SECOND CHAPTER: Emotions Are the Wax Hands In Your Dreaming Eye Robot

sometimes i’ll start thinking about sex then start thinking about eating too much chinese food
sometimes when i’m having sex i feel like i’m in a space shuttle
moving between two planets that aren’t earth
like from jupiter to saturn or venus to mars
sometimes i feel like i’m fishing with my dad
late in the afternoon in florida
on the pier at cocoa beach

i almost never know exactly what song to listen to
i’m laying on my back
the macbook is on me
my head is lifted off the pilates mat
is this exercise, what kind of exercise
like, can muscles get bigger through this
or does it just ‘burn calories’

it is 2009, m.i.a. is 33
m.i.a. is almost 40
listening to ‘paper planes’ on youtube
keep thinking she’s saying ‘suck my dick’
or ‘i’ll suck your dick’ or something
just keep hearing that
feeling so lost, is she saying ‘nigger’ in this song
feels like i can’t hear anything

an easy way to eat a lot of calories is to eat a block of cheese
something happened around 2 p.m. and i felt really bad
i began ‘an extremely vague, kind of funny’ process to make myself feel better
near 14th street and 3rd avenue i felt that i was ‘failing’ ‘a lot’
i felt my head, like, swivelling, in the air, sort of away from you
and my body sort of twisting, halfway, into sunlight
there were no clouds and it was maybe 65 degrees

the ‘classic image’ of a fisherman wrestling a tuna into submission on the deck of a boat i held you one time like a fisherman holding a tuna
you were lying on your back on top of me
i was lying on my back on top of my bed
you were sort of ‘flopping around’
i thought about a large, smooth tuna trying to get away from me
later i saw your legs suddenly moving around a lot in the air
i thought ‘damn’ and had images of spiders and felt nervous
i thought about you climbing diagonally across my walls and ceiling

i see cupcakes exploding
i see myself laughing a lot
and cupcakes exploding
then something dangerous happens
my face panics a lot
and i get cut really badly

i feel weird, like my favorite book is a novelisation of ‘metroid’ i feel like giving my penis papercuts
but i keep seeing a cupcake where my penis should be
and then i see myself ‘buttering’ some kind of ‘english muffin’
and then i see, like, a ‘really lightweight, handsome dog’

i’m on pg. 170 of ‘on the road’
lying on my pilates mat
talking on gmail chat
everything seems okay
like a romantic comedy
suddenly i feel like eating ten cupcakes
and drinking 2-4 beers while crying a lot

i felt happy without drinking coffee today i looked at a girl and thought ‘would i date her’
and thought ‘yes’ and felt happy and surprised
then i thought about girls i wouldn’t date and felt nervous
then i looked at a girl and thought ‘no, i wouldn’t date her’
and felt happy again and not nervous anymore
i also felt happy after thinking ‘ramen’ at one point today

sometimes my low self-esteem feels like a giant toy poodle
i was walking on the street behind nyu’s library
it was cloudy, i was thinking about a girl
my heart felt like a non-organic potato
with root things starting to grow out of it
i started thinking about my dad
i feel emotional when my dad is in certain situations
when he is trying to talk to me and i don’t acknowledge him
when he is talking to someone that doesn’t like him

one time we ‘rolled’ a wheelchair person’s house a teacher at our school was dying
he had a disease or something
he went around campus in a wheelchair
students hated him for some reason
he wasn’t even mean or anything
i threw a lot of eggs at his house
after it happened i learned whose house it was
i laughed a lot i think
i think i said ‘why’ or something

sometimes i feel like another person is ‘insane’
i view their behaviour and it seems very insane
it doesn’t seem sexy or something
it just seems depressing and like there is ‘evil’ in the world
i don’t think they are ‘normal’ or something
i value a person being tactful and consistent or something like thatYour enemies are not killed; they are converted.
Occasionally, a convert will leave behind Spirit Points,
which you can use to purchase things like fruits.
Each fruit has its own unique method of attack.
Pears, though weak, come in handy in the Slums,
since they can destroy large weeds and junk piles.
Vials of the Wrath of God: these are basically bombs,
purchased in groups of three or seven. Samson’s Jawbone
acts as a boomerang. You’ll need this to get the Raft.
To begin, enter the red door and receive an apple
from the Christian Helper. The basketball player
you come across in the Park is of no consequence.
Do not go into the Bar in the Shipyard; you will lose
the Belt of Truth and have to go to the Pawn Shop
in the Slums to retrieve it. Using the Raft, cross the lake
and search out the Grey-Haired Man in the Airport.
He is slow and weak; it takes only three Vials
to convert him. He will drop the Helmet of Salvation,
which renders you invulnerable to dynamite.
The Church is to the east. Here you can buy grapes
for 75 Spirit Points. Grapes travel through solid objects.
Once you have beaten the Man in Black Robes
and obtained the banana, pass through the Woods
and enter the Prison, under which lies the Demon Stronghold.
The demons are vulnerable only to the banana.
You will now be in a blue room (aren’t you glad
you brought that key?) with the Demon Master.
He can be defeated with persistence. You will know
you have damaged him when his color flashes from red
to a lighter red—an almost imperceptible change.

Wolf woke us all up. He had boiled a broth of hummingbirds, must have gone shooting from high oak branches in the night. He apologised and placed a paw on my cheek. We will go on a Girl Chase this afternoon, he announced. The cubs roared applause. I didnt feel hopeful, we hadnt caught any girls on the last two hunts. There had been one, a dancer with ribbons up her thighs, but we chased her into a well as deep as the earth.
Wolf had that day's passage written on his palms.
And when it rains I dance with her face drawn on my feet. She is the sinew of body and sky. I believe that her heart beats sweet milk and her head is a maze of honey.
Wolf copied this into one of the note pages of The Hunters Maw then drew a line between it and a passage from the girl's head, first showered in the south.
The train leaves at night and is a wreck in morning.
His tail coiled between legs.
Wolf gathered the shotgun and its shells, he lit a cigarette. Me and the cubs followed him out of The Hungry Tree. Rain began, of water. It slapped the earth so hard we couldnt hear. Turned the ground to torrents of thick mud. The cubs kept falling. They lost their silver coats to the dirt. Wolf didnt notice, he led us whistling.
We walked for an hour before we saw her.
The girl, her body half ripe pink half dirt. She wore a petticoat and thrashed in the sinking earth. She screamed. When we advanced her eyes began to grow until great fat pupils filled her whole face. Our line reflected in them. Freed herself and ran, waves formed around her heels and hit our chests. We made chase like sepia doves with teeth the size of children. When she screamed we howled.
She fell with hollow chest by the river banks. Wolf looked into her bronze cheeks and grinned. He tickled the undersides of her skinny arms till she was forced into laughter. Then he shot her.
The cubs leapt high and smiled. They nudged her body with their noses and licked her ribs.
We bred a fire inside the tree and ate her with the television on. Some news of more failed kitings in countries with streets of spices and emaciated children. What do they expect to catch there, Wolf says.
"I've told you before." Jim composed himself, yet he did so with passion. "The chips monitor the entire human body for defects and illness. Mostly it monitors 'high cost illness and diseases.' But think about it. The chip identifies a pathogen, like a malignant cancer. It sends out a lethal dose of a nontraceable substance into the body, don't ask me what it is because I don't know. It kills the person with no traceable evidence of anything suspicious. They just go to sleep one day, and never wake up. Not only is it population control, but it saves on billions of dollars of healthcare. Now think even further. Put your Hitler cap on. Now we stop that individual from passing down a negative trait or predisposition for that particular disease. A hundred years from now we have a healthy population, a smaller population. The economy will boom. Every child in this country born in the last thirty one years has had that chip implanted in their body. Any one of those people that would have gotten some crippling disease is dead. Of course the numbers would not be astronomical, because most of those people are still fairly young, and most things that are that serious don't kick in yet."
Jim's eyes wandered closed for a second. "But it does take out the AIDS population. That is a very interesting item. Patients have been showing up dead, and upon autopsy the HIV virus was detected at minimal levels. So now, the CDC thinks there is this new deadly strand of HIV out there, that kills you immediately. How ridiculous is that?! It sure is scaring the crap out of people, and for a while, it may mask what is going on out there. Just watch the news! You'll see. It's happening. Now all the government has to do is have mandatory chip placement for all those born prior to the legislation. Maybe that will get people suspicious."
Back inside those headphones, hearing SWITCHED-ON BACH, springs of dusty couch in leaky parlor digging ribs, all the change in the universe to spare, coming on to mushrooms, amphetamine, hash… in came Mike the Sailor – five-feet six-inch warhead of 160 pounds of incoming, me the sole soul awake in a hippie house of nine pelvises.
“Hey, Dick!” he grinned drunkenly, eyes rolling my face into focus. “This the party?”
“No,” I wanted to say, but was too high to verbalize, “the party is in Dick’s brain,” although apparently I did slur part of the sally, as Mike leaned over the dilapidated cocktail table and rapped twice smartly on my forehead.
“What is the password?” I carefully articulated, although couldn’t hear myself outside the headphones and the blaring electronic Bach.
“Eat,” he enunciated, “shit.”
WHERE SHEEP MAY SAFELY GRAZE sputtered to a pinball climax, as I dizzily nodded assent.
“My divorce finalized midnight.” The grin broadened. “Less party!”
“No,” I kept nodding yes, “more.”
There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that's rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, “Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail.” Terror can be mediocre, even idiotic, yet omnipresent. Terror can be terribly banal, utterly un-Romantic, but never-ending. Terror is when the secret police persuade your best friend to inform on you; when objects start moving around your room in your absence; when the secret police interrogator tells you, right before you leave his office after a day-long interrogation, that “accidents do happen,” or when your friends start committing (poorly) staged suicides.
1.
I wrote this poem accidentally in the following way:
In my late teens, I began to hear the voices of all of the animals I had killed and stacked into barrels. At a Boston shelter, in a summer rush of unwanted cats and dogs, we injected them with sodium pentothal and then waited for the small room to go quiet so the bodies could be loaded into cardboard barrels we'd lean onto a dolly and roll down the hall to a larger refrigerated room with its own loading dock door that opened up once a week for a huge Thermo King truck that carried the chilled fur and meat away. The week I lost it there were so many cats coming through that me and this guy who was in a band called Demon Fetus tried to liven things up by racing our tippy barrels to the refrigerated room. We got there and noticed that the compressors were broken--that the bodies were starting to smell. Then I went back to clean the smaller room where the caged were injected, where the smell of animal fear could never be washed away. I began to hear growls and meows that weren't there. When new animals were brought in and killed, I noticed that they were winking at me, letting me know they were still alive. When I inhaled they grew larger.
I toyed with the idea of injecting my ankle with sodium pentothal because I'd heard it was truth serum in small doses. I let the needle scratch my skin and then squirted some of the stuff into my shoe before deciding to steal a dog and depart through the nearest emergency exit.
The job and maybe some earlier substances had conspired to make me less than employable, awash in delusions, convinced that I was God or dirt. I called the rapidly fluctuating transitions from significance to insignificance a state of "Omni-impotence" and began writing notes trying to explain what was happening to my friends:
"God finally destroys the devil and accidentally disappears. I steal the bread of understanding and cast it to the duck pond. I have done what is good until an old and wise mallard looks me coldly in the eye, whispers that I have caused overpopulation, eventual starvation. It occurs to me that I give to charity only so calf-eyed children can continue to lead quiet lives.
The urge to go on a three state killing spree. Or help an old lady to cross the street. The realization that any action has an equal and opposite reaction, that to do any one thing is to kill the other. Parts of my body crawl away and are never seen again. I win friends. Their limbs fold back into a tree that leaves no seed. A tree that begs me to eat its red fruit. A tree that tells me the road to hell is paved with ordinary asphalt."
I was obsessed with morality. I forgot to feed or house myself for a few days and then started selling my body to the cheerful phlebotomists at Medical Technical Research Incorporated of Jamaica Plain. As a human guinea pig testing experimental dosages of theopheline and other drugs, I discovered that going insane is a great way to meet other crazy people. The solipsism of mental illness often has people going crazy in different directions--becoming more and more isolated. Yet at times one can go out of one's mind and meet other people who have exited their minds in a similar way and toward the same goal. Or one can recognize someone who can share and live in whatever world you happen to be dreaming up at the moment. I've stretched out the thread of my reason beyond my ability to reel it all back in, yet there really is such a thing as being a magnet for insane people and I became that. I felt that by absorbing all forms of madness, I would no longer be able to go mad. One way to absorb madness was to capture it in words. The pressures I was under made poetry a natural form of expression. It could compress experience. It didn't have to make sense. I could use it as a spell. The line breaks broke at fluctuations in or the collapse of conscious thought.
I wrote poems about delusions and crazy people. I had many insane girlfriends. The iceberg poem lifts the remembered inflections, incantations, and obsessions of at least two or three of them but does approximately center on one who was indeed committed for trying (quite seriously) to kill me. I really didn't mind at the time. I was sort of flattered. Other people committed her. I never would have.
2.
This seemed like it should be a poem because I wanted the voice to be as compressed and alone as her voice seemed to be in my head. I think the thin lines can penetrate and disorient as poetry in a way that they never could as prose. With prose, there would also be more of a temptation to frame and describe her. I wanted her more as a disembodied voice that had been cast out into the world. She is broken down into voice and thoughts that scatter across landscapes and then weave themselves back into her always with a misplaced significance, odd magnifications, something crucial forgotten. She is furiously trying to create a beautiful and whole picture of herself as someone capable of being alive and loved while crucial elements of her desired self dissolve, undermine her. In the end, her only hope is a delusion that she is sane.
3.
I originally had only her voice on a page with no preable or frame. I grafted the beginning on to create more of a context, an entry. In the battle between purity and accessibility, I hoped it was a good choice. Many of my poems have no such frame or point-of-entry so are quite invisible to many who for whatever reason are unable to break in.
Say this yellow square block is bored. Say she’s bored because she’s always been
a yellow square block and has always been knocked down with other yellow square blocks.
So one days she goes to the couch where she meets some blue rectangles. The idea
is to make something she hasn’t seen fall down before.
The alley. You can’t say it’s your home away from home, having no real home to be away from, but you know it well. You’ve spent serious time in it. Have been mugged, chased, blown, asked for a light, beaten up, paid off, conned, dumped, supplied, scared shitless, given hot tips, shortchanged, shot at in here. You say, here. The alley is not on any streetmap. It is under it somewhere. Or behind it. It is negotiated intuitively; maps are useless, maybe even deceptive. Even in the rain, its scabrous brick walls are layered with shadows, worn like old rags. It is not uninhabited. It has its pimps and dealers, street tramps, smalltime grifters, misnamed homeless (they know where their home is better than you do), muggers, psychopaths, deviants. Not unlike City Hall, in short, or any church or company boardroom. You have to keep your eye out for one of them in particular. Known as Mad Meg, she likes to leap out of the shadows and stab people with her rusty kitchen knife. Once an honest stripper, but misused by a sadistic sugar daddy who pumped her full of brain-burning opiates, thrown out on the streets when her mind went and her body bagged, now the hidden princess of the alley. Like the alley, she’s treacherously complex yet rough on the surface and without façade, oddly innocent or at least neutrally unmotivated even as she lunges at her victims, somewhat pestilential, smelling of urine and half-blind, the indecorous backside of the human condition, the poxy dead end we all try to avoid. She’s a friend of yours though she doesn’t always remember that. You bring her things that she collects like coat buttons, swizzle sticks, shoelaces, candy wrappers, and old tennis balls, and once she got you out of a scrape by attacking the killer who was attacking you, though that may have just been the luck of who was on top.
She wasn’t fighting. She was running and screaming and falling and an object, a man, was on top of her. Suddenly she heard her sister’s voice, coming over the loudspeaker of her heart, calling to her, finding the words, having the solution. Give them the bag, she said, and the sister on the ground (not alone), bent up her arms as if she’d been waiting all this time, all these years, for the single clear order (Oh, that’s what they want, the bag) that she could never agree to follow.
The T-bar dragged me up cold, dankly-reeling staircases of houses, lit by solitary light bulbs. I passed through dim hallways into a lobby. I shouted out when a figure suddenly appeared in front of me, but it was only my reflection in a big mirror above the shoe rack. I moved through the corners of bedrooms where people lay asleep. A man and a young woman were making love on a wide white bed; the girl heard the clatter and turned her head toward me, silently staring me in the eyes until I disappeared behind the closet. I was traveling through the interspace between the apartments whose existence is denied.

