Down forgotten subways tunnels drilled long ago in the cold earth. Past burning sugarcane fields. Sometimes the younger looks back. Sees his brother and calls out to him. Wait. Let’s talk about this a moment. A drink will do you good. But there is no agreement. No gray cloud unrolling from those eyes. The older brother draws near.
A big black horse is very rude to me.
I know. It wasn’t. And then choke. But before the birds started.
Then they creaked alongside the west wall of the room.
And in the interim.
The disparity between my breakfast and yours is alarming. I am also better looking.
One night when I was on the verge of sleep, my father whispered in my ear that he loved me so much that he forbade me to sweat.
Running in the park with my friends, I could not help sweating.
He did not want to hear me saying that I could not help sweating. He asked me if I could not help running either.
Margaret Atwood didn’t own a calculator, because she wasn’t sure what was inside them. Margaret Atwood could tell time by closing her eyes, concentrating, and asking the universe in Morse code, using her heart beats. Margaret Atwood could play complex orchestras using the beating of her heart. Margaret Atwood could control the heart beats of anyone within a seventeen mile radius. Margaret Atwood sometimes killed humming birds for fun. Margaret Atwood thought chickens were beautiful. She imagined that her legs looked like fleshy chicken meat and she would rub sage on her thighs before she went to sleep.
I put away my groceries and listen to Billie Holiday. I pour myself a glass of water and forget it on the counter. I stare out my window for ten minutes. I start compiling a list of my favorite directors on a sticky note, for no reason at all,
Kubrick,
Fellini,
Buñuel.
Captain Walker snatches the child out of the air. Steam rises from his body as the baby smolders in his arms. Other than a lack of fingernails, the baby, extinguished but alive, is fine. “A son,” the captain whispers, “a son, a son, a son.”
I would take the things that had no power of their own into my plastic play home. It was there that I pretended to be a woman. I was hungry and bored by the story of the fox and wolf.
I had plastic things that I pretended were remnants of a future I had yet to inhabit: branches of dogwood; carcasses of dead birds, squirrels, chipmunks; the limbs of my brother's plastic figurines.
Using a watering can, I filled these remnants with what filled the faces of our neighbors when they heard their proper names called out. It was very bright and could not be eyed directly. My ability to do this was often questioned from a window of my parents' bedroom.
Before Stephanie ate me, she asked a simple question.
“Are you an animal?”
“No, human,” I replied, fingering the duct tape tying my wrists together.
“I love evolution,” she said as she cracked my head with a crowbar.
Relationships are difficult. One holds the remote, one accepts whatever is on; one plays the first third of ‘Reign in Blood’ at volume 8 on the dial to show off one’s new distortion pedal, one wears earplugs throughout the house; one dry humps the other while the other is asleep, one pretends to be asleep. Life happens: babies come out bald, blinded by the cold indoor light of dozen fluorescent tubes. Sometimes these babies die from malnourishment, a gray corpse that looks like a plucked bird with a too large head. I tried to get Stephanie to feed it milk, but she refused, saying that she was trying to establish ethics and morality early on. At the funeral, I met Stella.
There’s a certain calmness that comes after extreme violence. It’s like the devil gets light headed and sits down. I remember lying face down in a pool of my own blood, part of my scalp next to my nose. Maybe I was unconscious, and this was a dream. Or maybe I died and this is the afterlife. All I know is Stephanie ate my left ass.
We know this ain't the Openline. The gold veins what? We know you can see the O from Google. About ten miles from the nearest paved road we found an old concrete bridge that crossed North Honcut Creek. We found a child's grave from 1855. Alpaca or mohair in the bears left month to month. We know how to plug along between cannery checks. We know to nick the tire from a ropeswing and hustle to the Forebay, glug to Mike Jones and Alan Jackson and maybe get some ass. We know the old mens' summer tennis, Meryle's cigars. We know a man and a woman have stretched some very long jumper cables between two cars stolen from a wrecking yard. We posted Big Lem's BBQ rap on YouTube. We buried Ishi's sister under the DMV. We saw Reagan bless this dam. We sucked California's dick, and glimmer oh glimmer this award-winning lake. Squawfish, lamprey, pupfish and sculpins. Roach and chub. We scrub the memorial by The Depot for those who ditched their shit via train. We don't carry sluices. We wipe our heads fuzzy at the Keg Room. We spend it all at Feather Falls. Social security, Section 8. Is this where you blow on the needle? Get your brick or driveway cleaner. Lye. Cheap starter fluid (Wal-Mart, always). Inhalers? Bezenedrex! Vicks won't work. Coffee filters, new socks, sawed-off lightbulb. Please no smoking in the same room. We pray to the ghosts of Olives. Easy off the guardrails we leap. I recorded these country songs into my cell phone. I never held my friends at gunpoint in the bandroom, but I did buy all the sunglasses in the hospital's thrift store. You got Oroville down to gurp, but shit, yo. Gotta hock this out while the line's hot. Pay in almonds. Smell that rice burn. Scoops got its hot dogs and TJ his coffee. The punkz got their glowstickz and ranchers their chew. We mark the Hmong new year. We let the hippies run mouth on community radio. Lo the Inn out there! Lo the AM-PM! Hella props to PG&E and Pigg's Liquors! Lo the bowling alley and the bowling alleys hulled! MC Oroville, say hello to my scraggly ass angels. If you can keep track of this shit I'll buy you a case of Pale Ales, but we gotta promise not to say Chico. All we say is the glug life. You gotta keep that plugging along / plug it along / plug it alone. If they call you, don't play tidy. Yodel that Feather River now. Plumas ahoy. Snort the resin off that fiddle. Hella yokel shit. Really we're just here until the levy breaks.
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Outside the windows were trees and in front of the windows were plants and on the windows were blinds. The plants were buried in dirt up to their necks. I will bury you up to your neck she said. I said But where. She said The Bathtub. But then I said You'd have to clean the bathtub. Or bathe in the sink. Nothing She said Would make me happier. Except this she said. One day I will possess your teeth and they will be in my mouth and my teeth will be in yours and I will dance very slowly and you won't even know I'm dancing at all. I will keep very good care of your teeth. I told her I once walked out the backyard and down several blocks and ended up in a house and when I opened the door all my teeth were nailed to the wall in the shape of my mouth. I put them back in my mouth. It took all day I said. I imagine it would she told me.
He looked like the creature of mud with a feather in his hand.
I have sympathy because a lot of the people I have loved and given to have never especially loved or given to me, and Westy is colding off like the planet, except I can’t believe it in either case.
Nothing really to say except in some reaction like on the television.
Now I am looking at the bird with the arrow through it.
And all it does is make me very sleepy.
The dust then. It slid through the crevices no ant could crawl through, sifting under doors to wedge them shut. It appeared like a sudden rush on polished tables, threw gloom in mirrors, begrimed the beds and grayed the linen, clung to drapes and curtains, filmed milk, sanded flour and sugar, and coated all uncovered food with its special granular display. On the other hand, the sky on hot dustless days would leap with light, nails would wink in their boards, pails blaze like beacons, and the glass of the several stores would shout the sun at you, empty your head through your ears with whistling sunshine.
One day we sat in front of Il Signore Galvani in his dying bed.
The bed, since the last time we remembered, had grown to fill the whole room. We could see nothing of Il Signore Galvani but his hands. The hands came out of nowhere, since the body of Il Signore Galvani had shrunk under the sheets that were vast and white as sails. The hands of Il Signore were blue, containing all the blood that Il Signore had left in his body.
Bones have been discovered in a villa on Ile Verte, near Grenoble, those—she admits it—of the clandestine offspring of Mme P.
Your expectations lead you out of the clouds and into a place where water runs down the walls and your voice echoes all night.
Nothing could be better than here. My hands inside an overcoat grasp at the seams.
The enormity of the distance between your legs makes me cross my ankles and cringe.
At one Beckett conference in America I mentioned Beckett’s view, expressed in Worstword Ho, that one reason for human existence is that pain should exist. And one professor actually said, ‘I can’t teach that to my students, I’d lose my job!’ There may be many people who believe that while pain surrounds us all the time it is somehow constructive to try to ignore it. Beckett doesn’t. His thinking is very close to Schopenhauer’s in this, although I think by the time he discovered him he’d already come to the same conclusions. Schopenhauer thinks that everything is caused by a kind of Will: Nature has a Will that for him is evil, the cause of suffering. Standard religions - not so much Hinduism or Buddhism - of course, deny this. Beckett asks deeply searching questions about conventional beliefs. Why should a god want to be worshipped, admired, praised? All we’re doing is replacing a parental figure with a god: Please, daddy, give me this.
He who tells the truth says almost nothing.
I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.
Only a few arrive at nothing, because the way is long.
Out of a hundred years a few minutes were made that stayed with me, not a hundred years.
When I come upon some idea that is not of this world, I feel as though this world had grown wider.
This world understands nothing but words, and you have come into it with almost none.
We become aware of the void as we fill it.
Fallen snowflakes serve
as a wish for a lightless life, and
their dance is all a farce, because
we haven't lit the lights.
He has already become almost an emblem of sorts for the poets of his generation, and for those a little older than him, like myself, who are still listening to the "rain slanting inside my coffee cup."
Long ago, in childhood, when Summer reverberates and feels and throbs all over, it begins to circumscribe my body along with my self, and my body gives it shape in turn: the “joy” of living, of experiencing, of already foreseeing dismembers it, this entire body explodes, neurons rush toward what attracts them, zones of sensation break off almost in blocks that come to rest at the four corners of the landscape, at the four corners of Creation.
In front of me lay the forest, where the elderly went from time to time, and when they did, they locked us children inside wooden cupboards in the kitchen. We could only breathe through the stars on the cupboard walls, empty stars, like windows in the shape of a star. Once I asked a boy from a nearby house if he was sometimes locked inside the kitchen cupboard, and he said he was. I asked him if the door had two panels with an empty star on each side. He said, there’s an empty star, but it’s not large enough to allow much air in, and if the elders are long in returning, we start to feel ill, like we’re suffocating. He said he watched through the star as the elderly people set off, and after that he could see only walls and ashes. Everything conveyed a sense of loneliness and sadness. Even the walls grew sad and old when the elderly left them alone and all the children were locked in cupboards like animals. And what he told me about things was true: alone, they grew old quickly, but in the company of people they grew old more slowly and in a different way; instead of becoming ugly, they became pretty.
Children's Hour. I feel I should fill in some philosophy, or a more formal advice; channels can be changed. Here to. Let it be known that a man in a box is yet a man. A man buried is as lonely as he'll ever be, and ever was. Walls move if you do not watch them. Never take the pill. Highly regimented diets of air will sustain us all. Troughs are to be watered and pigged upon. Mountains climbed are no less immortal. The back of the hand is a ravine that should not be crossed. Never touch. The unremarkable sound that faints in your bedroom at night is glass shattering, distant. Swallow when spoken to. Spit when exhumed. A tar-stained rope will never do. A year's worth of salt will build upon dank newspapers left quiet, then ignore the patterns in the smeared print, as they will only forebode. Askewed and stern, default. Let the noises crowd each other; it'll be like tea leaves. Turn to the stars. Diviners are to be held in faith. The most graceful motion is a slice. The most noble motion is a feint.
Young Goodman Brown was a window shade.
One side faced Paradise and Hell outdoors
the other furniture, food and shelter in.
But when Faith rolled him up
he saw himself no more.
A spider squeezed out the center and
threaded down. It yawned and opened
its eyes from sleep. All six legs flexed
wide, and like rust it farted spider dust,
which filled the house. We came in
with mops, hexes and vacuum cleaners,
until the house looked clean. But
how to kill a spider, which wasn’t ours?
It was masturbating like hell with every leg. Did
Young Goodman teach him that? Or Nathaniel?.
Copies of the magazine will be available for your purchasing pleasure at the highly reasonable price of $8. There will also be beer, and it will be cheap!
I see a multitude, in transports of joy.
Delirious! Adventure stories in the shape of poems.
You want a picture. Break me open again.
Your baby bitch weakness is never as cute an unreasonable defense as you think, especially when you’re off speed. If your tricks rather called you ugly, instead of letting you, in false modesty, say it first, they would then adorn you beyond your tiny comprehension, and you’d have to fill your own cunt with substance.
Herds of mosquitoes grazed the alleyways—mosquito-sized vampires—and heaved hordes of citizens above skyscrapers, then dropped the husks of their bodies to Peachtree Street. The hulls of destroyed brick rows lurked underground, and above, fiberglass rocketed into the rain. Hardwood floors lined my apartment, and cockroaches scrawled notes across my chest. With the humidity, I inhabited the inside of a mouth, the space between ass cheeks.
I spent the summer calling in bomb threats, alternating between the cineplex on North Cumberland and the public library on Liberty. On the Sundays I didn’t want to attend church (all Sundays, with the exception of the annual carnival fun fundraiser) I dialed the United Methodist Church on Valencia, imagining the choir blundering down the front steps in a crumbling falsetto.
I think, we as humans have a tendency for self-destruction and that is reflected in so many ways in our society. The media is another example of this havoc—a mirror of what the general population wants to see. Advertisement overpowers many media-related businesses, and of course they need to sell content to keep their company afloat. However, if less people were interested in celebrity bashing, gruesome accidents, and more, maybe there would be a better balance of good and bad news, and we would be less in hell right now.
She and he therefore sicken what prenatality of the aforementioned watering hole—you, silly! Ramified and Desdemona and Gilgamesh in and out of the brambled yacht. Our ocean. Our play dirt. Our mortified and relinquished testimonials. Our virile eggs and forever immortality. Our shovels and our pills.
Though alien to the world’s ancient past, young blood runs similar circles. All those bones are born from four grandparents. Baby teeth and baby teeth all down the line. Jackets didn’t used to zip up. There wasn’t a single door. The ground sits around us dumb and keeping secrets.
On the outskirts, we are linked
by power, slick chords doubling
the horizon. A good marker, the sky—constant
but for the flash of birds, and they have chosen
to leave us. Or did we drive them away?
Though the face was cracked, it could still be seen through, smelled through and heard through. Pinpricks were introduced. The face registered touch in all but three spots—in the depression below the nose and at both corners of the mouth. The eyes closed and stayed that way until it was discovered that applying pressure simultaneously to all three spots opened them up. At which point, they remained unblinking and almost too wide. Even when the pressure was released, it took half a minute for the eyes to return to a normal state, and for several minutes more, they gave the appearance of being on the lookout. As to the turning of the whole face along any axis, none was recorded. This may have been due to the absence of head. Or else the very act of our observing the face fixed its position. Of late, a new theory is gaining traction. It says the face is only one face, and that others are sure to be different.
If Sean Ruane doesn’t offend you, he will try again. He will come to your house. Follow you to work. Sit on your desk. Eat your goddamn apple. Sean Ruane is getting paid to slice your apple into such tiny slivers, that your apple becomes invisible. Sean Ruane is getting paid to eat invisible apple slices.
Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.
We’d stay up all night. Every angel’s
berserk. Hell, if you slit monkeys
for a living, you’d pray to me, too.
I’m not so forgiving. I’m rubber, you’re glue.
That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree
making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.
I set the controls, I pioneer
the seeding of the ionosphere.
I translate the Bible into velociraptor.
We barked into our portable phones and when the phones died we barked into our hats. Behind us were the graying stormclouds that’d been hung for the evening over our town.
Goth, noir, fantasy, speculative fiction in which the premise is as flimsy as a video game, video culture in which the video world is like a death world, is usually a space of death and has its literal interface thereon, its own glowing portal, virtuality in all its forms. Awesome and terrible books of poetry, like the nearly unreadibly excellent Alma or the Dead Women. Artforms which are already dead. Occult art. The ludicrous, the unjustifiable, the death-dealing.
Congratulations on your abortion
Kumiko-san
Congratulations on your abortion
Congratulations on killing Tomo-kun
Mari-san
How about getting rid of Nonoho-chan?
Mayumi-san
Was the fetus a boy or a girl?
Riko-chan
It’s about time to get rid of Kōta-kun
Let’s all get rid of them together
All of the daughters
All of the sons
If a man could dance and have a heart attack and an orgasm all at the same time, he would resemble that man.
He had only one eye. In the other socket was a belly button...
Oh, but not to worry, in his umbilical depression was his other eye fully equipped with eyelid and lashes. It even had tears for sad stories and onions.
But because his belly button, I mean his umbilical eye, was nearsighted, it wore a monocle ground for distant viewing.
He would stand naked at a window at night letting his belly button, I mean, his umbilical eye, view the moon as it flowed through the monocle into his belly button, I mean, his umbilical eye...
Not only do we build the skyscraper in the form of your outward likeness, we build the interior in the exact function shape & twirl of your veins & arteries & organs. The employees in the building of your body pass through your chutes & sphincters in their daily work. There are the obvious undesirable, one might even say officious, offices of guttural organ; the places for those who never dream of a desk at the command of the eyes. We have the finest conceptual architects constructing our skyscrapers with precision computer modeling – it is crucial that the buildings are not only structurally sound but anatomically coherent.
In the display window a dozen identical female legs are lined up in a row, feet up, the thighs lopped off at the hip joint resting on the floor, the knees slightly bent, as though the legs had been removed from some chorus of dancers at the precise moment that they are all kicking in unison, and put there in the window, just as they were, or perhaps snipped out, in monotonous multiplicity, from some advertisement showing a pretty girl in her slip pulling on a stocking, sitting on a pouf or on the edge of an unmade bed, her torso leaning backward, with the leg that she is pulling the stocking over raised up high, and a kitten, or a curly-haired puppy gleefully standing on its hind legs, barking, with its pink tongue sticking out.
Objects and buildings circulate randomly and mingle with one another. Memory must constantly untangle them since permanent order is not possible there. The city can neither be described nor drawn; the reality of the city blocks is resistant to orthogonal projection.
Dean Koontz thinks David Bowie was the second incarnation of Christ. Dean Koontz flushes his toilet once an hour, so the water will remain fresh and clean. If he is away from home, he makes arrangements for a neighbor to flush it for him. Dean Koontz feels disappointed in the sun. Dean Koontz steals welcome mats from strip clubs. Dean Koontz pulls out his belly hairs, one at a time, and eats them on toast with mayonnaise. Dean Koontz sleeps in a suit and tie. Dean Koontz masturbates to the Oxford English Dictionary. Dean Koontz confesses his sins to QVC operators. Dean Koontz has a spare bedroom where he keeps orange marmalade. Dean Koontz dreams in shades of yellow. Dean Koontz shows up at parties, uninvited, and eats the cheese and crackers. Sometimes he brings cheese whiz. Dean Koontz won’t read the first page of a novel. Dean Koontz swallows spit when he’s thirsty. Dean Koontz thinks inside brackets. Dean Koontz was born without lips. At the age of three, he received a lip transplant. Dean Koontz tints himself more green every day. Eventually he will be hunter green and no one will notice because of the gradual process. Dean Koontz spits acid. Dean Koontz can change your hair color by looking at you. Dean Koontz licks the ink off newspapers and doesn’t get indigestion. Dean Koontz is a level four paladin. Dean Koontz is afraid. Dean Koontz is never sorry.