Why doesn’t he choose another typewriter? All the other typewriters have disappeared: some have been borne away to the Caucasus by a swarm of locusts (it is proven that, by joining forces, locusts are capable of carrying even a horse many miles), some typewriters are used as part of some kind of new perversion spreading through the cities, and some have been transformed into the white light illuminating the statue of the beautiful animal angel.
When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we had:
nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the train, nothing to talk about to my aunt, nothing to talk about to her parents, nothing to talk about over pizza, nothing to talk about over good but insufferable sushi, nothing to talk about on the corner of Canal Street & Centre, nothing to talk about at jury duty, nothing to talk about in the bathroom at the theater before a movie began. When the bun place closed. The midnight movie theater in Midtown. When there was nothing to do in Midtown. No point to go. When the deli that pastramitized its own meats shut down, too. I really liked that bun place. When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we became more bearable (we had to be). But, speaking just for me, more depressed.
Andrew Jackson
finished off the Creek Indian
civilization after fighting beside them.
Why Andrew?
& he puts his finger in my nose.
To the gods goes my excess asparagus,
linoleum tabletop & coffee-bruised newspaper.
I say the mountain’s not coming.
I say “the traffic,” and shrug.
There’s just not enough Vaseline
for the whole room.
I do apologize.
If the presentation never ends maybe
I can keep this laser pointer.
Rabbit under truck tire
by the high school
already cold.
Socks up to my teeth.
Electric drill to the avocado.
Striped wallpaper behind a plastic folding chair.
The Etruscan man sees the world through a narrow shunt. Do not inquire as to its origin; smell the thing. Dress in shades of metal, and flit across his circle. Make him spin. Make him into a periscope. How he loves to search the horizon! Presage touch with the prick of a needle. Not requiring affection, he will not offer it, but there are ways. Become a flag and wave your color. Claim a place on your body, and his hand will come to claim it back.
Bare-chested, the Etruscan man will take you to a film. Keep your reservations to yourself. In the magic of the dark, he’ll become the film star you see on the screen – a French child in glasses. Hand in hand with that child, you’ll exit the theatre. Do not be a mother to him. Give him glimpses of your palm. Misbehave into the back of a police car. There are sounds in leather only men can hear. Shift in your seat to call the Etruscan back. Somewhere the boy will fall sleep again.
Each evening’s end takes the Etruscan man by surprise. Leave him quickly, and his friends will say you’ve escaped. He’ll run a stop sign through a wide oak tree before he sets up camp. In the morning, he’ll take a draught of air and call it poison. You will not have existed. Take it slow, do. Toss just a handful of dirt on the fire. In his locket is an insect made of hair, and there’s space enough for your fingertip there, should you choose to leave it behind.
A city named after carnage though imaginary.
The flint and glut of your white-ringed yogurt bottles, empty hearts of glass chewed on by low-riding pedestrians.
Yes, I dreamt of you in my wooden bed, ramshackled to the grilled iron shine of the handles that box you in.
A city expelling its suitors, a city packed tightly in the suitcase.
We bring you with us – a layer of exfoliated skin – wherever we go.
Light shined dull. Once our bodies were fluttering strips in the breeze, fragmented, compiled moments (strained through stacked stone), separated into the ocean's glow, spread through the current, we sank. Light flapped on the surface, it tickled our noses, pulsing. My wife's velvet feet rested in the coiling sand, layered over time. Her stomach flattened, opening over the sea, washed on shore. I heard whispers from my mother. Father inhaled dusty smirks between his charcoal teeth. My hands stretched through the water, but were not long enough to reach beyond the waves into the light. My lungs caved in. I called for my wife from someplace else, my mouth floating near her ear for a moment that passed with the next wave. Stones tumbled into the ocean's dirty windows. My father threw himself into the water. We watched from many angles, and with many bodies we consumed him as he begged.
But the equations of theoretical physics don’t require or imply any difference between past and present. They’re time-invariant—or to put it another way, they’re reversible in principle. The experiential fact of irreversibility doesn’t have an explanation in physical law. And once Carroll has pointed out this roadblock to our efforts to understand the universe through physical law, it’s difficult to shake the sense that here is the mystery of all mysteries.
What next? you ask. Switzerland, I say. Let's go sleep in Bern. Why is it called Bern? you ask in Bern, and you yawn, and I yawn, and there are bears in Bern, and drunks and children fall in the pit and get saved or die. We sleep well no matter where, we fall asleep together well. We have slept through a lot of world. We have slept on the train to Belgrade with our legs like bridges across the seats. The conductor's hat was tired and too small for his forehead. The conductor wanted a sincere ten euro for the mud on his seats. The conductor wore a mustache.
On the plane from Serbia you saw crows on the runway and fell asleep in the midst of a panic attack, and I had to wake you up and tell you about it, and that made you freak out again. During our landing the stewardess played Blue Velvet and danced slowly between the rows, but we didn't hear it, we didn't see it, we had our eyes closed.
In Washington we fell asleep in the National Gallery of Art—Matisse, the sleeping pill—but it wasn't only him, it was the troubling nights before; we had made up a new game, decided not to speak during the dark for a week, but you busted the edict right after midnight. You said that I wasn't being silent in English. You said that I was keeping still in a different language, and you felt left out and found it unjust. I couldn't answer. Rules are rules. I was scared that if I opened my mouth it wouldn't be English that came out. So we lay there awake, night after night—me not wanting to sleep unintelligibly next to you, and you trying to understand what I wasn't saying.
On a bench by the Brandenburg Gate we slept on a Sunday to voices of Russian tourists, to songs of pigeons. We were led to the bench with our eyes closed, again a game in which only our dreams were supposed to see the grand columns. As we woke up we couldn't remember what dreams we had, and we spoke Russian songs fluently for hours.
In Eastern Alabama we fell asleep on a dirt road leading to a church in the fields. Three hours in a full morning heat until a fat black guy woke us, fist against the windshield. We followed James to the mess, and the mess trembled and stunk and boiled. Let's sleep, you whispered, but chants and god and James kept us awake. We nestled up against him, he put his hands flat on our heads, his good shirt smelled like a lemon.
In Oxford, Mississippi, we slept in Faulkner's spacious garden and—believe me or not—on that day in Faulkner's garden, I forgot what the deal was with our sleeping. As a matter of fact, I forgot what the deal was with all our games, rules, and assignments. It happened at the sight of that Japanese photographer. You remember? A young guy, white jeans, who rollicked with his tripod between the cedar trees, looking for the right angle, for the best light, eyes alert like a vigilant lover. Focused people are the most beautiful ones, you said and called over to him asking if he would tell us a Japanese bedtime story. He didn't pay attention to us or he was scared of strangers lying in Faulkner's grass or he didn't speak this language, and when I was a kid, I believed that unheard and incomprehensible words don't just disappear but gather as clouds in the sky and come back to us as thunder, so that everyone can hear them. After you fell asleep, back in Faulkner's garden, I kissed your temple because I like it so much to see a kiss written down on your temple.
In Bern we went to Einstein's house, we wanted to sleep for Einstein. We have a soft spot for sleeping where famous people once slept. Bern is named Bern because Berlin was already given away, and you placed yourself on a chair under the photograph of Einstein's wife and you closed your beautiful eyes, and I sat opposite on the floor and closed my beautiful eyes, and we paid homage to Einstein. It was half an hour maybe, before they came and got us. I never told you what I dreamt in Bern. In Bern I dreamt about Japan—that is, I dreamt about Bill Murray. Let's soon go sleep Japan. On that day in Bern, you were a little bit sick, you were a little bit pale, you were a little bit silent in Bern. In Bern you were a little bit asleep with me.
A man with two heads walks in,
blue overalls, blue eyes and two beards,
one short beard, one not that short beard,
he doesn't limp, I just imagine it so.
The left head says, they are here to pick up the empty bottles,
the right head doesn't say why they are here.
The man pushes his handcart,
it is little between his hands,
and it is older than the universe,
it must be the first thing ever made
through stellar nucleosynthesis with dark matter
and mass and temperature and whatnot.
Where are the beer crates? asks the left head,
the right head takes a look around.
The man's math skills are above average,
he whispers numbers in a way I would write songs for you
if I wrote songs for you, but I don't,
I only have kind words for you
and this confusion for you
and this man for you with one beard longer than the other.
Aesthetically seen
I have not ever seen anything as beautiful
as the elegant self conception of this man
picking up the remains of a feast to which he was not invited,
and at which his presence in the midst of
Berlin's media and literary people
with their lack of a second head and big muscles
would have been as odd as his little handcart might have been,
floating through the universe back then
when beer and social pressure and role play
and shirts were not an issue yet.
The left head says: 68 Euro for the bottles,
the right head doesn't say how much we're getting back,
and the man pushes his little cart out to the street,
where at this particular moment you could see,
and I wish you could,
a street, a street sign, a poodle, a woman behind the poodle,
a blackened piece of gum, a pale tree, a bicycle, a man on a bicycle,
a flower store, flowers, a graffito and a man with two heads
unloading beer crates into a blue and black van.
Before Wasson, I felt the saint children [entities in the mushroom] elevated me. I don't feel that anymore. The force has diminished, If [the foreigners hadn't come] the saint children would have kept their power... From the moment the foreigners arrived, the saint children lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won't be any good. There's no remedy for it.
"...What is terrible, listen, is that the divine mushroom no longer belongs to us. Its sacred language has been profaned. The language has been spoiled and it is indecipherable for us..."
"What is this new language like?"
"Now the mushrooms speak English! Yes, it's the tongue that the foreigners speak..."
"What is this change of Language due to?"
"The mushrooms have a divine spirit; they always had it for us, but the foreigner arrived and frightened it away..."
"Where was this divine spirit frightened to?"
"It wanders without direction in the atmosphere, it goes along in the clouds. And not only was the divine spirit profaned, but that of ourselves [the Mazatecs] as wel
Over There, Then
IN THE BEGINNING, THEY ARE LATE.
Now it stands empty, a void.
Darkness about to deepen the far fire outside.
A synagogue, not yet destroyed. A survivor. Who isn't?
Now, it's empty. A stomach, a shell, a last train station after the last train left to the last border of the last country on the last night of the last world; a hull, a husk—a synagogue, a shul.
Mincha to be prayed at sundown, Ma’ariv at dark.
Why this lateness?
He says reasons and she says excuses.
And so let there be reasons and excuses.
And there were.
A last boat out, why didn’t they catch it? They didn’t have their papers? their papers weren’t in order?
He says excuses and she says reasons.
And so let there be excuses and reasons.
And there were, if belated.
Misses Singer strokes her husband’s scar as if to calm him. But what she calls a scar he knows is his mouth.
Late because they’re stuck in one exilic fantasy or another; late because the adventure of ingathering doesn’t seem all on the up and up; late because they’re owed payments, and you’re goddamned right they’re going to collect . . . what’s yours? I’m just waiting for this one deal of a lifetime to come through, and, when it does, God! the moment it does, you’d better believe I’m out of here . . .
Singer stops, stoops to pick up a shoe, sized wide, fallen from his withered foot last step.
Nu, it’s been like this ever since he was born, and those long, hard years have all been as yesterday’s toll: the bridge crossing, the bottomless price of a boat full with holes, an aeroplane cast down from heaven, betrayed of its wings. And it’s not as if he hasn’t crawled his end of the bargain: wriggling ever forward from garden to grave, he’s trying, just ask him; if he hadn’t married so well, he’d have to gnaw down a branch for a cane. And then what: you pray for a splinter, you get a tree in return, from whose flesh is made paper and from whose fruit is sucked ink, both of which collaborate in God’s writing of Laws whose words and even the letters of which bless you beholden to meaning; and so we receive knowledge, such as the following, and the preceding, and this: in seeking only to stay upright, you fall, are banished then cursed and reviled, condemned to wander a continent you don’t even know where you’re going, only when you’re expected, which is every Friday at sundown though your calendars were never coordinated and what you always thought had been west was really only a left turn taken with your back to the north, in haste and with little sleep, then upon your forehead, the development of a worrying mark.
A meal after Shacharit, which is the prayer of the morning, praising God Who made the light only by saying it illuminating, also, our own saying of thanks to Him for not making us unto them—the animals, women, or sick; for not yet giving us over to the darkness of death—shadows that have no souls for which to pray if even they could, as they lack both voices and hearts, shuffle their bloated, crapulous ways into shul: Unaffiliated, jingjangling keys—there couldn’t be! that many doors . . . goyim nameless faceless nearly formless, quiet massing hulks emerged out of dim wet here to make a living that’s more a dying. It’s strange, no one understands: they’re here to help, not destroy. Be calm. One sweeps up; another sweeps the seats for articles and personal effects left behind, by night. Yet another stacks books on the almemar, shoves them, balled up crumpled wet, into pew pockets, lays them out on seats swept toward the rear, nosebleed territory from which the Shammes groans in with an enormous what hath God wrought iron key, looped on a rope around his waist, hanging low under his gut, swinging with his stride—which is as long and wide as the last night he’ll spend here, free, unconcerned.
Hours later when hours were still hours as restful and lit as all Sabbath’s day, not the binding celestials of numeral and ordinal, the narrow gauge of comet trains, stardeadline, failing, falling, the tickers of arrival and departure and arrival, diurnal again—the clock centerpieces upon our timetables that not only remind us when to partake but are, simultaneously, the only sustenance left—the Affiliated muster, assemble outside . . . soon, there’s a congregation beyond: nondenominational, because what does observance mean anyway, irreligious maybe even, or all of them heaped together, thrown atop the burning pile, who knows, with the languages who can tell? Their bloods are their tickets, purchased at a steep price or a long song much in advance. Presence by the pint. They lineup two-by-two, two of each kind, husband and wife. They’ve restedup, washedup, dressedup; they’ve reported for showers and were shorn. There’s last summer’s rose attar, perfume stagnant in air—or it’s smoke, strangely sweet . . .
Menschs bow down by the curb, bow at the knees and cast fingers, fish around in last regime’s grates and late afternoon’s puddles for anything that’s not yet blown away: loose pages, blots of blatt, daf stains, yellowed newspapers the print of which’s run off to tomorrow with yesterday’s wife, scraps of rag, parchment or is it just skin, God, it’s skin. As a handful of the oldest menschs bow, they fall, are then helped back to their feet by menschs only slightly younger, each of them by another younger by just a wink or a wrinkle, they’re righted, and so now they’re ten altogether, which makes us a minyan. Runoff is wrung out from these yarmulkes, mud knuckled away with spit. The menschs gather these scraps, spread them on glassy bald skulls with thumb’s knife, against the gusts at the doorway, as if they didn’t have these frags and parches, corking it All down, their heads would spill out to the sky. And its vault. Never forget the vault. Windily, they kiss at the jamb, which is marked. An Unaffiliated at the door hands out books, programs inside, both also pressed into yarmulkes.
Yellow over red to brown over black if I’m squinting it right, I don’t have my glasses on me just now, comes to west through the windows. Then, Let there be light, and there is light and if not good, then so-so—eh, though you might prefer feh. It’s not theirs, though: insight is forbidden to the assembled, at least here, and what they seek in their own homes, hosting ruin just past the horizon, and on their own time, which is almost up, is absolutely none of our business. Two lights becoming one becoming two: the Shammes has lit candles, flame, but the fire’s outside. The stainedglass remains dark. The floor’s a mess: remnants of flowing tracery, shards of leaded panes from the windows lancet and rose, long replaced or walled up due to heating costs; pews’ rubble heaped to the side, seating’s splinters, scrapped immature limbs—for use in stoking the furnace.
They’re still late—it’s a long walk and in these shoes . . .
Those who aren’t late yet they go some to the left some to the right and up the stairs, to the balcony there: the cheap seats, the women, forgive; some have forgotten though they’re forgiven, reminded again. Entering, the audience is shaking hands; they hug, kiss, and make inquiries with the hands they’re not shaking. Shoes echo off stone. Sweeping suits up in their hands, gathering skirts and slacks they sit, Phfoy. Elders should sit first, but the kinder these days threw respect to the dogs, a distant barking the night through. Cushions, where there are cushions, in the first few rows, wheeze out a measure of dust. Coughs and sneezes ensue, allergies. Some sit on benches, others on seats along the wall, at shtenders, a nod to the old traditionalists: a grip on the hat’s brim, a little bow, the upright stooping to become the fallen in greeting, left wordless while the dialect’s still being decided. Everyone’s pooped, the day’s pooped . . . I yi yi and all that kitsch, it once was. A few sit in pews, they appear ashamed, remote; there are foldingchairs way in the back. The room’s filling up; there aren’t enough seats, never are, no room, no space, no air: some stand rocking for warmth as if they’re their own mothers; others sit on headstones hauled desecrated from the cemetery beyond; there’re a few pieces of remaindered furniture outside, too, holy borax that’s rental on special, on remnants of sample carpeting they sit anywhere they can, on frayed cushions over loose currencies, sagging under weight, on a sofa with corneal slipcover making piecework flatulence when you go to give up your seat to someone with more hope, or is it less luck, I don’t know—to make way for others, people standing on people pouring in through the smashed in shattered out windows slicing their guts open on jagged edges of glass then falling their ways in, intestinal ladders and no, no angels registered, not tonight . . . though if not now, if you’re such a Hillel, then when—then never: widows and orphans emerging from drafts of pure nothingness and of the absence of pure nothingness, which is just the proof of pure nothingness, yadda; they lean against the walls, crouch in neighboring alleys—with the door left open a crack.
Womenfolk above, the menschs below—the women can’t complain: it’s all ritual, no one’s fault, merely a gesture to what, who remembers; the women disappearing behind the mechitza, then peeking out, disappearing again. Curtains, bodying presences—is that the one I’m in love with? her sister? maybe her mother?
How can the room hold so many, their light—so fresh, so clean, such blushing about the face? Virginal, their apples intact, if desperately ripe. For the purposes of swallowing them the shul seems to expand, a snake’s mouth, releasing an inky venom decreeing the digestion of a millennium, slower. The Fire Marshal Who art in Heaven has bestowedeth upon them His blessings of numinous capacities and maximal occupancies, illimitably, which means nevermore up for renewal . . . a great oven, heating.
Authorities up on High have dictated All.
A group huddling past the river of three names and of no name, done feeding the waters, done watering them, and so just in time to make the first seating’s lights: they’re rushing in, they’re dripping, taking the steps down to humble, supplication doesn’t matter if meant as it’s imposed from above—this ducking through the portal so that their prayers might rise up from the depths; and, too, so that they don’t smack their heads that’s how low.
Psalm 130, if you know it. An arch.
They’re entering their Father’s House—but is their Father home? Anyone, anyone?
You were expecting what besides miserly decoration, impoverished, no humanity, just faceless lions and onewinged birds, frozen midroar and half tweeting. Above the ark, where the scrolls are kept, where no scrolls will be kept anymore—a tympanum, a woodwork canopy peeling paint and blue mold; deepplanted vaunt, hardened bounty amidst carved drapery, earthen vines strangling eternity, then above, only ribbing. Menschs on the lowest level, their wives and daughters higher, upon the balcony then on balconies decorated in rock flowers and jewels, who knows how many of them on up to the stone seat of the moon, as if one half of the Decalogue, the cleaved five commandments, and who can sneak a look? or else they’re kept to the side, or toward the rear, the women, nearest the western wall, the separating grillwork a veil of metal, an armor of plaits . . . the menschs keep turning, keep coming up with prayerless occasions to turn their eyes upward, behind. We’re inattentive, weekly; resentful, daily; at all times our souls unprepared—beginning there at the ceiling, its crown, an ornamental rib intended to forsake the vault of a cross. An extra, whether left from Creation or a predating build. An almemar parts the room, though later in the show the staging will remove itself to the eastern wall, the pulpit: another migration, yet another orientation, and so which way to face, though the movements are known, felt instinctually—are up and down and back and forth, in and out and this and that and what where, only now.
Everything known better days. The worn steps up to the proscenium’s ark, arching at the height of the street once again: their cups covered over in dissolute pillows, stuffed with who wants to think. Just inside the vestibule, a lavabo for the washing of hands before prayer’s suffered drought. Those without prayerbooks are to read the prayers that have been written on the walls in a hand unwashed. A hand impure, in that it’s withheld.
At that proscenium, arkways, the House Manager, resident schlockmeister extraordinaire, an obese mensch shvitzing nerves in this freeze, smokes a frond rolled in loose page, fitted into a holder hollowed out from his humerus; he taps ash to the floor, lines of ash indicating staging. All has been blocked since eternity. The pit’s just below; the baldspot on the Conductor’s head blinding the balcony: he’s bent over his score, baton in one nostril out the other, scribbling his cues in fanatical charcoal, circling rests and only the rests. Tacit. His tuxedo’s motheaten, his cummerbund an enormous expropriated armband. A clarinet running scales up from the chalumeau, embouchure cracked, his reed a sliver of skull; a fiddler, a tallskinny mensch to the clarinet’s shortfat, fiddling with the tuner on his tailpiece: if he’s sharp he’s sharp, if he’s flat he’s flat, it’s the thought that counts, condemns; an organist, pulling out all the stops, warming up the webbed pipes; the Copyist rushes in, vaults over the rail, trips over stands, slipslides in spitvalve discharge, hands out parts barely dry, just finished as all work—not just that of Creation but of copying, too—must be barred from the sunset: dusk’s red ink smeared, ink that actually ran out yesterday and is now only blood worried with spit; the Prompter wiping his forehead with the House Manager’s noserag, then numbering cue cards with a quill so sharp his cousin could perform morally impossible ocular surgery with it—a procedure ensuring prophetic hindsight, would help. The House Manager, lapels at his ears, flicking the switch to the Applause sign, ON and OFF then ON again, as onstage, the Emcee the rabbi pops Polyn’s P’s into the microphone smuggled in tonight only.
Testing . . .
Testing . . .
One—Two—Three . . .
Is this thing on?
. . .
Good evening, ladies & gentlemen . . . and feedback attends
Try the veal!
. . .
the fivethirty show’s exactly the same as the threethirty show—and thanks folks, I’ll be here all week . . .

Solar Anus
It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne's thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.
But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.
Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.
Gold, water, the equator, or crime can each be put forward as the principle of things.
And if the origin of things is not like the ground of the planet that seems to be the base, but like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile center, then a car a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle.
The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive's wheels and pistons.
These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.
Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus.
It is the mechanical combination or transformation of these movements that the alchemists sought as the philosopher's stone.
It is through the use of this magically valued combination that one can determine the present position of men in the midst of the elements.
An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality.
An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love.
A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love.
A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.
In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.
Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.
Love or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager's vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments.
They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.
The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass.
I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens.
It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.
The planetary systems that turn in space like rapid disks, and whose centers also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return it, completing their rotation.
Movement is a figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another.
But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory.
A man gets up as brusquely as a specter in a coffin and falls in the same way.
He gets up a few hours later and then he falls again, and the same thing happens every day; this great coitus with the celestial atmosphere is regulated by the terrestrial rotation around the sun.
Thus even though terrestrial life moves to the rhythm of this rotation, the image of this movement is not turning earth, but the male shaft penetrating the female and almost entirely emerging, in order to reenter.
Love and life appear to be separate only because everything on earth is broken apart by vibrations of various amplitudes and durations.
However, there are no vibrations that are not conjugated with a continuous circular movement; in the same way, a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis.
Beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them.
Plants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of the ground.
Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun.
The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or uprooted. Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form.
But their polymorphous coitus is a function of uniform terrestrial rotation.
The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.
But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element. The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.
The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant.
Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from salt water.
The sea, then, has played the role of the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis.
The sea continuously jerks off.
Solid elements, contained and brewed in water animated by erotic movement, shoot out in the form of flying fish.
The erection and the sun scandalize, in the same way as the cadaver and the darkness of cellars.
Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to other animals, necessarily avert their eyes.
Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions.
When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene.
It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.
For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are expressed only by the JESUVE.
The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus.
Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails.
Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere.
In fact, the erotic movements of the ground are not fertile like those of the water, but they are far more rapid.
The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy, and everything collapses on its surface.
The Jesuve is thus the image of an erotic movement that burglarizes the ideas contained in the mind, giving them the force a scandalous eruption.
This eruptive force accumulates in those who are necessarily situated below.
Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.
The erotic revolutionary and volcanic deflagrations antagonize the heavens.
As in the case of violent love, they take place beyond the constraints of fecundity.
In opposition to celestial fertility there are terrestrial disasters, the image of terrestrial love without condition, erection without escape and without rule, scandal, and terror.
Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.
I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.
The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.
The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.
you use the word ‘beautiful’ to describe things
and i derive meaning by connecting things in my brain with other things in my brain
it feels important to read ~6 or 7 non-fiction books per year
about like, the atrocities of power or man or world war two or something,
in order to have a more encompassing range of things in your brain
to connect with other things in your brain
you think i am ugly because of something someone has taught you
i feel worried and anxious and depressed because of something
in my brain connecting with something else in my brain,
which is not my brain, but is chunks of
your brain, adolf hitler’s brain, gene simmon’s brain, albert einsteins brain,
et. al.
I’m a poet not a
motivational speaker
someone told me I can’t
hate death without
hating life they’re so full of shit!
I’m hating death
looking for you between the microscope and telescope
WAKE UP AND UPDATE YOUR BLOG DAMMIT!
roommates are monsters
a graveyard’s relaxing
a dad is demented
the police are pretentious
my baby’s a coward he’s stupid he’s drunk his ego is tearing his teeth are all yellow he’s arrogant offensive he’s limp-dicked and gun-shy he looks like he’s homeless he’s manic unwilling he’s on drugs he’s uptight he eats from the garbage he fucks like a nun he’s nervous he’s anxious he’s rude and impervious he can’t dress for shit he won’t hop a turnstile he’s religious and whining he’s high and he’s dealing he’s fat and he’s failing he’s ugly and cocky and lustful he’s awful

these girls, some of them are writing poetry in their head full-time
in the sun and the shade
in little groups on the grass
having just eaten lunch
in a blissful between-class state
some are wrestling in the grass
the only men are two older ones, eating lunch in grey suits
curators of the Experiment
an armless girl moseys on by
here is a safe place for an armless girl, her parents said to another
these Smith girls are filled with atoms
being around each other is like bananas being around bananas
before i left
i envisioned myself setting fire to your collection of self-help books
knowing your mother bought them for you made me feel slightly
more destructive
i also envisioned myself
punching through your drunken squinty eyes
and hitting with my fist your confused and unexplainable neuroses
leaving disorganized cracks in your psyche that i hoped you'd be
able to see through
and all gods only in black & white, and the two of us with the luxury of fading away the walls there thick with blood, the air heavy with ghosts rain against the windows 35 degrees shades of grey laid on top of shades of grey and it’s not love, it’s fucking, and the bruises are as meaningless as you’d expect said listen to this and unbuttoned her shirt said look and then pushed her hand in through her pale flesh pulled out someone else’s child a miracle, but i refused to applaud
I WANT A LIFE FILLED WITH EXPIRATION DATES
"this friendship will expire 06-18-2009"
"this relationship will expire 05-23-2008"
"this existence will expire 08-19-1987"
"this orange juice will expire 01-31-2010"
actually i want a life void of expiration dates
because we always finish the orange juice
and i always manage to fuck up all things
before the expiration date, anyway