This book is called Hypneratomachia Fuckphila.
Fuckfila on her journey her new spelling
reminiscent of Chick-Fil-A. Fill the
chick and filler well of ding ding dong.
Fuckin’ A. Behold a useful and
profitable book. If you think otherwise,
do not lay the blame on the book, but on
yourself. If you sourly refuse
the new erotic guest, do not despise
the well-ordered sequence nor the fine
well-ordered style. Then in this volume
she falls in love. It is a worthy book, and full
of many ornaments: he who will not read it
is dull of mind. Various things are treated in it
which it would tire me to relate, but accept
the work which offers a cornucopia
emending it should it be incorrect. The End.
A Mongoloid, shuffling down the street on the arm of his grey and faded Irish mother, punching himself in the face. Yet we all stand now as idiots in the face of the mass devastation of feeling that abounds.
God and censored and Jehova were driNking whiskey together and taLking
about ----censored-----. jesus ChriSt was there bleEding all over you and cuRsing
you.
Suddenly your bRain became 100 times bigGer and the english langUage
went out for a waLk. Assault! That's wheN god said -
"I'm going to marRy a rock at the botteM of the ocean!"
- the -------------censored--------------------------. I couLdn't find a censored at
that moment so I turnEd the floOr into a skY of words. Your brain grew a
thousand times biGger and your bRain is a forest of clamoR, your brain is a
desert of floodS, your brain is a maZe of reStlesSnesS.
Some of the whitE peOple were eAting the deliRious waLls. Some of the bLack
peoPle were tRying to stAb-the-sUn stAb-the-sUn. It was like wAtching barbeD
wiRe groWing inside the bOdies of liTtle children. ThE nUclEar bOmbs arE
thrashing! THRASHING! impatient! THRASHING! IMPATIENT! thrashing-impatient!
impatient!
death is a process and life is a process and on a graph they are crossing each other
you have died in your dream about a wolf
on the day you first heard the story of the little boy who cried wolf
you have died in a zombie dream
the dream camera zoomed out and panned from right to left
and you saw more people than you thought existed
you respected my personal space by being on the other side of the room
i rolled over in bed like a depressed ian curtis
it was the eve of my 1980 american tour
it was horrible
my heart sounds like a dog lapping water from the bottom of the bowl
i think that means something is wrong but we don't have to worry about it tonight
Miles down the road and all I need is a heaven. A place to go where I can really be. Ghosts appear like flowers from dirt. Forget all of her, leave memories behind, before they made me run. No matter how hard I try, I know if I stop for too long, I’ll remember her: Someone I lost, back there, and keep losing, over and over again. Try to keep it from happening again and again but I can’t. The windshield and the rain, the heat on the highway. Desert plain of the horizon. The road ahead of me, strangers with names the same as flowers. They remind me we all have to wilt and die like the rest of it. Trying to keep going but I’m alone. Afraid of never knowing where to stop. And it just goes on.
Each minute we have to be sure that we show five different ideas.
She slipped about the room like walking on petals on pillows on air. He approached her.
For the State will know how to use your insubordination, and not only will it take advantage of it, but you, in opposition and revolt, will be its delegate and representative as fully as you would have been in your office, following the law. The only change is that you want change and there won’t be any. What you’d like to call destruction of the State will always appear to you really as service to the State. What you’ll do to escape the law will still be the force of the law for you. And when the State decides to annihilate you, you’ll know that this annihilation doesn’t sanction your error, doesn’t give you, before history, the vain arrogance of men in revolt, but rather that it makes you one of these modest and correct servants on the dust of whom rests the good of all — and your good as well.
After compulsory relocation to Hornville, Misery’s family lived in a skyscraper made of living flesh. The building’s eyes served as windows that were barely transparent, and although it was said that the heavens were out there, no one could see them. The people who lived in the building wore internal helmets injected into their ears by the doorman, who was also a skilled surgeon. On any given day, one was either deaf to the world, or everything was painfully amplified, but it was worth it. The human head was indestructible. When people died, the government shot their heads into the sun…
fiction is a kind of secular literature running alongside every culture's sacred literature—testing its validity in "real" life, so to speak—and that fiction is finally a more trustworthy guide to life than sacred texts.
Literature was the last of all the arts to make its appearance. It will be the first to disappear.
this rain never ends this ride has not and will never have an arrival this storm is in the room is the room this room is the black body radiating omnidirectionally at such a temperature that the maximum emission is at the wavelength of yellow this yellow room overlooks and pours into the moaning moat of the capital to find the Gaussian curvature of white heads of the decapitated geese the Green’s function and the false projection of the moon.
Palm-round, palm-rounded, this snow, these frozen hunks. Balls of ice now hardened, once snow rolled, balled by cup as if to sip or sup, made from the fall that stilled his helicopter’s skids. He would sit like this for days, waiting for an assignment: a contractor’s business here to prospect oil, an opposing ecological legation always tapdanced attendance upon by its token indigeneity, Indian or Inuit, the requisite feather or fur, their red palm greased with greening—whatever would rub from the paper money, which would circulate between the same two hands or ten forever: dirty, handled, with egg batter, cum and the sperm of the nose, the register waitresses’, the daughter and cook’s, change from her cigarette purchase discounted if not held against her salary, if broke, from her work at the dinette that was the northern center of the country and their world.
The gray wool ski cap James Henderson’s grandmother knitted for him when he was six and which was missing between the ages of eleven and fourteen was knocked clean off with the first blow. The second swing, coming only moments after the first and doing the most damage, broke three ribs and knocked the wind out of James Henderson. The only blood visible trailed from his right ear, staining his neck. Even as the assailant walked away, leaving James Henderson and the gray wool ski cap on the pavement, he could feel the tingle of contact up and down his arms.
Windows of humor roll down low & whistle
At our glorious legs & eyeball the stiff &
Enthronging death of accidents.
The humpbacked light of the moon is the
Funnel cloud of direction, sawn off & mighty.
The government has come to collect my wife. If things had been only slightly slightly different, we would have been mid-coitus for this event. I step out, brazen, into the light and I fall in such a way under the spray of bullets that's meant to be a signal for goodbye.
I have come to this conclusion:
I cannot read straight narrative anymore. When I hit phrases that explain, that justify, that preface, that highlight, that draw lines for me from A to B, I just can’t go on.
Don’t worry, you have done all the right things. I know, I know, that is how some short stories work & I am sure they do work for a lot of readers, they just aren’t right for me anymore. Please don’t cry. Please.
Look: it’s not you, it’s me. You are a fantastic you, I just need something else. I need more poetics in my prose. I need more descriptive prowess. I need more writing that plummets & swirls & dives & takes me to unexpected places. I need something damaged & hurt & broken open & spilling. I need something with antlers with teeth with butterfly wings & birds nested in beards.
I am sorry to do this to you, the new year looming & all, but really, I swear, it’s time. You will find a new reader. I know you will. You will find a reader who wants the regular world handed back in easy words with care-taking instructions. You will find more audience than I can imagine, & I will applaud you silently from my corner.
Enjoy the ride. See you sometime down the line.
Our novels will be hacked out by ranks of glassy eyed author-serfs, the skeletal fingers of these mindless minions tip-tapping away at 200 words per minute for 24 hours of every day of every week of every year churning out an endless stream of pulp fiction classics with titles like HUGETITTED SPUNKSUCKING NAZISNAKE SLUTNUNS IN CYBERSPACE!, FISTFUCK TO FREEDOM! , JOYRIDING INTELLECTUAL CRACKBABY BLOODFIENDS!, GASHCRAZED MEDICAL STUDENT CANNIBAL PARTY PAEDOPHILE CRACK-MASSACRE!, SUBMISSIVE BOOTBOY SMACK ADDICT SEXTOY!, I KILL FOR LAGER!, SKINHEAD TAKES IT UP THE SHITTER!, MENTAL SELF-MUTILATION FRENZIED KUNG FU GLUESNIFFER SPUNK RIOT!, I SHAT THE HOT-CUM OF A BILLION NEW LABOUR SPIN-DOCTOR SCUM IN A CRACK-WRAP LITTERED AND BADLY-LIT BACKSTREET BOMBAY BUMBOY BROTHEL FOR BASTARD YONKS!, MY LIFE AS THE DRUG-DERANGED AND SAVAGELY UNDERPAID MAD MONKEY WAGE SLAVE OF CUTTING EDGE ENFANT TERRIBLE BAD BOY NOVELIST MARTIN AMIS FOR PEANUTS AND LOVED EVERY FUCKING MINUTE OF EVERY CUNTING DAY! And SHITSURFINGFISHNETS TOCKINGEDI NTELLIGENT JUNGLECRAZEDMUTANTFERRET SEXSLAVECANNIBALSPUNKADD ICTS INGLEMOTHERDRUGALIEN CRACKSMUGGLINGCOPKILLERAND ROIDRIOT GRRLWHORENUNS FROMREABCLINICCOLDTURKEY HELLVERSUSTHECOCKSU CKERMER CENARYSKULLFUCKEDPSYCHODRUG KOPSPACEFASCI STRANGERSFA NSFROMSPEED GABBAKEBAB PUKESMEAREDMINICAB HELLPLANET 9ONSMACK! 2—THE SCREENPLAY which will sell in their millions.
When its eyes terrify me and the moment of escape turns dangerous as a tide of dead children crashing on the table when there are no nights without the setting of the moon and your voice appears in my dreams damningly different when you and I sit at the table and we love each other in tongues unknown to the butterflies we curl like a tongue we get lost between the darkest horizons of the night we see each other drawing windows in the corridors we look at each other chagrined before the cavity of time and we let ourselves laugh as if we didn’t have hinges and were really recumbent bodies on the sun under the distressing shadow of the moon When nothing that I say makes sense because I shatter in your body like glass from the violent impact of a stone when I look at you and know that I know you and that you don’t recognize me when I think that what I know is useful somehow but in reality it’s only a crack when what I really want is to run to your house and hurl myself on your bed like a bat wounded by the day when I can only fall back on my shoes and compose myself in a corner and slap my face three times against the red palm of my hand when there are no more melodies left in my mouth except those that I pronounce in silence when you sleep with your eyes open to my mouth I let myself die a long slow death I proceed with caution toward the black coasts of your laugh I exhaust myself in your eyes I sleep in your eyes and then and only then do I remember you as a drawing that I lost long ago.
a neutrino is form and content
neutrinos enjoy exhaling the universe at 3:15am
a neutrino is ideas and solutions
neutrinos practice writing buckminster fuller poetry
a neutrino is mental ingenuity
neutrinos believe in fighting against inanimate slavery
a neutrino is a trillion trillion trillion clitorises
neutrinos escape interacting with the speed of light
a neutrino is the great experiment
neutrinos hate sniffing gravitational glue
The first attack against February occurred directly under where Thaddeus had
seen the two holes in the sky. Thaddeus, Selah, Caldor Clemens, and the
members of The Solution had devised a plan to trick February by pretending
it was summer. The men had taken off their shirts and rolled their pants to
a ring at their kneecaps. Selah wore a thin summer dress, the one she wore
while on her first balloon trip with Thaddeus.
William Butler Yeats would have been a great astronaut, if his father hadn’t read him so much goddamned poetry. William Butler Yeats still floats, invisible, in the Earth’s atmosphere, waiting on the day when every living person is dead.
Doris told us about five guys from Arizona who stormed across the country writing fake painkiller prescriptions, how they hustled different Walgreen stores in Seattle and Tacoma and Butte and Cheyenne, until they got caught in Denver because of expired tags on their stolen Chevy Nova, and how one guy cried to the police about his mother who was dying a terrible horrible death in Missouri and how he needed to get back to her pronto, while one of the other guys, who couldn't really communicate properly, told the police he was from the future and wasn't worried about any legal ramifications because he already knew the outcome, and the other three didn't even get to speak on their own behalf, partly because they were Mexican and partly because they were shy.
a lepton, the neutrino is a clitoris
to us, a clit, maneuvering
past the explosion, neutrally, not neutralizing
it is a scandinavian country
taking no part in anything moving
a conscientious objector
unwilling to be party to any collision
but, a secretary of state, she has some weight
you know she has been being there
over two hundred trillion trillion trillion massless earths
are passing through the sun every second
not to speak of you, you muon monster!
p.s. if i say to my sister: i’m not me
i’m a neutrino, passing through you
is she still the same?
The near absence of blues is electric
A map speaks watery urgencies
but no one notices
I began to chew at your leg, an inch above the fang marks, to stop the spread of the venom. It was such a beautiful leg, a leg that brought you home to me each night, a leg that worked the gas pedal like some kind of miracle.
I said, “This is a good thing. This is for the best.”
You said, “I agree.”
I continued to chew through meat, through bone, through meat, until the leg was off.
Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
You, You’re a History in Rust
Walking Cloud and Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered and the Sun Shined
Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever
He Has Left Us Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms…
Bryce has taped Bertrand’s postcards to the refrigerator door, to the microwave door, to the television screen. Now she is coating them with polyurethane. She adds a bit of moss to Lake Nero, to simulate an algal bloom. Over here—silica flakes! They give a badly needed glimmer to the deserts of Poland.
Bryce imagines Bertrand in the deserts of Poland. Will Bertrand see the white and gold Polish eagle? Will she see Queen Wanda the Drowned?
The moss absorbs a good deal of polyurethane. Bryce has a terrible headache. Headaches are always the danger with the plastic arts.
His knees were ball-and-socket joints of hard plastic lubricated with silicon dust, his nipples were tiny red bulbs, easy to lose (until they lit up) in the painted ruffles of his old-fashioned shirt. At the push of a button and a knowing tug his hair went from butch to folderol, poet's ringlets and curlicues, and the genius girls brushed and set it. Parts of him were made of absinthe, antimony, arsenic, bismuth, chromium, cuttle-bone, egg yolk, grout, gutta-percha, jute, latex, lead, manganese, molasses, nickel, paper, phosphorus, plaster of paris, tungsten, wax, wicker, and zinc. But most of him was tin: the sharp little feet with their unfiled edges, the head with its neatly welded planes, the curved door on its shoddy hinges which swung open to reveal—what a contrast of workmanship!—the perfectly formed genitals, soft and rubbery.
The Jolan hemorrhages with olives, oily bread, brake pads, shoes shined with butter and ink, chicken pens with chickens thrashing rabid – and hovering silver trays like spaceships, tea kettles, tea glasses, tea – motorbikes backfiring, cabbage choking tailpipes, Mountain Dew drizzling through gutters, and children, dozens of shoe-less children pitting dates. Their fingers look shit-stained, but it’s just date juice.
Those could be eyelids, fused shut beneath the veiling. She decides they are. She imagines them lit by the ghostly blue glow of blood. Everything in this world that he needs to see, he sees.
As she read essays, she plaited one side of her hair. You’d last forever, he said, up from his puzzle. The green light of some vehicle tracked across the ceiling.
Self, you are too sincere, not nearly ironic enough. You are way too un-cool: hipster-with-a-fannypack-for-a-purse-uncool. Self, I know what you’re thinking—you’ve got books strewn around you on New Year’s Eve, you look drunk—but you’re thinking about urgency, the deep and monstrously incoherent need to believe in something against a backdrop of post-postmodern self-conscious irony, gluttony, and emotional vacancy.
When you were in the mall, I was drunk, looking for the toilet, photocopies following me everywhere. When you were brushing my teeth, I was in the Oldsmobile, the cold water flushed over my face like a flash of light in the woods.
I could see you there, watching me with your ugly lens, my body bent into the ice chest like a baseball bat. The baseball bat wrapped out of a tree into the angles of my body.
As every shepherd down the ages has learned, if you fuck them too much, the hair gets a stink.
I tried to think about the ribboned girl and work from her toward an explanation that would include us in a plan to remember why we were.
This name comes from Condylura cristata, a small North American mole with a tentacular snout endowed with a multitude of electromagnetic senso-sensors.
So it went on like that for a few more days—stretches of blanketed half-awareness marked with short ecstasies of correctly-placed guesses of where she and I might have things in common.
If such rumours existed, they were not recorded—at least not in any materials subsequently published or catalogued—but this circumstance may not be as discouraging as it seems.
He did the hitching trick with his throat to clear it more vehemently.
People will tell you the ant is not related to the elephant, Menchov said, they will deny the bee in the wildebeest, he said, but what do they know, said Menchov.
Impossible to decipher, yet easy enough to intuit into some sort of action, usually involving the growth of more tissue for their young to feed on.
She is unaware of the little bits of fabric he would sew into her palms: in private she squelches her poise and it is awful to hear silence exist in such a perfect American accent.
Meat was hardly involved.
I played a tuba for like eighteen years until one day I just gave up.
Eventually one realizes that, in this city, everyone is walking around with gauze wrapped around their faces; everything they see is as I see it: through sheets and sheets and sheets and sheets of water.
the family of the deceased close the door to the courtyard from the inside and engage in a verbal fast for a day, at the end of which the oldest member, again, to break the fast, opens his mouth and gives sound to the deceased’s name for the last.
A fatal collusion of drag embryos and DNA angels in Cadaver City ignites the circuitry of the ADAM doll... dogs of zero waging gene war in Placenta World, chaos unleashed by the digital vampires of Sato Corporation, nano-junk virus pandemic. On the pink ash planet EVOL, DAM and ANTI=ADAM clash in terminal zodiac burn... enter robo-succubus Super-Cherry 666, hunting for the grotesque nova skulls of Sato Corporation napalm torture victims.
They'd caught a minotaur down by the wharf; people were calling out and rushing down narrow streets. I heard shouts of excitement and tramping feet, and despite my dislike of gawking crowds, I tucked a small pistol in my belt and went out through the back alley.
The woman with whom he had had the affair was also in the dark restaurant in the basement of the building. She was sitting at a table on the other side of the room. Ray even pointed to her, discretely, and indicated that that very woman was the one with whom he had had an affair. He said, there she is, the woman with whom I had an affair. It meant nothing to me.
The Professor had named his duck lady Ruthie. In order to keep her in good health, he established, and intended to maintain, a biosecurity program that would prevent the introduction of diseases into the premises where she was kept. No source of infectious agents would be allowed entry. In cases where it was necessary to bring other duck ladies to the lab, they had to be from an established disease-free source, and would be quarantined for observation before gaining entry. Potential carriers of infectious material such as people, trucks, and poultry crates and equipment would be denied entry unless appropriate disinfection measures were taken. The Professor planned to change clothing and boots and use disinfectant foot-baths upon entering the premises or buildings. He would seek to minimize environmental stresses which could cause his duck lady to become susceptible to infections by making sure to provide her proper housing, management, ventilation and nutrition.
The bird chirped in his ear and the sweet sound ran along the skin inside his ear and down his throat and down down down to the blood around his feet turning everything cold and white. They both watched a deer, sleek as the glare off a knife, break into the snow covered trees.
There is only the slightest movement of the fingers that makes the v-sign different from the Nazi salute. Always watch that.
They’re about to poke their genitals into our cream cheese moon right now. That’s my eye; the moon is part of me. Why don’t they poke it in the sun? They’re not very daring.
I don’t think there’s any way you can *know* music. The minute you *know* it, you stop playing, and the minute a person stops playing, the music isn’t playing anymore.
For instance, the English language is the only language that has an *i* before *e* except after *c*. What’s before an *i*? Before my eyes is a sea. But the *c* I see is a sea. I’m not that word-oriented. I’m trying to use words like music so that they don’t take your mind anywhere that I want them to.
It’s hard to use the English language. I’d rather play a tune on a horn, but I’ve always felt that I didn’t want to train myself. Because when you get a train, you’ve got to have an engine and a caboose. I think it’s better to train the caboose. You train yourself, you strain yourself.
There are only forty people in the world and five of them are hamburgers.
I was able to turn myself inside out, and that’s all I’m trying to do.
I sat at the base of a cliff expecting to die at any moment. Vultures circled overhead forming ∞-shaped orbitals. The colors were brilliant and everything appeared vivid and clear. I was euphoric -- in last-request mode. What did I have to lose? I told P that I had to have her. This was my last request. She was reluctant. Somewhere in the park literature she had read that crossbreeding was against the rules.
"There are no rules when you know you are going to die," I said. "Come on. I won't tell anyone because I will be dead."
Strangeness is everywhere and everything makes you tired in the end.
Happiness? I have never come across a more foolish word, invented by all those unfortunate girls from north-eastern Brazil.
They shut the door, and Ahmed sat down on the toilet. It was enough to make you throw up. He had breasts like a woman's, except they were covered in hair, and he reeked of sour sweat. Every few minutes he would break into idiotic laughter and order Didi to lick his corrupted body from head to toe. Or else he would fart and laugh as if it were the funniest joke he'd ever heard. Didi did lick him, but all the while she fantasized about those cigarettes and cutlets, which allowed her to forget what she was doing.
He would not leave the shroud that the snow was knitting to perfection -- one he might have admired had he still his mind on the world. There was nothing to detain us further, now that Wilson and Bowers sat dead in the corner. I looked at them through iced lashes and wondered, idly, if they could hear the barrel-organ bellowing outside the tent. It sounded like the crack and thunder of an avalanche. I despise bombast. My art aspired to lightness and immateriality. Mrs. Burke, wife of the meat-packing king, called the summerhouse I had designed for her "a dream in chiffon!" Was it for this I had come to Antarctica, where all is ponderous yet curiously insubstantial? To build a house in chiffon spun of snow?
It's occurred to me that part of his appeal is the guarantee, as much as anything can be guaranteed, that he will love me and only me for the rest of his life. He will die loving me. By default, of course -- he doesn't have the time to find someone else. But if I could grant him more years, enough time to make it likely that he would abandon me for another woman, I would do it. I said this to him one night, when we were in the backyard, underneath the tree, telling the truth for once. Then you do love me after all, he replied, a smile spreading across his hollowed face. And I wondered if he might be right.
A few years earlier, I’d awoken in a room in a country inn to discover that our thoughts are produced in a region of our innermost being marked by the quality of silence. Even amid a great city’s most strident clamor we think in silence about where we’re going or what we have to do, or whatever it is that corresponds to our desires. And the silence in which our feelings take shape is still deeper. We feel love in silence, before the thoughts come, and then the words, and then the acts, always moving farther towards the outside, towards the noise. Some thoughts can hide within silence and never become words, though they may carry out hidden acts. But there are also feelings that hide in silence behind deceptive thoughts. The silence where feelings and thoughts are formed is the place where the style of a human being’s life and life work is formed.
Breastfeed whale
Whalebroodshell
Give hare-milk
all whales are
the same whale
Misery, social injustice, all the injustices in the world, and they are countless, will disappear only with the human species. One remedies hundreds of miseries only to discover millions of others... It’s a lost cause. And of course there is the hunger of the body and that of the soul. And the hunger of the mind and the hunger of the senses. All sufferings are equal. To defend himself, man refines the meanness of his heart. By what miracle has this poor nation managed to stay so good, so welcoming, so joyful for so long despite its poverty, despite injustice, prejudice, our many civil wars? We have been practicing at cutting each other's throats since Independence. The claws of our people have been growing and getting sharper. Hatred has hatched among us, and torturers have crawled out of the nest. They torture you before cutting your throat. It’s a colonial legacy to which we cling, just as we cling to French.
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color.
It started with a summons, a brunette, and a Turk. The summons was in my pocket, the brunette was in trouble, and the Turk was dead.
absolutely unavailable to speak with any person desiring to collect money.
Carve tiny beasts out of the teeth & wrap them in strands of black hair
Sew the animals into your stomach
Advertise your crimes as "the failings of a
zoo"
A large woman fell off a table. The table was medium height. She shouldn't have been up there, but she saw herself as sort of a savior to the masses or at the very least a person who stood up for all the world's social injustices. When she fell though people forgot what she had been screaming about and braced themselves for a split in emotions. Half the witnesses would feel sorry for this large woman when she hit the ground and the other half would stifle their laughs. And if someone was lucky enough to capture the event on camera then a copy of the video would most likely be put on the internet. A best case scenario would have involved a person with too much time on their hands editing the footage, drawing it out, rewinding, and repeating. Yes, the best you could hope for was a video in slow motion that looped over and over and at some point the direction would change, but it would be a subtle change and you wouldn't notice it until hours later.
Take an already written work of your own and insert, at random or by choice, a paragraph or section from, for example, a psychology book or a seed catalogue. Then study the possibilities of rearranging this work or rewriting the source.
While the grownups
grilled sausages
I hit sticks with sticks.
This started my career as a killer.
You were wondering where I was all those years.
I was killing people.
For example: Howard
much admired patent clerk.
I killed Norris Floyd
the inconstant and reviled
critic of animal rights.
Henrique Shushufindi
who never existed and died
slowly without complaint.
I killed France once.
It grew a discourteous second head.
I killed it a second time.
It became amphibious.
I said in my purposeful worst French accent
France you are giving me goosebumps
and I am going mental.
I killed France 70 times in total.
A popular avant garde artist
rendered my likeness
from fiberoptics and silicon tubes.
This is what I look like
in the Pompidou:
Many art students have written
dissertations about death
but I am a small planet with
a large hope for water.
1. the entire town was a series of narrow adobe houses built down a narrow ocean cliff. at sunrise the lamplighters climbed up the crags in their bare feet, their snuffing poles slung and tapping in the dark.
2. the townspeople were all skilled climbers and their feet were leather-patched brown. they had lived on the cliff commune their whole lives. the rectangle roofs made for slender streets and at night there were lamps going up and lamps going down.
I can only say one simple dictum: The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.
i am standing in front of the mirror looking at my massive penis giving myself two thumbs up and making a face that communicates i have been successful in satisfying the illusion of augmenting my already superior ego. after thirty seconds i put my arms down and stare at my massive penis. it is no longer a tower. it is falling. it is going from a stalactite to a stalagmite. or is it the other way around? my penis is a stalactite orbiting my body. my penis is a stalagmite orbiting my body. my penis is only massive because it has five thousand pounds of play-doh molded onto it. to try to maintain my erection i make laser noises like i do when i watch star wars or star trek or any other time i am watching the space channel and my massive penis bobs up and down but it is still a falling tower/stalactite/stalagmite. the play-doh slips off and i have no penis anymore. my mother walks in and asks why i have no penis, why there are five thousand pounds of play-doh on the floor, why i am not surfing the internet looking at women insert massive fruits and vegetables genetically modified specifically for vagina penetration/obliteration. i tell her i am going to massive penis attack her face if she doesn't shut up. she doesn't shut up; she says she is not going to shut up. she continues to ask questions. i close my eyes and concentrate and think about massive penis attacking her face. she asks me what i am doing. she tells me to stop what i am doing. she says her face feels hot, her face wants to explode. i say MASSIVE PENIS ATTACK really quietly and make laser noises and her head explodes and her neck turns into a flaccid penis and i take it and i put it where my old penis used to be and i say massive penis attack successful.
A plane raped through the low clouds of the sunset.
At the bar a gun stretched the distance between us.
We drank martinis, watched the clouds deform and swallowed swords.
In general, his mouth spoke my vision & his eyeglasses circled one specific area of my brain.
What he ended up looking at were the places where the lace peeked through to my skin.
Beyond that, in a parlor, ladies wove through the crowds of wealthy men like roots looking for water.
We were handed glasses of gin by women with jazzed out tits.
They were squatters in an abandoned block. She and her husband rebuilt the house using pieces from the homes around theirs. She had a makeshift protective visor made of a tinted windshield. He used cast iron pans as hammers. He swallowed his teeth at times. She was happy. She used cigarettes to burn off the spider web tattoo on her wrist.
A dot of blood where the sun should be. “I’ve nothing to
say about it,” my heart said. Trees in full leaf haunted
the highway for miles, millions of dimly veined hands
reaching out as if begging forgiveness, or offering it –
but, of course, I’ve made mistaken inferences from vague
gestures before. At the border the guard told me to pop
the trunk. My heart rattled like a plastic bottle of
small, white pills. It was then the evening returned with
two guns and started shooting.
We romp like wrestlers and then he cums and holds me. He falls asleep quickly while I stare up at the ceiling. I unwrap myself out of his arms and put on my clothes. I let myself out and walk to the bus stop on the corner. On the ride I make up my mind to go to my boyfriend’s apartment. I hate to sleep alone.
I wrote a story about cats, but this is not that story. The other story had cats dying, crawling over each other and mewing. There were clichéd descriptions and it was very sad. I read it and I felt sad. Afterwards I changed the cats to pigeons and instead of killing them, I had them solve a series of equations so that they could advance safely through a labyrinth made of bookcases. I read the story and I felt better.
They had the Word That Must Not Be Spoken, we had the word that no one could figure out how to pronounce. He said he was going to make some sweeping changes; we asked him to make a commercial when he was done so we’d know. I am my own worst enemy and I will overcome this problem through self-reliance: interesting things happen if you get depressed enough. The first thing the lab ape drew with the pencils we gave it was the bars of its cage, which struck us all as pathetic, so we made it some eyeglasses.
Poems that begin with silverish moon and a car pulling up. A description of the gravel. And then out steps a young woman with perfumed hair, holding a hatchet, or cherry blossom. Depends on the poem. The man sits on a sagging green couch, head in his hands, and says, “You never had this kind of conviction when we were together.” Fade out to clouds, their snow banks piling. An owl limps o into o the sky.
The perfumed hair is remorse over eating fellow animals. Marilyn Monroe is the secret drug we all take. The philosopher’s words are all the lips you could have, and should have kissed. The boulder: marriage. The sagging green couch: death. The moon is the moon.
Breached out the birth canal massive legs first, her body normal as a body, a baby's body: skin and teeth. A shriek like the song of humpbacks. She grew, her legs expansive, exponential. Her legs were the trunks of redwoods. Her legs became Studebakers. She drove forward into redwoods. Everyone stared. What's wrong with that woman? She is special. Her legs became their own ecosystem: rains of bleach-blonde peach fuzz, clouds of cotton socks and landslides of darkened sweatpants. Custom shoes for size 18 women's. Her crutch is her body, so normal, skin and teeth.
Two people who should not copulate will copulate in a motel room tonight. The man, keen on contributing genetic emissions to these types of endeavors, will do so. The woman, who has known this man for two weeks, has opted for the rhythm method, though her rhythm is terribly
syncopated, and tonight her eggs are in her basket. The prostrate and seminal vesicles secrete clear fluids that, along with spermatozoa, make up semen. The fluid's alkalinity aids in counteracting the acidity common in the vaginal tract; thus prolonging the lifespan of the sperm.
The prostrate is made up of 'smooth muscles' which are necessary to expel said fluid with a force somewhere between breathing and sneezing. The Pizza delivery man will knock on the wrong door, for he has been smoking marijuana all day. A 14-year-old boy has run away tonight, and
has taken lodging in room 311. Fifteen minutes ago, he ordered a medium pizza, murmuring three-eleven in a way that sounded like three o' seven. On this rainy night, in room 307, I was to be conceived. Yes, it's raining. That was an earnest touch. Thank you Chief. The woman got
considerably soaked after the movie while walking to the parking lot. Inside the car, the man pats her down with napkins and brings her closer to him; closer and closer, until their lips meet. The pizza dough is now in the oven. It will be ready in 12 minutes. The man and woman check
into a motel, enter room 307, and are met by the voice of Denzel Washington. The TV is playing Malcolm X on TBS. "Turn Malcolm off," the woman says. The man grabs the remote and, without even aiming, does so. The pizza is done, its crust is even hard. Time can change anything,
with thermodynamics. The man and woman undress, slowly, tentatively. The pizza delivery man drives down Minerva Ave. listening to the songs he listened to when he was a teenager. The man inserts his penis inside the woman and starts moving the lower half of his body. The pizza delivery man enters the motel parking lot, parks, takes one last hit, looks at the order slip, gets out of the car, and walks up the stairs. He finds the number 307 on a door. The 14-year-old boy is waiting for his pizza. He will never get his pizza, and decides not to run away. The man is
almost there. His prostrate contracts. His DNA is etched in sperm. The mozzarella is steaming in the box. Malcolm X was near-sighted, and had an overall attitude problem. The universe does not have a contour. The rain has stopped, and the new silence is deafening. A worm curls in
futility on the sidewalk. The man is almost there. There, there. There is a knock at the door.
But meaninglessness, when accepted, can be beautiful
in the way the way the Greeks were beautiful
when they accepted death.
Only in this sense can a poem be heroic.
After the towers collapsed.
The image of the towers collapsing is a work of art
and, like all works of art, may be rejected
for soiling that which it ostensibly depicts. As a general rule,
if a representation of the towers collapsing
may be repeated, it is unrealistic.
i comb my armpit hair until it is an exact replica of a steel arrowhead. i do this to both of my underarms. i do not use gel or hairspray or hair glue to keep it in place. this is an example of my expertise craft in combing hair. the hair on my head is combed into a giant vagina. it is the hairdo of post-post modern youth. if i am walking around and i need to greet people i bow really hard and fast and the vagina-hair sculpture on my head consumes their face. my pubic hair is combed into a massive fist. i can fuck two people at once with this feature. i am combing my armpit hair until it is an exact replica of a steel arrowhead so when i lift my arms up i can stab people by falling sideways on them. i am imagining myself walking through the streets, lifting up my arms, and stabbing people with my steel arrowhead-molded armpit hair. both my arms are up as if i've just scored a goal in soccer or i am a referee giving someone a red card except both my arms are up so i am giving the person two red cards. i can hug people around the neck and slice their heads off and have my vagina-hair sculpture consume it. i am going to steal hair growth products from the drug store and rub them all over my body. i will take rogaine baths and then i will have enough hair to be able to mold my entire body into a giant dildo-hair sculpture and launch myself into someone's rectum.
Heath Ledger died laying face down on his bed. Heath Ledger felt a pressure in his knees. Heath Ledger could not think of forests without cringing. Heath Ledger was once the only person in the state of Oklahoma for several minutes. Heath Ledger would bare his teeth in the mirror of public restrooms. Heath Ledger had a set of barbells in his bathroom that he never lifted. Heath Ledger often wrote his name backwards by mistake. Heath Ledger would drive for hours with his eyes closed. Heath Ledger went by many names without knowing. Heath Ledger could fit inside his glove box. Heath Ledger kept a Tootsie Roll against the roof of his mouth at all times. Heath Ledger would spend hours in the bathroom while on airplanes. Heath Ledger disappeared from several rolls of film. Heath Ledger curled into a ball. Heath Ledger did not want to know. Heath Ledger closed the curtains in the morning and opened them at night. Heath Ledger opened his Christmas present. Heath Ledger had a misarranged and unmarked computer keyboard on which he typed long sentences perfectly without blinking. Heath Ledger beat the original Legend of Zelda while standing in another room. Heath Ledger would eat the chalk when his teacher was not looking. Heath Ledger wanted to appear confused more often. Heath Ledger walked into the room. Heath Ledger bought a puppy and touched its forehead. Heath Ledger swam to the bottom of the hotel pool. Heather Ledger pressed a button that changed his color. Heath Ledger jumped up and down on the umbrella. Heath Ledger wanted a baby he could keep in his coat pocket. Heath Ledger knew Morse code. Heath Ledger owned a version of THE GREAT GATSBY in which Gatsby mentioned Heath Ledger's name in conversation. Heath Ledger sometimes hid his mother's pillbox. Heath Ledger once levitated in the shower. Heath Ledger could not remember what he'd done any Sunday evening in 1992. Heath Ledger apologized at length to the window. Heath Ledger caught the baseball with his teeth. Heath Ledger brought old brownies to the bake sale. Heath Ledger could not cheat. Heath Ledger had an indentation in his forehead that he hid with makeup. Heath Ledger saw through the moon once and never told anyone except an Asian taxi driver who looked him in the rearview in the eyes.
Light passes through a tunnel on its way to somewhere. Light is going to the airport. Light is on a train. That train is going to the airport. At the airport, light boards a plane on its way to somewhere. The plane is going to Philadelphia and light is on it. Philadelphia is dark when light arrives, because it is eleven o'clock at night. Light goes to a motel near the airport and waits for morning. Light is a morning person. Light will feel good and full of possibility in the morning. Light dreams of all its bright tomorrows while it sleeps. Someone breaks into light's motel room and murders light with a candlestick. In the morning the sun doesn't rise. By nine o'clock, everyone in Philadelphia is terribly frightened. You and I are in my old bedroom at my parent's house. People are running around screaming about the End Times. We're playing Clue on my old Macintosh and you're about to guess that it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the revolver, but actually, it was Mrs.Peacock and the noose.
Tao Lin can open jars faster than anyone. Tao Lin’s fingertips are super sensitive and if he holds his hand out the window, he can predict the weather to a 98.653% accuracy. Sometimes while it is raining, Tao Lin imagines crawling underneath the kitchen sink. He knows that the rain will not find him there and though he is very close to a source of water, he will remain dry. Tao Lin can grow a moustache on the palm of his hand, but he uses antibacterial soap to keep it from happening. Tao Lin wouldn’t leap from the top of a building, but he would wear a superman cape. He would wrap himself in the satiny red material and pretend he was a guest on Lady Chatterley’s love. If Tao Lin was on television, he would get weekly manicures and pedicures, but never wash his hair. The dandruff would build up until the weight of it turned him upside down. He would stay that way until so much dust settled on the bottoms of his feet, that it counter-acted the dandruff. Then he’d spin round and round, head-feet, head-feet, head-feet.