Philip, he wanted to shoot right for the head. He wanted to split that deer’s face or splatter it. Or otherwise deface that deer in the most literal and irreversible way. Philip didn’t give a damn about trophies or mounting any ten-pointer. He wanted the small proud center of that head to accelerate evenly across a whole arc of sky and forest, to settle or rain onto that tawny strong back.
Andrew wanted to stuff and mount and look deeply into deep marble replacement-eyes. He said, “Shoot him right in his heart!” He thought, what a funny thing to have said! If we own this dead animal, it will be our hart. We will have shot our own heart. Our hart’s heart! “Shoot him right in my future heart!”
They were covered proper with deer urine and dark green blotches. The stag looked at them straight on like the logo for the Hartford Group. The stag knew what was up; those boys were firing at will. This was quite a bachelor party.
You came over in red high tops from a yard sale and your old bandana with a Rubbermaid trunk of things for me to keep. Your Junior Legion plaque. Records from the bank you worked at one summer, but you never worked at a bank. You worked in a furniture factory and a Bible software company. There were toy baseball bats that I thought I might let my son play with but would maybe keep wrapped forever, a baseball with funny faces, binders from Seminary and records. “Have you heard any news of any kind?” I asked, afraid of why you were doing this. “I haven’t heard,” you said and I tried to remember how I felt when you were given back to us. I don’t remember what I said when I found out, like I’d missed the news but still knew it, like I coveted the chance I must have had to jump and yell and strip and beat my chest. I should have bruises there like butterflies, their brown shadow wings spreading from my sternum. My knuckles would be burger meat, my lungs would break my ribs, my throat would cut and chafe on the impossible proclamation, would scab and petrify, vanity, I’d bleed the truth out in a dribble. If you hadn’t really died, once, if I found out they had been mistaken, a clerical error, even a resurrection. What they can do with medicine, now. But I don’t remember.
I think you better leave me with the trunk, too, so I have a place to keep this all just how it is, you know, and I don’t say just in case because just in case is doubt and doubt kills t-cells, eats your organs. You have been so positive. You smile at everything you show me. “I probably shouldn’t have taken these,” you say about the jump drives from the bank that are branded with Jerry Dior’s batsman. “They might be interesting.”
I wonder if you were lucid all those mornings you slept through class, if you were conjugating Greek declensions, parsing Hebrew in your dreams. I wonder if you parse me now, if first and second person are constructs of the living. If your Thou to my I is only feltboard Jesus.
I understood that you were private, but I understand now, after our visit is consumed by things I don’t sleep through — my wife calling after church to wake me up for lunch, my son in the background saying “Hallelujah, Daddy!” — why you didn’t want a funeral. You couldn’t say goodbye and wouldn’t let me, either. And so when you visit in the morning, as often as the intervals in which I’d always seen you, we don’t have to talk about how we miss each other, I don’t have to ask if the end hurts or know how scared you were to go. The night is hypothetical and it seems we both are only sleeping.
1. We buried our tambourines into the earth and filled our mouths with ash. After that we only spoke in anvils. Our garden was filled with half-submerged steel rising from the dark soft soil. We decided to knit a giant quilt to cover the mass grave. We would not speak or sing or say anything. We would only fasten the quilt onto the earth. We would drive stakes through the fabric. We began to dig but our holes only filled up with blood.
2. The Lord had granted us victory and we moved up from the grass and foam dancing. We broke with flute and sacrifice. We made the wreath to present before the Lord; dancing and vines pulled through our hair, strings tied around our wrists. But the wrath of the Lord burned toward us and toward our sacrifice for it was not worthy. And the earth moaned and opened wide to swallow our drums.
3. Abraham pulled up from the rocks the water on which we stand. There were flaming swords keeping us from the garden and the serpents came to strike our heels. We said to Abraham, You must make us suffer. You must make us pay. After 40 days and 40 nights a dove came and spoke to us of dreams and asteroids. We were baptized by a flood and when we came up from the ground, our beards were laced with stones.
5. When I saw the limp swan falling through the sky I remembered the beautiful young woman at the oasis who stayed up all night at the water's edge. I remembered how all the neon passed behind her face and behind her neck. I remembered how we all waited hungry for morning and churning with dirt.
take me with water
and i will dissolve
travel through
your body
brushing
your organs
with my liquid
eyelashes
you will piss me out in the shower
i will become human
you will wash me clean
as i tell you
with big eyes
the things i had seen
I look at the clock
I put on a Simon & Garfunkel record
I turn down the volume
I get undressed in the dark
I get into bed
I write this poem
I go to sleep
You are nowhere near me
you use the word ‘beautiful’ to describe things
and i derive meaning by connecting things in my brain with other things in my brain
it feels important to read ~6 or 7 non-fiction books per year
about like, the atrocities of power or man or world war two or something,
in order to have a more encompassing range of things in your brain
to connect with other things in your brain
you think i am ugly because of something someone has taught you
i feel worried and anxious and depressed because of something
in my brain connecting with something else in my brain,
which is not my brain, but is chunks of
your brain, adolf hitler’s brain, gene simmon’s brain, albert einsteins brain,
et. al.
while listening to a song by the mountain goats today, i felt
overcome with ‘beauty’ and i felt a tear on my face
doing schoolwork can relieve depression and
today i felt less lonely because of
the square root of two ‘over’ two
being the sin of the radian
pi ‘over’ four
being able to dominate abstract mathematical hierarchies gives purpose to my life
what am i doing
drinking an iced soy latte
It had been a precise fall, quick and sharp, as a nail slipped into wood, and the someone who had fallen had stood back up, awkward and disoriented in such a situation, and then, just as quickly, had fallen back down, the forehead first, onto an oak tree next to the sidewalk where the someone had been walking.
For a moment it had sounded like carpentry outside.
Some of the someones who lived in a house close to where the someone had fallen had seen the someone fall and were thinking about taking action.
“Someone has fallen,” someone said, looking out the blinds of a window, “someone has fallen and they are not standing back up.” Some-other-ones shrugged as the someone at the blinds turned towards them. The someone at the blinds stood still then walked into the kitchen to make a sandwich.
Someone with a bedroom facing the space where the someone who had fallen had fallen looked down from the bedroom window and started counting the time it took for some-other-one to help the someone who had fallen. Nothing for twenty-five minutes. Then forty-five. The someone with the bedroom put on some music and lay down for a little while.
A few some-other-ones walked over the someone who had fallen, grazing the someone who had fallen’s pant leg as they looked at a text message on a cell phone screen.
“Someone else is so fucked,” one of them said, pointing at the screen and snickering.
Eventually, the someone with the bedroom facing the oak tree forgot about the someone who had fallen and about the possibility of some-other-one helping the someone who had fallen and about the day’s events, about the color of things, about the casual retreats from meaning that stung, however dully, at one and would not fade, and closed their eyes in an attempt to sleep.
As the someone with the bedroom attempted sleep, the someone’s thoughts ran through images from the day, like a slideshow, a recap of another game that had been played and finished.
One of the last images was of the someone who had fallen’s body, which looked like it had tried hugging the oak tree and had failed or missed and now lay at the oak tree’s base sprawled out, as some skin that had been shed, some container tossed down like litter.
After a short while of being asleep, the someone with the bedroom was awoken by the wave of a siren and a flood of light coming in through the blinds of the bedroom window.
The someone with the bedroom stood up and looked through the blinds of the window at the street below. There was the ambulance now, blinking against the house that the someone with the bedroom lived in, the colors of emergency, red and yellow-white, panting against everything within close enough distance. The someone with the bedroom stood up and put on a coat.
The someone with the bedroom walked outside and stood close to the edge of the front porch, left hand clutching the black barrier of it, squinting towards the road, which now seemed an incalculable distance away.
Turning from the road, the someone with the bedroom studied a brick that made the house that the someone with the bedroom and some-other-ones lived in able to stand, suddenly interested in how the three-story house just stood there like it did.
How easy it was to forget simple things, structural information, like this.
The someone with the bedroom turned again towards the ambulance, trying to locate the someone who had fallen through the beating of light.
A some-other-one, who had come in the ambulance, helped the someone who had fallen up off of the ground and then looked at the someone with the bedroom while pointing at the someone who had fallen’s head.
The some-other-one who had come with the ambulance turned the someone who had fallen’s body toward the someone with the bedroom and the someone with the bedroom shrugged towards it. The someone who had fallen’s head seemed like it had been dented. A stretcher was produced and the someone who had fallen was strapped into it and hurried into the back of the ambulance. The doors closed and the exhaust let out a sigh.
The ambulance drove off, a police car magnetized close behind. The someone with the bedroom stood there for a moment staring at the space where the someone who had fallen had just been. It seemed odd that the someone who had fallen was gone now.
The wind blew. There was blood and what seemed like skin on the oak tree and part of the sidewalk.
* * *
Later, when telling the story of the someone who had fallen to a friend or neighbor or a passerby who, perhaps, wanted to know if anything exciting had happened recently, or remembered hearing an ambulance the other night, or noticed the blood on the oak tree, the someone with the bedroom would start by saying Someone fell.
Sometimes, depending on who the someone with the bedroom was telling the story to, the someone with the bedroom would elaborate and describe the experience with more adjectives and nouns, but most of the time the someone listening was someone who the someone with the bedroom did not wish to talk with for more than a short moment in time, and the someone with the bedroom would just leave it there like that: Someone fell.
Few would argue. Rape of children is the crime beyond crime. It’s the terminus where liberalism ends. It’s incomprehensible. Rob, Keeble’s hardened boss, points out that ‘a significant part of our society is sexually attracted to children’ - and we have no idea why. Some people who abuse kids have been abused themselves but the research is inconclusive and, as the DI goes on to say, the easy cycle of violence theory is an insult to ‘countless adult survivors of abuse who’d rather die than see a child suffer as they did.’
The Kidsgrove mobs gave the impression that the public will kill anyone who is accused of child rape. In fact, they are more likely to defend the accused with gusto. Paedophiles often have families, careers, clean CRBs. They are ’the surrogate uncle who offers to babysit without charge, the community worker who devotes an extraordinary amount of time to kids’ projects, the Boy Scout leader, teachers, doctors, all of these people are close to us and we instinctively trust them. They go the extra mile; they pick litter, visit the elderly, take part in fundraising and give generously to charities. Their reputation is second to none.’ As Keeble explains, people have invested so much trust in the criminal that they simply cannot believe his crimes. We are not - or not entirely - dealing with loners in parks.
Most victims will know their abusers and most abuse will take place within the family home.
Do you read upside down on the couch with your feet in the air and chocolate milk there by your side? Can you say the Czech alphabet backwards while juggling eggs over a thirty story balcony? Have you ever hotwired a car in downtown Berlin with a safety pin, a screwdriver, and a metal emory board, with the heat encroaching? Are you the sort of person who folds while holding a royal flush just to give the other person a win? Would you ever purposefully misappropriate syntax? Would you orchestrate everything down to the color of the dishtowels, teacups, and magnets? Have you ever not paid your taxes? Do you ever obsess over numbers? Ever set your alarm clock to an even number? What kind of deodorant do you wear? Is it masculine? Can you name a city in France you haven’t been? Are there places in the north of Spain that you have never seen? Have you ever planted a tree? Have you ever forgotten a friend’s birthday? Ever been caught in a lie and forgot what version of the truth you previously spilled? Have you ever raced across the countryside on a horse in complete rhythm? Ever challenged an anteater to a duel? Ever made your loved one go running? Ever parked on the wrong side of the road? When was the last time you bought a lottery ticket? Watched television? Bought clothes from a thrift store, a shopping mall, or on eBay? Would you even recognize the secret password when it mattered most? Would you leave town? Would you try to dig a tunnel to Japan?
DD: Was drinking and self-destruction necessary for you to be able to express yourself as an artist?
Billy Childish: Definitely, and even more so to stop me from killing myself. I found alcohol to be a useful crutch that helped me continue and be here, and it’s important to be here as much as you can, because it’s a great gift to be born as a human and it’s a shame to blow it. Luckily, I couldn’t carry on with the drinking and I had to find other ways of dealing with the pain and the suffering that was subdued by the alcohol, and that’s an ongoing journey. I often say to young people who are interested in writing or art – who seem to think that suffering and acting like an asshole are mandatory – that there is no problem with finding out you are in the shit, but once you realise you are in it you want to get out of it as fast as possible. There is no reason to embroil yourself in this romance of suffering.
DD: You have written a lot of manifestos, what is their purpose?

Billy Childish: Writing manifestos and forming groups is a way of playing a game, and playing is very important because it gives us a lightness of touch in all this difficulty. I pretend to be painter, for example, and when you pretend to be something the more you actually are that thing. It’s a way of being in things and being free of them at the same time. To engage in the world in playful way is to really honour the fleeting nature of being and existence.
DD: You new works feel lighter in a sense. When you wrote Notebooks Of A Naked Youth, for example, you were certainly exploring some of the darker aspects of the human psyche...
Billy Childish: There is something very absurd about being alive and something very dark and something very funny. Someone once said to me that they had worked out how I wrote. They said that I wrote until it made me laugh. I don’t mean in cheerful way, but just in the way that I keep writing until I find it absurd enough for me to move on. If I encounter certain things in my work it’s because they are what comes up. If I go to the fridge and pull out some eggs, some of them might be rotten and some of them might make a soufflé. Maybe I used a few rotten eggs now and then but I’m hoping to get hold of a batch of happy free-range eggs one of these days...
DD: So your work has been an extended cathartic act that has made you feel more comfortable with being human?
Billy Childish: That would be the nice answer but the problem is that it always goes in spirals and sometimes it can still feel as difficult as it always did. I presume that life on Earth is a spiritual journey, and I am just trying to engage in it in an open and real way. It is a journey that’s expansive, like an island that is getting bigger – you still have all the rotten shit in one corner but there is a new headland in view that is a bit cleaner with a bit more fresh air on it. What I am trying to do is make more options of experience, although sometimes you spiral back down into some old ones, which aren’t too pleasant. It’s almost like you can aspire towards something but it’s a very strange game to play, because wishing to be somewhere else is really negative. When you want it better or different you get the escapist society we live within, which causes more dirt and more misery. I think our responsibility is really to each other, and the way that is met is by taking the journey seriously, but also seeing the journey as being a big joke, so that you can have this lightness in all the difficulty as well. Understanding the joke is being able to deal with even the heaviest or darkest thing with ease and a lightness of touch, and maybe art can help us do that, although I do think art gets overrated...
DD: I suppose peace of mind is always elusive...
Billy Childish: It’s always elusive and it should always be elusive. Everything is shared and everything is discovered and unmasked, not learned. Recognising the world is what growing is, and recognising truth is what growing is. There is no teaching as such. When you find out any great truth, you think, “I already knew that!’ It’s the same if you read a great book, you sometimes think, ‘I should have written this... I think I will!’ That’s what great art and music does – you encounter it and you think, ‘I should have done this... and I will!’
The earth drank while it was pregnant with me.
*
I bought some sidewalk chalk and then I drew a pretty girl on the
street and I fell asleep next to her facing her so I’d be the first
thing she saw when she woke up, like I was important.
I can’t wait to touch your morning face, the one that for three
seconds thinks I am something great.

Every time I come home I stand in the doorway and say, "It's time for a monster to eat me now." Then it does.
When I go to bed and pull the covers open, I say, "It's time for a monster to eat me now." Then it does.
Every time I get out of bed I say, "It's time for a monster to eat me now." Then it does.
Every time I leave my home, I say, "It's time for a monster to eat me now." Then it does.

I am walking around Wrigleyville feeling like a piece of shit.
There are a lot of people out.
I pass an older homeless man and he is dressed a lot like me.
I want to stop him and say, “So I make it passed 30 then?”
He walks by me.
I don’t make eye contact with any girls because I don’t want to ruin their night.
I make eyecontact with some guys because I want them to feel small.
At a stoplight, I wait to cross and there are two guys next to me.
I imagine myself as them, standing next to a dipshit with an ugly face.
Later on, will one say to the other, “Hey did you see that asshole at the stoplight, why does he live on the same earth as us.”
At the stoplight I can hear Christmas music coming out of someone’s car.
Will I get run over tonight.
I always think about getting randomly hurt and how awesome it would be to just be immediately changed and removed from my situation.
When the stoplight tells us to cross I wait to take a step and the men walk away, now knowing that in infinite space, there is a pure negative shaped exactly like me with no intentions of making friends.
There is ice on the sidewalk.
Will I fall.
If I fell, and just stayed there, would someone eventually help me.
Would a policeman walk by and say, “Stay there.”
I don’t know where I am walking.
There are a lot of bars and people yelling.
I walk by a group of people standing outside a bar and someone almost bumps into me.
I imagine myself capable of pulling this person apart with my hands, just pulling pieces of face and neck off.
I walk by them and smell perfume and I am no different.
I concentrate on my heartbeat and worry it is not going to stop ever.
I worry that I will have a heartattack and it will hurt.
I walk past an outdoor icerink and there are people skating.
I reassess being a piece of shit and decide instead I am a shitstreak.
I am the area the shit passes over and leaves behind part of itself.
I hear my cat meowing and it sounds like he is in my coat somewhere.
He is not there.
I see a billboard with a child on it, all her hair gone.
It is for cancer research.
I feel bad about people with cancer.
I think to myself that if I discovered I had cancer I would immediately say the word, “phew”
I see the word “phew” in my head in big block letters.
It seems like everyone I see has a haircut.
I see a bookstore.
I think that maybe I have read for people there before.
Will they remember me there.
They will not.
I realize it is not the same bookstore.
I go into the bookstore.
Inside the bookstore there is a girl walking around.
I wonder if she is thinking about having sex with me.
Am I standing naked before her in her thoughts.
What do I look like to her.
Do I have coins taped to my stomach.
Why would I have coins taped to my stomach.
I check my stomach with my hand and there is nothing there but some hair.
I say nothing to the girl.
I buy an inexpensive book by Karl Jaspers and leave the store.
I act like I am looking at something as I leave the store and I don’t know why.
There is an ad for clothing on the building outside.
I think, “so what.”
I see a candybar wrapper on the ground.
I think, “so what.”
I walk in the same direction as before.
I think about the moment of my birth.
I imagine my mom seeing me come out and then saying, “Can we try this over.”
I imagine myself looking at her and saying the same thing.
I make a face by clamping my teeth together to keep from crying.
I only cry like once a year.
Walking, I realize everything I worry about is nothing compared to the main worry I have which never has a object.
I realize there is nothing to worry about without first wanting to be alive a certain way.
It occurs to me I might never laugh again.
I imagine a man coming out of an alley and stabbing me a number of times until I die.
I see him being given a wreath and a box of candy by the mayor of Chicago at some kind of ceremony for killing me.
I pass more people.
I feel like my eyes look really wild.
There is a cop wagon parked on the street and two cops are inside.
I barely resist an urge to jump and scream at the window, and resisting the urge I feel something like a rush of energy in my heart area.
I contemplate walking to Lake Michigan and taking my clothes off and getting in until I die.
I don’t think that would be a bad way to die.
There are usually a lot of ducks or geese by lake Michigan and I think it would be nice to slowly lose consciousness while they stared at me.
I think about people I used to know and I wonder if they are thinking about me.
I see myself before all the people I used to know, them forming a line.
I see myself greeting them each, one by one, and saying, “I really am a good person.”
I see Wrigley park and I look at the l/e/d sign out front and imagine it reading, “nobody likes you and you don’t have a home, people just tolerate you.”
for some reason I then imagine an old newbroadcaster in front of a big microphone going, “this just in, nobody likes you, they just tolerate you.”
I pass by a girl and I think about an agent from new york who contacted me about my writing.
She stopped contacting me after I sent her THE SELF ESTEEM HOLOCAUST COMES HOME
I think that maybe the girl I just passed is the agent.
Maybe I should ask her to be my agent and to pay me in sugar.
I feel hunger.
A weird noise happens in my stomach and I feel bad.
I consider starving to death on purpose.
Starving to death on purpose seems awesome to do in North America.
It would be something that people would remember.
I would be remembered as the man who purposely starved to death in North America.
I pass by a liquor store and go inside and ask a man if they sell pens.
He is confused.
Then I make a motion with my hand like I am writing and I say, “pens, pencils.”
He says no.
I walk more and come to a 7-11.
I go inside and ask the man if they have pens or pencils.
He says some things I don’t understand and points to an aisle.
I go to walk down an aisle and he yells at me and motions a different way.
There are a lot of people at the register and he keeps yelling at me to go different ways.
I smile for some reason and I feel awesome for three seconds.
I find the pencils.
There are people by the drink-area and one of them goes, “yeah the fucking juice is fucking awesome man it fucks you up.”
I take the pencil to the register and wait in line.
When the woman in front of me is paying, the man at the register holds up a thing of juice she is buying and he says, “go get another,” and then when the woman just stands there, he says it again, really angrily.
The woman goes and gets another and she says, “is it buy one get one.”
The man at the register says yes.
The woman just blankly did what an angry man working a register told her to do.
I pay for my pencil and he tells me to have a good night.
I walk nextdoor to the Subway restaurant and then when I see some people in there who were just in the 7-11 with me, I walk away and get food at a Mexican restaurant.
I order food and eat it, keeping my hoodie and coat on.
I get worried that a worker will walk up to me and say, “why don’t you take your coat off” and then I decide I would say, “I am undercover” if that happens.
It doesn’t happen.
I eat my food without looking up and I write all this down in the white space inside my Karl Jaspers book.
I walk home and think paranoid thoughts about how people are trying to fuck with me somehow and I haven’t figured it out yet.
This is all I got. If you are writing a novel stop. There is no drinking water left anywhere. We are getting by on hallucination. Today we found film of a naked woman in grass and developed one of the pictures. The woman looked better in negative. And when your phlegm hits me we will be connected and the planet will squeeze smaller like it is trying to hold itself and failing.
I abandoned my superego
At the gas station on a Tuesday night
On my way to buy a carton of milk
Growing progressively madder ever since
At home my lover and I conversed about the future
We nodded and packed for another time
Back in 1989, for the execution of a madman
O the news reporters had a field day the moment he died
We hoped for 1950 in New York or the like
To meet the benzo Beat men, but lost our way
Instead we ate literature for tea, as artists
Composing an opus we soon burnt
And I became another kind of mad
Corresponding with Jung in my sleep
Talking about metaphysics and life and the infinity thereof
Not understanding a word he said
But he understood my neurosis of the mirror girl
So, I smiled
And asked him if God could have a hand
In making the days longer
Or whether Freud could spare an analysis
But Father's couch looked rather dreary
Instead I foraged for female cut-outs
Dreaming of the Vivian Girls and weathercasts
Dear Mothra,
I am in America again. I feel really weird. This morning I was in a really bad mood, so I used my atomic breath to destroy several IKEA stores. The people were running and screaming and pointing up at me. Why do they do that anyway? They are just doing things that they have seen people do in movies. That's all they do. Assholes living in the movies. It's just one more thing which proves that destroying their world is the right thing to do. After a while I felt bad about destroying so many IKEA stores, so I destroyed a few MUJI stores. There were more Beamers and Lexuses in the MUJI parking lots so I felt better. All of the people were wearing black and pretending to be Japanese. I am worried about the American economy.

Dear Godzilla,
I am still in Japan, but thinking about flying across the ocean. Today when I signed on my FACEBOOK, I had one less friend. I felt really bad that I had no way of knowing who it was who deleted me and if I should feel bad about it or if it was just somebody I didn't even know was on my list. Humans keep inventing things to make us second-guess our existence and our karma. I think they are waging war on us again.
FACEBOOK is just a cleverly designed weapon.
So I went into destroy mode. I too destroyed several IKEA stores today. I thought that was funny when I read your email. But I hadn't destroyed any MUJI stores, so in the afternoon after reading your email I destroyed several MUJI stores also. They were near the ocean and the people were running and jumping in the ocean which I thought was funny. You know the Japanese. I used the gale force winds from my wings to knock down skycrapers and various annoyingly quirky towers also. I think I destroyed a Frank Gehry design. It was a piece of shit anyway.
I too am worried about the American economy. I am thinking of flying across the ocean. Did I already say that? Sorry, I'm sleepy. We could hang out and destroy things or try to destroy each other again. I realize I really should print out a list of everybody on my Friends list on FACEBOOK and that way the next time this happens I can just go down the checklist and find out who it was and possibly fly to their town and destroy it.
But why bother. Why bother with anything really?
honorificabilitudinitatibus (p.172)
his parboiled eyes (p. 137)
the young May moon she's beaming, love. (p.137)
They say they used to give pauper children soup to change to protestants in the time of the potato blight. (p. 148)
a warm shock of air heat of mustard hanched on Mr. Bloom's heart. (p.141)
safer to eat from his three hands. Tear it limb from limb. Second nature to him. Born with a silver knife in his mouth. That's witty, I think. Or no. Silver means born rich. Born with a knife. But the allusion is lost. (p.139)
a tiny coffin flashed by. In a hurry to bury. A mourning coach. Unmarried. Black for the married. Piebald for bachelors. Dun for a nun. (p. 79)
girl's face stained with dirt and tears, holding the woman's arm, looking up at her for a sign to cry. Fish's face, bloodless and livid. (p. 83)
bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it. (p.90)
Professor Machugh strode across the room and seized the cringing urchin by the collar as the others scampered out of the hall and down the steps. The issues rustled up in the draught, floated softly in the air blue scrawls and under the table came to earth. (p.106)
wonder what h was eating. Something galoptious. (p.139)
her stockings are loose over her ankles. I detest that: so tasteless. Those literary etherial people they are all. Dreaming, cloudy, symbolistic. Esthetes they are. I wouldn't be surprised if it was that kind of food you see produces the like waves of the brain the poetical. (p. 136)
the republicanism is the best form of government. That the language question should take precedence of the economic question. (p.134)
-where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering. (p.159)
That may be too, Stephen said. There is a saying of Goethe's which Mr Magee likes to quote:-Beware of what you wish for in your youth because you will get it in middle life. (p.161)
primrosevested (p.63)
rosalie (the coalquay whore) (p. 178)
I was hanging out and drinking mescal with my stepbrother Eric before he became paralyzed. He became paralyzed by smoking pot on an aircraft carrier and falling forty feet from a communications tower onto the flight deck.
But this was before all that. Now we were coming home from a Radiohead concert. I was so thrilled to see them live that I couldn’t control my momentum and lifted off the ground up into the sky. Not only that, but I had eagle-eye vision. I was hundreds of feet off the ground and could see Eric trudging along below without me. His mind was so preoccupied with the worm he had swallowed that he had not even noticed I was gone. I wanted to yell out, “Eric, look how high I am,” but feared this would induce me fall.
Flying just for the sake of myself wasn’t satisfying enough—I wanted somebody to verify it. So in the end I yelled out to him. And of course this made me fall. I didn’t blame Eric so much as my own self-consciousness. I fell at an alarming rate, even faster than everyday gravity. I was passing ordinary objects such as matchsticks and eggbeaters and anvils. I was propelled downward with such great force that I created a crater in the ground that was the exact shape of my body profile—just like in the cartoons Eric and I watched as kids, counting how many times the coyote died and arguing over whether it would constitute a death in real life.
I climbed out of the hole and told Eric that he had to try it. He was never one to cave in to peer pressure so I pushed him into the hole of my body profile. He wasn’t quite immortal like me and didn’t fit my shape. Not that he died or anything, but he didn’t get up right away and he was not happy with me for pushing him in my hole. He didn’t have crutches or a wheelchair yet but was acting like he needed them.
Then I remembered the objects that I had passed on the way down, and once I remembered and looked up, they came whistling through the air. The anvil hit Eric on the head and knocked him back in the hole. He shook it off and started to crawl out when the eggbeater hit him smack on the nose. That really pissed him off and he stopped talking to me, even though I argued that it had nothing to do with me. Then the friction from the raining matchsticks caused lightning with no thunder that rained like brimstone down on both of us.
Today, it rained. It's finished. The last rain before the drought. We have six months of rain and six months of sun. It's a desert. When it rains, it's a sea. We have boat houses with everything we need in them, nice boat houses. When it's raining, there are twice as many stars as when it's not raining. We call it a boat house because we live in it as well. We sleep there, we eat there. Drink! Drink! Drink! There's enough for everybody. Drink your fill. When the sun comes, there will be nothing to drink or eat. Perhaps some mushrooms but you can never be full on those things alone. Then, no matter how far we sailed, we would always return to the place where we started off so it appeared as if we had never been anywhere though we have traveled the seven seas and crossed extreme universes, we were at the start, home but homeless. Therefore, we have no nationality. We have no names or symbols. We are floating on water. We are dancing on wood. I caught as many fish as possible. Those I couldn't eat, I dried. Whenever I found a cactus, I would save it. Two sips a day. That would keep me alive for a few days. At sea, everything's free. In the desert, everything's expensive. Even a flower costs a penny. I never had that kind of money. I never needed more than I could eat or drink for I was never hungry. When it rained, I would collect as much water as possible so I could survive the drought. It's no easy task. I had to make a boat house strong and big enough to carry fish and water for half a year. Do you understand? Now, I'm tired and I want to sleep for three days straight. Excuse me. I have to go. Bye. Bye.
Atumn came with rains & the sea crept into the room beneath the mill.
It washed sobriety into the eyes of the Saints & Michael woke them all
with his plan:
WE ARE BLEEDING INTO THE BRICKS OF THIS TOWN. Concrete is a vice but we are Saints (Catherine coughed). Let us lead these few from here. Promised land, a holy town. There must be something. A guide will manifest, God wills it. We will lead these men from the clutches of the tide of evil, OF INDUSTRIAL CIVILISATON! We shall save them, salvation. They shall be Gods people, free & joyful. Let us promise them grass & trees, for these they shall have. They will be happy beyond the dreams that hands can claw. They will see clear glass as far as their eyes will care to look.