The top part of my head comes off and out fly four baby birds and they fly straight up and you can't believe your eyes because that's not how baby birds are supposed to move, directly up, like that.
The top part of my head comes off and when I tilt my head to the side some water pours out and then more of it comes and eventually a tiny goldfish falls out and lands in the puddle of water and it flaps around sadly and I look up at you and wink.
The top part of my head comes off and if you just reach in there you might pull out a bar of chocolate and then you can eat the chocolate and smile or else who knows you might pull out a single beetroot or a goose, there are no guarantees in life.
The top part of my head comes off and inside there is a hedgehog wearing reading glasses and holding a tiny copy of Catch-22 and he looks up at you over the top of his glasses and says 'Do you mind?'
The top part of my head comes off and I am bleeding of course and I fall down and you can see my brain from where you're standing and you throw up and run away.
We are too dark for this town. We come from far away. Humble glove makers from the rain-shadow side of the volcano. For twelve hundred years our family lived in the same small place. Rain, soot, rain. No sun for the glove makers. Lots of drinking and fascist songs. Crummy shops, crummy piazza. Too hot, too wet. Nice gloves, though. Very fine gloves, beautiful stitch-work. Then Nonno kills a big fascist in a fight. Nonno is a big fascist but this man is a bigger fascist and he sells Nonno a rancid flagon of oil.
Yum Yum I Can’t Wait to Die or I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It
Stopping in the middle of a sentence, distracted by thoughts about food, he closes the book without marking his place, even though it’s not time for a meal, even though the sentence was holding his interest, making the claim that mainstream reality doesn’t exist anymore, that at this point we can only talk about mainstream unreality, an assertion that’s not as simple as it sounds, not when the distinction between real and unreal has been relentlessly blurred by the mainstream itself, to such an extent that the mainstream exists only because real and unreal have become interchangeable terms, generating a confusion so pervasive that it hardly seems to exist, functioning as a background noise that you notice only when it’s not there anymore, but such moments of silence are unusual, difficult to recognize and even more difficult to sustain, provisional in a way that makes you feel insecure, like you need more control, the power to make such moments happen at will
In class I assign the students a paper on Roman Polanski’s Macbeth. One student comments on the swordfights in the movie. She observes that they were slow and clunky in the armor, whereas she expected them to be fast and graceful like in Pirates Of The Caribbean. She doesn’t know which is the way it is in reality. My girlfriend wants to go to the museum tonight, but I am tired. I still agree to go with her. Later we read on our separate sides of the bed and kiss each other goodnight on the cheek. We are in the most love we can imagine. She has one pile of dirty laundry and I have another. I cook eggs well. She bakes pancakes. People are astonished when we say that we are dating. For our anniversary we bought each other the same DVD box set we had each been secretly hoping for. It was one of those hilarious things we told everybody again and again. It was MGM’s greatest romances. We returned the copy I bought and bought Universal’s classic monsters collection. Strangely, those movies ended up also being about love in their own way. The loss. The recovery. The pull on the inside veins.
To call the man a nihilist is something of an understatement. He outdoes even Herodotus – who instructs us in the Histories to call no man happy until he is dead – in his proclamations of the punitive (or criminal) nature of our existences. Later in his career, he would identify birth itself as the primary human tragedy: “We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose, dying. Everything.
It is to the everyday that we consign that which no longer holds our attention. Things become ‘everyday’ by becoming invisible, unnoticed, part of the furniture. And if familiarity does not always breed contempt, it does encourage neglect.
I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained.
Rumors abound about Marty’s smile. Has it become a UFO often seen in the night skies? Does it form in odd places like on Cheetos in the Dine-A-Way Café? Or has it gone to Heaven, stationed at the edge of a cloud, our blue world beneath it, the cloud drifting and drifting, eternity following it like a hound?
We begin to wonder if our neighbor across the way might be able to help us. That perhaps if we sit together in the gaping hole she is digging we will somehow find out what true meaning is. Maybe she’ll ask us to follow her as she tunnels down, through coral and core, uncovering a world we’ve never known.
When it comes to literature, I am interested in other people’s imaginations, not other people’s versions of reality or hypothetical realities unless those hypothetical realities are inconsonant with our shared reality.
But perhaps, above all, the masses are little children.
The memories true or not against him seem to be turning to steam, as I turned,all the while thinking of chewing out alone through the ghostly meats.
The doctor said it was not because of her diet, it was her brain making her body die, and then it finally did its job. One stupid nurse said that to my mother, about her brain being in charge. Mom turned to the chair dad would have sat in, and said, "see?"
Is there a relationship between the population density
of Tokyo and the pinkest part of a hamburger? Can
one touch the inside of a noun to learn the difference
between one bicycle and a field of bicycles? How
close is yellow to need? How far are human fears from
the fears of insects?
Caused by a very low light upon a very small ant, its elongated legs move not slower, just taller, with a weightiness akin to that loaded gun over there on that table. Beside the ant is the trigger, but only in shadow. In shadow the ant meets its lover, angles in for a kiss, passes right through her, unless, perhaps, is devouring her instead.
I would like to change this botanical garden into a playground
one that would not disturb the slumbering giant into wakefulness
like the man who wants to commit suicide because he can’t find
his wife and he doesn’t know that she’s already dead
“But what about,” you ask, “the cryogenic machine used by the sphinx monster?”
We, LINDA MONTANO and TEHCHING HSIEH, plan to do a one year performance.
We will stay together for one year and never be alone. We will be in the same room at the same time, when we are inside. We will be tied together at the waist with an 8 foot rope. We will never touch each other during the year.
The performance will begin on July 4, 1983, at 6 p.m., and continue until July 4, 1984, at 6 p. m.
This was in a town without much in the way of vicinity—just groupings of confusable buildings and fields we were expected to treat as parks.
I had no friends, just timid emergency contacts.
I married the second woman to come along.
The first had been clear-hearted, and hair-colored, and the few times she spoke, it sounded as if water were running over her words. Something was coursing through her speech that was other than what she was saying, even when all she was saying was: Tell me your news.
The trick is, she reminds me, to never let it get too hermetic, to leave the window cracked, that dent unfixed, and most effective, if you can stomach it, to get yourself a pickup truck and get used to driving it, find a comfort at every speed, and then, after having mastered all that, after having spent a majority of your lifetime driving, driving which includes stopping, parking, head-on, tail-first, three-point turns, twenty-seven point turns, immediate and perfect and elliptical circles and donuts and pinwheels, oh my, backing out of a narrow and longer-than-usual driveway, stopping and having an extended conversation with someone out the window, while keeping your foot on the brake the whole time, piling it in, piling it on, everything at any given point, in the front, the cab in that space behind the seats, in the inches of air above your head, piling it in with every which kind of breath and intention, further, piling in, on, out, back, while only slowing down, yielding to the additional weight of more and more, and all of it, filling the infinite back of the pickup, taking it on taking it all on as if it were nothing, keeping the foot steady, tender, still, on the gas, hand lightly on the handbrake but there’s no need to go there, wait until the piling of it on never gets to its final conclusion, never gets to the end, no ceiling no end not even edges, no, the round and infinite surface of the outside of the back of the pickup a dark gray shiny pickup you’ve had it all your life, everything all the intangibles and all the cities and all the breaths of good or no intention all piled up still and further going in the growing small space back of the truck, tailgate busting up and still you drive, along the middle of the freeway and you watch through the rearview mirror what it is that stays, or rather sticks, and the rest of those things which fly away, tiny or medium-sized fragments of matter yes they do matter quite a bit which is why you keep driving, with your eyes both on the front and on the mirror as you go and go and go on, this way that way any any any this moment rather than the last.
A man works as a dishwasher.
One day, as he is rinsing the dishes, he finds something strange in the water. He takes it out and looks at it, but it appears to be invisible.
When it came time to destroy the child, the skin around my nipples blackened. My lungs defected in their swelling patterns, my sternum hardened, groin in crumbs. I could not not hiccup in the hour. I wore the light around my neck in wreaths. The second house was now translucent. I would not be deceived. My upper lip stung raw where I’d shaved it seven times rehearsing. I counted layers with my hips, denting the wall. Seven days in seven minutes. I heard the front door down the hall, its latch still stuck still with my best blood cells, but giving inches—the time had come indeed. Through the window sealed with my saliva, I could see where the father and his doppelganger had hulked the monolith already to the yard, its worn white sides prismatic, erupting in the rhythm of my name, the name I heard the soft mouths together saying softly into the stunned crack of the door, also sealed. I had given all I could. I would not be divided. In the house alone the child was mine.
The child came out with thistle in him where he should have had the son. In his first hours he’d spit up on my inches a corded crust I’d never shake. In the rooms he’d grind when I came near him: teeth to teeth and bone to bone. He had ripped scripture in his eye. I had plans. I had made them, over years and years and years. I’d prayed and prayed with the machete, soaking. I dreamt an outline on the house. There was a glass case in my mattress, the one I’d carried here through seven states, and in which in the night I could lay down in and feel the air leaving my lungs. There was a gong, which made me dizzy and would initiate the sing. There was a loom I am not sure what for. In the room my gashing gums ripped through the tee-shirt on the child, so wide so I could see where there brightened on his white sternum the digits he’d welled up refused to flicker: the unlock cipher for the lawn hood, which kept the ground against the ground. In the light the lawn showed wormholes and spat blood in the outline of the father. In the ground the father’s bone had turned to flesh and his flesh had turned to bone. Making wishes on a human
body is the way that bread is made, I told the child with my tongue against his eardrum.
Elvis hands me a Ruger 10/22 blued barrel semiautomatic rifle and picks up a Ruger 10/22 stainless steel barrel semiautomatic and we go into the living room to shoot action figures. He has them lined up along the stairs, Flash Gordon and Wonder Woman and The King himself. We shred them. We shred the stairs.
Elvis says, “What you think about these extended banana clips? They hold 30 rounds. They’re illegal sometimes and sometimes legal — depends on the president — but I bought them when they were legal and all this gun shit is grandfathered in. They’re never going to get my guns. That’s why I have guns. So they can never get them. Are you hungry?”
The fields are screaming. Crickets. Frogs. Lost and angry spirits. Crossing from the yard into the field, he thinks he hears Mother call him. He stops. Listens. A coal snaps in the fire pit. He watches the dull red murmuring embers. He watches the surrounding area and waits to see if the sperm of the sun found fertile ground in the dry grass; he waited for the birth of a flame. He watched for some time. He awoke again and remembered Mother. He had heard her. He hadn’t heard her. The fields are screaming. The fields are moving, wandering. The fields are driving cars and getting drunk and fucking. The fields are sitting alone in the house, praying through the heat. Praying. The fields pray and scream. The fields will not witness the birth of the flame to cleanse and transform all things. Not tonight. Not until this night finally passes, however many days that will take. He looks toward the field, into the darkness hiding the combine, covering the soil containing his father’s blood, the beginning and end and eternity of all things; the dawn and duration of this endless night. He squeezes the hungry mouth of the Mason jar in his hand; the jar containing air from a moment in time when none of this had yet happened and ceased to happen, sealing in time untouched, untainted by what was coming to kill it all together. It only took the right combination of elements meeting in the chaos to set things in motion. He starts into the field. He hears a murmur from somewhere as he crosses from the yard into the field. Mother calls him. He stops. He waits. He looks at the glowing dying embers left from burning another load. The coals might pop and light the straw grass on fire and maybe burn the whole yard, maybe burn the house and the barn, spread to the field, blow into town and choke the sky with a sooty eclipse. No, the glow retreats beneath a blanket of ash. He stands there and listens for Mother, watching the dying coals wink from under the ashes, a trace of what once was. His eyes drift out of focus. The fields are screaming. He hears nothing.
that oven-bird just answered a call.
that sharp-shinned hawk just grunted.
that northern flicker just went ah-ah.
that spotted sandpiper just said morning George.
that ruby-throated hummingbird just left a visiting card.
that long-eared owl just buried a Quaker.
that catbird just made a Tom.
that tufted titmouse just went upstairs.
that ruffed grouse just went for a walk with a spade.
that brown creeper just let out its Hong Kong dog.
that black rail just posted a letter.
that bobwhite just worked a sit-down job.
that pintail just visited the Chic sale.
that cerulean warbler just shook its ashes out.
that black-throated green warbler just shot a dunk.
that worm-eating warbler just opened its medicine.
that snowy egret just tilled some nightsoil.
that least flycatcher just sat on the throne.
that blue grosbeak just pearled some cement.
that little blue heron just did a rural.
that veery just dropped its wax.
that marsh pullet just cast its pellet.
that white-eyed vireo just oozed honey.
that royal tern just shot a torpedo.
that wood pewee just blew.
I had a letter. To mail a letter, you have to walk from my apartment to the end of the street where the post office is. You do this if you have an envelope which I did. So on went my boots. Nothing to it.
At the post office was the whole town. All 28,978 of us were there. We are 22 people short of being 29,000 strong I said to myself. I counted fast. It was just heads, heads, heads.
The post office is a zoo today I said to a troop of boy scouts. They looked around for their leader.
I said this place is a zoo to the veteran in a wheelchair I had seen in the newspaper that month. He was writing a book on courage I knew.
It really is he said.
What he falls in love with is a room full of newborns, all possibilities.
What he falls in love with is a woman inserting herself into magazines, fingering a razor blade with her index finger carefully cutting around the heads of celebrities. A woman who special-orders glossy magazine paper, who unsteals magazines from the 7-Eleven, who inserts herself into other lives. What he falls in love with are legs, eyes, lips, hands in images not their own.
This is the story of putting one of the babies in a banana box at the end of the shift and throwing a coat over its sleeping body and walking with purpose into the hospital elevator careful to stand in the back between the gurney and two glazed nurses walking carefully out the back door and into the parking garage running up the stairs to the Subaru throwing the baby in the back situating the banana box between the spare tire and a dead battery to keep the baby safe for the ride home.
This is the story of running over a hill in the park at night through the cold, crisp snow, through a dark arbor to get to an aviary full of gray birds wintering. Running over the green hill past summering geese. Drinking from a bottle of Wild Turkey. Listening to captive owls. Noticing a man sitting in a chair in the snow beneath a tree reading a magazine on the first night of winter.
Anonymous Moon
Banana Split, male handstand with legs spread
Bent-Over Moon
Black and Blue Moon, bruised moon
Blue Moon, a.k.a. Sexually Frustrated Moon
Chocolate Moon, mooning following by defecation on floor, lawn, bottom of pool
Cruise Moon, a.k.a. Tom Cruise Moon, mooning with sunglasses atop buttocks
Double Hogback Growler, a.k.a. Full Moon Stick-Out plus Salad-Tuck Under
Fried Eggs, a.k.a. Boobs on Glass
Fruit Bowl, moon with penis and testicles visible
Gobbling Turkey, same as Double Hogback Growler, except with jumping
Hanging Brains, a handstand in moving car, with mooners lower naked half, e.g., buttocks, genitals, sticking out of sunroof
Humpback Whale, a.k.a. Free Willy Moon, resurfacing pants-less in a pool, lake, or ocean
Paper Moon, moon with toilet paper still stuck to self or underwear
Pooning, any variety of legs-apart mooning by a woman
Pressed Ham, a.k.a., Ass on Glass
Shaking Moon, a.k.a., Shakira Moon
Turtle Head Poker, moon with a bit of poop coming out
Walking Away While Pulling Down Pants Moon
His wife dies, mouth slightly parted and one eye open. He knocks on his younger daughter's bedroom door and says "You better come. Mom seems to be expiring." His wife slips into a coma three days after she comes home and stays in it for eleven days. They have a little party second day she's home: Nova Scotia salmon, chocolates, a risotto he made, brie cheese, champagne. An ambulette brings his wife home. She says to him "Wheel me around the garden before I go to bed for the last time." His wife refuses the feeding tube the doctors want to put in her and insists she wants to die at home. She says "I don't want any more life support, fluid or food." He calls 911 for the fourth time in two years and tells the dispatcher "My wife; I'm sure she has pneumonia again." His wife has a trach put in. "When will it come out?" she says, and the doctor says "To be honest? Never." "Your wife has a very bad case of pneumonia," the doctor tells him and his daughters the first time, "and has a one to two percent chance of surviving." His wife now uses a wheelchair. His wife now uses a motor cart. His wife now uses a walker with wheels. His wife now uses a walker. His wife has to use a cane. His wife’s diagnosed with MS. His wife has trouble walking. His wife gives birth to their second daughter. "This time you didn't cry," she says, and he says "I'm just as happy, though." His wife says to him "Something's wrong with my eyes." His wife gives birth to their daughter. The obstetrician says "I've never seen a father cry in the birthing room." The rabbi pronounces them man and wife and he bursts out crying. "Let's get married," he says to her, and she says "It's all right with me," and he starts crying. "What a reaction," she says, and he says "I'm so happy, so happy," and she hugs him and says "So am I." She calls and says "How are you? Do you want to meet and talk?" She drops him off in front of his building and says "It's just not working." He meets a woman at a party. They talk for a long time. She has to leave the party to go to a concert. He gets her phone number and says "I'll call you tomorrow," and she says "I'd like that." He says goodbye to her at the door and shakes her hand. After she leaves he thinks "That woman's going to be my wife."
He turned on the television and after a moment Margaret looked over at him and then at the screen. On the morning news there was a report of a man driving into a family of four crossing the street the night before. Backing up, about to speed away, a bystander heard him say, "who are these people with their ugly children?" Margaret sighed and shifted in her chair.
Mike calls to tell me he is now ready for commitment. I tell him about my recent
engagement to Chris. He hangs up. Chris ends the engagement 3 months later, saying
he’s still working through intimacy issues with his therapist of 5 years.
But they were sullen, these monarchs in love, and they were sullen because they knew this: they were not people in the way that others were people. Their works were not the products of their bodies, and their bodies were not the products of their intellects. They did not move through the world; instead, the world moved through them, and its demands--there were profits that needed taxing, and there was land that needed conquering--forced them into existence.
anaesthetics, operating in an area free of pain; Chr2(23), MSH2: A human gene mutated in some colon cancers is homologous to an enzyme in the ROM-DNA mismatch repair pathway to a number of engineered bacteria. Once the patient is reduced to a body, positioned and connected, the body is, in turn, reduced to the area of operation. The caress that articulated us, handled in the manner of a brightly lit touch-screen, it then becomes the crawling of innumerable fingers. Our luminescent, naked bodies dissolve into a swarm of obscure things, and we are a mass of glutinous coiling worms, endless.
A man woke up to the sound of a shriek outside his door! He leapt out of bed and opened the door to see who had emitted the shriek. Nobody was there. So he attributed the shriek to the bite-sized version of himself that had taken refuge in his refrigerator. When he opened the refrigerator, however, he discovered that he had drowned in a pitcher of fresh milk. So he decided to drink his coffee black.
I stare out of my window with a flashlight behind each eye.
I do not know what I am looking for.
The bushes barely quiver in the wind.
A few people get into a mauve truck.
I return to my couch.
Darkness creeps into the corners of the microwave.
A river disappears into a plastic coffee cup.
I pet a moth as big as a baby.
The desert approaches
inch by ecstatic inch.
What did the lamp say?
Permission to drink ink from the sink?
I feel a vineyard growing inside me.
No need to be alarmed.
Shut the door. Glass of wine. Try to sleep.
My eucalyptus grove can hardly breathe.
Memories of pagoda duck-pond relief.
Diode, diode, nomenclature.
Nocturne for Susie.
The people return to the apartment complex.
Their suits and ties are torn to shreds.
Their cars are barely audible songs.
A grizzly bear snags a salmon made of dreams.
I remove the duct tape from my naked body.
If the sun comes up
I won’t be a different person.
I did worse things than owe people too much money. I hurt people I loved. I went up to the Nightlife to drink out the day in irony. I kept seeing Eddie’s limping grin in the broken pieces of mirror above the bar. When it was dark and safe outside, I walked the streets and stopped here in front of Mary. She doesn’t judge me. She thinks I’ve still got a chance to do something good. The City Nuns will know. It’s probably time to get out of town, and the City Nuns will know for sure. I push the button and the buzzer sounds. Mary’s eyes look skyward. I try it, too. Let my eyes roll up into my head and reach out my arms. I need saving, I say into the voice box. The door buzzes and opens up. I go inside knowing if I can’t be saved then the City Nuns will have mercy on me and put a bullet through my brain.
discover half the city missing; do not mind;
haven't visited the tobacconist today;
will go quietly; will finish that drink; will never cast aspersions such as "mattress back" or "real man";
have tendencies; minister in the waste places; should be there in about fifteen minutes, really;
keep a safe distance from the sky; keep it like a secret;
never cut in line; never talk about the year of the scalpel;
like it that way;
collude with Autumn to overthrow kingdoms, principalities, powers, nation-states, city-states: fire in the agora, fire in the trees—all around music—bending breeze;
think often;
Guy Maddin, a hockey player with the Winnipeg Maroons, cravenly dumps his pregnant girlfriend Veronica right in the middle of an abortion in order to be with someone new, someone met just minutes earlier, a fiery and domineering girl named Meta. An instant before losing consciousness on the operating table, Veronica sees ardent Meta dragging away Guy, the father of her unborn child. Guy ravishes Meta upon a pile of hockey gloves in the Maroons’ dressing room as Veronica dies crawling across the ice trying to find him, leaving a trail of blood frozen there. Guy discovers his new girlfriend Meta is pathologically obsessed with her dead father Chas, a man whose death she is sworn to avenge—she is convinced her mother Liliom and step-father Shaky have murdered him. Guy finds that Meta is engaged in a project to turn him into someone more like the dead father. Meta feels she has completed the conversion of her lover into Chas when she bullies abortionist Dr. Fusi into transplanting the strangely preserved blue hands of Chas onto her lover. Fusi fools Meta and Guy by just pretending to perform a hand transplant—he merely dyes Guy’s hands blue.
Now that Meta believes her lover has her father’s hands, she forbids him to play hockey, forces him to take up the dead man’s former profession of hairdresser. Next, Meta commands pliant Guy to strangle her mother Liliom, and vile Shaky, too, so that Chas’s hands may have their revenge. But when Guy attempts to murder Liliom, he ends up making love to her instead. Guy’s attempt to murder Shaky is more successful—he strangles the step-father to death right on the ice during a big hockey game in front of hundreds of witnesses.
However, not one witness sees him do it. Guy lives in terror of his out-of-control hands, which, seemingly with a will of their own, next murder his best friend Mo. In the meantime, Guy has fallen in love with a new woman who works alongside him at the hair salon. Unknown to anyone, this new woman is actually the ghost of his dead ex-girlfriend Veronica, who has returned to wreak vengeance on her heartless killers.
The arrival of this ghost sends Meta into agonies of jealousy. Meta attempts to kill thenew woman, who is actually already dead. With the peril of death threatening his new beloved (the ghost), Guy finally accedes to Meta’s wishes and strangles Liliom to death. Meta is surprisingly traumatized and grief-stricken by this long-demanded murder. The Furies are unleashed upon all. Meta now hates Guy and demands her father’s hands back.
Dr. Fusi amputates the hands of Guy, who deliriously celebrates his new freedom from the accursed Meta by playing, handlessly, in a climactic hockey game just hours after his surgery. This game occasions a final tragedy: Meta meets her dead father and dies!"
Who IS "Bob"?
While yet the least approachable or scrutable of the vast SubGenius membership, he is the preeminent and most frequently invoked of the god-zillion Personal Saviors of the SubGenius. While he remains an anonymous executive shunning publicity or recognition at a faceless multinational corporation, he is nevertheless The Most Ascended Master, the original Retriever of Jehovah's Message on Earth and basic model of the Archetype SubGenius. He set the "anti-pattern" of random conduct among all those who are now practicing SubGeniuses. His are the defects and peccadillos that we 'analize,' his the Slongs and Jests which we devotedly twist and distort for future generations according to our unexplored whims. - And yet the only photos of him that exist are grainy frame blow-ups from Grade Z movie thrillers in which he played bit parts!
Dobbs is, of course, the ultimate symbol of SubGeniusness, but despite/because of his infrahuman mediumship he possesses one single failing above and beyond all other shortcomings: his omninclusive FOLLIES. Yet where they would be crippling stubbing-blocks for another person, in Dobbs they loom stranger-than-life. His ten billion all-too-human quasimodalities embody, in some cheaply symbolic way, all the Foibles of the Primate Race. Dobbs is a miacrocosm encapsulating the imperfektions of the so-called 'human condition;' his Blunders and Idiocies, errors and inadvertencies are perhaps more sacrosanct, more deserving of analitization than even his hallowed salesmanship. None of "Bob's" words or deeds are particularly spectacular: their holiness lies in their nondescript but inviolable triviality. As Dobbs once 'spouted,' "The stupider it looks, the more important it probably is."
Since his Emaculation, Dobbs has been divinely shoved down the behavio-electric Path of Least Resistance to become the living incarnation of Slack on Earth. As mysteriously and profitably as he doles out his prophecies and cassette messages, he unfailingly (yet, perhaps, accidentally) enrichens himself with material things using only the exagerated human nature he was born with. Just as the Nazarene was a carpenter, so is "Bob" a salesman - the High Sales Man of the SubGenius - and whereas his stature as hero and holyman of the SubGenius flock is still obscure to the Mediocretins who make up 80flo of the Overpop, among fellow salesmen he is internationally known as "The Man Who Can Sell Anything."
"Bob's" surreavolutionary doctrine of PATRIO-PSYCHOTIC ANARCHO-MATERIALISM has found ever-larger numbers of zealous adherents despite relentless persecution by the FBI and other robot engines of the Conspiracy. Furthermore, Dobbs is the only Adept to pass the scrutiny of The Illuminati Corporation's rigorous scientific tests for ectosplasmodic manifestations.
He does invisible performance art that no one will ever see.
He claims to have a miniature city inside his head, which he took me on a personalized (*"insert your name here _______") tour of in his exceptional book Capacity, but which he gives a more generalized view of here:
He regularly hikes and walks around everywhere, apparently seeing all the gorillas the rest of us have been missing, then runs home and records it on paper to help us catch up.
This is my day in the sun and I’ve got my arms in the air, my head tipped back like the hinged lid of a lighter. Contrary to popular belief, I am not alone. Everyone’s listening. All I see is the bulging gas above me and I’m shooting my mind at it. I’m as close to God as I’ll ever be. The people are tiny. They’re buckshot around my ankles. I could kneel and run my fingers through them.
This report is to state our progress on the development of the railroad that will run from Dakota South to Dakota North. The men have not only continued taking hour and ten minute lunch breaks, but stretched the breaks out to three hours and eventually stopped coming to work. The axels, wheels, and other mechanical parts broke, so we had to start re-manufacturing them. The conductor, Tom, had an anxiety attack several weeks ago and has been in the hospital ever since. We haven’t heard from him. Those who recommended the engineers apparently confused the individuals and recently called to advise against using them. Our printer has been malfunctioning and we need to get it repaired before we can print any tickets. The places where we were going to plant warning lights and signs are now occupied with hitchhikers, so we have to find new locations. We have listened to the whistle designed for the first car so many times that it annoys us now, and we must select a different one. The materials we had decided on were found to be toxic and highly dangerous; therefore it will be awhile before our team recovers from the poisonous exposure and can search for safer ingredients. It was really hot one day and we had left the cars out in the sun, but they melted. We have to build all eighteen all over again. Prairie dogs have settled nicely into their homes on our tracks, so we have to scout a different stretch of land to build more tracks on. Finally, Dakota South and Dakota North aren’t even sure anymore if they want a train, so we are waiting to hear back from them. In conclusion, we will need more staples.
What if they forget she’s in here and start slicing the cake with a big knife? They might cut her head off! She’d better get out of here. She wipes the crumbs off her lips. She flexes the muscles in her calves, and springs up through layers and layers of white and chocolate. She flings out her arms. Happy Birthday! But they’ve all gone into the other room to watch dirty movies.
The game begins with a ball at center court. The ball is an egg. When the whistle drops, do not take any guff. Whatever an opponent whispers to you, project confidence. There are baskets, usually five or so. Don’t feel like you need to run unless you just want to. When you spot a basket, fake, pivot, fake, and see if there’s anything in there you could love some day. If you can’t, move on. If you can, try not to come on too strong. Signal a teammate. Have your teammate flatter you. If an opponent is hovering around the same basket as you, fake, roll, fadeaway, and appear disinterested in the basket’s contents. If your opponent sees through this, claim firsties. Failing that, let what’s in the basket decide. Brace yourself. Remember your heart is large, feral, fanged. If the basket chooses your opponent, remind yourself that none of this has anything to do with the object of the game. Somewhere on the court is a gun.
1:My great-grandmother was afraid of grass.
2:My great-uncle’s addictive streak was so strong that after he gave up gambling, smoking and drinking, he became addicted to milk.
3:My father’s father joined the KKK when he was young, but quit because he “didn’t like their methods.” Their goals? Fine. Just not their methods. He died before my father married my Jewish mother, so he never met his Jewish granddaughter, but I like to think my existence would have eaten slowly away at him.
The effigy was always burned rather gaily apparently. The band would play in the road. The ribbons and the banners, I suppose, would hang from the posts. There are, in passages in Saint Thomas, his hair and the bier, for instance—thus the pomp, thus the haw. In Saint Matthew—daffodils, the dot on the body, the question of the widow, a quaint explanation of the cloaks. In Saint Philip—a procession in Galilee, which is apropos, is it not?—though a bit curious, too, actually, given how, according to Saint Peter at least, the bones were arranged to form a cross. I hate to think of grave things—though it occurs to me that I have already confused various of the phrases, that I have perhaps mistaken one verse for another, that there is a moment at the conclusion of a sermon wherein an array of serpents appears in a potter’s field, the location of the sun invoked for this reason or that, and he is buried.
Observe then, reader—we are safe here. Do you see? The Pharisees were whipped and stoned—while, for instance, women called to the goats. The day, of course, ended, which is pretty safe for us—save the image, it seems to me, of the open gate—save the fact, obviously, of the leeches upon the priests’ feet. It gives me a fright—though the pommée and the bleat are, after all, so dire, are they not? The ridge apparent in the wood somehow reminds me, however, of that Dürer painting—the grand red stripe at the edge, the unfortunate boys, the tiny hat for naught. But please forgive me; I will try to make this quite clear. He was shaking so. He hid (as such). He spoke (possibly). The Gospels indicate he dropped the silver coins in the temple, that he hanged himself in Qumran. Or, on the other hand, no—indeed, certainly not, as he actually rode in an animal cart through a pass, as he actually fell in a field in Emmaus.
Thus—Maundy Thursday.
Thus—Good Friday.
The effigy was always marked, first of all, about the neck—mud, probably, or soot, albeit only a smudge, really, as per a certain parable—which is an oddly charming point, I think. But are we to believe such things, finally? That Saint Francis’s alb was boiled in a stew at a priory in Portugal? That a Sadducee’s bowl contains a lock (as they say) of the hair? That the straw represents the purse? That the powder represents the ashes? Behold, in other words, the body. There is an engraving (fourteenth-century, if I remember correctly—English, maybe) that displays a figure in, if you will, his eternal torment—and so a neat column of flames and a loop of beehives, for instance, are introduced in the foreground. There is one with horses, too, in the corner, in the bramble, in gallop, manes to and fro, it would seem, the horses facing one another, or, again, no—one is looking away. I love the olive trees (there is a sort of stateliness, is there not?)—beneath which, moreover, are lines of arrows and ovals that, arranged thus, indicate, why, not very much at all—as far as I can see, anyway. The inscription mentions how he was brought to the tomb—days in the wilderness, to begin with; the row of camels in the road; the hair cut off, the thumbs cut off, the tongue cut out.
There is a Spanish word for his footsteps.
The monks would walk in the morning, you know. The effigy was always marked elsewhere, also, on Holy Saturday, unless I have not understood the story properly—the wrists and the ankles, naturally; the reddish streak about the lips, of course. There are older stories—the sexton stood in the belfry; the cassock was drawn to the hip; the church cat was fixed; the puppet was cinched and then dipped in tar (by the vicar). How it wounds me, this notion—though I wonder if they were saved, on the other hand, something concerning Mary’s hair in May and the women walking with baskets of market—hew, imagine, crocks, a home—so merry, so merry. But in fact—the goats were all gone, higgledy-piggledy, down the hill, far away; and he appears, actually, in none of the drawings, anyway, except the one in Saint Bartholomew’s book—gargoyles for the birthday, and blots, only, for the wife on Saint Agnes’s Eve—the skulls and the like, even the smoke next to the lists of the names—whereas she died, as you know, oh, somewhat less well.
But to continue. I have never known quite why the bits of wax were placed here and there, near the altar, in the pew, for the Mass—and, either way, indeed, how does this explain the lovely ivy on the walls of the abbey? Saint Bathildes ate cabbage for lunch every day—with the prelate, who was ill. Saint Jerome sat in his cell—the engraving shows this (and, too, candlesticks and a statue of Saint Christopher). Saint Anthony looked away—this is in one or another of the lives. A cross was there by chance, just the hasps, or a shadow, a wisp of something on his hand, they say, the moment before his death—though they are uncertain on the subject of the sunlight—though they are uncertain as to the figure of the attendant, about whom they include a pun, as it happens. The body was perfumed and costumed, and the face was hidden—though maybe this is melancholy to consider.
In any event.
I like to think of the ceremony—hoods, filigree, the folds in the drapery, you see, the breeze in the trees in the arbor. Well, this sort of moment, yes—but I am wrong, of course. A cat was once thrown from the tower on East Sunday—and Saint Babylas refers to buzzards and to a spot of dirt in Spain. The effigy was always brought to the church steps at noon, certainly. I have always imagined a great billowing of the cloak in the wind—though this is probably silly of me, is it not? The ministrant would ring the bells. The band would march back and forth in the road. The ladder, I take it, would creak.
—The term “adult” is problematic, I think, and it’s too easy to say that my childwork is directly divisive to Matures, particularly Rigid or Bolted Matures. I may help accelerate a latent behavior, I may enable conflict vectors along the lines of the Michiganers, who fasted as a form of warfare, and I feign indifference to familial tension, but I think that success itself has been fetishized, and a certain nostalgia for growth has spoiled our thinking. I can be pro-family without coddling actual families. I can support familial fear-based clustering even if it involves admitting that we are most likely associated with the wrong cluster. There is that famous German phrase, which I can’t remember exactly, that describes a certain way to hold a gun to someone’s head. The literal meaning of the phrase is that you love that person deeply, just not at the moment. I argue for a love that functions perfectly in theory.
—But you have destroyed an unprecedented number of families.
—I don’t destroy anything. I do question the term limits of parents, and I’m not the first to promote child-driven power reversals. We have to remember just how much thinking Benner-Louis did on this subject, and how resonant her geological metaphors were. If prodding an object for flaws causes a momentarily resolved family to unravel, or, as Benner-Louis would have it, dissolve, then what you’re saying is that we should stay silent and paralyzed, the classic demand placed upon children. It is not my problem that families are hurt when we notice how they have hardened into stone, how they stoke each other’s failure instinct, and if Matures are not powerful enough to admit a stagnation, they are welcome to blame me, but that’s fairly evasive. I give choices to children, and I supply functional tunnels to those who have yet to become children. This is mapping as Parsons envisioned it: you don’t map a route that has been spoiled by the progress of others. Adulthood looks like an exhaustion farm. Who would knowingly purchase a ticket to that? In my work, I re-child certain people who have presumed a premature adulthood, and, most importantly, I question adulthood as a retreat from the power of infancy. I’m a supplier.
finding him under the piano
was not the most alarming part of
the day, that day
finding his waifish
six year old body
in my underwear and
costume jewelry was not
the most alarming part
either
what worried us all the most
was his inability
to pronounce the syllables
that didn’t really
exist anyways
The impossibility of romantic love becomes its aching sweetness.
But we do despise beauty.
We connect it with softness and immortality.
Last year
thought was bourgeois.
This year I can't even think.
Can't afford it.
Thought -- the new poverty-chic.
Bubbles. Code
for breaking into one's head.
The reversal of the dirt. The leap.
Summer is strange. Pale frog-leaves are lit up. By naked lightning. White child-limbs that open up and coil around the Good God’s throat. Snake-ferns sleep by a forest path. Stars glimmer in a virgin brush. Black larkspurs that want to dry and penetrate your dead camphor cabinet. The little capsule in your evil heart. The forest should be the cruel star Or the stars in my virgin hair. Black waterlily water. With deep and desolate mud bottoms. Where the cold unfolds like a father harbor. A small female eider drowns in your murky reeds. Or in the murky limbs of your Male-limbs. What I forsake to your gaze.
I live with a political scientist. Recently, as I was reading Leigh’s short paper on social revolutions, I was struck by Theda Skocpol’s suggestion that such revolutions can only occur when
a) there is international pressure from a more advanced state or states;
b) there are economic or political elites who have the power to resist the domestic state; and
c) there are organizations that are capable of mobilizing peasants for popular uprisings.