Our ancestors being significantly more functional than we are, were acutely aware of their predicament. They developed a number of ingenious practices and techniques in an attempt to treat the emerging symptoms of their neurodegenerative disease and slow its rate of progression. Through the insight of their minds alone they achieved a high science of consciousness now largely forgotten and dismissed as the mythological ramblings of our ‘primitive' forebears. They were faced with a condition so insidious it is difficult for us to imagine, symptoms include the inability to accurately perceive reality and a progressive blindness to the nature and severity of the condition itself. Ultimately their best efforts failed, though the relics of their treatments can offer a powerful insight into the specific nature of the condition when considered within a neurological framework.
The lights went out, there is no one home
From the most advanced consciousness system this side of the Milky Way the human brain has been reduced to a zombie like state, unable to recognise itself, paralysed by a profound sense of paranoia, plagued by deeply rooted psychosis and driven to control anything beyond its rapidly diminishing experiential capacity. In the most recent and severe period of degeneration, what we now refer to as recorded history (a necessary response to the failure of our eidetic memory) it has created a world in its own demented image. The stratification of society along neurodegenerative lines resulted in the emergence of hierarchical and patriarchal structures that reward delusion and dysfunction with power and control. This has further accelerated our plunge into a culture dominated by fear where the least functional members of society inevitably end up creating a world that reflects their underlying dysfunction. Ironically labelled civilisation, built on foundations of deep psychosis, devoid of reality, empathy or any sense of beingness, a living hell where only the deluded sense of being in control at any cost provides temporary respite from the self inflicted nightmare.
You’ve got to feel bad for hardware stores. Or for a town where the mayor is a rat. I come from a town where the mayor is a whale. When we have parades, they happen in the lake. “Floats,” the mayor says. “I want to see more floats.” But of course, he’s already floating; somewhere in the lake, with streamers tied to his fins and a pointy hat that makes him look as silly as a goose. He doesn’t care. No one in my town cares about anything. No one has problems. In my entire town there is not one problem. Nowhere! I couldn’t find one if I looked with a microscope. Nor could I find a screw.
Since screws are sometimes used for fixing things, and since things need to be fixed when they’re broken, and since broken things are indeed a problem, my town has outlawed screws. “Read my calcium-based food-filtration mechanisms!” the mayor yelled. “No new screws!” Everyone cheered except for me. My roof was leaking. I needed a screw. Rain had come in and ruined my TV set. No more Captain Kangaroo for this guy. When I stepped back and looked at my house, and my TV set, and my life, I noticed there were some problems. My neighbor did, too. “Next town, hardware store,” he whispered. “Quick, before anyone notices.”
“Got any screws?” I asked the man at the hardware sore. He had plenty. “Do you mind if I buy one?” I asked him. “See, I’ve got a problem.” No sooner had I posed the question than I realized the inevitable—any screw I buy is one less for him to fix his own problems with. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take ’em all. We’ve got so many goddamn problems here. The mayor’s a rat. I can’t even remember what a good steak tastes like. Nobody’s gonna fix a thing.” He handed me a paper bag filled with screws.
On my way out of the store I noticed a T-shirt. It read: Before there was software, there was hardware. “How much?” I asked, wanting to buy the one thing in the town next to mine that reminded people things weren’t always so bad, wanting to wear it in my town, to look ironic, to stir the pot. “Make me an offer,” he said. “I’ll take anything.”

I karate chopped the shit out of you but you couldn’t hear me because there was an alligator chewing on your ear, she was pretty.
“HIIIYAH” I said at you and the alligator but nobody paid attention.
“Excuse me,” I said but you kept walking.

I step, step go, I have gone. A plane, boats, the walking. This a trip and I exist now having moved my feet until they stopped, step step. A girl in a red dress and hovering over my hands, trickling down me, the inside of me, this woman. I am inside her and lingering back, stumbling. My boots and the heaviness of them, constantly magnetized. I hearken. Her ankles lilting in the light step of strapped black, the swish of material, the heels on hard tile. The heart through the circles of her, the way I broke in, through the clasped hands and the begging off, heart tenderized in their mouths. I eat. I eat. I cannot say enough about my guilt. I have tasted fingers now and the rot of my rotting, the torrent, the problems now I have, strangling. She is maybe waiting for me, picture in her soft tips, the hummingbird vibrations of her hair. That photograph was taken so long ago, before I became so much less. And yesterday I walked and ended up back. And the day before and the day before. I have walked, the rise of no sun and the moonless stretch, my hands pitch thick and blackening on sanded dark fires, they shake. I have walked and always here am back and facing the darkness and their faces again. Bowls of fingers, the fast effects. The waves of fingerless hands, the wailing. Crying in all languages. That image of me, boots for long walking and the jacket a brea ker and a warmth. Here in the always heat, the jacket become a flag, a souvenir, a marker for my already boiling pot. The steam opens my mouth but the words are not there. I do not bloom.

GILBERT: They [poets of the Beat movement] evade the complexity life really has; and they can escape awareness of themselves into sensation. When you realize how little these people like being themselves, you begin to understand why they want to escape consciousness.
LISH: But I thought the idea was to arrive at a greater awareness of the self. And to be more open to love.
GILBERT: They talk a lot about love, but they experience almost none. Neither for people nor for the world. Their natural condition is unhappiness. And because they have so little genuine appetite for the world, they go in constant fear of boredom. That’s why they are quiet so little. After all, there is something radically wrong when you have to go to always more violent and stranger devices to get a response. A man who delights in the world isn’t so dependent on drugs and alcohol and novelty. And the sad thing is that even so they manage to squeeze out always less response. If you’ve been to any of their parties, you must have noticed how much it was like an hysterical woman straining for an orgasm synthetically. And the poetry is the same. Almost none of it stands up under rereading. In the first place, it all ends up sounding curiously anonymous. And in the second place, despite the cult of energy, all that violence of language and image seems curiously slack after six months. The poems just don’t wear well.
Poetry seems almost the only device we have for persisting at problems without their being mysteriously transformed into an abstract game. It seems almost our only escape from the blind alley of sophistication where comparative anthropology and psychiatry have led us, seeing that there are so many sides to any question that it is impossible to have convictions. Poetry is almost the only way we can escape from the viscous constipation of moral relativism. Because poetry is the art of prejudice. If prejudice is the inability to discuss a conviction calmly, then poetry is prejudice. Prose is rational and fair. It works out an idea and gives all the evidence. Poetry doesn’t. It doesn’t argue, it demonstrates.
Woke up from dream on
July 9 1965, dream was erotic
(can’t remember what was in it),
I think the woman was attempting
to sit on her chair while
lifting the man’s wallet
but then on the boatride my hand
got caught in the elevator door
by the firecracker tossed in
by a child who was a woman as missing
as the coffee money, anyway I
lost balance and, falling, woke up
jerking off through the chair,
another chair, was still falling
on my foot, sorry.

So long honey, don’t ever come around again, I’m sick of you
& of your friends, you take up all my time & I don’t write
Poems cause I spend all my time wanting to fuck you & then
You put the apple onto the grilled cheese, I tie you up
Save me from your respective beauties, keep them home
Thanks for all the rock & roll music, if such a
Thing can be said. Who are those guys? The B-52’s?
That’s what Ethie told me. Can I believe her?
You wanna get married? You tie me up with
Garter belts & less than Heidegger & Kierkegaard the fact
That as we know the poem is not the thought so a slap
Might notice that Uranus suspected a comet? Let me know
He kicks her fallen hat & they are not grownup
Any more than a vase of flowers is, painted, so what?
Before photography, people didn’t exist.
…I’m in
Each photo, in the cool blur, in the
Brown cloud, my tiny head redrawn,
My splayed limbs cropped.
True, I’m lying
Face down, here, in the mud, my pants
Stained with too much clarity.

Belonging to the lower class, you’re expected
To cater to the upper classes’ bodily functions,
Not to engage their minds but to wipe their asses,
Kiss their cunts on demand, suck cocks for tips,
Unless, of course, you’re an artist, in which case
You’re an aristocrat of the servant class, to quote
That grand maestro among slaves, Jasper Johns.
Wait, I don’t want this to turn
Turn into a major novel. I want this to be
Composed entirely of edges, a little path
For Ari. All my teachers have been women
But not how you mean that. That’s why I speak
In a voice so soft it sounds like writing
Night writing. A structure of feeling
Broken by hand. I want the paper to have poor
Opacity, the verso just visible beneath

For I felt nothing,
which was cool,
totally cool with me.
For my blood was cola.
For my authority was small
involuntary muscles
in my face.
For I had some work done
on my face.
Sarah sees a large piece on the ground, crackling and shedding layers. She kneels down, puts her hands out, feels no heat, and she feels no cold. She scoops it up, the light illuminating her face. If Matthew’s eyes weren’t closed, he’d see her in the pale blue light incandescing in her hands. The shard crackles again, tickles her palms, splits in two and burrows down through her hands and into her arms. She feels her arms stiffen and fill, her elbows straighten, and her shoulders shrug, like an involuntary shudder in the cold winter of Upper Michigan. But this is something else: this is something growing in her forearms.
And here is where it gets weird. The thing that fell from the sky that he then swallowed? It rattles around and around in his belly, and it cuts the cords of gravity. You probably didn’t know this, but gravity works because we are all born with an invisible cord in our bellies, and those cords are what hold us down. The cord runs all the way to the center of the Earth, where they all attach to each other in a huge knot. We, all of us, hold each other to the Earth.
That’s his theory, anyway. That’s how he explains the whole thing to her. His cord is cut, and he finds that he can fly, if he puts his mind to it.
He flies. And something has happened to her, too. The burrowing, bright objects from the sky that have settled in her arms can project a material out of the center of her palms, where little stigmatic holes open and close. It grows out, a sort of a transparent bronzy substance. She can will it to spin out of her, like a web, and use it to make long ropes, or she can cover herself in a shell that is impossible to crack. It is hard or soft depending on what she wants. And she can make the stuff disappear whenever she wants, too. It smells vaguely organic, mossy. The scent mingles well with the rosewater perfume she wears. She smells a little like the woods for the rest of her life. It is, she feels lucky, not at all an unpleasant odor. People tell her that she smells outdoorsy, and that they think of her sometimes when they go hiking.
They call themselves Cocoon Lass and the Astounding Traveler. And they never tell a soul. Not one. They promise to keep it a secret forever from everyone. And they never break that promise.
Or they expect to never break that promise. This conversation, I suppose, is a little bit of all-bets-are-off.
In high school, she gets in the middle of fights, a thin impenetrable layer of brown beneath her clothes. She confronts bullies who pick on the younger, smaller, meeker students. Because of that, almost everybody likes her. She is a fearless crusader for justice.
Or something like that.
His grades fall and never recover. He spends his time looking out the window and never really finds a girlfriend. He sleeps at his school desk because he stays up all night. Teachers chastise him, but eventually just ignore him. He is beyond their help.
Dear Lover,
There are a lot of butterflies on the planet. But none in the winter. You are my winter butterfly.
I want to lick the inside of your belly button. I want to lick the lint out of it and then kiss you. Then you have the lint in your mouth. We are naked and you laugh.
[If you are a straight man or lesbian] I want to grab your pussy. I want to cup your naked pussy in my hand. Your pussy is like a leaf with dew on it on a July Morning. That means I like when your pussy is wet. I like your pussy more when it is wet than when it is dry.
[If you a woman or a gay man] I want to hold your soft penis in my hand. Then I want to caress it until it becomes hard and then I’ll call it a cock. I want you to do things with your cock that will make me moan and make strange sounds.
I want to eat candy with you and check our facebooks sitting close.
We need each other like poor people need food and politicians need votes.
We need each other like cell phones need signals and books need readers.
Right now I’m yearning for your genitals to be near by, for your laugh, for your arms, and your legs to wrap around me and pull me deeper.
I can never get deep enough into you.
I want you have my babies. I want our babies to look like us.
We will raise our children to be nervous and strange and to love music like we do.
I keep seeing your belly in my mind, your belly flat, I rest my head on your belly, your belly is soft and we watch a movie. A movie staring Will Ferrell. Everything is right with the world. We have good credit and our grades are good.
I want to fuck until both of our genitals are chafed and sore.
There are a lot of butterflies on the planet. But none in the winter. You are my winter butterfly.
Sincerely,
Your Lover
I've always had a certain love for exits
you see a permanent immigrant to more bachelorhood
than strictly necessary, me giving in
to the pollution like weak tea, me as chops and
giant blocks, a paperboy with the taste of ashes
in his friendly fingers or a
reporter with no news, a robot of light
bicycling backwards from the gravity, shirt off
set to kill the haze: I see
exits everywhere, library or restaurant
hospital or airport, roads already tilting towards their
sequels, regeneration in a
black hole, reversed dollars, missing owls
I'm your meaty amnesia, your continuous
last chance, your fire escape:
your super crutch.
My wife's in love with our white Siberian tiger, Charlie. She spends all her time with him. We don't even play Tuesday-night charades with the Goldbergs, anymore. And you can forget Bingo down at the community center, or classic movie night at the drive in.
"What's the deal?" I say one night after TV dinners. "I feel like I'm losing you to the tiger."
"Charlie and I have a special connection," she says. "You wouldn't understand it."
"But he can't even talk."
"That's the difference, Bob. Charlie listens."
I can hear Charlie in the next room ripping into a zebra. She smiles at this, but I'm the one that'll scrub the blood out of the carpet when he's finished.
That night she lets him sleep in our bed, right between us. I wake up and Charlie's spooning me, tiger drool running down my neck. I can't take it. I drive down to Opal’s and order a beer.
"She's got him sleeping in our bed now," I tell Jimmy.
"Sounds to me like your woman needs some sugar."
Jimmy was in the navy. He’s knows.
I drive like hell, ready to give it to her. But when I get home and flick on the lights I see Charlie's beat me to it. They do it like dogs. I slam the door, run outside and puke all over the driveway. I sit on the curb wiping the sick from my mouth. The moon is ugly in the sky and then I feel a hoof on my shoulder. It’s one of the zebras escaped from their pen. She snorts and licks my face. In her eyes I see the orange light from the gas lamps. She gestures something sexy, then puts her arms around my shoulders as if to say, "You ready for this, old boy?"
Aunt Marjorie, I think I love her, as she takes me behind the tub on wash day and washes my dirty violent parts. She says, don't tell anyone about this and cries and cries like she has no shame, or perhaps, too much of it. Aunt Marjorie's gut reminds me of fish and old maps and animal fur. She says, love is like this. Don't tell anyone. I am confused by this and angry at her bad armor. But I love Aunt Marjorie, the dark shallow water in her eyes, the scent of sycamore leaves in her old hair. I love Aunt Marjorie, mostly in the closet in my bedroom, where she says, don't tell anyone about this and I don't tell anyone about this, except once I told my mother, told her in the way you would talk about new green soap or the toes in your sandals.
Everywhere there is dirt. Crumbs. Growing balls of hair. And the visitor is due any day now. Our family has read about the symbiotic beast. It will trail a person, an animal, any organic creature, and eat what falls, sheds, emits, and flakes off of them. The symbiotic beast arrives at our home seven days later. The symbiotic beast is well dressed, sleek, and handsome in a beastly way, not at all what we expected. The symbiotic beast becomes very popular in our home. All our floors shine. Every crevice is immaculate. When the visitor arrives, she is pleased with the order of our home. She stays well past her welcome. She stops bathing. She rolls around in mud and dribbles food down her breast. Every night she is filthy, but when she emerges from her room in the morning, she gleams like a well-scrubbed kitchen.

The elkhood live in the glade behind our house. They like to chew, methodically, on the tough forest greens. Their top teeth are like pestles. Their bottom teeth like mortars. They grind seed and grain to flour in their mouths. My wife employs the elkhood as she would a gristmill. She allows the elkhood to consume one eighth of the food they process. The elkhood are slender and sinewy. Their jaws have biceps. The elkhood have a leader who has many rounded breasts and a large, open vagina that doubles as a nursery. The many elkhood children are often found playing within her. The walls of her vagina are covered in bright posters. The floor of her vagina is always vacuumed after snack time. The elkhood tower over us. We are small and plump and barely move. When I yell into my wife’s vagina, my voice circles around inside and comes back diminished in loneliness. But we own the elkhood and have many other wonderful possessions.
My aqua-green bathroom is in the middle of the house, on the main floor. It's the warmest room in the house because we're afraid of frozen pipes. The shower curtain is dark blue and when I'm the shower, thinking, it seems like nearly night time. There's a window to the backyard, next to the sink. What I've seen through the window: trees, my husband, my daughter, squirrel brothers, deer, a hawk, the white cat from next door.
When I have a special request I write it on the window, in the shower fog. I write it backwards, facing the rest of the world. It's the only writing I do in there.
If you cut me open and assembled my innards on a tray, among them would be an aqua-green tile. It would stand upright and survey the swollen mess around it. It would smell faintly of bleach and toothpaste. But at all times on a winter day, it would be warm to the touch.
i miss you.
you are the happiest octopus alive. you are my cold hands. you are the third tallest building in the city. you are my nose. you are santa claus. you are my cold, cold hands going blue at the tips.
i miss you.
i will throw you to the tigers and dance on their graves when you eat
their hearts right out of their chests, ridiculous things.
you berk. you child molestor. you chief.
i miss you
you have ruined my life
you have ruined me
i miss you
you horrible thing
you have ruined my life
After the severance package, I returned to the armpit of the nation, rented a mild-rise room overlooking an anonymous graveyard and began taking things in stride as best I could. The city was a factory on strike. The streets—named after sunken battleships, notorious conmen, and other lesser-known tragedies—were lined with picketers, glass and hubcaps. Everywhere I went somebody had spray-painted something sad but poignant. Still, I made an effort, no gains, but a good solid effort. What else could I do?
July was a dog on speed.
August busted.
It was autumn in the slums.
I figured if I ruminated long enough and well enough then the answer to my personal ad would materialize in some form or another. Then I thought again.
By Halloween, I'd started becoming aroused by the slightest obscenities and began having gymnastic dreams involving flight attendants. I awoke feeling jet-lagged and amazingly flexible, but somehow less sturdy than before, my stomach wobblier than an ancient ping-pong table.
My therapist prescribed holidays every other weekend. "Just pretend," she said. "Buy yourself something nice, something gleaming. Then take yourself to dinner, a real nice dinner."
The restaurant was filled with men with handkerchiefed lapels and pinky rings, women who felt comfortable walking a fine line. Families? They were there too. I felt nuisanced and stupid in the presence of small children. They reminded me of miniature celebrities. I was envious, heartbroken, and awed by their inability to conform to the standards of municipal places.
I drank my dinner with terrible goodwill, undertipped the overaggressive waiter, and struggled out into the darkness of this terribly underimagined place.
News kept breaking and no one could fix it. There was a rash of elderly kidnappings and a string of dollhouse arsons that had everyone swiveting. My landlord impregnated another tenant's teenaged granddaughter, then repentant, hung himself upside down on a homemade cross in the boiler room. They buried him the next day in an unmarked grave in the anonymous cemetery and then his brother assumed lordship. This brother looked like a man who'd returned from somewhere difficult. He admitted to being destroyed by recent events but collected our money just the same. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you."
Days passed, weeks mounted. The town newspaper folded. My room was dark and televisionless.

At my school we all have clones. We learn about them in science. They're called our Genetically Paired Medical Auxiliaries.
The kids in public schools don't usually have clones. They sometimes get them when they're grown up, just in case, but they're not like ours that are exactly the same age as us.
When I was just a nursery school kid, I asked my mother if I could invite Isabella to my birthday party, but she said don't be silly, clones are not real people. They're just depots for medical purposes. Couldn't all the kids bring their clones, I said, like the nannies. They could have their own party like the nannies do.
The night is how the night normally is, moon hung, machine-gunned stars. What does the night mean? I wonder, as if it were art. Electric lights built by humans shine because of the no sunshine. We take a walk and wonder under it all. Where are we headed? I ask. I'm hungry, she says.
I had fallen in love with a ghost but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was how to hold him and where to get the nicotine. Here, kitty, kitty, I said to him but he wasn’t biting, he wasn’t even looking. He was at a bluegrass festival. Activists and Saints fuck like rabbits, proven fact. 75 percent of you will die with people in the room, fact. Not alone, you’ve got people. He swept in and out, he didn’t even need to open the door to get in, though I think he was mostly concerned with getting out, which was easy to do quietly because he was of course, a ghost. But let’s not be coy and affected, this is poetry, peppers. The Pinata was hanging in the living room when we met, I walked up to it quietly to better survey the situation, I circled it twice hanging, I sniffed the paper-mache but only smelled dust. I looked around for something to hit it with, like a stick or a pool cue or a bamboo shoot but realized in order to crack it open I’d have to think to myself about how far back I can reach my arms.

Sometimes I wake up questioning my sanity. Like the other day, for example, I awoke from a dream where giraffes were dying their fur brown while carrying machine guns in their hand. And yesterday, I dreamt that I was on death row, looking to my second grade teacher to confess my innocence. I sat in the electric chair, without a single drop of sweat running down my forehead. Instead, I concentrated intently on an itch that strained all mental capacity. It sat right on my back, with no potential to scratch. I woke up more tired than when I had gone to bed, worrying about my mental state.
It’s not just that. There is an intense pain in my right index finger that sends a vibrant shock up to my shoulder. Every time I walk upstairs to do laundry, my hip feels out of junction with the rest of my body. And sometimes, I find myself completely lost in my Montana home even though I have never moved. The kitchen table has been set with flowered china, and there are always dishes piled up in the sink. I try to close my eyes and breath in the feint smell of a cooked dinner but it’s just not there. I turn the lights off and avoid the room completely, stubbing my toes when I go in to get a glass of milk from the unfamiliar fridge. Suffice it to say, I think I am dying.
So the other day, I sat down in my living room, staring out the window at the Montana emptiness. Holding a pen in my left hand afraid to strain my index finger, I made a list of the things I want to do before I die. It was a short list, mainly because I knew there was not a whole lot of time.
1 – Cheese fries. I want to try cheese fries.
2 – Meet a politician cop that I can respect.
3 – Find the best piece of literature ever written.
In childhood, time is something different. At ten my father tells me to sit on my bed and wait for my punishment. He will be back in five minutes.
In those five minutes I become a farmer, a security guard, a thief, an addict and then a caveman. If only I'd known, I would have wrote a postcard to myself. Farewell, I would have written in dark, bold letters.
By the fourth minute my hair has turned pink and I've lost all my teeth. I am superhuman, not human at all. I become myself sixteen times, over and over, in rapid succession. I picture my grandma naked, crying.
A 'D' is not acceptable, my father says. This was my first bad report card and I now hate my teachers so much for doing this that I know I will never be anything. An 'A' is acceptable, he says.
I black out as if to music as he does what he thinks he must. I wake up covered in glitter and dust.
I'm now a figure skater, a hair stylist, a palm reader, maybe even a murderer but there is no one weaker to kill. I paint my toenails and picture sucking dick. The world shrinks to the size of a parking lot.
My father's worst threat is the belt because it represents a distance. I am too shitty to even be touched by hand. He catches me in my mother's coat one stupid Sunday and I see that look in his eye.
You're getting the belt.
I learn to make an art of failure, my worst moments my greatest. I fail the same math class twice, forget to shower for a week. I smoke pot with homeless men, catch crabs from a girl named Lisa. I break my heart like a surgeon, I am so thorough it almost never hurts.
Years later a man on a kibbutz asks me if I'm mute then spits on the ground. How can I explain to him that I'm dying of inwardness and that this is the journey I've chosen? He is just another man. I picture him in nothing but socks, grunting on top of his wife.
Now I read everything. Part-student, part-astronaut; I study foreign languages under my bed or in the closet. I use the Internet like a pair of gloves and love and hate people like some bad soap actor. I believe in my demons and talk to no one. Occasionally I sell a story to an online journal. Or lose it and lay in the bath for twenty-four hours.
I masturbate to the most beautiful women on Earth. I am a poet.
1.
I’m gone. I’ve gone from trajectory to wax.
I’m surrogate.
If I were an eaten thing, I’d taste like seeds.
I’d be a syllable.
2.
I’m twilight on a scaffold.
I need a table for my health.
I’ll walk through forty-five pounds of sleep.
One wild vacancy.
3.
I’m naked but still rattle.
Paper from rust, transfusions.
Negative parachutes,
and serenaded wreckage.
4.
I eat yogurt.
I traffic and trespass, supported by wishbones.
I’m stained wrenches.
I’m tundra.
5.
I’m neglected omens.
Revival is a kind of monster.
I’m vulnerable as any tourist.
I’m self-stigma.
Loose, dense drops, we lift our heads, it suddenly poured buckets,
water came down in sheets, a sudden wind rose, panic, everyone
running for the nearest tree, but the pines are leaking, dripping,
dribbling, water, water, water, wet hair, backs, thighs, and just
ahead of us in the dark darkness a vertical fall of falling water
interrupted solely by despairing flashlights, then, in the light of
the flashlights, one could see it pour, fall, also streams, waterfalls,
lakes, it drips, spurts, splashes, lakes, seas, currents of gurgling
water and a bit of straw, stick, carried by water, disappearing....
The way of the world is insane. With him climbing on top of the tree, shirt all torn up. Eyes always smiling, shining. Dancing around the bushes. It's never safe. An arm that wraps around your face. Flushed. Oozing desperation. But the smile is still there even though the branches cut up half his leg. Oozing red.
He begins with clinical depression, raunchy sex with sad sexy women, and wounds that won’t heal. He adds a daughter with razorblade slits on her thighs, a suicidal son, and a family dog brutalized. He stirs in bankruptcy, unending quarrels over who gets the kids for the holidays, and severed family ties. He throws in endless nights sleeping on an awkward couch, insomnia, whole days drunk, and sticky rendezvous in adult bookstores.
Seven months later, he has the ring. Sparkling. Lustrous.
All he needs now is to ask her to marry him.
awaiting men of the windowless suicide / the morning vagueness of blood on white flooring / choreographed experiments hidden behind the breeze /order of more shivering in a godless cannibalization of women / of humanus sizzling in brochures / sliding out my brightly lit corridors / tiny corners of sunlight / of consciousness hiding in and of black possibilities / with factories allowing his sheds with blue unwritten perversity / disassembling the blind sightings of slashed dogs / boozy bloodless lies of honest harvesters armed with thought / the way rewritten over their half-sleep / single prayers stiffened roses and anything / cruel gates creaking in mastery / piss steaming off cord / on the wives an empty current / the disorganized pauses / an evidence glass / veal of their thigh / smell of dragging muscles /clumsy social camouflage and coffee faces / scanning with people’s dreams /regulars clean of rope / exploitation reassembly / sorrowful dread and seagulls bleached with the past /
There is a bad drug—don’t try it—it’s called smack. Smack is a bad drug, the baddest drug. Don’t try it. Priests will tempt you, they’ll pressure you with their peg-legs and their hook-hands. Diabolical! You must ask yourself: What are the priests really after? Do they have my best interests under their parrots, cooling in their hearts?
The priests want to use you to get to me. Decades ago I stole their tattooed maps, when they served me meals in their restaurant, the Priest House. A house of fine priest dining, serving fine priest stew and seafood sandwiches. Squid by the bucket, and excellent squid at that. Crabs and lobsters and mussels and oysters you got to whack with little hammers.
I saw how patrons entered the restaurant, bloody-eyed and wary of the light, to be seated at reserved corner tables, serenaded by priests on mandolins and priest-harps, shanties of tragic maritime love. I saw how the cabin boys bore steaming plates of mackerels over their heads, and how—
Sometimes the priests look really, really cool. I know. The priests look really, really cool when they’re smashing car windshields. You will not have ever seen anything cooler. At my dining table I sat in awe, straining to peer through the window. Out in the street, the priests went after the windshield of a stalled Camry with their blunderbusses. The glass buckled out, but it held in a smashed-up sheet, like fragmented crystals on a string, like half-eaten rock candy on astring; the priests again pummeled the glass with their screaming parrots; they hit and hit and broke a jagged hole; the glass sprayed up and into the listless car like ice pebbles, like hurtling pearls from a snapped pearl necklace; the priests sang and bellowed and cheered their priestly belly cheers. My god, but they were cool.
They’ll make it look natural, casual, nonchalant, an everyday substance, appropriate to want. They’ll call no undue attention to themselves as they model it, consume it, showy advertisements at work displaying their junk. When that transparent charade of a spectacle fails—as it must fail!—they’ll grow pernicious. They’ll entice you, they’ll surround you, they’ll clutch you to sweaty chests and offer you peg-legged parrots, pearl necklaces, lost fleets, tragic women tattooed with treasure maps—anything if you’ll try.
Yes, the priests are cool. But no you should not take the smack, take the smack from their clutching hands. Is it that you are afraid that you will hurt the priests’ feelings? The priests feel, they weather the storms of emotion, like you and I. The priests write bad poetry. But don’t take the smack! Oh my god, the stuff is so bad, what can I say to get through to you?
This is priest poetry:
My lady love
rots at the bottom;
She’ll sing to me no more, no more—
In moonlit coves
I sail, forgotten;
Never to hear her sing no more,
No more no more no more—
Do not mistake this for the one thing in the universe that is good. How do you think they got those metal hook hands? How do you think they lost those legs, now wooden?
I will pick up some stones and I will beat them against your head. I will slam my fists into the walls, over and over again, over and over again, over and over again, my fists into the walls. My god! Do you hear how I am screaming? Do you see how I stomp my feet? But my protests have no effect: the priests have already exerted their control. While my back was turned, in the single second my guard was down, they somehow tiptoed past me. Their priestly plot, this verybad drug, has turned you against me; it has already entered our home.
The Violent Man Who Attacked 13 People (a loose translation) is deserving of infamy for it is one of the most nihilistic pink films ever made. A chubby, bicycle-riding rapist/killer dispatches 13 people (mostly women) in a cold, bloody, detached rampage. In the first 38 minutes, 8 people die. Koji Wakamatsu, one of the Godfathers of Pink, makes no concessions to anybody in this grim exercise. The killer unloads his gun into vaginas, a man's ass, arms, legs, and heads. The film appears to be a catalog of murder and rape. There is no humor and no let-up. Only a minimalist harmonica score is heard in the quieter moments between the attacks. Shot on grainy 16mm, the tone is similar to Yojiro Takita's 1983 film "Renzoku Boko", suggesting that Takita was heavily influenced by this film. The relentlessness of the narrative draws the viewer into a process where he (the viewer) becomes anxious about the next attack. As this is a film from the esteemed director of "Go Go Second Time Virgin" and the excellent "Violated Angels", a poetry emerges from the images that separates it from standard pink fare. Just as the film dryly documents the slaughter of more than a dozen people, so will I right now: 1 housewife is murdered and raped in her apartment, 1 young girl is murdered and raped by the river, a couple are stalked "Maniac"-style while making love in a car, 1 girl in uniform is abducted and abused, another couple are attacked, shot, and raped by the same river, 1 girl is invited to a rooftop where she is raped and shot, a couple are raped and shot in their apartment, 1 drunk girl is shot and raped, 1 girl is killed outside a toilet block, 1 girl is dragged into marshland and murdered and raped. A final girl, the killer's 14th, meets a different fate. It should be noted that the sequence where the killer stalks the lovers in a car has several shots that may have been duplicated by Bill Lustig in "Maniac"; one, in particular, of the killer peering through the window at the couple as they make love, is uncannily similar. Perhaps Lustig saw this film, though I doubt it -- it is quite obscure. This is certainly the first film I know of documenting the exploits of a dysfunctional, bicycle-riding serial rapist/killer and is one of the purest horror films I have seen. Highly, highly recommended. It is a type of cinema that many people fear, yet a small minority admire.
Place thumb and forefinger on a baby's ankle. So pudgy!
Obtuse Rex-es and the gods plague my self-esteem.
Hard to keep them separate: gods; Rex-es; me.
Penelope was tricky herself. Laura primped for
genteel callers while a thousand putti wept.
Job loved too much, perhaps, and was bewared of gifts.
Philoctetes needs a good talking to.
I'll escort him to a showing of Simon of the Desert.
Simon stood on a pillar in a bright Bibley landscape.
Philoctetes is a study in shadow puppetry.
A lot of people are forsaken then learn a craft.
The Greeks don't have “that goddam Bide-a-Wee Home
heart of [Franny's]” do they.
Life would be gentler if gentlemen wore make-up.
For the discothèque, St. Simon Stylites and Philoctetes
might rub a Hercules beetle exoskeleton before
its blue is black. Is everything subject to change?
I woke up today to abstinence, refraining from crack-of-dawn sex, because libido is ab-fantastic for tapping the Orphic muse. I’ll be sleeping in my own Murphy bed tonight, alone, what with this inner city retreat expecting lights-out at nine. Not a pickle situation, given that 70% of art historiographers in this Abstract Expressionist painting live in public housing, albeit in living spaces ranging from a Glory-box studio to a double-storeyed apartment. Think of them as high-rise villages, tiered but loosely bound, and perfect for what I’m calling “Sandwich Wallism: The Poetics of Confined Spaces”. It’s myo-nouveau theory, percolating like my partner’s prose after reading After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory, thank every dreamy notion for Colin Davis, his staggering, dripping intellect like Wittgenstein writing into his notebook, “It all depends on settling what distinguishes the proposition from the mere picture”. Who said “let Jeremy Bentham floss in private behind black-out curtains in his Pleasantville model home of Truman-Show proportions? Who will walk in with Wallace Stevens and together intone: “Say that it is a crude effect, black reds, / Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are / To be anything else in the sunlight of the room.”
One is Scheherazade but they both wear overcoats.
One traces sun’s rectangle on the floor but they
both wear overcoats. Are you my sister from Mom’s
uterus? Are you using a fork in that way? Why does
one flower in our arrangement look so eaten?
I’m sailing to you. I’m sailing to you on white sails.
On white cells. I’ve recently counted my white cells.
One is a stirrup, but they both ride in saddles.
One has puffy lips, but they both ride in saddles.
I like names like Angela, Angelica, and Stanley.
I like Beuford, Blaine, and Tammy. Düsseldorf really
is for sisters. Please Bring in the rhinestones,
the leather purses. Bring on the hair pins
and lacquered horses. One wears a metal band,
but they both have pink gums. One doesn’t mind
that much, but they both have pink gums.

NDEs take place among those who are blind, and these NDEs often include visual experiences. Individuals totally blind from birth are completely unable to perceive the visual world that the rest of us do in everyday life. To those born blind, the ability to see is an abstract concept. They understand the world only from their senses of hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Their dreams do not include vision, although they may include other senses such as sound and touch. Vision cannot be adequately explained to a person blind from birth by drawing analogies to the four remaining senses they possess. Yet when a blind person has an NDE, the experience usually includes vision.
Beyer makes the provocative argument - which is growing on me the more I think about it - that DMT (the most active ingredient in ayahausca) deserves to be classed as a "hallucinogen" distinct from "entheogens" like LSD and mescaline, which peel away the layers of the self to reveal the god within (the literal meaning of entheogen). In contrast, according to Beyer, DMT unveils a visionary world out there, one that is not only believable but seemingly inhabited.
...when it comes to talking about the spirits themselves, Beyer just calls ‘em as he sees ‘em. Spirits - or "doctores" - are simply part of the picture; there is no need to reduce them to projections or myths - they harm and they heal, converse and confuse. As long as we remain aware of the various contexts which structure our encounters, we have every reason to acknowledge and engage the spirits as part of our world - an aspect of nature and consciousness, but also - and this is crucial - an aspect of modernity itself.
...Beyer notes that Dona Maria's spirit doctors regularly spoke in "computer language," just as an earlier generation of shamans used metaphors of electro-magnetism and radio to characterize the spirit world. The UFOs found scattered through Pablo Amaringo's paintings are icons of this visionary futurism. But they are equally signs of the syncretic, mix-and-match, opportunistic, and almost willfully contaminated aspects of mestizo culture
...If shamans are not frozen under glass, they are not squeaky-clean avatars of sweetness and light either. Beyer is very clear: to enter the shamanic world is to enter a world shot through with sorcery, with harms as well as healings. Budding shamans either struggle with sorcerers or join the wickedness; in his fascinating discussion of psychic darts, which healers store in their bodies for a rainy day after extracting them from victims, Beyer explains why the dark side is actually an easier path to take. "Good" shamanism reveals itself to be an intensely ethical discipline, not only in relationship to the community of persons (human and otherwise), but to the darkness within. The shaman's predicament is also grounded in social reality: a successful healer necessarily creates rivalry and envy, and when he fails at his healing task, necessarily creates paranoia and suspicion as well. This accounts for what Beyer calls the "social ambiguity of the shaman," the fact that many of them are sneaky, unstable, and mistrustful. It's a lonely path, anxious and ambiguous all the way down the line.
Reading a book by Franz Kafka or watching a movie by director David Lynch just might make you smarter.
According to researchers at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia, exposure to the surrealism in, say, Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions.
The idea is that when you’re exposed to a meaning threat - something that fundamentally does not make sense - your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment. “And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat,” says Travis Proulx, one of the study’s co-authors.
Had it to do with kids and Halloween? But it was Christmas. In the corner of the room, for a split second, unusually large ears. Or, was it Easter? There was little difference anymore. Within a half hour, he would be there, slouching in front of the wall, his splashing and sloshing in the bathtub afterward leading her to imagine all manner of savior.
She’d left the door open. A single glass remained from the afternoon. He’d tried to explain self-abuse. The implications were there for anyone to see.
When the moment arrived, her body was on her side of the bed. His use of tools was limited. The woman shrieked.
The shape of the stain suggested her luck was about to run out.
Next, they’re in the condition of not knowing how to stand there. They lack a certain freedom. The proper formation of a thought often escaped him. The edge of her mouth is drooping. In the corner, for a split second, a blind cat. The sudden recognition gives them both a start.
He goes for a walk. Her eyes remain fixed. She lives alone in a small circle. She holds up the glass. At the window, beneath a crust of snow, she hears screeching birds, which are everywhere, always. In the maple, where the birds should have been, the face of a chimp. He’d meant to carve his own face, but his use of tools … The snowman beside the tree has the maple’s broken-off limbs for arms. Everything is moving. An uncomfortable dream in the midst of a grueling hangover. Were those weed stalks and feathers now sticking to the window?
What is there to understand? They had trouble untangling themselves.
The bedroom was lighter inside than she had expected. She goes to the kitchen and opens the refrigerator. Into a jar of strawberry jam, she slides her middle finger. It lay dormant in there for forty-three years before the then old woman took it out again, and the finger beckoned her under.

Three of her limbs were bent backwards. I had to do something, you see.
One day, she saw me at the gates and called her friends over. Their eyes clear as daisies, they put their tongues out at me. I went and told mother.
When I’m in a café, I dare not look at people. Beneath skin, striated muscle props a quarter smile under my nose. Mother forbade me to open my door, but here I am, loaded down with blueprints of myself. I know all her noises by heart.
I escaped to the restroom and returned a lesser man.
I think about it all the time.
It doesn’t do to think too much. I get everything mixed up. Be a mold, I tell myself. A mold shapes candles, so it could shape your thoughts.
Every evening Mother says, “I want to see you fill out a bit.” It’s all this worm-powder she’s been taking. She goes about sweeping, as if not to bother me, but leaves my door open and makes broad strokes with the broom whenever she’s in my sight. Who paired me with this clown anyway? I could swim through her larger blood vessels.
“So this is it, is it?” said my father at last. I was ill at ease in the blue-striped shirt, so he gave me a clean one and I drank milk.
I looked everywhere for him, under the bookshelf, under the chair. He was sitting in the middle of my room with only his underpants on. I circled him like a long-legged bird. The breath in the room was hot and bitter and strong smelling.
He said, “I’m sorry about the bit of trouble you had with my daughter.”


Despite the soot that tumbles from the sky, our old people look good—the color of milk and veal roast. Margaret gathers them up and gives them clean teeth, while I show them a variety of lifelike images and make them answer question after question. Tubes and wires prod the ceiling like forked hazel wands. Always, there are sounds like hiccups and belches. And cheese stacked upon a board the size of a door.
One man’s eyebrows press together, as if they are hands clasped in prayer. I shave them off and sew them lengthwise. I find myself whacking him over the head with the eyebrow, shouting, “Luck is luck.” It would relieve the pain, or so I was told. After the beating he is very tired.
This goes on day after day. In the hall, those waiting their turn do terrible things to the dog, forcing her throat open, for example, and making her eat dirt, earthworms, spiders, and moths. They have no idea what else to do with themselves.
Margaret hasn’t the energy to twiddle her thumbs or bake an apple, but it’s important to get old folks soaped and combed. She gobs a mouthful of petals, juicy, sour-sweet, stuffs toilet paper in her ears, and gets herself into position. She looks wistfully into an old woman’s smiling face before removing the lips, the nose, the eyelashes and wig. The look on the now cow-y mug suggests that the woman is a bit befuddled though, at her age, willing to make the best of it. Before our eyes she is metamorphosed into a pool of mucous.
The pumpkin yellow school bus comes for Margaret and me. Head spinning, I run to my hotel and upon reaching the room am sick on the carpet. A hot bath, a good rest—and the nerves unravel like spools of thread. Everything is simple. I give myself a terrific sudsing. Afterward, I walk hours in a city where the air clings to my beard and skin like a rancid oil. “We’re making headway, we’re making headway,” I tell myself when, in fact, we are only making more holes.

The Las Vegas that is criticized in the book is a Vegas that, for me, is emblematic of America. Certainly, most of America doesn’t look or feel or function like Las Vegas, which is why Las Vegas is special. But, on the other hand, most of Las Vegas doesn’t look or feel or function like Las Vegas, which is a point that the book makes. Las Vegas is mostly an idea, it’s a conceptual tourist destination. I mean, it’s a real place that people visit of course, but it’s the idea of the place that people bring with them to Vegas that really makes the city what it is. Otherwise, Las Vegas is just a town with a big amusement park at its center. It’s not like the families that live there or the politicians that run the place have a looser sense of morality than the rest of the country. It’s not there are no laws there. I grew up in an adorable little seaside town of 5,000 people on Cape Cod and I can tell you without a speck of hesitation that the politics and the people of that place are a hell of a lot nastier than anything I’ve encountered in Vegas. So I like Vegas. It’s what we as a nation have decided to allow Vegas to represent in our culture that I find problematic. Because what it’s representing is inside all of us. We really do not leave it there when our vacations are over, no matter what the city’s advertisements like to tell us. We bring that shit with us and it follows us home.
The beauty of a woman is only skin-deep. If men could only see what is beneath the flesh and penetrate below the surface with eyes like the Boetian lynx, they would be nauseated just to look at women, for all this feminine charm is nothing but phlegm, blood, humours, gall. Just imagine all that is hidden in nostrils, throat and stomach… We are all repelled to touch vomit and ordure even with our fingertips. How then can we ever want to embrace what is merely a sack of rottenness?
In 1983, the publisher Einaudi asked Primo Levi to translate Kafka's The Trial. Infinite interpretations of The Trial have been offered; some underline the novel's prophetic political character (modern bureaucracy as absolute evil) or its theological dimension (the court as the unknown God) or its biographical meaning (condemnation as the illness from which Kafka believed himself to suffer). It has been rarely noted that this book, in which law appears solely in the form of trial, contains a profound insight into the nature of law, which, contrary to common belief, is not so much rule as it is judgment and, therefore, trial. But if the essence of the law - of every law - is the trial, if all right (and morality that is contaminated by it) is only tribunal right, then execution and transgression, innocence and guilt, obedience and disobedience all become indistinct and lose their importance. "The court wants nothing from you. It welcomes you when you come; it releases you when you go." The ultimate end of the juridical regulation is to produce judgment; but judgment aims neither to punish not to extol, nether to establish justice nor to prove the truth. Judgment is in itself the end and this, it has been said, constitutes its mystery, the mystery of the trial.
But it is too late. She is out the door and down the street, somersaulting away from me.
Contrary to popularly held beliefs, Henry Darger’s work–Mann argues– was not created in the vacuum of one cloistered man’s mind. While many of his paintings depict naked and brutalized child slaves and transexual transformation, L. Frank Baum’s phenomenally popular Oz books–which Darger read and collected– explored many similar topics normally taboo in the mainstream of American culture. “In the Realms of the Unreal,” Darger’s 15,000 page epic, draws from and inter-textualizes Oz, as well as the larger cultural obsessions with white slavery, seen, for example, in the passage of the “White Slave Traffic Act” in 1910. Further, Darger was personally affected by the instability and vulnerability that marks the existence of displaced children. When his mother died in childbirth, his baby sister was put up for adoption, and while in the home for feeble-minded children, Darger himself was almost adopted. He also desperately worked to adopt a child for decades as an adult, and in the archive, Mann investigated some rarely-exhibited collages (which will be on view at the American Folk Art Museum in 2010) that make use of photographs of Korean and Vietnamese children culled from newspapers. When looked at in this larger context of American cultural history, Mann believes that Darger is a key figure for understanding the notion and draw of “cuteness” in the United States, and will discuss how this notion is united with violence, race, and adoption.
Where we are now is flat but not cool. The other one of us is round and warm. We touch the other’s hair, face. Pull. Push. There is wetness. Coldness. Bad. We rub our eyes, chew our fists. We make noise we fall into the roundness the warmth of the other. Nothing.