A mud monkey under the house. The country of exceptional drains walked over on huge, squirmy roots. Another forest jerked itself up and paddled over. Look, underneath the underground: ancient jars, Paleolithic spear points. Worms the size of firehoses. A skeleton wearing an Aerosmith t-shirt a little farther up. A skeleton with a slashed miniskirt. The fans grind away in the tobacco storage facility. The warehouse front office glows like a haunch. After the flood we used magazine stacks to clean up the flood. A box of something strange hangs down.
No one knew what to call him, which suited him perfectly well, because he liked to kill babies, and it was better not to have a name attached to such acts. Most of the babies he killed were the sons and daughters of high-level bureaucrats from around the world. He liked to strangle and not cut; in fact, he was quite afraid of knives and never had a barber shave him. Only his mother shaved him. She had worked for thirty years at a turnpike toll booth, grimly dispensing change on a bridge that led from one state to another. An overpass collapsed on her, and since then his beard reached to his chest and knotted in the worst possible tangles. The collapse was considered an accident, though he knew it wasn’t true.
He also liked orange juice, but it was hard to make a living by simply liking orange juice, as he did for liking to kill babies. The market for such services was quite lucrative, though “below the table,” as was to be expected.
A pussy has a life of its own. A secret life. One can smuggle drugs inside a pussy.
the one good thing that capitalism did was destroy Mother Earth.
Sensations are simultaneously specific and vague. Exquisitely specific. Ethereally vague. Somewhere in there is a thought. Waves of light in the head. Sounds on the tongue.
What I want you to see is another lovely and inexplicable thing.
Are people really shaken up politically by reading Badiou, or does he not simply provide more evidence for them that: "yes, I was right all along"? I'm not seeing enough evidence of people allowing their political positions to be falsified. It's just a lot of fuzzy slogans about revolution and neo-liberalism, and the range of acceptable politics is suffocatingly narrow. Don't people have any smart conservative friends? They ought to get some. It broadens your world and really challenges you to think. Otherwise, you simply get a party game where everyone is trying to outflank everyone in one direction. Your thoughts?
Father is draped over the windows: what is left of him, dried and stiff and burgundy-brown: somewhat wrinkled and dirty, bleeding and caked with soul.
No, this was an accident. It should be soil. Soil, parched and small and something to be washed away at night. Just soil.
Flies. Smell of rot: meat untouched for days, spoiled in the heat, swarming swimming with maggots:
the air becomes a plastic bag over his head.
the house a festering womb
How do you market poetry you do it with shattered nights and guns shooting adhesive predications whatever exists that can exist in air the lips of Jackson Pollock the chin of Samuel Taylor Coleridge the eyes of Emily Dickinson the throat of Edgar Allan Poe the electricity of Christopher Smart.
I feel like walking out of here and spending vast sums of money. I want to buy the Bank of England. I want to buy roses and pink cushions and fancy cars and palatial mansions with luscious blue swimming pools and swans and peacocks and pearl-handled jackknives and rare books and exotic antiques.
All I need is money.
A necklace of skulls and fingers.
He did not bleed, he did not cry, he did not sweat. He
was dry. Even his urine divorced itself from his penis and
entered the toilet almost before it had left him, like a bullet
from a gun.
Greetings. I just received your considerable missile. And I agree. Your personality has nothing to do with you. Every time I see myself as I am I am staring into a cosmic mirror in which I see myself with my thoughts broken into nothing. The unbelievable in back of the head. You know what I mean? Something like asparagus, or exile.
You speak of time as if time were an entity, a hard solid thing like a chair, or tuba. But let me tell you. I used to wash dishes on Times Square. That’s when I learned what time is.
Time is a pulse. Time is inside you like a color. Like russet. Like pearl. Like indigo.
Astrophysicists speak of time as being synonymous with space. How can that be? How can space and time be the same thing? The Hopi think of time horizontally, as a form of landscape. At least, that’s what I read in Benjamin Whorf.
I think of time as a misunderstanding. A black eye in a black cloud. Or Gertrude Stein’s stomach.
I write like a criminal doing push ups in a cell. My right ear argues constantly against the evidence of my left eye. My right eye languishes under a bushy eyebrow creating a jewel of light for the X-ray of a bean. My left ear has a job in Kentucky and my taste buds lean toward scallops. My emotions are absorbed in yardstick hair. I applaud the law of physics. I walk around dreaming of quatrains that describe themselves as toast. Do you remember Prospero? How about Caliban? Remember him? All he wanted was freedom. What can you do with your hands? I fought the law and the law won. There are sockets in Antarctica that beg for this kind of attention. What’s so special about philodendrons? The hardware of heaven is an imbroglio of blue and red. If zip codes were parsley I would wear velour in the fog. But here we are lost and alone, masturbating ghosts bursting into fire. Give me a spoon. Give me a needle. And I will give you time crawling toward a library crackling with black. I will give you the tall glue of reply. The light of the mind shames the darkness of the bank. It is silly under such circumstances to expect yeast, or unanimity. If you’d like, I can imitate the passage of Thursday. I can cram it full of scintillating questions. I can show you skeletons dancing on a map. Essence thirsts for explosion. Imagery is fur, cadence is bone. Each time I push my emotions into words light squeezes through a hole of blackberries and wrestles the sky onto a loom of seaweed where it becomes a coin of thought. Eternity tastes of quince and drapery clicks across a window. Is it true that a pendulum will swing in the same plane as the planet rotates beneath it? The azure of afternoon pours through the window and quick as a barracuda the horizon is hijacked by tendrils of mist. These words these fingers these strains cannot prevent the afternoon erasing itself from the wall. I can never understand the United States. This passion for jokes. For revival. For crickets and trigonometry. Once the voice mixes with a body of words I have a parakeet on my finger. See it? It is gripped in a gargantuan gloom. Eyes as dark as wine. As you may have already guessed, I don’t wear cologne. I prefer the natural odor of garlic. It makes me feel French. It holds my ego together while I explore the planet. The planet, that is, as it appears to me in photographs and flint. I consider such things luxuries, like knowing where to scratch, or pulses of light creating a dialogue with time.
I do believe, however, that Buffalo Bill was pretty progressive. He was a close friend of Sitting Bull. I suspect Jesse James was fiercely anti-government & right wing. He was probably racist as hell, too.
Billy the Kid was just silly. A dopey kid with a lot of potential. Just liked to chase women, sing songs, and get into gun fights.
Wyatt Earp I suspect was a moderate Republican. He seemed always to be looking for some way to get rich. Wild Bill Hickok was probably some weirdly eccentric form of Libertarian. I do know in 1876 there was a big national strike & a progressive populist movement called the Greenback Party. I think Wild Bill would have been partial to that.
angelfood operator: field full in the moon
too big a house, too many children -- homelife a pastry riddled with ants, allegorical forms: slippery silent never roof, almost ursuline nuns. that echo was answered 40 years ago now, he said, this woman moved into the shadowed motherlode where she first experienced bears, outside, that is, of the tales of her european youth. a defiance wrecked on waves of trash, banging daughters and sons of pioneers to the landshore, grown tall and handsome, weak and grim, the sliding glass, the eaves, garden and the patio, the dump up above town, bent against history, highway and mountainface, sky, river, or the stupid antique. black, brown, and golden these years and their tiny faces, heavy limbs wonder camper. and when the wagoner, the wolf came courting. behind the altar, thieving, thieving. creamy-faced doors beckon, they told the knapsack'd serving girl: deepest apostle nooks began to wash and scrape, do anything, keep down to the barn companion. wild apples and wildflowers. lupine bottle of coke. have another drink and eat it all up.
Detonation.
You have to blow up all your assumptions, opinions, prejudices, and preconceptions. You have to empty yourself. Bring the edifice down. Start anew from the foundation up.
All these people are running around.
I wonder what they do in real time.
I knew you were the spawn of the sugar plum fairies and the Waffen
SS, but not that your human souvenirs were strewn about like so much
dung.
Or that your voice was thick and gargly, like pond sputum.
Have you tasted me yet with the black hairs of your feet?
In the break room, my boss stands above me. Need relief from work, he announces, tightens the fabric of his slacks to accentuate his hard-on.
My body becomes vacant, deprived of the digestive track. Numb inability courses through nerves, preparing for him to act. Not from this submissive will but from the mystery of action I will continue.
Her legs were going to get tighter. She was chubby, a little, too much for the butcher’s bad back. He was going to warn her about his back. Before he knew it she had moved to another man’s shoulders and the butcher was rubbing his neck, where her heat had been.
During that period of her life grandpa's breath was overwhelming moldy. He had a lake in his stomach. He was bloated. There were creatures. K expected snakes to crawl out of his mouth but
he always woke up. He would snore himself awake. When grandpa found out he was ill he put on a bowtie and hasn't taken it off. Maybe when he showered he put it on the toilet. They showered in the guest bathroom in the house. His couch was under the stain. It was plaid. The windows were so high up in the door that no light got down to their level. There was no heat. The house in comparison was like a
temple. When K opened the door to go in and use the toilet a warm light came about two feet in. It was ovular. It got as far as her but never as far as the couch.
A Rembrandt crock refrigerated in carnations is like a piece of thunder, a rumbling tenderloin of air, of which the jackknife is such a splendid example. Because no assignment of meaning is conventional, the aforementioned crock is a crock of chalk, subtle, complex, protean, just like the jackknife, but robust, round, and moderate to livid red.
Now I’m a horse, a gun, an ebb. I’m listening for clues to their code. My research indicates that nearly every thinking person can come up with a slogan. What Has Been Done to Death Will Be Done Again. With my zillions of statistics I could presently attract the eye of any
modern scholar, but I discard their paradise like chewing gum. I could have sworn there was something to this fight, something to do with the openness of the field. I walked many miles to get here, only to mismanage my life.
Language is a machine that runs on curiosity, a spider with eight testicles creating a web of bulbs and iron. What will these words do next? Shots pour out of a rifle. A parenthesis falls dead.
Personalities are the candy of ingratitude. When they are flung about at high velocities they tend to release a curious behavior called dance. This cupidity for space scolds the honorable bed of matter and personalizes the naked glitter of a scorched anxiety. The entire question of existence rests on a feeling of mathematical beauty. On the imagery of the city. The towns. The ports and wharfs and tambourines and docks. Over here, quantum numbers and airy abstractions heave and bubble on a blackboard, and over there an old seaman’s knife shines in a store window like an X-ray of eternity. Which is dust, which is waves? Which is real, which is dream?
Each thought is phantom of another. Another thought, another tender moment slobbering jukebox ghosts on a queasy paradigm.
Accident Powder: Chemical residue of tongue, hair, leaving. Oxidizes rapidly when exposed to air or nomenclature; in sensory vacuum, halflife indeterminate. Irregular magnetic field, greatly diminished by electricity, water. Has been shown to cause animal affection, volume. Can be used as relief of ease, guilt weight, fence. When inhaled, rings untrue. When one door opens the same one swings shut.
Until recently, oppressors were defined as obfuscated vessels housing homogeneous solutions of proteins. However, scientists are now moving away from the “cell as an amorphous vessel” as positive support that life was “obviously designed.”
Consciousness swarms with language. Totems in the fog. Bathtub full of diamonds. The night squeezed out of a tube of paint.
Do you hear distance in the distant thunder? Yesterday afternoon we lifted the rug to find a swarm of ants under it. You never know when the anatomy of a moment will make itself legible in a fluke or apex. Sometimes it takes a dozen summers in Arkansas to get eternity to taste even a little like chocolate.
Gideon Sundback invented the zipper. But only you can invent yourself. Play a red melody on a blue guitar. Vomit money. Arrest the rain and put it in jail. Arrest gravity and put it in jail. And never let it out until everything is floating. And idiomatic and rock.
Give it a good, long, hard look and you will see: nothing becomes me quite like nothing does. I am—motherfucker—the Howling Wolf of Escanaba, Michigan, you might say. I am the last living man who really remembers what it means to be Northtown. I am the soul and the splendor—motherfucker—of all that is thrown in your face whenever you make it over to my side of town.
The river has a voice like an oboe, which is why reality tastes baroque and perpendicular today. I know little about the origin of glands, other than that they generate flyers and handbooks for the conduct of life, rather like a comma that is dry with insinuation, or the pleasure of being in a house on a cold wet day.
Before we developed an ideal brainwashing solvent strong enough to make us forget yesterday morning, our minds were dirtier; polluted by fields of wage-less labor: shadows of primitive ghosts (later—immortal sports mascots) slow-danced on Windex ponds beneath banana moonlight to Shawnee Blues ballads.
Of course, these scenes aren’t indexed in used textbooks either. They will, however, serve as footnotes to the comments appended to the margins in broken Cyrillic.
in your psychic future find the mating habits of armadillos and gazelles and octopi lolling along the ocean floor and the top of mt. kilamanjaro like that kid in indiana who interviews tom green from his basement while his parents force-feed everyone in sight some down-home god bless America disk of balled-up ground beef that the evildoer saddam hussein will never get to enjoy once he’s smoked out of his cave says the retired general whose 401k will finally see some action unlike that united airline guy in the black mustache who looks like saddam but isn’t quite him or maybe is him again with the glasses a bit too big and his face a bit too wrinkled and the hairs on his mouth a bit too perfectly in place for the fury of the allies forcing him to build a small island in the shape of his thumb with a stone mosaic of his thumbprint uber alle which makes you think of the jorge luis borges parable you about the map of the country scaled 1 to 1 and then placed directly on top of the country itself, and you remember not so much reading this story but having someone tell you about it, whisper it into your ear, print it across the lining of your forehead that is a lot like watching yourself watching me, telling you, now, here, in this space, to please pause, your, attention, for, a, limited, time, offer that has no endocrine system whatsoever because you see, i am bill clinton who did not have relations with you but might like to beep your pager when the heat dies down and his arteries unclog and maybe you can wear the dress, you know the one he likes while pretending he’s george w. snorting cocaine with an emaciated senator’s daughter purging foie-gras and listerine while the lonesome jukebox plays “fortunate son” as some descendant of that nazi bastard henry ford sells you the american dream in the form of viagra in a gum stick that works so quick on your central nervous system you won’t even notice that we’re back from commercial already cause everything is so light and fluffy when even your dreams remind you that i am TELEVISION and i have assumed control of your network
If you’re going to write about drugs, please stop.
If you’re going to write about a wedding, please stop.
Stop writing about how weird it is to be gay. It’s not weird anymore.
Please do not write in hip-hop language.
Don’t write about porn. We already have enough of that in our lives and we all beat off a much as you do, so it’s no biggie.
Don’t try to “write what you know.” You don’t know anything. Me either.
If you have to write about drugs, don’t write about pot. Candy is more interesting than pot is. Knives are almost always cool.
Accidents are good, but not car ones, unless everybody in the book is dead or dies at once.
If there is lace of any kind in your writing, you are doomed.
Don’t write about Europe. You were there with a backpack for a week and barely scratched the surface. This does not permit you to have a character called Giuseppe.
Do not open up your story with Bob Seger or John Mellencamp lyrics. Stephen King did that shit to me once when I was small and I’m still recovering.
Mental institutions are a dealbreaker. You can have an institution on your street or near your school but you can’t be in one anymore. It sucks, I know.
If you write by hand, write with the hand you don’t favor.
If you write by computer, and the room has a window, sit by that, and don’t look out it.
Ignore or be rude to the people you love.
Then try to make up for it.
Don’t try to surprise me unless you surprised yourself.
Write a book that will make me want to keep reading it rather than getting head. I can think of 10.
Font is important, both while you are typing the words, and when it is printed in the book.
When you think you are about to write something really good, go to the grocery.
Chekov’s idea that “if a gun is on the mantle in the first act it should go off in the last” has done more damage than any other single sentence in writing. Objects are not road signs. Action in a book should not occur as if Keanu Reeves was in charge.
I’m still waiting to read a really good scene about somebody getting their ears pierced. It can be done.
Never have children.
Study story. Realize you cannot win. Repeat.
If you’ve ever thought about Star Wars or mentioned Star Wars in conversation, or own anything related to Star Wars, or have seen Star Wars, don’t write.
Oh sweet, you went to that museum alone one day and had a tuna sandwich in the cafe? You’re killing me, please.
The subway, huh?
If you listen to the Beatles or Radiohead, or Jay-Z, don’t write.
If you ever put up devil’s horns with your hand at shows, don’t write.
You’re probably in bad shape if you mention whiskey or a beach.
Don’t say “story” or “poem.”
Mothers are better for characters to have than girlfriends. Ditto fathers/boyfriends. If the mother is the girlfriend or the boyfriend, I hope your story isn’t minimalist or narrative.
Abstractions and dreams are good. (Unless your dream is about building a tree-house out of honey and glue with your brother who isn’t really your brother but that Brad Renfro guy who died in Hollywood but nobody noticed and the tree-house turns into a bar then a candle then a city. We’ve all had that dream or something equally as underwhelming.)
Write less dialogue, unless you are really good at it, which I guarantee you aren’t.
You’re probably in pretty bad shape if you mention any website whatsoever or even a computer for that matter.
When was the last time you ate at an Arbys? If it was more than a year you probably can’t say anything I need to know.
The cute fat Mexican at the bodega and his family who you think you’re such good friends with probably live a much different life than you expect. Maybe don’t start messing around in there.
Are you writing about someone taking a drag off of a cigarette? You might as well be saying, “He breathed.”
Don’t write about skin unless it’s going bad. Acne is always a choice subject. The shame and embarrassment that comes with terrible skin can be a goldmine. I’m talking Acne Vulgaris too, not a goddamn blackhead on your chin.
Don’t conceive of your “central” characters by defining them with a mental or physical “condition.”
If you’re going to tell me about your Mom, do it from your dad’s point of view. I want to know what she’s like in the sack.
Don’t connect with me. Don’t try to pretend I’m not there.
Don’t try to be funny. You are or you aren’t. Or the sentence is or isn’t.
You are neither David Lynch nor Captain Beefheart. You might be Cher.
Cry more, but don’t tell anybody either. This is the way crying is like rap.
I used to say you can’t write about serial killers, but they work sometimes, if they are described in the way one would a washcloth or a doll.
Remember your asshole is a tunnel.
If you’ve ever read Bukowski, please stop.
Please, God, no characters who are musicians. There is nothing worse than trying to describe music, or how someone plays it. Leave music to douchebags.
Stop writing about rich literary boys in college. I hated you people when I was in college and I still hate you. Your frat took a shit on my porch.
Drink some water.
Do not write about writing. Have you ever seen a painting of a person painting? No? Well, it sucks.
If you’ve ever told someone they are “misreading” a philosopher, eat a cock.
You are not Andy Warhol.
You probably don’t really listen to black metal.
Can I reiterate the one about not writing about musicians?
If you are more aware of your own dick or vagina than you are of what your breath sounds like when you are asleep, please go get a job in marketing instead.