They are on the couch, stomachs full, satisfied. They see the babies, asleep in a pile in front of them. The husband says, oh, they smell worse than the farm. They are nasty, the wife agrees, and folds herself into his arms to sleep until morning.
At its heart is an idea so simple, and yet so fundamental, that it seems incredible that no one had articulated it before. Girard's premise is the Romantic myth of "divine autonomy", according to which our desires are freely chosen expressions of our individuality. Don Quixote, for instance, aspires to a chivalric lifestyle. Nothing seems more straightforward but, besides the subject (Don Quixote) and object (chivalry), Girard highlights the vital presence of a model he calls the mediator (Amadis de Gaule in this instance). Don Quixote wants to lead the life of a knight errant because he has read the romances of Amadis de Gaule: far from being spontaneous, his desire stems from, and is mediated through, a third party. Metaphysical desire – as opposed to simple needs or appetites – is triangular, not linear. You can always trust a Frenchman to view the world as a ménage à trois.
Mediation is said to be external when the distance between subject and mediator is so great that never the twain shall meet. This is the case of Don Quixote and Amadis, or Emma Bovary and the fashionable Parisian circles she dreams of. Here, the derivative nature of desire is clearly acknowledged. The hero of external mediation "worships his model openly and declares himself his disciple". When mediation is internal, however, the distance between subject and mediator is small enough to give rise to rivalry between the two. The mediator, who aroused desire for the object in the first place, comes to be seen as an obstacle to the fulfilment of this very desire: "the model shows his disciple the gate of paradise and forbids him to enter with one and the same gesture". Although now ostensibly a figure of hatred, the mediator continues to be idolised subterraneously or even subconsciously. In Proust's In Search of Lost Time, for instance, the Guermantes remain Mme Verdurin's sworn enemies until the day when she marries into this family she had in fact secretly admired and envied all along.
Girard's contention is that the need for transcendence has survived the decline of Christianity, resulting in the ersatz "inverted transcendence" of mimetic desire. The spread of this highly-contagious "ontological disease" gathers momentum in the works of Stendhal before reaching pandemic proportions in Proust and Dostoyevsky. Whereas Don Quixote is an "upside-down hero in a right-side-up world," Julien Sorel (The Red and the Black) is a "right-side-up hero" in a topsy-turvy world. By the time we reach Dostoyevsky (Notes From the Underground, The Possessed), everything has gone awry. All these novels illustrate how internal mediation "triumphs in a universe where the differences between men are gradually erased". The more egalitarian a society, the closer the mediator and the greater the rivalry.
In Stendhal's worldview, there once was a golden age when the nobility's social status was correlated with its nobility of spirit. Passion and spontaneity, which used to be the hallmarks of the true nobleman, have all but disappeared from The Red and the Black, giving way to abject vanity. After the French Revolution, it is no longer possible for the nobility to simply be: it must now justify its privileges in the eyes of "the Other". In so doing, it becomes ignoble. The aristocrat mimics the bourgeois who mimics the aristocrat. At the level of individuals, this double mediation is a delicate balancing act in which the loser is the one who can no longer conceal his desire for the other, from the other. This revelation acts as an instant passion killer, since it shatters the illusion of "divine autonomy" that had proved so compelling. Open rejection, in turn, makes the heart of the spurned lover grow ever fonder.
Masochism – which features so prominently in both Proust and Dostoyevsky – is a by-product of the increasing proximity of the mediator; a means of enhancing his supposed divinity. The greater the obstacle he represents, the greater his divinity. Girard explains that we become masochists as soon as "we no longer choose our mediator because of the admiration which he inspires in us but because of the disgust we seem to inspire in him". As the "ontological sickness" progresses, the desired object is increasingly forgotten – it virtually disappears in Dostoyevsky – to be replaced by the mediator. The masochist desires the obstacle which signals the divine presence of the mediator. In the same way, the Proustian snob puts up purely abstract barriers between himself and an object that is so ineffable it barely exists at all. This disappearance of the object is of no real consequence since it "loses its value in the very act of being possessed" anyway.
Writers themselves are not immune to mimetic desire. The release of a book is an "appeal to the public" which is frequently experienced as an affront to authorial pride. Aristocratic writers used to keep up appearances by claiming that they never intended their works to be printed. La Rochefoucauld even went as far as to claim that his manuscript had been stolen by a servant. The modern writer has no servants, so he makes "an anti-appeal to the public in the shape of anti-poetry, anti-novel, or anti-play. The main thing is to make the Other taste the rare, ineffable, and fresh quality of one's scorn for him". Sound familiar?
With Deceit, Desire and the Novel, René Girard wanted to demonstrate that the truly "great novelists reveal the imitative nature of desire" in their works. In the process, he reinterpreted some of the most important novels ever written, launched a devastating broadside against the inheritors of Romantic individualism and spawned a whole new sub-genre — mimetic theory — which has been applied to almost everything, from psychology to economics. Were it not for this brilliant debut, published in France back in 1961, incidentally, Facebook may have remained the plaything of a handful of Harvard geeks.
Peter Thiel – a venture capitalist whose mentor at Stanford was none other than Girard lui-même - soon spotted the commercial potential of a social networking site based on mimetic desire. In fact, the whole concept of viral, word-of-mouth marketing follows Girard's principle according to which the strongest desires are those influenced by an admired third party. The gods haven't withdrawn: they have gone online and their name is Legion. What the venerable Académicien makes of this exploitation of an "ontological disease" he has been denouncing for half a century is anyone's guess.
She staples her plaid skirt shut. The buttons shot off, she says. I want to ask whose glitter press-on nails I found beneath a desk, whose clot of blood I smeared with my shoe in the girls' bathroom. I visited it a few days later. It had dried and flaked, as if scratched by someone's fingernail.
There's a lesson on how to sit properly going on in the cafeteria. (Don't straddle.) There's also a Student Council meeting about ways to get the boys to stop chewing tobacco and masturbating in the lavatory between classes. They've been writing on the walls with themselves.
Ingrid Bergman
told me she'd sleep with any man who desired. And there had been plenty. She slept with the majority of her costars on every film, most of the directors, several costume designers, and once, for kicks, a sound-effects editor—"helps me get into the role," she argued. It didn't bother her at all. It was like taking a walk, "like reading from a script," she said.
I was tempted. Oh god, I was tempted. Things like that don't just fall into your lap, and, honestly, my blood thrummed with the possibility. To put it plainly, it had been a while. But no, I told her, I just couldn't.
She said, "You ever seen a Nordic woman naked? Skin like fresh milk…"
She said, "I'm more flexible than I might appear, I'll tell you that."
She said, "Are you jesting? Marriage? That's just the art of saying no."
I built a bridge and named it Samuel. I built a bridge out of tongue depressors and cotton swabs stolen from my doctor's office. I built a bridge out of paper gowns and syringes stolen from my doctor's office. I built a bridge out of soap dispensers and air hoses stolen from my doctor's office. It took me seven years to build my bridge. I visited eighteen doctors. I stole from eighteen doctors. I waited in eighteen exam rooms. I looked through eighteen sets of drawers and cabinets. I had a sore throat. I had an ear infection. I stepped on a rusty nail. I stubbed my toe. I broke my arm. Influenza. Yeast infection. Shingles. Lyme Disease. Breast lump. Strep throat. Poison Ivy. Hair loss. Swollen tongue. Glaucoma. Concussion. Herpes. Hangnail.
I built a bridge and used it to cross. I built a bridge and used it as shelter during storm. I built a bridge and skated in ice and snow. I made my ice skates out of razor blades and rubber bands stolen from my doctor. I cut my nails and made a mirror. I grew my hair and made a rope. I cut my hand and made a river to run under. I cut my hair and made a mattress, a shirt, a rug to shake and beat over the railing.
I built a bridge for strong and sturdy. I built a bridge and named it Doris.
Not done. I needed a tree. I needed a road. I needed a car to move me faster. To make me crash. To throw me free. I followed my doctor home. I chased his Honda. I put a flag on his bumper so I could see it from far off. I kept my distance. I followed my doctor. I followed my doctor home. I waited outside his house. I waited for him to sleep. I waited for him to eat dinner. Do the dishes. Read a magazine. Jerk off. I waited for him to take a shower. To watch the talk shows. I waited for him to sleep. For him to R.E.M. For him to toss and turn. To dream of children. To dream of pre-pubescents fighting a war using elephants and camels instead of horses. Waited for him to dream of children firing guns and throwing grenades and building bombs. I waited for him to snore.
I stood in the moonlight.
I hung from a streetlight.
I broke down his door.
I rearranged his furniture. I made an omelet for my hunter. I washed my clothes. I tore the curtains and made a dress. I made shoes from the door handles and earrings from the soap. I made a garden salad from paint chips and used batteries.
I found his room I said his name, Doctor. I moved closer and said his name louder, Doctor. I moved to the bed and said his name louder again, Doctor Doctor. He rolled over. He pulled his knees to his chest. He nuzzled his pillow. I moved to his bedside. I sat next to him. I kissed his forehead. I stole pieces of his hair. A corner from his blanket. His right slipper. His four front teeth.
I found his attic. I found his workshop. I unlocked the door and I found a model airplane. The size of my upper half. Wingspan my wingspan. I found an airplane made of skin samples and hair. Blood cells and Petri dishes. Propellers made of charts and hair roots. Wings of x-rays and phlegm. I found maps made of bed trays and goggles made from rubber bands.
I took the plane to the roof.
I made the plane fly.
In August 1968, a visiting minister from Pakistan gave Chairman Mao a basket of mangoes as a token of the friendship between the two states. The Chairman, who was very particular about what he ate, did not care for the taste of mangoes, so he sent them to the worker-peasant Mao Zedong Thought propaganda team. The workers, flattered and overwhelmed by the Chairman’s love, preserved the mangoes in formaldehyde and revered them as sacred relics. Thousands from around the country made pilgrimages to the mangoes, and the mangoes, accompanied by drums, gongs, and banners, went on tours in various cities where they were placed under glass cases and watched over by security guards. When they started to decompose, thousands of replicas were made out of wax, and millions of propaganda posters were painted and disseminated, so that everybody, even toddlers with split pants, knew what a mango looked like, but almost nobody knew what it tasted like.
BEFORE THE WOOD ROTTED. Before the elms suffocated and starved. Before the looters stole our hubcaps and copper wire and cabinet doors and doorknobs and canned food and toilet seats. Before the sky got low and touched the ground and the neighborhood got small and fragile and the storms came through and tore trees apart and threw them onto houses and garages and split cars in half and pulled away the swamp grass and cat-tails and roof shingles, and rope swings, we spent our days in play.
We acted out cops and robbers in the neighbor’s yard. Our neighbor was this old woman with hands like SaranWrap encased electric wires and smashed grapes. She sat on her back porch swing and watched us run in zigzags between the cottonwood trees and lawn furniture. And when the cottonwood bloomed all the fuzz got in our hair and eyes and covered the screens on windows and doors. The cotton was like a million dead dandelions had been turned into wishes and we ran through it like mounties through a blizzard. And when it got hot, the cotton stuck to our skin and sweat and made red rashes, it made us burn. On these, the hottest days, the old woman neighbor poured us full glasses of sour lemonade. The kind that is almost as clear as water until you put the big chunks of lemon in the glass and spoon in plenty of sugar when you drink it. Even so, our lips puckered and our eyes closed and we tried very hard to smile and say “Thank you.”
He played cop and I played robber and he shot me dead nine times out of ten. When it was my turn to die, I would stumble around the entire yard, my hands clutching my chest. I’d hobble left, I’d hobble right. I’d settle into a wicker chair and then I’d gasp and rise again all suddenlike. I’d stumble some more, bumping into trees and a bird bath, slumping over the porch railing and exhaling a final, willowing, singing, gagging breath. But that tenth time, when I would be the one to make the fatal shot, he would just drop to the ground, splayed out like some kind of fallen bird and the old woman neighbor would clap the soft pads of her hands together and cheer.
Sometimes I would have dreams about the games we’d play. In the dreams, he cheated. He stole my lemonade and stepped on my gun and I woke up very angry. Sometimes he would show up at the front door of our house the next morning, all decked out in his fringed white vest with sheriff badge and big white hat and matching white cowboy boots with plastic spurs, having walked four blocks in the complete outfit, and I would stand behind my mother while she told him I wasn’t feeling well and I saw him look around her hip to see me standing there, my gun aimed at the curious wrinkle that had formed like a bullseye between his eyes.
It is true, that sometimes after playing cops and robbers, the old woman neighbor would invite us in to wash the cotton off our hands and faces and necks and arms and it is also true that I once took a tiny little seashell from a dish on the back of the toilet. It is certainly true that he made me return the shell to the old woman neighbor. He held my elbow like he was a real cop and I was a real robber while we stood on her front stoop and my head hung low and the old woman neighbor took the seashell and put it in her apron pocket and went back inside her house and closed the screen door, and all the bits of cotton caught in the mesh of the screen shivered in the wind that got pulled up and turned around and told us a branch breaking, flood making, basement hiding kind of storm was coming our way.
I am a bullet and I am very fast. I make a sound. I make a spark. I cut through metal, air, I burn fabric, I shred skin, I splinter bone, I settle into the muscle that makes the heart. Not quite inside, but close enough to do serious harm. Close enough to slow the pumping of blood. Not enough damage to make a spill of red, but just enough to create a kind of plug to the natural order of things. Just close enough to make everything stop. An involuntary and violent action that is just enough to make it all my fault.
When I Worked for Madonna
The bodyguards wear white
The bullets fly towards them
The bodyguards are clouds
The bullets do not penetrate
Kaddafi. The bullets are precipitation
After we drink coffee, we check
the bird feeders. Kaddafi has purple
martins on his shoulders. The bodyguards
are snowy egrets. Forget
in both directions from this moment
I am right in front of you
I have a rifle
I am sexually wonderful
like a horse

I watch him smiling to himself as we eat our first married meal together. McDonald's. He has some light in his eyes now, his hair is combed back into his ponytail, and when he looks at me, his face turns a pale shade of pink. I love that in a man.
I think I've made a mistake, I'm jittery and can't eat except for the French fries. I married a schizophrenic with droopy brown eyes and incisor cheekbones a 5′7″ Puerto Rican man with butter lips and buttery under-biceps, a belly that I bounce on and a habit of grabbing my breasts, smiling and saying, perky boobies. Look at you, he says, taking my face into both his cracked-skin hands, where the knuckles are raw and red from sleeping in the castle. You are dewy. Your skin is even more beautiful. You're glowing like a jack o lantern.
Don't talk to me like that, Jose, that kind of talk won't change what you did. What he did was not tell me. Not really or fully or what's true. Wouldn't tell me when he left his life behind.

TRANSLATIONS OF “MY REFRIGERATOR LIGHT MAKES ITS WAY TOWARD YOU” INTO THE 34 LANGUAGES SPOKEN IN THE MANY WOODS OF GRIEF
If man was indeed born when the first animal wept, then it
should be clear enough why I have been dying to drown.
River of Life
…
If it weren’t for my refrigerator light
I’d acknowledge the incandescence of the bird in my refrigerator,
the one I understand to be a regular bird, just a regular old bird
without a head.
…
I’m afraid God thinks I’m his telephone voice.
…
I’m afraid God thinks I’m his nose in profile.
…
I’m afraid if God saw me, he would very nearly recognize me.
Lost as he’d be in my many woods of grief.
…
Don’t touch my things,
he would want to say—
so say it.
…
Welcome to the three-star
hotel of my mind.
…
Like anyone else,
I quote the many woods of grief.
…
For instance, the moon here is divided into thirds.
…
The moon is a love triangle dropped in a flour bin
(its white cloud outpour incorrigible, soft).
…
Months come and go as if bearing
fresh trout for supper.
…
You, me, our awesome appliances.
…
I’d like to use that toothbrush, please,
the one with your face attached to it.
…
In the orchard of beloved green apples,
there is a relinquishing of the city-body, the city-self.
…
My refrigerator light is one weir in the River.
…
Like the first kiss of a stranger’s elbow
in the backseat of your mother’s fears,
wait for it (my refrigerator light)
to brush up against you.
…
You whose seawater floods my acoustic guitar.
…
In the same way bees dodge raindrops in the night
given their capacity for discerning particular
shades of black, I’ve spent
a lifetime searching for the blackest film frame
in the People’s History of Drive-In (from 1933 to the Present),
exploring every public archive
in the many woods of grief.
…
This country of I know what you left unsaid.
…
As my refrigerator light makes its way toward you.
…
The musk of careful interaction in the limelight of uncertainty
rustles through the leaves. In the many woods of grief.
…
The dial-tone.
Which is the equivalent of
God’s unfamiliarity
with aspects of himself.
…
All that is clear is that everyone around here drinks.
So as to employ the vocabulary of the birds we’ve hunted to extinction
in the many woods of grief.
…
I am fortunate in that I happen to be
a pretty good-looking dead thing.
…
For instance, I could never imagine what it
must feel like to be asphalt in its infancy.
…
When the doctor asked me to have a little faith,
I told her to expose her right breast
so I’d have something to press my unholy against.
…
That’s a line should be FedExed to the many woods of grief.
…
Your words are the house lights coming on
after a double-bill screening
in a theatre I was led to ungently by the wrist—
the words whose sole effect
is in reaffirming how real this world we live in
must be to live in.
…
No one is ever so alone as in the moment he asks for
the check and, instead, receives an incandescent bird
where the dinner mint should be.
…
This is not a precise enough translation
of what I was unable to tell you
the night you became something other
than moonlight in a drawer.
…
I want to and do believe in bird and in you
Competing impulses
Whether to get sick
Have furious sex
Or stab myself with the mohair just now emitting from my brain.
your sweaty party dress and my sweaty party dress lasted a few minutes until the tomato was gone some day they will disambiguate you but not while I'm around our species won Emily we won it feels so good to be winning the flame of victory pass it around it never goes out dinosaurs ruled Massachusetts dinosaurs fucking and laying eggs in Amherst Boston Mount Holyoke then you appeared high priestess pulling it out of the goddamned garden with both hands you Emily remembered the first time comprehending a struck match can spread a flame it feels good to win this fair and square protest my assessment all you want but not needing to dream is like not needing to see the world awaken to itself indestructible epiphanies consume the path and just because you're having fun doesn't mean you're not going to die recrimination is the fruit to defy with unexpected appetite I will be your outsider if that's how you need me electric company's stupid threatening letters cannot affect a poet who has faced death
Visit the home of a deceased poet you admire and bring some natural thing back with you. I went to Emily Dickinson's house the day after a reading event with my friend Susie Timmons. I scraped dirt from the foot of huge trees in the backyard into a little pot. We then drove into the woods where we found miniature pears, apples and cherries to eat. I meditated in the arms of an oak tree with the pot of Emily's dirt, waking to the flutter of a red cardinal on a branch a foot or so from my face, staring, showing me his little tongue. When I returned to Philadelphia I didn't shower for three days, then rubbed Emily's dirt all over my body, kneaded her rich Massachusetts soil deeply into my flesh, then put on my clothes and went out into the world. Every once in awhile I stuck my nose inside the neck of my shirt to inhale her delicious, sweet earth covering me. I felt revirginized through the ceremony of my senses, I could feel her power tell me these are the ways to walk and speak and shift each glance into total concentration for maximum usage of our little allotment of time on a planet. LOSE AND WASTE NO MORE TIME POET! Lose and waste no more time she said to me as I took note after note on the world around me for the poem.
if jews required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is not required to wear the insignia, then they are required to have a separate nameplate on the apartment entrance and the insignia immediately next to it
if persons not required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is required to wear the insignia, then they are entitled to a separate nameplate without the insignia
the affixation of nameplates and insignia is to be completed in such a way that every doubt is eliminated and so that it is clearly evident that
7/1 19 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
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It is a black life, but I don’t want to die
I don’t want to die, I don’t ever want to die
God damn you, don’t you shoot me in my sleep
Let me rot on this earth forever
Like a carrot I will be everything God can’t see
Oh, what do I mean
God can see everything
I mean the angels, I mean the half-gods
I mean the flowers, don’t ever let them see me live forever
Don’t you ever let them see
That I am all root here in the ground

With one hand, she paints. The other hand strokes an egg carton full of babies. One by one, the babies fly up and into her painting. They melt together on her canvas to form a man. She paints the man within an oven. He is in the process of exploding. She paints small, jagged flecks of vermillion erupting from the base of his spine.

They lay on their backs on her bed, her parents visible and laughing in the next room. She said she could extract her umbilical cord. He could hear the echo of her parents. She contracted her small, plump, muscular stomach and reached inside herself to pull out a fleshy cord with a small tip like an arrowhead. See, she said.
There are many reasons why my reconstructions fail. For one, horse screams are impossible outside elevators. We need grates. We need some space to bleed. There are many titter-tatters inside God. There are many feet kicking. There are many reasons to want out. My hares are offensive. Listen to them digging in the sand. Listen to my squandered chest. Listen.
The birds of paradise have expired.
They must have been throbbing. They must have been bright. Touch. There are many reasons we feed them to the pigs. They don’t make any noise in the pigs’ mouths. They flap but they cannot make any more sounds. The only sound in this museum: a centipede burrowing into your eardrum.
Listen. The funeral has begun.
The Sound:
kneeling, incised
barked torso
ornamental infanticides in the ceiling
soak a foot in salt water
If the marching band is tearing down the cutout Christs, who is painting a bird on my chest? That plucked anatomy doesn’t look like last night at all. That’s a joke I keep telling myself about last night to confuse the gentle peruser who wants to stab open my landscape painting to feel the stained hares inside. She wants to knead them like dough in my hands. When I talk about last night this openly, I am joking in a panicky way. When I say “last night,” I don’t mean night as much as a woman, the white color of her thighs. Or the swan that burst out of my wife’s dress. Or my wife’s voice in my ear. Or my flocked torso. My barked torso. My car alarm car alarm car alarm.
Iconoclastic Riot:
traversed
distance
After puncturing the grand opera,
we moved into more advanced anatomies,
teaching immigrants how to speak
with peanuts in their mouths
while watching the tiger devour another lamb.
Now all we have to do is teach them
how to find a tunnel and douse it.
We will be stuck on the other side.
Last night’s architecture exhibits many foreign influences. The ceiling is unusually low for a horse show. Walls are not usually this thick unless the rooms are used for interrogations. The main stylistic impulses of the decorative patterns seem to come from the orient or some such illusion of tranquility. The persistent iconographic feature of the open eyes seems to come from the fire. The realistic style is nostalgic. The flecks on the torso appear to be real blood, if not human blood then the blood of a horse. The birds are trying to escape. The glass is almost unbreakable unless you use a hammer.
The poem engraved on the torso should not be read.
Its obscene depiction gives us an idea
of what the architecture looked liked before the fire.
No pigs in the elevators! No pigs in the women! No disfigured birds or pigs or horse screams! And absolutely no drive-in theatrics with my x-rays!
I’m reconstructing the horse farce with a garden hose and an infant.
The only problem is that all these beautiful beautiful birds
disfigured and fed to grunting pigs cannot fit into the elevators.
I want to fit them all into the eye of a needle.
I want to stitch up the landscape. I want to drive the bungled
innocents down the well and into town like loud lambs.
Come my chosen birds
Come my brick narrative
The theme of the futility of reconstruction is inscribed in my medicine chest. I’m scratching through the shelves searching for a drug to swallow, the right implements to make a cut.
When I tell you that I’m trying to reconstruct last night’s architecture I mean that I’m trying to drown a horse in a mudslide or a kindergarten. When I tell you that God is violent in the elevator I mean: there is not enough space for all of those hammers in your seashell collection. A torso can contain an entire October of birds. But eyes can only take so many breakouts.
A torso can contain a travesty of stitches.
What do you keep inside your abandoned factory?
I keep carving up my legs up there in your abandoned factory.
I keep pearls soft in my mouth. I keep my hares hid in my woman.
I clean a woman with turpentine. The hares will be safe in there
but they will choke, choke wonderfully like a car alarm.
I’ve been worried about my slippery puzzle since I sat through a movie about traffic jams hiding my hares inside my shirt. I thought they had sharp teeth but they don’t have any teeth at all. They don’t even have a mouth.
Bleed my hares. Bleed me a bed for all the starving children. Bail me out. Not because I’m innocent but because the show must go on, and the show needs a pair of eyes that have been used for photographs. This is not my voice. It’s a recording.
The hares are breeding in the cabinet.
This is my voice. This is my Rome was raised for
the barbarians. This anatomy was made to model
for Dührer’s allegorical representation of corruption.
Green. That was the color of my eyes when I wrote a poem called “The Diary of a Pig Circus” about the assassination of my silhouette. I will probably paint over the naked girl with the guitar string because I like to keep my music clean and my girls alive. The mice scurrying around in the projector sound like an itch. The kneeling figure with his arms outstretched is the donor. His body is drawn with great plasticity, a style that was later eliminated by the linear styles of the later period.
We need some space to bleed.
We need a tree in which to breed.
(Why is the bird still intact?)
“In general the picture is the apparition of an appearance.” (Duchamp)
This command was written on a mural featuring children rising out of boxes. The style suggests a direct influence from the international Gothic workshops. The snakes are undulating wonderfully in the pajamas. The holes are in the bellies. I’m writing this poem on a cutting room floor while editing a documentary about the Massacre of the Innocents. Before I came in here someone was editing a film about distance. The landscape is shot from far away, from behind a wall. The soldiers are curious. The working title is “Ostranenie.” The voice-over is Shklovsky reading Zoo: Letters Not About Love. Berlin looks laughable with all those mothers wearing fur.
My hare is shivering here. Touch me. Here. Here. “Am I really that disgusting” shouts one of the strippers into my ear. “No, I’m cold” I shout back but I keep looking at the scar on her little belly. The gorgeous money shot will be dismantled on the sidewalk. The scar will be erased.
Do you want my broken fist? It’s actually my brother’s broken fist but he won’t need any broken fists in the barn where he’s going to sell pearls to swine. He’s going to engineer a change. I hope to engineer my emptiness into another kind of animal, one less likely to get struck on a dark highway. The final paradigm of the landscape as a reclining woman would be pacifying if it weren’t for the smell of oven-gas and the holes in my eyes.
I can’t see a single thing
I don’t want to wear
on my body like a car
skidding out of control.
I joined the Big Dance with a rotten scarf wrapped around my baby sister and a theological look in my eyes. I originally ended this with a shiver in the animal and an image of distance as salvation. I’m discussing the recreation again. Realizing that it will fail again. My torso was not made for birds. It was made for herds and Rome and I’m erasing my vocabulary of dispossession. If I had my choice, I wouldn’t even be here. I would be painting an odalisque with wonderful slabs of thighs and a choke collar that would be too tight around my dog’s throat. My dog’s dead and buried in a cornfield in Iowa. Listen. No. Listen.
Traffickers in the Black Meat, flesh of the giant black centipede - sometimes attaining the length of six feet - found in a lane of black rocks and iridescent, brown lagoons, exibit paralyzed crustaceans in camoflage pockets of the Plaza visible only to the Meat Eaters.
Followers of obsolete unthinkable trades, doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, black marketeers of World War II, excisors of telepatic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrents taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, officials of unconstituted police states, brokers of exquisite dreams and nostalgias tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, drinkers of the Heavy Fluid sealed in translucent anber of dreams.
The Meet Café occupies one side of the Plaza, a maze of kitchens, restaurants, sleeping cubicles, perilous balconies and basements opening into the underground baths.
On stools covered in white satin sit naked Mugwumps sucking translucent, colored syrups through alabaster straws. Mugwambs have no liver and norish themselfes excusivly on sweets. Thin, purple-blue lips cover a razor-sharp beak of black bone with which they frequantly tear each other t shreds in fights over clients. These creatures secrete an addicting fluid from their erect penises which prolongs life by slowing metabolism. (In fact all logevity agents have proved addicting in exact ratio to their effectiveness in prolonging life.) Addicts of Mugwamp fluid are known as Reptiles. A number of these flow over the chairs with their flexible bones and black-pink flesh. A fan of green cartilage covered with hollow erectile hairs through which the Reptiles absorb the fluid sprouts from behind each ear. The fans, which move from time to time touched by invisible currents, serve also some form of communications known only to Reptiles.
During the bienal Panics when the raw, pealed Dream Police storm the City, the Mugwamps take refuge in the deepest crevices of the wall sealing themselves in day cubicles and remain for weeks in biostasis. In those days of gray terror the Reptiles dart about faster and faster, scream past each other at supersonic speed, their flexible sculls flapping in black winds of insect agony.
The key thing to do now is to move into a new field. I've stopped calling myself a writer, for the book I'm just going to call myself a concept engineer. That makes the whole thing much fresher, much more exciting and much less known about. Because that's really what we're really doing. What we're doing is engineering, is grasping fictions, grasping concepts, grasping hallucinations from our own area, translating them into another one, mixing them, and seeing where we go with them. We use these different concepts to probe new areas of experience, to anticipate and fastforward different explorations into new fields of perceptions which are always there, but whose strength lies in that they don't exist in traditional mainstream terms. Traditional mainstream terms are still completely bound up with the literary, and the two cultures, and thank god for that, that means that they can't in any way get in on what's going on - which is just this sudden glance at the end of the century, through the synthesiser. I've renamed all the instruments, I've renamed the synthesiser the Sonatron. Zenakis called the synthesiser the sonatron back in 1980 in one of his books on computers. That's perfect because Sonatron just sounds like a superhero comic, so again there's that convergence of sound into a ballistics. And the drum machine should be renamed what it is: a rhythm synthesizer. I call that rear view hearing. The drum machine isn't a drum machine, there's no drums in it - it's pulses and signals synthesized into new pulses and new signals. There's no drums in it. That's a weird thing that's confused me for years and years - until I worked it out. You'd listen and they'd sound utterly different from drums. The movement from funk to drum machines is an exteremely incredible one: people's whole rhythmic perception changed overnight. And people of course pretended that nothing had happened but it was a major shift, hearing bleeps and signals and different kinds of alternating current as sound. It was a huge kind of shift. In a similar sense Varese calls the drum machine a rhythm synthesizer, and that's a good way to describe it. So all those kind of things, all those concepts, make a sense that really the mainstream are just completely incapable of really grasping at all.
To me, it makes complete sense to see action movies in the same stratum as scratchadelia. There's the same velocities, the same vectors, the same sounds: the sound of a car as it skids round a corner is the same sound as the wheels of steel make as they ride around. You're captured, abducted by the same sounds in each. It's this fantastic sound of velocity, as two surfaces in friction literally converge and then shoot apart at fantastic speeds. It's an incredible excitement. These things are happening concurrently, at any moment in time it's really easy to see that's where sonic invention has gone. It's part of being captured by tiny moments of time, being obsessed with tiny moments of time. Part of what happens with sampladelia is that you've got a lot of music based on sampler memory, so that a lot of the hooks, a lot of the music that abducts you will have to be 4 seconds or 9 seconds. So there's this huge pyschedelia based upon disguising these seconds; it's like Mark Sinker says, Mark's got this great line about finding the universe in a grain of sound and that's what the sampler does.
There's this huge psychedelia grown up in which you're able to literally fall into a universe of sound and it's literally granular, tiny microphonemes of sound. Or in Abbaon Fat Tracks by Tricky, there's this woman who whispers to her kid `Quick, quick, fly away, fast as you can to be with Jesus', she really whispers it. That whole sample must last, I dunno, 5, 7 seconds, 8 seconds, 11 seconds, but there's something so incredible about it. It abducts you so much, because you can hear an atmosphere in it, you can hear an ambience, you can hear levels of foreground within that sample. You can feel yourself getting abducted by it. So there's way in which the visual really seems to suggest that. Then there's this whole thing I was reading with Michel Chion, where he was saying in Audio-Vision. Michel Chion is a really interesting guy, he was a student of Pierre Schaffer, the guy who started Concrete, then he became a theorist. So he's the best person on film and sound ever. Part of my relation to sound is that he talks about sound in film, and sound in film, I'm only just realising it now, a lot of my favourite samples are of course from sound in film.
So sampladelia opens a continuum between visual sound and audio sound. Visual sound is always feeding in from one to the other. Hence why I love a lot of film samples. Probably why I love the visual so much is that it's always being grabbed any way by the music. By extinguishing the visual output, the music is switching it on elsewhere. It's almost as if the eyes start to have ears, as if, Michel Chion would say this, your ears have had their optical capacity switched on. In a strange way, your ear starts to see. Chion is saying that each of the senses have the full capactity of all the others. It's simply that hearing happens to go through the ear, but all the other senses can go through the ear as well. The ear is meant to hear, but it can do all the other things as well, if it was switched on to the right capacity. I think that's what he meant, but that's what I take from it any way. And sometimes when you hear those samples, Predator 2 or Flytronix, it does feel like the ear is somehow sensing things.
Fernando Botero’s son died in his hands, I was told, and every painting after that looked mournful. Everywhere we look is what we’ve lost: The boy’s face was a pig’s, was a dog’s, was a cow’s. The fat man’s on the caballo. Their faces were as big as dinner plates—same face. Same teensy pink meringue of a mouth. Some foods are better licked than eaten, as anybody knows.
Joy laid an egg. To break its shell is a rite: a joyous egg cannot be cracked by rocks or hammers. Humor and salt, in subtle doses. Its surface doesn’t always have an ovoid shape. There are many eggs shaped like squares, pyramids, icicles, or crystalline spheres. Even polyhedrons.
The birth of joy in its larval phase. Filaments, sounds, teeth for the celebration. There can even be green ligaments, lichens, and muscles set in motion like a watchmaker’s shop. There are also thunderings and artificial storms, relics and joints that defy goodwill. Minefields and incubated larvae put the birth at risk. It’s recommended you don’t make waves until the offspring acquires the consistency of bread or vitriol. In some cases the egg produces a bird or a field of sunflowers.
Five workers are proceeding down a country path. It begins to rain and one of the men starts to walk faster. He notices sheep in a meadow and a giant oak that seems familiar. As he reaches the tree, a truck passes with his four companions in the back. The truck is a green late-model Ford pickup. It is driven by an Indian from Brazil who used to be a shepherd, but gave up that life for a show he saw on TV. In this show it only rains when something bad is about to happen. The main character drives a pickup every morning to his job at a theme park cutting grass. He passes a group of five men wearing identical overalls. It begins to rain and tires lose their traction. Then comes a commercial counting sheep sacrificed for a tranquilizing drug.
They say the time you spend in a foreign country isn’t part of your own life. The same is true with music and dreaming. You live somewhere else in someone else and never want to leave. The shock is how, when you finally do, you discover everything in exactly the same place as before. What an extraordinary act of will: to seize hold of the contents of the room around you just where you left them, as though you have never been gone, the instant of coming back the riskiest of the day.
I thought Scarlet Pimpernel was a kind of bread. I thought antipasto was the opposite of some other food. At Sunday school, the teacher and the pastor kept saying, “Thy will be done,” and I kept thinking, “Thy what will be done?”
When we are in bed and you are on top of me, I think about the painting of the bear hanging over the great stone fireplace. I say to myself, bear, tell me a story about your tooth and your hide, about the three dogs that bare their teeth, and about the one dog that is so brave, he takes your flank in his jaw and hangs from it. Bear, tell me about the time it takes to put a sweater on. I want to know what it means to lie down empty. And bear answers, I have always been ashamed. I put on fish skin. They sometimes call the bear a lonely monk. The bear’s habitat is the gorge, the tree, the cleft of rock. If you open the bear’s stomach, you will find a rubber doll and a piece of canvas. I tap my upper and lower eye-teeth together. I refuse to eat. You laid yourself beside me, and I realized I was cold in my hairless skin. I wear wool in the rain so I will smell like bear, so that she will kiss my shoulder as I kiss the wood of our cabin walls.


In the blue city, in the dawn-scraped awakening, Tomas the fish-monger is already stacking the day’s catch in the fish stalls of the great Cathderal-skied market. Tomas wears a shawl of the blue city. If you were to ask someone what is it like to work all day and sleep at night in the city of blue arches and passageways, Tomas could tell you with a child’s eyes. He could tell you with the eyes of a broken lover. He could tell you with the lips of a long married man. He could tell you with the weeping of a man who has lost his mother in the wards where they send the destitute, down into The Dark City beneath the city that is blue. Tomas was born in the blue city with his sister, that placenta-sized other who never opened her blue coin-small mouth.
Tomas, in each fish you lift is a story. In each coin and call you offer to the morning is a song. Tomas can tell you the name of so many we pass on the street. There, Tomas says, do you see him in the black bowler hat? You would think he is a banker. But he belongs to the Black city, the city of night-song and insomnia. Why do we see him here in the Blue City sometimes? He never sleeps. He strolls from one city to the other, comes in here in his English-tailored suit, his hand-carved stick. How do I know this? Did I not tell you that my brother is from the Black City? My sister from the City of Broken Roses? My other brother from the Yellow City? Or my mother who is from the Oldest City, that city even older than us The First? That is another song.
The road is a tight, thin line. No shoulder, each side guarded with loops of barbed wire and electric fencing: metal signs with skulls and crossbones threaded into the electric wires every few feet. An SUV stops in the middle of the road, the door opens, the car belches a fog of cold air. The man puts forth his hand and shakes mine, tightly bunching my knuckles together. He is past middle-age, with creased khakis, tinted glasses and a flattop haircut. I look at everything as an opportunity, he says. I'm a Toastmaster, do you know what that is? You an army kid? My father was in the army. . . . Well, he says, I'm Marines. He rests his right hand behind my headrest. See, I can talk about anything—it's about communication. Just give me a topic. Okay, let's just look out the window, he says. What's out there, looks like nothing. Looks like a wasteland, right? I look out the window. But there is no nothing, he says. He moves his driving hand to gesture at the land outside. This is a large caldera, covering thousands of square miles. An area of pressure building up. All this empty nothing was dumped here thousands of years ago, heaved out from the earth itself, tons of rock and ash. All life for hundreds of miles extinguished instantly—a black cloud from Mexico to the Mississippi. Now those aren't just rocks that you're looking at. Not just rocks, I say. That's right, he says. Now let's go one step forward, let's deepen the discussion. See them signs, those smokestacks in the middle of nothing? Yes. That's man. Man's put his hand in the pie, that's nuclear power. Now let's really get out there. What do you think about nuclear power? I don't know. Okay, well. The Russians blew a 100 kiloton bomb, out in the Arctic Sea in 1948. Nova Zembla. That's nothing compared to what happens if this caldera goes again. And it'll happen again, bet your pants—but, here's the kicker, it probably won't for a hell of a long while, that's in the science fiction future. But what we got here, we got atomic energy in the middle of nowhere, with fissile material just coming in and out every day. This is today, this isn't fiction. Okay. Hold on, I'm really humming now. So you got fissile material, a gram of which makes a little backpack nuke and you got it sitting on top an area of massive geothermal pressure. Do the math, can you see where I'm going? It could be anti-government people, could be an inside job, could be some Russians still on the inside, could be the Belgians, no one suspects them, could be anybody. Oh yeah, lot a people got their eye on this spot of nothing.
Chickens scratch at the dirt road, a peacock stands motionless, one eye fixed in my direction. I wait for the car to pull out the driveway. Through the windows I see a litter box, couches, a framed diploma wedged between books. I wait for the car to come back. We sleep behind a eucalyptus tree. I wait for the car to leave again the next morning. Betsy whines as I tuck her into my arms. She licks the salt off my face. She squirms as I fill a bowl of water. I clear a space on the bottom of the coop. I put her inside. I walk away. She is crying.
The earth is wrong. The birds are gone or silent. The road broken. I sit in the lupine and wait. The sun pasted like a white disk in the sky. The dog has been following me, she squats just out of reach. I call the dog Betsy. Betsy and I are hungry. The pavement has ceased to function. What is this place? Betsy does not know. She is blameless. Silently we consider the steam pouring out of the earth.
The idea is both simple and awesome: you want to transport energy through an “antenna protein” in a plant cell to the “reaction-center proteins” where it is chemically converted into something useful for the rest of the plant. Obviously you’d like to transport that energy in the most efficient way possible, but you’re in a warm and wet environment where losses are to be expected. But the plants somehow manage the nearly impossible, of sending the energy with nearly perfect efficiency through the judicious use of quantum mechanics.
We can think about this in terms of Feynman’s way of talking about quantum mechanics: rather than a particle taking a unique path between two points, as in classical mechanics, a quantum particle takes every possible path, with simple paths getting a bit more weight than complicated ones. In the case of the protein, different paths for the energy might be more or less efficient at any particular moment, but this bit of quantum trickery allows the energy to find the best possible route at any one time. Imagine at rush hour, if your car could take every possible route from your home to the office, and the time it officially took would be whatever turned out to be the shortest path. How awesome would that be?
Some levels of loneliness are unbearable and fucking for money just makes me sad. I don’t hock my stuff for the same reason. It’s not that I think having sex for money is morally repugnant or degrading to women. I think sex acts between consenting adults should be legal. I have had sex for money. When I’m extremely sad or heartbroken, it’s easier for me to give my body to men for money but I don’t feel good about it afterwards. Escort work is isolating and more risky. I feel like I’m in a movie when I’m doing outcall, but the movie could turn very scary at any moment, like the time in SF when I saw a regular client for a paid date at The Clift hotel. I didn’t tell anyone where I was or what I was doing. The trick drugged me with GHB at Asia de Cuba in a glass of water that was waiting for me at our table. He was someone I liked and trusted. I was so embarrassed and ashamed, because I was sober for several years and I blamed myself for the incident, so I didn’t tell anyone about it for several days.
Dancing is a rush. I love being on stage and pole dancing is an art form. I like connecting to people in the context of a strip club. Lonely men can share their secrets with a stripper easier than the people who know them well. I enjoy being objectified and desired and being in control of that exchange. It’s been said that men are simple, but it’s not true. I’ve met dynamic, fascinating men with exciting fetishes and obscure, complicated desires and it’s a pleasure to participate in that desire. It’s also stimulating and fun to be around naked hot women. I love to watch other dancers and crack the codes of their hustle and know about their lives and watch them perform to their music.

I’m in a room with blood on my arms and chest. Jets come screeching in, and goats strain at their fences. I’m in bed with the Venus de Milo. My wrists are bent, and the sheets are fluttering. A priest’s running his hands up the thigh of a bull dozing inside the trees. A voice through the wall tells me to shut the hell up and make her happy. Put on the Beatles. Break out the Cokes. Doves: painted red.

A lizard, a knife, a tree in the bathroom at 3 AM: I’m leaping back into my veins. A girl walks home from a clinic. There’s a nail rusting in my foot. Her body’s covered in dust, hills, and burning bricks. Elephants are listening to God. Yes, they stand in the rain and they listen to God. On my way down to the river I shifted my heart from one side to the other and winked up at the sky. The stars came bruising down. Horses kicked.