The guy who lives upstairs from you is probably really cool. You should introduce yourself instead of imagining him doing weird shit with hooks and rope all the time and then writing it down. Get a hold of yourself, the guy’s probably just playing Wii.
Oooh, prostitutes. So you’re into that. Awesome. I’d rather hear from them about you.
If there’s never been a book that made you not want to leave the house again, don’t try to make your own.
Stop being in bars all the time. Man in Bar = Man in Life. We know.
If you’re angry, go outside. Please do not put words into things. Not to keep the anger away, but to keep the Rage Against The Machine out of my ears.
Own your advice in the same way you once tried to suck your own dick. By that I mean: everything is true.
If my cousins on my dad’s side of the family know who you are, or feel interested in reading your book when told what it’s about, you might be dying.
Any critique of the social or emotional will go unnoticed. Pity.
If you can separate the words and the story: trash.
The word “lovers” always fails on some level.
Don’t just kill your idols; leave them in history.
Avoid L.A. and New York altogether. If you lived in either of those cities, you would have given up writing by now anyway. I don’t believe you.
Have you ever printed out your manuscript and bathed in it?
Right answers are for those who hope.
Tone belongs to music while deafness is holy.
If you or the people in your writing have bought new clothes in the past two years, it’s over.
If you can point out “Action” in a book, why isn’t it a movie?
Don’t write about America or Bush or Arabs.
Don’t write about the future.
Don’t write about endings.
Probably don’t write anything at all.
I entered as a God, and now I’m a stranger——all this love in filthy puddles, in jungles, chained together, crumbling. You’re coming towards me. The sun’s behind you. You are tall and dark. I am crying. I want you to fuck me crying.
You’re pushing me back down on the bed now and you’ve got my wrists above my head and you’re eating me out. Licking up between my breasts. It’s dusk. Your grip’s tightening. I’m sinking. Like fish in cool shade. Birds like planets——all ripped up.
That night I first went down on you I knew we were doomed. But you tasted so good, and we watched Titanic, and we poured champagne straight down each other’s throats. Making love I described us walking into church together. Soldiers tipped up their swords. Dogs started barking and wouldn’t stop. The sand on our hands so hot the blood boiled off in us.
They gave him one dose: a digital pill that launched Mr Oi into epileptic seizures, and during that time the room became cold and he believed the snow that would overcome him would be nano-snow, and who would notice but he (hint—your nano-brain knows).
The Tiny Monkeys Overhear an Odd Conversation Among the Residents, Re: Who the Fuck is Tyra:
“I think she is a robot.”
“I think she is made of fiberglass and plastic.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t make a very intelligent painting: I have already made 36. To look at them is to lower your IQ by fifty points.”
“I think she is the fire that shall inherit Oprah’s forest.”
“It’s true that the chameleonic philosophy of the common man churns in her hair, but there is the bald spot, the flaw, the hunk of pink exposed brain, human as any other: warding off unforeseen desires, releasing the bitter chemicals of loss into her blood.”
“Still, she walks the robot’s walk. Do you choose your robot, or does she choose you?”
“Maybe the chemicals just pile up. Maybe the chemicals char and blacken and harden over the years until you walk like that.”
“Dreams and mothers are just piles of chemicals, too, but what do hers sound like?”
“A child kneeling in a Saharan mirage, scrubbing her face with sand, scooping sand into her mouth to ward off thirst.”
“Just think how pure her blood used to be back then.”
"You know her secret ingredient is moon, right?"
"I hear she rises mornings and claws it down with her fingernails. In her giant’s hands it is bright and tiny like a baby, then she mortars and pestles it to death, scatters it fizzing into the vats: a cremation undone."
"The moon does not resist; the moon does not strive, it only reflects."
"What would happen if she tossed it out over the ocean, into all the city’s orifices like a cure? What would happen if she bathed in it? If we all did?"
"Nobody ever looks into a shot glass before they put it inside of themselves. Nobody sees how the silvered liquid reflects us doing cartwheels across the lawn in unison."
"Only the werewolves know, and only for a minute before the moon recollects itself."
“Um, guys, I think we’ve been in here way too long. Everything is starting to get way too poetic.”
One of the things that most fans don't know about NBA superstars, is that we like to meet in the off season and fight to the death. So, this past Saturday, I called LeBron James while I was watching my immense LCD. LeBron answered, "What's up, Mamba?"
We chose to have our fight to the death in an abandoned factory in China. I flew over in my private jet and made sure I preserved my vital combat energies by abstaining from totally consensual intercourse with my perfect-10 stewardesses.
Instead, I reminisced about other NBA superstars who I have killed in action: Mel Turpin, Joe Barry Carroll, Benoit Benjamin, Stanley Roberts, Arvydas Sabonis, Mike Giminski, Bill Wennington and Edward Martini, who is not technically in the NBA or a superstar but a male nurse I mowed down in an unsolved hit-and-run homicide.
But fighting with LeBron was obviously a different matter. For one thing, he was a small forward, not a center like the usual NBA players I've fought and killed, so he was probably faster, would require a different type of lethality. And another aspect of LeBron James was that he is an active player as opposed to the retired players I prefer to fight and kill, so that would mean I would need to be at the top of my hand-to-hand combat skills. Yes, this was the game 7 of hand-to-hand combat, fight-to-the-death situations, only instead of win-or-go-home, in this case, the loser would be dead, and the winner would go home. (I did not plan to stay in China after the fight.) So it would be lose-or-go-home. I decided to say that to Bron before the fight, for extra intimidation.
Imagine: You drop in at your local coffee shop / internet cafe, and one of the things you can do there is print out, on the cafe's espresso book printing machine (still no idea what this is), a sleek and arty collection of stories, or novella, or novel, even, maybe, from your favorite writer. Then you can carry it around in your bag for a week or so, while you read it. You can give it to a friend when you are done with it. To me, this sounds like a lot more fun than downloading something onto your Ereader.
lost six teeth
in a motorcycle accident
but ya can't tell
when i smile
'cause i don't.
Being close to her, only just, made me feel needed, and there was the potential for violence.
In his watercolors she always looked fat and intoxicated.
We looked back and found our tracks well preserved. They made the unshakable impression of belonging to a single animal—something with six legs and a massive tail. Though we knew better, we grew frightened. It didn’t help that we were in unknown lands. We felt like helpless jackrabbits. And that is what we became, leaving the canoe behind and bounding through the woods, which opened out onto a grassy plain. Once in a while, I ran into Helen or Herbert or both together, but I recognized them less and less, though I always had a strange desire to linger in their company as if I’d known them in a previous life.
I bolted the doors, but it was no use. We watched as one crawled slowly over our neighbor’s house. It used hydraulics to wrench open the door, then sent its ghastly stomach in to digest our friend. If he’d fled before it was too late, he would have only been defenseless out there where so many others were waiting to pick him off. At least in his house, he stood the chance that one of these door-breakers might never come knocking. That’s how we felt anyway, waiting in our tomb.
I was staring idly at one of Janice’s hypnotic walls when suddenly we were flying. We knew about this fate too and were equally powerless to stop it. I’d built the house as tough as I knew how, but still it could be dashed to pieces.
There was a moment when the weightlessness tickled, and Janice looked at me and giggled. I embraced her more tightly until the thunderous crack that opened home and sky and let us in.
His search drives him to take on a precarious dual identity. By day, he works as the humble, God-fearing webmaster for First Church of the Church Before Church, a Born Again community eager to expand its ministry online. At night, he plays the part of sexual messiah, servicing the needs of countless women he meets on fallenangels.net, an alternative social network for the Fashionably Dissed & Franchised. But JAG fails to recognize that roleplay is a dangerous game when you don’t know who you are.
As War Without End (aka the Initiative for Peace) rages in the background and election-season fear-mongering spurs panic among the masses, JAG begins to slack on his First Church responsibilities while obsessing on the fallenangels, whose extreme desires challenge his moral values. “But who am I to judge?” he tells himself, justifying his self-destructive behaviors as noble acts of redemption. Blinded by righteousness and addiction, he refuses to change his path even as it leads to the greatest of sins.
Jim had a wife named Adele, and Tim, a live-in partner named Estelle. Adele and Estelle took back seats to Jim and Tim and had nothing to say to one another, though they frequently rolled their eyes at each other and yawned in empathy. After a while the couple outings lost Estelle, who disappeared, maybe with a man named Marvin she’d met at Tango Tuesdays. Adele, a clinical psychologist, declared Jim guilty of a parasitic form of narcissism that would be his undoing. He returned the diagnosis, with one swift, impulsive stroke, as people are wont to do when they’re rightfully attacked. So Adele left with the child and three cats and Tim moved in with Jim.
I will, of course, be there for whatever.
But only if I'm so famous I can't be held
against myself. My sense of humor in
real life is like the street person who
convinced you to give him money after
he moonwalked explicitly into your heart,
I mean tripped on a pigeon, I mean off the
pier to float above the invisible seals of
thirty-nine obligations, where we steal those
yachts and stand on our decks in bathrobes
trying not to acknowledge the In-And-Out
neon or the other quite entirely, quietly,
like trying to erase the word you from all
promotional material. We never did see
Laundromat Jesus or those tinfoil shoes
that weather divine since they would be
lying anyway, which is another way to say
trying too hard. "Let's ride the BART to the
airport," you said. "Then what?" "Germany."
Bravery's a lot easier under your ushanka.
Push the option on me to stop the orbit I take
around the tiny dwarfs of preoccupation.
Which sounds like a big halve-the-tides-via-
eye-games, but it's really just a need for an
alternate light source. Really I just want to be
quiet for a little while inside your quiet too.
amoebas with amicable ammunition, amphibians
meandering in Amish amendments and the synergies
of flavors found in Wisconsin maple syrup.
ambassadors amok with amnesia & ampersands in
none other than Omaha, brash, the nebula of Nebraska.
an ambush of ambidextrous amino acids, a mutation,
aghast, The Amityville Horror—
And there was no global widespread Ativan.
This was a look-at-my-face-does-it-look-
gotcha-it-doesn't-look-gotcha-it-looks-
oh-shit kind of deal. Woe usurped the
deeds. Snakes ate the food stamps.
God's wheelchair hit a baby sapling.
Not even a nice shower felt that nice.
UN officials took to wearing charcoal
baseball makeup. I stole a vat of
cottage cheese and sold it for hot
sluts. We set the laundromats on fire,
by which I mean OMG LAUNDROMAT PARTY!
We didn't worry about having grand
kids or copies of The Lion King for
them. Nobody invented new aftershaves.
No history was coveted, not even by the
apologists or for marketing purposes.
God's tirejack fucked His tennis racquet.
When Shasta Lake went dry, we held a
contest: EMERGENCY REFILL IDOL (TM).
The winners: iced coffee, Dr. Pepper,
benzoyl peroxide, breast milk and Tang.
Plenty of disgruntled cum jockeys felt
left out, which didn't seem, you know,
"shocking." If by this point you're like
"wait a minute what about eternal grace"
then I guess you never went four wheeling
naked with your best friends in August
and ate hot dogs and drank champagne
and made up songs about each other
and traded sunglasses with each other
and graded the dawn with each other
and did coke off each others' eyelashes
without thinking of how to tell the story
later, because later is a crosseyed donkey.
Hang on. Is someone in trouble, boy? Shhh.
Say what? What do you mean we're fired?
No one knows it but I love to sit in the closet and videotape myself. I love, love, love it more than anything. I say things into the camera that will boost my self-esteem, which is forever plummeting, when I watch the tapes later. When I feel a low-self-esteem attack coming on during filming, I take a break and recollect myself. The tapes are what keep me going; the tapes are how I survive; the tapes will bring me glory, fame, and bitches, namely TYRA, unless I kill her first.
And…ACTION:
I am eating the flesh off your face to expose the bone, to rip into and puree it with my vampire’s teeth. I have a taste for fame and I know there is some buried in your blood. I eat the flesh off the earth by ingesting all of its polluted carrots, all its landfills of human spewage, all the rare creatures that cohabitate on the oceanfloor, dying out from the heat. I eat polar bears and their switchblade claws and their fantasies of unified religion. I had a lover once, Samosa, and I ate her, too. She was like the Russian Bottle Dance going down: broken and flailing. It is best to feed on the broken and flailing; call me evil but nobody can help biting into their squish. It is the way to fame, fame, fame, the vampire teeth are so cut-throat they will eat your famous face. ROARRRRR!!!
And…CUT.
when it's hot my stomach hurts and i miss henry. henry is a person i have never met. henry is like a coke bottle in the parade of auschwitz. everywhere i turn there is an animal in a cage.
when i have a problem i buy a red heart purse and spit into it until it is full. then i throw the purse on the subway tracks. the heart gets run over and i feel my chest inflate. sometimes people are bad. but maybe there is a kind of badness that is like the bacteria that causes stomach ulcers. this happened to my grandmother.
i like yellow circles of light and the shadows they make. when i am alone i miss henry and my chest sinks down through the couch. i find myself chewing on a coke bottle and then i think, "remember how you are not supposed to be doing this." i can feel the glass in my chest. i don't want to do the dishes if henry isn't here. when i go home there is always a small animal waiting for me in the corner.
I kept calling my one brother adopted
I said, you're adopted, adopted
I ran from the laundry machine to the bathroom
Yelling Adopted! and You have a hole in your heart!
Because he did. People smarter than me call it a murmur
a ventricular septale defect
I yelled, You, Adopted, have a hole in your heart
through the locked bathroom door
and he kicked that shit off its hinges
i met pedro in the air. he was collecting letters. he was assembling pieces of cloud.
i told pedro about the oldest form of human-carrying flight technology. he told me about a fire-starter in his village. she had a flame halo.
pedro went away to discover new fire words. “there should be a word for each kind of fire that exists” he said.
“there is a flame in this hot air balloon” i said.
“humans have explored the entire horizontal world, but they rarely think to explore vertically,” i said.
pedro and i are in love.
i taught pedro about how the oldest form of human-carrying flight technology started with floating eggshells and airborne lanterns. pieces of things went into the air before humans went into the air. birds are not included in this.
“people think too much about birds” pedro said.
i think too much about people. the tree line looks like a silver dollar when it reflects the sun. it makes the shape of a man’s face.
pedro is not even writing a new language. he is confused. he thinks he is in school right now. he thinks the air is a chalkboard.
“i am on my 49th word for fire!” pedro said.
i am going to throw pedro overboard. pedro and i are not in love.
When I was five, I tried to lay an egg. I squatted in a corner and pushed. I grunted and squawked, all the things chickens do when laying eggs. I ran around, still squatted, trying to loosen the egg from bowel or tract or wherever it was eggs dropped out of.
See: I was born in the year of the chicken. Chickens lay eggs. It’s an issue of fulfilling destiny.
This wasn’t my doing. The siblings three told me. One said: I’m born in the year of the dog. I can smell my own butt. At that, she spun her body around and around, and I laughed. Another said: I’m born in the year of the rabbit. Watch me jump. And I watched him jump from the floor up the ceiling back down. He did it again, just so I could believe it. The last one said: I was born in the year of the dragon. I can spit fire. And she did. She opened her mouth and fire dashed out.
And so I was convinced. I was born in the year of the chicken. I must be able to lay eggs.
See: chickens are birds that don’t fly. They don’t do much other than lay eggs. I could peck at the ground, sure, but anyone can do that. Pecking at the ground is no special power. It can’t compete with butt-sniffing or ceiling propelling or most importantly, fire breathing. I needed a unique power, one that could distinguish me, make me special enough they’d change their name. I could see it: the siblings four. I would get a special “4” embroidered onto my sleeve: maybe in purple or orange, maybe both, maybe the triangle of the number in one color, the stem in another.
It was not the egg I cared about but acceptance. I was not a sibling, but I wanted to be.
And so I squatted on the ground and pushed harder. It was not ridiculous. It was a testament. It was a test.
I was there for hours, such an unfortunate case, hungry and delirious, exhausted, until I looked down and saw a little egg, smaller than most eggs, sure, but a circular opaque thing nonetheless. I’d succeeded. I’d laid an egg. I’d fulfilled destiny. I would be part of the siblings three.
They had not promised me membership. I’d only assumed it.
See: The egg was real, sure. But I was wearing pants and little girl panties. So despite my hard work, the hours of labor, the siblings three murdered my chickenness.
I would not get my embroidered “4.”
I would only be ridiculed for believing their tricks, again, fooled.
Afternoons find me slow in the bedroom, stiff-listening to a woman working towards orgasm. The sounds are pretty animal ones. I don’t put music on. I’m always rooting for the woman, any woman. Hers takes her to a place she wants to explain.
Grandma was on her way dying. There was nothing to do. I poked around my room. Tried to invent new kinds of praying. Got naked. Did jumping jacks. I found an ant. Wondered, should I put it outside or in the garbage? The garbage is easy, and the ant eats garbage. But when the garbage gets put in bigger garbage, the ant will get claustrophobic, die. My phone rang. The family had found something to do about Grandma. In the cousins’ yard. A bunch of trees just sitting there, doing nothing.
They’d already started when I got there. Hacksaws and chainsaws, milk paint. My parents, cousins, aunts and uncles. Frankie explained as I got out. The dogs wove excitedly around us, dragging sticks. Little Freezy Jane took the knives from the drawer. Bananas wasn’t allowed any sharp object, so he dug with a spoon in the dirt.
The trees appeared gnawed like pencils. I picked up a gouge and mallet and peeled off the price-tags. I didn’t immediately carve a face in the tree. A face might’ve spoken up, told me the tree wanted to be left alone. A tree is best as is, to brand it aesthetically questionable, but this tree was a telephone pole without electricity, skeletal, bare, whatever relationship the other trees had with this one was gone. It needed decoration as a role, to keep it upright, how it preferred. I thought of Grandma and hammered the gouge into the bark, carving a big Jewish star. Fresh wood fell to my shirt, to the grass. And then a five-pointed star, which means Good! or Good Job! I looked at the other tree carvers. My parents were sharpening the chisels. My brother was hauling away the scraps so Frankie could cut the grass. I liked seeing us on the front lawn together. Like we had made the world small on purpose. I looked at them teary-eyed, but a family you can’t see all at once. A family runs at different intervals, though a family tree would have you believe everyone stays, waiting the whole thing out.
What happens in this long between? Blackened globs of chewing gum start to spot sidewalks. Men wear frock coats. The teddy bear appears. The windshield wiper. Cornflakes, Crossword puzzles. Wars and music. The slinky. Silly putty. The first credit card. Fat presidents and thin presidents. First kisses all around. Jokes, problems. JD Salinger writes Catcher in the Rye. Days, nights, people waiting for the telephone. People falling down stairs. People blowing their noses. Dick Dale tries out Leo Fender's new Stratocaster Electric Guitar and blows the amp into flames. The ballpoint pens, the underwire bras, dark dreamy movies. Triumphant jack hammering and pouring of cement at the end of driveways. The animals run to the woods. The woods get cut into pieces. The game HORSE. A girl's first period. Family pets fall ill. Tiny sperms fly around in fast puddles. To celebrate the new pinball ban, New York Mayor Fiorello Henry LaGuardia smashes a number of machines in front a supportive crowd. America sits up neatly in its states. Someone keeps track of all the seals and flags, songs and birds. Summer smells like sex, even in cabbage patches and parking lots. Young children can tell the difference between a Chevy and a Toyota just by the sounds outside their window. Basketball still building. Primary and secondary colors combine in every combination. Sneezes hit the air, lingering like plus signs. Wax builds in small ears. The wind feels mean, but sometimes nice, depending on the weather and what is going on at the time. The sky is the background in back of everything. Cigarettes sit back smugly. Cats try and act sexy. Dogs eat garbage. Raccoons eat garbage. Skunks are very elusive. Deer are magical angels. Foxes are elusive. Giraffes and elephants are locked up in fake areas meant to simulate the world. Baby chimpanzees are put in diapers. Monkeys are taught languages, given toys, made to watch videos. Pink and blue are chosen as the team colors for boys and girls. Mickey doesn't want to do his work and uses magic to make the broom do it for him, but he doesn't stop there! The Beatles eclipse Elvis and become the world's most popular musical artists. The Celtics are #1. Dads are #1. Magic and Isiah whisper in each others ears and handle the ball sweet as cake. Everyone who played the first game of basket ball has died. Lucille Ball is dead. Buster Keaton is dead. Dogs are dead, foreign dictators are dead, authors are dead. Ants wander into the house and get lost in the bathroom floor tiles. Should they be rescued? Are they curious by the sci-fi implications of the smooth alien squares? John Casavettes makes some magic. Looney Tunes make magic too. Babies are born fat and naked. Plans dreamt up. Traditions grudgingly survive. The weather runs its cycles. The girls look pretty. The boys tell them so. TV Commercials use classic rock to sell products. Grandparents tell good stories. A Varsity coach makes his cuts. Boys carry home their basketballs, dejected. One grows all summer long. The game gathers watchers. Video cameras eat it up, spit it out. A part in the chest, below the heart, above the stomach, weasels around in sympathy and faith while ten point leads inflate it. The unfeeling buzzer stabs it. Adidas gets involved. Fila, NBC, TBS. Full court brawls. Big big names. No standing in the key. The pale refs run insistently along side. Butts are slapped nicely. The names get interviewed, the names get famous, the names get written on junior high sneakers.
I love speaking French and listening to albums in the sun.
What are your favorite things? What kind of teeth grow
on your back porch? I want to know everything.
When you were growing up did your grandmother heat
the furniture? Mine did. There were always fires
lit under the couch. The cat wore a helmet.
I want to know things about you so that I can feel
that I know you and that there is a you.
I am against the idea of a decentralized self.
For example, when I was in Haiti I discovered beach balls.
This is a clear memory. If I was holding the beach ball
then there is a me to hold the ball and to remember holding the ball.
See. You know what I am saying. I love your brown hair.
You feel like email to me. I could lay down inside your long
sentences. I am always waiting for more from you.
I like it when the sunlight refracts off your eyebrows.
Your eyebrows are like dark flames lighting your forehead.
I want to know every fire you have ever lit
and every house you have ever haunted.
Do you have the internet in your pinkie?
I heard this about you. Every time I sit down
I feel the internet coming up my legs.
It is a sensational feeling. Do you have feeling
in your legs? See, I want to know everything.
Tell me if you feel your feet. Tell me how much sadness
there is in your body and where it is located.
Tell me if your hands ever spark at night.
I want to know everything about you.
What kinds of trees appear in your dreams
and what whale is beached in your room when you wake.
I think my favorite poem from this collection is “sorry i didn’t catch you as you plummeted to the earth,” which to me feels like something from a Craigslist “missed connections” posting. The narrator, who’s riding in a hot air balloon, witnesses a man falling from the sky and fails to connect with him for primarily circumstantial reasons. Despite this, she still shows a sincere interest in being able to connect with him at some future point, if at all possible.
It seems that something has gone wrong with our transmissions. It's possible you entered an incorrect URL. Whatever happened, you are now stranded in a kind of limbo that leads nowhere, and wherin no one can find you. You could either take this rare opportunity to remain idle, hiding out in this quiet corner while the digital avalanche of Internet activities continues to swirl darkly around you, or you could try again. Best of luck.
I'd rather talk to them than to god. I hope they are watching me instead of god. If you get your body exactly where one of theirs has been, then nothing happens, nothing like what you'd want, nothing crazy magic, or Disney, epic or Hollywood, or montage-happy, nothing day shaking, but there is half-magic, something a little, a little bit something, more then nothing, a nice sky, a squirrel eating cream cheese, middle-magic, day magic, a friendly roll, a one-time tradition.
To take your life, you make a knot of it, pulling yourself towards yourself, letting there be no more room. To give your life you let the knot undo, strings fall single, and all this is night-magic, its novel length, it stops pinball games, it makes a mini-apocalypse, absurd freedom, the future as pointlessly extravagent, each day meandering in a huge USA size hole.
There are human lives I don’t value at all.
Little kids are fake.
Everyone is nice until you talk to them.
the air is empty but i have a thing inside me
i have several families living in my chest
i am going to open my own store and sell only
things that i especially like. puppets, diet coke,
spell books, beautiful rocks. i am going to sell
these things to the families in my arteries
some of the people in the families die. there is a funeral
in my kneecap. the grandmother throws herself
into the grave. the children play at empty plots
some of the people in the families say maybe they’ll call
which means they will not call. one person says
he will walk again, which means he will roll into his grave
and my knee will snap. there isn’t any time in the air
all time is encased in skin. it is new year
it is a rolling ocean and empty air and a grandmother
haunting my fingernail. it is a bright sun and a mother
under my eyelid, complaining of the heat.
If Finnegans Wake crystallized the collage consciousness of industrial modernity, Naked Lunch presages the multitasking, mashed-up sensibility of our remix culture, where we always have at least a half-dozen windows open in our minds: "This book spills off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises..." In a laconic, corner-of-the-mouth drawl that crosses the St. Louis upper class into which he was born with the underworld whose brutal honesty was always more congenial to his cast of mind, Burroughs channels the comic-strip unconscious of American society in all its nightmare hilarity.
Fifty years on, Naked Lunch still delivers the gut-grabbing jolt of the autoerotic hangings that punctuate its pages, every death erection and post-mortem ejaculation described with a grim relish that walks the line between cry of conscience and shudder of fetishistic pleasure.
A few years ago, Mamie Manneh, a Staten Island woman, was arrested for importing 720 pounds of monkey meat, including limbs, skulls and torsos, from baboons and green monkeys in boxes labeled “African dresses and smoked fish”. She argued it was her Constitutional right to bring monkey meat into the United States. Her lawyers claimed she needed to eat monkey during certain religious ceremonies for her syncretic faith, which merges Christian and African traditions
The doctors scampered all throughout the bathroom, running about, their shirts untucked, their sleeves unbuttoned, their flies dangling open, their privates out. They raced back and forth, sticking their legs out, trying to trip and shove one another. They leapt up and down. They clowned around.
They unwrapped the condoms and filled them with water, tied them shut, then stuck them up on the wall and crouched underneath them, smirking. Others threw uncapped hypodermic syringes at them, at the condoms. Someone, the Analyst thought from the safety of his stall, is going to get stabbed, get all wet.
One doctor moved quickly from toilet to toilet, from stall to stall, urinating in each one, a little urine in each stall. Another doctor followed behind him, flushing the toilets.
They rolled their eyes. They stuffed their fingers in their mouths—Dirty fingers, surely, the Analyst thought—and waggled their tongues. They blew their noses on the floor, on tile already brown and green, already disgusting.
They threw unraveling rolls of TP, bouncing rolls off the walls and one another, wasting the TP, unwinding the rolls down to their pathetic cardboard cores. They stood in a circle around one of their fellow doctors, twirling him, spinning him while he held the ends of the rolls of TP, transforming him into a mummy.
They left the sinks on, running, filling, the water blasting, the sinks overflowing, then threw whole rolls of TP in the toilets. They crapped in the sinks. All the while, the whole time, one of the doctors flickered the overhead lights, giggling and snickering, laughing at the grotesquerie in strobe.
They banged on the stalls. They banged on the Analyst’s stall; they tugged at the cheap plastic door, banging and pulling. They yanked and struggled, desperately trying to force it open. “This door is broken!” they called out. “We’ll have to break it down! Put your backs into it, comrades! Heave ho!”
Inside, the Analyst crouched, squatting on top of the toilet, praying the doctors couldn’t see him. He had no idea what they would do if they could see him. They might grab his ankles, or pull his off his shoes, or pull his trousers down and off. They might grab a hold and pull him clear out of the stall, half-naked, his hands up over his face, not hiding his face.
The Analyst cringing on his back, an obvious coward. The doctors would stand around him and laugh, would point at his body’s ugly flab, then whip out their privates and, as a man, urinate on his belly, flooding his navel. Other doctors, standing aside, would lift up his trousers, would rifle his pockets, would find his quarters, find his papers, take his quarters and his papers. They’d flee the bathroom and sell his quarters and his papers on URUK’s black market.
His secret name, his guarded identity gone beyond reclaim, lost for all time, the property now of a higher bidder.
Elsewhere in URUK. One of the doctors approached the Analyst, sipping coffee. “What’s wrong with my wife?” the Analyst asked him. “What’s wrong with our baby? Can you tell me? Can you cure it?”
The doctor put coffee in his mouth. “I’d rather you guess.”
Another doctor, the one in command, the one more in charge of the Analyst’s wife than the other doctors, emerged from Delivery, smiling brightly. He turned and swaggered toward the Analyst, his hands in his tight jean’s pockets.
“I am thinking of a number,” the lead doctor said, “a number between three and seventeen—the number of months more that your wife is going to live.”
Those very rude doctors!
[1967]
Dear Mom and Dad,
I didn’t know that I was two weeks late and that you were waiting for me. But it always made me feel special to know that Ingham County had to send a snowplow out to our house. It always made me feel special to think of Dad driving the car so slowly behind the snowplow and Mom with her hands on top of her stomach as if I were an important, but breakable, package. I always thought that there was some important destiny in that for me. I always thought that the path that was cleared through all of that cold and snow was somehow going to determine the rest of my life.
[1969]
Dear Dad,
Thank you for taking me to the barbershop to get my hair cut for the first time. I know that it was long and curly and that Mom said that it looked pretty, but I didn’t like all of the other moms and dads thinking that I was a girl either.
[1970]
Dear Mom and Dad,
I’m sorry that I pulled the stitching out of my feather pillow and then pulled all of the feathers out of it. I thought that I was going to find a bird.
[1973]
Dear Kathy Granger,
Do you remember when I used to stand on the sidewalk outside your house and yell out your name until you came out to play with me? I didn’t know that you were just my babysitter and that my mom and dad paid you to watch me. I thought that you really liked me—and not just because I was a cute little boy. I thought that we were going to get married when I was old enough.
[1974]
Dear Grandma and Grandpa Winters,
Thank you for giving me the Etch-a-Sketch for my seventh birthday. I liked drawing with it better than drawing on the walls, but I always felt bad when I shook it and everything on its magic screen disappeared. It reminded me of how my dad would grab me by both of my shoulders and shake me until everything went blank inside of me too.
[1975]
Dear Scott Poor,
I’m not sorry that I hit you over the head with my Scooby-Doo lunch box and cracked your head open with it. You were a lot bigger than I was then and I was afraid of you and I wanted you and your brother to stop picking on me on the way home from school. But here’s what I want to know: Did the doctor show you what it looked like inside your head? If he did, I bet it looked mean.
[1977]
Dear Secret Admirer,
Thank you for giving me the Valentine on Valentine’s Day that asked me if I would be your Valentine. I would have been. I wanted to be. But I couldn’t ever figure out who you were.
[1978]
Dear Dad,
They taught us in our sexual education class that a baby lives in its mother for nine months. So I counted the nine months back from my birthday, added on the two weeks that I was late, and figured out that I must have been conceived around your birthday, which means that one of your birthday presents turned out to be me.
Happy birthday, Dad.
[1980]
Dear Dr. Fritch,
I cried when you told me that I had a cavity because I didn’t want you to drill a hole inside one of my teeth and then fill it back in with some kind of metal. I hated the idea that I was already beginning to rot.
[1981]
Dear Blue Oldsmobile,
I don’t know if you saw me or not. I don’t know if you meant to hit me or not. But it really hurt when you hit me. I wish that you could have thrown yourself in reverse and turned time back for a few minutes. Maybe then you would have thought about what you were doing and you never would have hit me. Then I never would have hit the pavement and broken my arm and broken my bike too. Did I at least dent your fender or scratch the paint on you? I hope so.
[1982]
Dear Dr. Adler:
That test that you asked me to take knew how I felt. I did feel blue. I did feel sad. I did feel bored most of the time. But here is what I need to know: When I feel happy, what color will that be? Because I know that the red pills were supposed to make me feel better. But I stopped taking them because they were red and they made the whole world blurry. Sometimes, I would start to shake even when I wasn’t afraid of anything. Other times, I couldn’t think or I didn’t know where I was. And one time, those red pills gave me red spots on my skin that made me feel prickly and hot. I thought that I had set myself on fire.
[1984]
Dear Michael J. Fox or Alex P. Keaton,
I didn’t like your television show even though everybody at school talked about how funny it was. I didn’t think it was funny and I didn’t even believe that it was true that anybody’s family could get along like that. I know that television is made up, but it should at least be believable. I mean, we were supposed to be about the same age, so how could our lives be so different?
[1985]
Dear Jessica Cooper,
I’m sorry that I stood you up for the date that we were supposed to have on Valentine’s Day in 1985. Do you think that we could have been happy together?
[1987]
Dear Mom and Dad,
I know that you had to sell the house that we had all lived in for so many years when you got divorced. But I don’t think that you should have sold it to that young couple. The same thing was probably going to happen to them.
[1988]
Dear Man in the White Pants and White Shirt Who Looked at Me Through a Face-Sized Window Every Half Hour,
I know that you were just looking in on me to make sure that I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I know that you were just checking off that I was still alive at 1:30, at 2:00, at 2:30, etc., but I liked seeing your face in that little window and I started to wait for you to appear. I found it reassuring.
[1989]
Dear Ellen Lipsyte,
You probably thought that it was me who kept calling and hanging up after we broke up. It was. I wanted to see whether you were at home at night or whether you were already going out with somebody else. I was glad that you kept answering the telephone. I’m sorry that I kept hanging up.
[1990]
Dear State of Michigan,
Moving away from you that fall after college was easier than trying to run away when I was little. I had a car by then and could drive.
[1991]
Dear Weather Satellite,
I didn’t know many people when I first moved to Jefferson City. That’s why I used to watch you blinking your way across the sky at night and that made me think that you were winking at me and that made me think that we were friends. That’s why I climbed up onto the roof of my apartment building every night to look for you—even if it was cold, even if there were clouds. I was comforted to know that you were still traveling in your orbit around me.
[1992]
Dear Sara,
You were so beautiful the first time that I saw you that the first thing I thought was that I wasn’t good enough for you. I still don’t know why you thought I was, but thank you for smiling at me so that I could smile back at you. I didn’t think that I was ever going to meet you.
[1993]
Dear Sara,
Thank you for moving into my apartment and living there with me. I needed somebody else to sit on the couch and the chairs with me. I needed somebody else to watch the television with me. I needed somebody else to eat at the kitchen table with me. I needed somebody else to put their clothes in the dresser drawers and the closet with my clothes.
[1994]
Dear Sara,
Thank you for making me put a sliver of our wedding cake under my pillow on our wedding night. It made quite a mess, but I always had the sweetest dreams of you.
[1995]
Dear Sara,
I know how much that you wanted to have children. I did too. That’s why I was always disappointed when your menses came every month. I have always thought of all of that blood as one of my failures. I really thought that we were going to have one kid and then another kid. I thought that the kids would get bigger and that we would eventually move into a bigger house. I thought that our kids would have kids and we would become grandparents together. I thought that we would retire and then take care of each other. I never expected so much of that to never happen to us. I can’t believe that my forecast for the rest of our lives was so far off.
[1996]
Dear Sara,
I smashed the television screen with a hammer because I thought that it was watching us. Even when it was off, I could see this faint reflection of somebody in the screen. Also, I unplugged the radio because I thought that it was listening to me and broadcasting everything that I thought outside my head. But even after I unplugged the radio, I could still hear them talking. That’s why I threw the radio outside in the rain where it probably got electrocuted.
What I’m trying to say is thank you for holding onto me so tightly when I couldn’t hold onto myself anymore. Sometimes, I can still feel your arms around me trying to hold me still.
[1997]
Dear Dr. Gregory,
Thank you for writing a new prescription for me. I think that it helped that the pills were red. That seemed to stop some of the voices from talking to me.
[1998]
Dear Sara,
I used to walk around the house looking for things that you had left behind—clothes, a blow dryer, the pillow that you liked to sleep on—so that I would have an excuse to call you up and see you. But it wasn’t long before I couldn’t find anything else in the house that was yours. That’s when I started buying things that you used to use so that I could pretend that you had left them behind—your favorite shampoo, that hand lotion you used, blue jeans and shoes that were in your size. I didn’t mean to be so desperate.
[1999]
Dear Sara,
I didn’t sign the divorce papers because I wanted to be married to you for as long as I could. I was even hoping that you wouldn’t be able to divorce me at all if I didn’t sign them. You didn’t have to go to a judge to prove that I was unfit for marriage.
Since we really are divorced now, I think that we should split up our memories too. I want the time when we met and the time when we went to the Grand Canyon. You can have our first date and the day we got married. You can also have the day when you left me, which I have no use for. I want when we moved in together and when we bought our house, though, and I want all of the times that we sat on the couch and watched television together. You can have the times we ate breakfast together, but I want most of the dinners. There are a lot more. Maybe we should talk about all of them.
Your servant and oppressor, son.
I permit your blossoming
along the sticks inserted in your brain:
Socialize. Intellectualize. Capitalize.
Socialization implies original sin.
Play Ambrose-as-Iraq: I'm mighty
and I'll direct him polite before he interferes:
"Dear other nations: your servant, USA Catherine Anne,
I'll tidy up your house to look like mine;
you're free now to be me."
There's no analogy.
Iraq's dictator was evil. Baby's not evil.
But Iraq's dictator was naughty,
and the baby wants things he should not have.
There's my analogy.
I have learned best.
I'm free, right, and point a gun.
A stupid pun can't end this section.
A stupid cunt can. Bye!
THE END OF CHAPTER ONE