The rains made grass and the grass made mice. We poisoned the mice and we poisoned the lakes and seas. A man stood on a rock and blew on his trumpet. He was wearing a pointed hat and a woman climbed on to a wagon. She pointed up at the sky, her tall thin body flexed. Our bodies floated off except at the edge of the cliff a girl who saw in the mist a barrel made of gold gleaming around her body as she tumbled down. She stood up, folded her blanket, smoothed down her skirt, and walked away.
But perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves—let’s say our thinking
is a fun car our noses are attached to. In thirty years the sun will have
pulled off a lot of dirty tricks and not been punished. Other things
you can’t arrest are: leaves and crazy loving. The leaves arrived all
at once this year, came on like a clumsy chorus. Hi! We’re all here
in our outfits! It is hard to dislike the trees, but we should probably
try, as a kind of exercise or basic amusement. We could do it for hours
and arrange for someone to stop by with a sandwich. Yesterday, today,
tomorrow, we must eat eat eat! Which is but one of the many things
that ducks say to their offspring. Learning can take place anywhere—
the parking lot, Milan, the parking garage. It’s all a matter of close
regard for the gasoline-lipped puddle. And then a spring into action,
a sprint into plein air, where all the wives have gathered. They are
of infinite variety, some lacquered, some even giving off mist, having
only just left the aquarium, where they spent days with the kids touching
starfish. Let’s go up and introduce ourselves—speak whatever language
comes to mind—they cannot hear us, but need only a little opening
through which it becomes polite to smile and offer us their hand.
They have machine gunned Heaven into a screen of holes!
It will not take long to fall.
Groping around in the darkness
Someone chases himself, a blade with teeth.
The insane are sniffing, hot breath.
Where should I hide, in which chapel?
Every encounter wants someone dead,
The corks jump like brains
And the orgy is drunk on blood.
—Duck, quickly.
Too late!!
My son is eternal like a corpse
He is beautiful like a hero!
And this carnage has continued for a hundred days.
I put my hand in all the wounds
There are so many deaths I have forgotten the number.
All the nurses have collapsed from the pain
And there is not enough wood in the world
to make all the caskets.
In the sky over the Anthropophagous Islands
God erected the Southern Cross
For all the dead without tombs.
Undoubtedly, we go to see some vast
and crucial constellation as it’s born!
Our dead are not buried.
Nor the enemies! Their mouths bite the earth!
My friends come… with weapons behind their backs.
Live, go!
New corpses!
The last girl dies on the body of the last poet.
One more cry beneath the stars.
Now, what I did was necessary!
But I never want anyone to see all this carnage!
I will go up on the barn roof
to plug holes in the sky with my fingers.
And the first who approaches, I’ll cut him down.
Three wolf pups curl inside a shell of rock candy,
a toothache for animals, an airplane growing smaller.
Flame on the forearm, choke of cloth lining
the leaving cheek: these are the paths through
a wolf's ribs. The aviatrix sees wolf-ants
below the wing. Wipes her goggles with a silk scarf.
The cirrus clouds scratch the plains,
fingernails over the shoulder blades,
leaving white lines that fade into red. The pups
follow the plane's shadow into foliage & cotton candy.
They collect coins from soda bottles
left by the hikers with bird-legged walking sticks.
They twist each other with rubberbands
& sugar, they will never marble like a name.
For only one week a year, if you look directly into the sun
& then run forward, you will travel too far to circle back.
You will find yourself in the murmur of wolf den.
Dried bones in the corner, photographs of tomorrow's prey
wheat-pasted to the wall . Pockets so heavy
with coins you sink into the asphalt,
the jukebox of wolfcries. You used to save
nickels to remind yourself of the moment a child
cups his hands around a sprig of light & squeezes
it shut. The first mistake is a stack of tires blocking the den.
The second is melody played through the blood of your ears.
The pup nips your shank. The plane smolders in the
background of the photograph, becomes
the cross of a goat's eye. The plane begins to shake
like a grand piano clawed into meat. Candlestick bones
light the way. You've circled back against the greater will.
Pups lean in, the circle has an inside & an
outside. The outside is light & the other, fur
cottoned to a human heart. It was never blood on the hand.
It was blood on the lip. The aviatrix unties the scarf
around her throat & steps into the darkest of dens.
She rolls the tire in front of the hole, rests
in the daguerreotype of a stuffed wolf posed between
two mirrors. She picks burrs from her ankles, speaks
in musk to the circle. The circle responds
in the language of flight. Black morning
of fur, toothache in the aviatrix snarl. You’ll
rest when her tail ties around your candied pup.
All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure
There is by sun on the other side of night, unseen. Moon is sun’s meridian spy, her blue pornography stomached in half-twilight by shady actors. A mountain is an uncompleted dream with steep sides you slick up your hands on. My.
The mountain is a world with its own weather. Windows crack only when the ingénue twirls her umbrella toward the fountain. Desire is the MORE we invent and store for the winter in shoe boxes.
Film runs out. The earth is not a building. It is paper born in the woods & hacked into rectangles children flip through. The horizon is one border. But the edge is convex per Christopher Columbus whose halo shines down from outer-space like a star you pointed to & never saw fall.
And there was goodness in the room. I looked at the goodness and checked to see if my roommate was looking too. He wasn’t. Did he see it. He didn’t. The goodness hung in the middle of the room. I took a long slow breath and breathed the goodness into my chest and held it there. I felt like individually asking everyone on earth if s/he was ok. I thought I’d better get started while I still had legs that were young.
I have agreed — in what now seems a moment of complete recklessness — to take part in a scientific experiment in which my brain will be temporarily “switched off”.
Cosmic Camera: Sex #2
Close-up: sweated forehead, beads melding into beads, mini-rivulets…
Pull-away: shaky-hand stroking naked back, twisty-sheets, stifle-sunlight through pull-down shade, shadows shading body-hollows…
Wide-angle: motel second-story balcony, blister-hot asphalt, heat-plumping metal creak, ‘hopper-buzz, street car-whoosh, couples checking in checking out, couples checking under shades under sheets, couples checking couples coupling…
Panorama-view: city trailing into strip-mall pall of people-auto-semi rush, retail-trash, gasoline-pumps with wavy fume-funk, porn shops, porn stars, porn sites; cheating, lying, crying, pleading, living, dying; sound and silence; violence and pe…violence, violence…
Satellite-shot: buyers and sellers, cheaters and straights; Ponzi-schemes, not-what-it-seems, shattered dreams; shades of green, brown, blue washed by red o’ shame…(#21) Ready
He kept his back to the wall as he broke down the rifle, laying each part carefully on top of the shirt he had beside them so that they wouldn’t slip through the cracks in the floor. Below him, he could hear the water lapping softly against the stilts, the structure slowly swaying with the wind. He cleaned each part carefully, then reassembled the gun. Then he loaded it, eight hollowpoints. Two for each of them, just in case the first shot missed.
He stood. He made his way from window to window, staring quickly out before moving to the next one. Nothing. He kept moving, from window to window. This time I’m ready, he thought. Let them come, he told himself. Let them try to surprise me this time.
The Boxes (#104)
In winter, once the light had slid very low in the sky, the sun barely cresting the horizon to muddle its way along the edge of the horizon before succumbing again, Einar found his sanity slipping once again into questionable realms. Unable to stop himself, he wandered the darkened streets, gathering what bits and scraps of metal he could find. These he arranged in his apartment, tacking them to the walls or spreading them in careful patterns on the floor. This did not seem to help exactly, but he told himself that without this activity to occupy himself things would only have gotten worse.
This was before the discovery in the street of the two boxes. One had a metal grillwork for its face, the grillwork thick and doubled so that one could not see through it. The other was completely enclosed save for two dark holes, the first hole blocked by a metal cross, the second just a little too small for him to force his hand into.
The boxes were connected to one another, both attached to a long thin rusted metal sheet, puckered at one edge. Einar did not know what they were. He wondered if they weren’t a part of a wrecked ship, something someone had dragged up from the rocks and then abandoned. Or maybe a piece of an old building, the rest collapsed now, scattered.
Nor could Einar say how long it took him to drag the thing home. It was wrong for the house, he realized as soon as he had it inside, too massive and self-contained to sit comfortably with the smaller scrap. So he hauled it outside again, left it around back of the building.
#
It was still there a few weeks later, when the light had reached its nadir and it seemed to Einar that the world was guttering so low that it threatened to be permanently snuffed out. I must do something, he could not help but think. Before he knew it, he found himself in the backyard, his flashlight balanced on the ground, beam shining up. He dragged the boxes and the metal sheet connecting them up near the building. Then, slowly, he forced the whole of it to stand upright.
They loomed over him, but something was missing. Wire, he thought, and found it and strung it about until there was a good skein of it linking the boxes to one another and to different objects in the yard.
Thus he waited, staring at the boxes, for what would happen next.
#
Hours later, the flashlight’s beam growing dim, the cold making his bones ache, he suddenly felt more lucid than he’d felt in weeks.
Oh no, he thought. What have I done?
But it was a fleeting lucidity, quickly gone.
Camouflage (#100)
She was there somewhere, there hidden in the garden, back among the flowers—he was sure of it: he had just seen her, hadn’t he? But there was something different about her. Even the brief glimpse he’d had of her had made that clear: something, he couldn’t help but think, wrong with her, something missing. And she had seemed—unless he was mistaken—afraid. What is she afraid of? he wondered, rubbing his chin against the butt of his axe. Surely not me?
But Carter, far less reasonable than his better half, is agitated – from the doorbell, from the cough drops, from the day after day in the landscape of someone else’s disease, sandwiched between his post-precancerous pre-postpartum wife and his postcancerous pre-posthumous mother – buffering and ferrying and shepherding from hospital bed to home to hospital proper from pre-op to post-op to “hear the heartbeat honey, can you feel the kick?” while life kicks him again and again and again in the balls, as God the referee counts theatrically from one to ten. Seven, eight, nine, oh shit he’s up again, there’s Carter for another round
I had to take a calculated risk, to describe the hemispheres as if they were personalities, with desires and values of their own (no odder that supposing them to be machines, in my view). The left hemisphere evolved to help us manipulate the world. Its disposition is acquisitive, and because it has a simplified model of the world, it thinks it knows it all - it seems arrogant. Therefore to liken it to a person who has those qualities is reasonable enough, though of course, like every scientific explanation, it is just another model. The left hemisphere sees only a very simple version of reality, is black and white in its view, tends to arrogant certainty, a view that it "knows it all already" and doesn’t have to listen to anything new, and is in denial about its own short-comings. And it has a tendency to paranoia if it feels its position is being threatened.
...What we know about human beings from philosophy and the arts is equally essential to understanding what the brain is. There is no fixed, unimpeachable place to start one’s exploration. I’m afraid that far too many scientists are philosophically naïve: they believe it is transparent that if you can make the machine model fit what you are looking at, it is a machine. What they fail to see is that we can understand anything only ‘as a’ something else: and depending on what that something else is, we see only the bits that fit that model. So choosing the right model is of critical importance. Until the Enlightenment, the natural model for understanding anything was itself that of a living being, a body, a tree, or a community: now we are so impressed by our ability to make machines, that even living beings, bodies, trees, and communities are modelled as machines - and as a result reveal only their mechanical aspects.
I will never believe in a God who loves me.
Revision: I will never believe God can love me.
[ exit, anthropomorphism ]
[ exit, streetlights ]
God rattles around like taste-buds, like evaporation.
God the gag reflex God the orgasm
God doo-wop, arthritis & toenails
God anthills, red & black God
the anteater God the best trout fishing river in New Mexico.
God Atlantis God the mammoths
God paper-cuts God paint
dirt cum
sweat air
etcetera
Somewhere above, an airplane snores.
They’ve hired skywriters
to compose clouds in a sky
off-color but clear; such
clever hats the chimneys
wear; so furiously they twirl.
Three people awoke. A maid would make them bathe, and a fifth slept in the pantry.
They were all entirely incompatible.
They never washed their bed nor allowed anyone else to do so.
Even so it was all completely disagreeable, but in the dining room that morning they were polite.
For breakfast Judy served them pancakes. Judy had been long in the kitchen and then went around the table with a large plate of the pancakes and placed three of them on each of the plates. A second help was also in the room and also had a plate. The second help was a small woman named Mary and a warm plate of butter was on hers, which she put in the center of the table, then quickly took a seat at the fourth place of the table where there was not a plate.
After a few hours of this breakfast, Mary was left alone at the table with the leftovers.
***
Three women are sitting at a tea party.
The one with spooky hair gets up and touches something on the wall. What it is is Gertrude's invention, a bicycle-like, metallic device. It is easy to see that Gertrude was not serious at all with her thoughts, thought Esther, as she returned to the laughing table, and dealt a hand.
At once she took a very small sip of the bitter tea and looked towards the couch where the dog was picking at a paw. A little farther behind was a small person who was hiding in the darkened corner and was scribbling away at a notebook.
Another woman who was unaccounted for telephoned. In the conversation with Alice, she explained her situation very badly. Anyway, she was also really bad at favors and didn't have a costume. And in fact, she never had a costume, although sometimes her favors were very generous, for example, the double cake.
And the hours passed and the light dwelt more in the corner, which revealed that the boy was wearing lavender, a yellowish lavender cape with satin frills, and his eyes seemed even brighter somehow now that he was standing over them.
What Gertrude said to him then I am almost completely in agreement with, but in response he took a little oar out from behind his back and smashed it upon the table.
Some thing are and some things are not about Marvin. Some Marvins are Marvin, and other Marvins are not Marvin.
Go ahead. Sit down and look through your history books. You'll see that I'm right. You'll see. Just check.
Marvin has his hands bound. Marvin leaves his jacket unzipped. Marvin remembers birthdays with unerring accuracy. Marvin looms large in the minds of those who think about people other than Marvin.
Some of those things are about Marvin. Some of them are not. You must decide on your own which is which.
Marvin will repair the fence for you. Marvin lives in fear of being discovered by his uncle. Marvin reads much, much, much, much slower than any other person in the entire world. Marvin has never ever killed a bug.
Some of those things are about Marvin. Some of them are not. You have free will. God has given you free will. I leave it to your free will to make choices.
Marvin resembles no one so much as Marvin resembles Marvin. Marvin has a tree in his bathtub. When John Cage talks about silence, John Cage is talking about Marvin. When Flannery O'Conner talks about God, Flannery O'Conner is talking about Marvin. God is forever talking to everyone he knows about Marvin.
See the paragraph above the paragraph above this sentence for further instructions. It won't take long to reread it. Reread it. It's important. Trust me.
Marvin shines a light, shines a light, shines a light in the daaaarkness. Marvin is rude to children when being rude to children is completely necessary. Marvin stalls out after 600 miles of running in place. The sun is not efficient. The sun is not efficient. Stop believing that the sun is efficient.
Just stop.
Can't blog. The sun is not efficient.
A man could spend ‘is entire life watchin' Perseus move across th' night sky, runnin' away from th' Great Square. An' a lass could devote th' lass' ever' night t' watchin' Cygnus fall headfirst towards 't. These constellations will nay change. Unlike th' observers who age an' eventually sink t' Davy Jones' locker, Perseus will forere run from th' Great Square an' Cygnus be forere doomed t' careen towards 't. They be immortal. Picture perfect an' beautiful. They play the'r part wi' flawless conviction. Great grandparents o' great grandparents be havin' this in common wi' all the'r descendants: th' glowin' everlastin' paintin' o' th' night sky. 'Tis rotten then t' reckon th' sky be nay perfect. In fact, 'tis heartbreakin'. Reckon th' sheer loneliness Perseus must endure fer all o' eternity, fleein' th' Great Square. Th' sheer loneliness Cygnus must endure in th' lass' perpetual descent towards 't. They be both obviously lookin' fer somethin'. Love? Perhaps. But most likely they be lookin' simply fer companionship. Someone t' share the'r existence wi'. Cygnus be prayin' t' find 't at th' Great Square an' Perseus be convinced he can find 't elsewhere. They be so close in th' sky, only a wee fathoms from meetin', how sad 'tis t' be seein' them frozen thar so close t' findin' each other ever' single night. They be nay lost. They will simply neremeet. They will nereknow that th' other existed. Destiny will be havin' nothin' o' 't. Th' sky be a cruel vortex. 't has a dull luminosity like 't’s jus' barely hangin' on. Them silvery stars shine on accoun' o' they be havin' t' nay on accoun' o' they want t'. Th' sky has nay hope. Th' constellations be havin' nay dreams, but e'en if they did what use would they be? They be havin' nay way o' congregatin' amongst they's self t' discuss the'r wishes let alone act upon them. They be jus' as helpless as we be. But maybe they be better off. They do nay be havin' t' deal wi' flora or fauna. They don’t worry about other stars. They don’t be havin' scurvy or famine. They exist exactly as we exist, meaningless, but wi' th' distinct advantage o' nay bein' burdened wi' th' horrible cripplin' dire need t' create meanin' fer they's self. They don’t struggle fer a bucketfull o' voyages t' understand th' importance o' the'r bein', they don’t pine away at a job an' waste the'r voyages, they jus' glow unsuspectin' until one tide they burst an' slowly fade t' a stellar cinder, scatterin' a tattered streamer o' star dust across th' graveyard o' space.
from one temple to the other, the ebony blood of my virtual suicide drains in virulent silence…the bullets crisscross my brain day and night…dispersing inside the skull an odor of detonated gun powder, of clotted blood, of chaos

the female bodies that rendezvous inside my lover leave at the door, like a useless corpse, all their knowns, the ideas they had formulated about love…that cause her to search in me for that same lugubrious personage of a thousand masks that is her father.

nothing can make me believe that love comes by anything other than this mortal passageway to the marvelous, inciting lascivious perilousness, in its aphrodisiac catacomb, where the never-before-encountered and the never-before-seen are the current characters of a continual surprise.
Mundane things, pitiful in their mundane assertiveness, their sad isolation. Kraft French dressing, glowing weirdly orange through its glass bottle, a green glass bowl of green salad, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce, its paper wrapper still on. All are in repose, in their absolute thingness, under the overhead alarming bright light of the kitchen. They may or they should, they must, really, reveal the meaning of this silent room, this silent house, save that they won’t. There is no meaning. These things will evoke nothing.
We are goober. We are brontosaurus. In the back of a car, we are dumb luck.
We drink our quiet through a straw and piss whispers behind the neighbor’s shed.
Sometimes, when we are sleeping, ferns the size of houses make us cry. Not because we are sad. But because they are beautiful. And we are hungry.
*They,* however, have shown no interest in us or our activities. For that we are grateful, though not a little bemused.
Was it not they who, after considerable wining and dining, sold us on moving here?
Did they not offer our sons their daughters? We must be vigilant, lest we be unmoored.
[Our parents have no idea! Even though we are so close to home! They never know we are hungry! They never think we are asleep!]
And so one night we wake, the hunger in our heads spilling out like lantern light at last.
We shake our daughters from sleep and dress them, lacing their toe shoes and lowering their tulle veils. We tiptoe down the courtyard, past our full and sleeping parents, and lead our dancing daughters to their bridal feast.
Our greed is a moonslice on the gravel.
[I saw Buzz Bissinger in Pittsburgh. He sounds a lot like Lewis Black. Called a guy who asked a dumb, confrontational question a “fuckhead.” I like Buzz Bissinger a good deal.]
“Oh, woe!” cried the sisters. The tulle-veiled, toe-shoed, whispering fern-dream sisters. “We don’t like Pittsburgh! And we don’t like Lewis Black! Please don’t make us marry him! He sprays spittle! Every time he speaks!”
*Please don’t make us…
I read that Buzz Bissinger hung himself the next day. He didn’t even leave a note.
Just a birthday card from his mother. The card was three weeks late and did not even make a joke of its own belatedness. I doubt the sisters read the newspaper. I know *they* don’t. Our parents don’t read at all.


These days, the phallogocentric artists have also been knitting things on knitting machines. I think about all the Chinese ladies sewing t-shirts in windowless buildings in Chinatown and I think about all the artists knitting flowers in bright lofts in DUMBO. The artists are listening to The Arcade Fire and NPR. I feel self-righteous. The artists should be taken into a field and shot. Self-righteousness is irritating. I should be taken into a field and shot. I imagine myself being shot in a field, by Chinese ladies. Would the Chinese ladies feel self-righteous, shooting me? They would not. They would shoot me selflessly, thinking about higher powers, like the ocean. The Chinese ladies would look sexy, in tight jeans and cutoff shirts, holding snub-nosed derringers and lighting each other’s cigarettes. I wish I were a lesbian. I would be overpowered by a sexy gang of Chinese lady biker-girls. They would tie me down and then they would put their silicone derringers in harnesses. They would take turns inserting their derringers into my trepanning hole. I wish I had a trepanning hole. I wish pure light were pouring from my third eye. I wish I were getting fucked in the head, in a field, splashes of light, sun-squirts, little prisms of skull on the milkweeds. What if I associate lesbian with Asian fetish? That would be wrong. That would mean my fantasies are over-determined by the power structure. I amend my imagination. Now I am being taken into a field and shot by self-righteous white lesbians whose fathers are famous politicians. Afterwards, we have a picnic, tiny tongue sandwiches, tiny watercress and cream cheese sandwiches, tiny salmon sandwiches, Prim’s, petit fours. A discreet entourage of Ecuadorian maids use hand vacuums to remove the red ants and pollens.
My name is Ariana Reines.
I wrote a book called THE COW, which won The Alberta Prize and was published by FenceBooks in 2006.
I wrote it and a lot of other things. It has many big ideas inside of it. It quotes from many sources.
THE COW is the first book of The Koran. Nobody notices this. Intellectual women who have feelings like THE COW. Gay men like THE COW. Men who like to have sex with women who have a lot of feelings like THE COW. People who like things with good style and no typos do not like THE COW. I can sympathize with them, but those people are not my problem.
I am speaking clearly because I am going to explain why sometimes THE COW speaks clearly and why sometimes it is a voluptuary, a vat of mushy ideals and disgusting feelings. The reason is that I am often a voluptuary, a vat of mushy ideas and disgusting feelings, and I have resented the cleanliness and elegance of tight and perfect writing. I have felt that writing should be dirtier and more excessive. I still feel this way. Often. Not all the time. A person has the right to feel in many different ways.
Writing can be more than good.
Rather the roaring of hordes of desperate zombie losers than rhymed verse or political rhetoric.

The ulterior times: raging and unintelligable, but still remarkably banal and predictable. Surrealism in the ulterior times unreasonable, compromising, conspiratorial, confused, single-minded, bloodthirsty. Meet it by the lemures or on the blood stained back streets or in the parks that still are ugly.
what is evolving under the hood—a new generation of games as mature and complex as any art form available to audiences today. And such games capture the depth and scope of the human condition through the power of collaboration, rather than singular artistic vision. Even the term for the gaming audience—“install base”—reinforces the integration of participant and medium. For these individuals are not merely “connected to” or “invested in” their form: they are installed.
The killer opened the window with bewildering ease and slipped quietly into the room. There were three narrow wooden beds, each with a bedside table. On the wall, inches above the beds, I could see three framed prints. The killer stopped for a moment. I felt him breathe; the air made a healthy sound as it went into his lungs. Then he groped his way forward, between the wall and the ends of the beds, directly toward where I was crouched, waiting for him. Although it was hard to believe, I knew he hadn’t seen me: I thanked my lucky stars, and when he got close enough I grabbed him by the feet and pulled him down. Once he was on the floor I started kicking him with the aim of doing as much damage as possible
What lures Kate back from Florida is news, through the extended family grapevine, that Darlene tried to kill herself. One of the strangers (the blinking man, Kate thinks) threatened to move out. In response, Darlene ran into Kate's room, which had been converted into storage space for all the crap Kate's mother bought at flea markets, and sat down on Kate's bed. Darlene put the blinking man's pistol pistol into her mouth and pulled the trigger. But her aim was poor and the bullet came out between her eyes, obliterating her nose and sinuses. The blinking man tried to stop the blood but he couldn’t still his hands.
Before Kate comes back, she and Amanda pack light.
She shows up at Billy’s. The buzzer doesn’t work. The elevator does, though it takes her to a different number floor at first. The geometric pattern of the rug doesn’t look the same. She knocks on his door. But he doesn’t answer. The dark brown door opens, mysteriously, and she goes inside. There’s the piano, in shadows. There’s the phony owl. Where is Billy? Hey, man, where are you? She looks in the refrigerator.
In the bathroom, he’s turning to jelly. The piano starts to vibrate. She looks over at it and wonders how you turn it off. She goes into the bathroom, with a knife. The shower curtain scares her.
She sees something and doesn’t know what it is. It’s breathing, red, alive. It’s like a baby with the juice still on but it isn’t a baby. It isn’t pretty. It opens one of its mouths – if those are mouths – and extends some kind of half-formed tentacle or arm.
She sits down on the closed toilet seat and tries to understand. She doesn’t understand. A knife flies around like some little bird.
A girl masters the art of forgetting among kidney thieves. A motivational speaker skins his best friend to impress his wife. A man outlines the rules and regulations for sadistic childrearing. You’ve heard these people whispering in hallways, mumbling in diners, shouting in the apartment next door.

I want to get rid of or kill Kanoko
Before she spills my blood...
Congratulations on your destruction
Congratulations on your destruction
These words come from "Killing Kanoko," one of the most controversial and dramatic poems from contemporary Japan. Published in 1985, this poem conveys the Japanese poet Hiromi Ito's exhaustion as a mother and her thoughts of infanticide. She was subsequently pilloried by the popular press for her writing, while feminist writers held her up as a hero, praising her for her bold and unflinching exploration of the dark, emotional underside of motherhood.
Bread knives and boning knives, scalpels and switchblades and razors of all description carpet the floor in a jangling mass. The ceiling is too low for the insurgent to stand, but not the boy. The boy can stand.
In my bedroom is a door and that door goes straight to the ground and in that ground there is a hole and in that hole there are birds flying perfectly still in a sky that never moves, because it is underground. Out my window is another window. It is part of someone’s house. Out their window is an alleyway, where a man is performing magic tricks. I saw him pull a ghost out of his hat. It looked just like his assistant. His hat turned into his assistant and his assistant crumpled up. They took a nap. She said I imagine being a magician’s assistant is very tiring. Or she said He murdered her, and we should run him out of town, as that sort of person is undesirable. Then the magician was standing over us, and he was weeping. We looked at our feet. He kept on crying. He opened an umbrella. He covered his face with a sheet until the wind took him away and we never saw him again.
equipment, personnel, ad revenues, sky scrapers, almost ate me up. Key thing. Twenty-four news network, bury yourself, don’t get
no harness could hold him, prevent his little neck from snapping, she found herself an unscrupulous harness dealer, even he refused, she doubled and redoubled, soon six figures for a damn parachute harness, by no means a low six. He gave way as they all do, the wife indemnified him and took to the sky with our baby, crashed square in a pumpkin patch, neck snapping on impact, or before, in midair. Boy dead on impact, or before, perhaps, little heart bursting, perhaps. More than one way to take the wife’s later description of the sound. So peaceful, she said, snap the most peaceful snap possible. Our son perhaps gone already. Changes everything, crucial fact changed, snap not the same snap, no way of knowing. What delicious soup. After the tragedy, the burial, surrendered herself full-time to the exploitation of the corpse, most obscene goddamn
paid her deeper into the art game, AIDS-charity game, worked for a time, stifled her tastelessness. New toys, me with my own. Hocked the theaters, Obie awards, built ground-up a 24-hour cable news network, dandy new toys, none of it enough. Art game, AIDS game, news cycle. The wife back at the corpse, wailing at her misfortune, hers, mark it, nasty ululations, pseudo-spontaneous histrionics, express purpose bringing low all within earshot. Be warned, you, sir, and your Tanya, now within the perimeter of ululation, our wives descending, fourth cellar, and you and I at this table, and the high windows, and the chandelier, and Granger and Kidd, a locked
small, dried-out, bent and gravely crippled southern Italian men, with the family for generations, subjected me to heinous childhood rituals. Thought all that hidden from my parents, but growing up, gathering evidence, shoveling bullshit, the will at last to see what it had truly been. All these rituals expressly commissioned by
day in, day out, ululations. Couldn’t abide, left home, the beeches, sycamores, paintings of Granger and Kidd, hell out of Dodge. Disappeared for weeks at a time, news game, those vipers and cocksuckers, home shorter intervals, more and more among vipers and cocksuckers, finally left the Copper Beeches for good, hearth and home, childhood goddamn home, The Pentecost and Untitled #43, projecting hemicycle, arcaded side projects, all that behind me. Buried myself in advertisers, personalities, affiliates, going concerns, cocksuckers, vipers, every step dragging. Copper Beeches, childhood home, abandoned it to the wife’s ululations, those wails that shook bedrooms, libraries, first and second cellar, goddamn unending screams refracted in the accelerator of her toxic self-regard, up to such a pitch of horror, so many thousand decibels, that the last of our servants, the sorriest old pricks, the ones hadn’t fled, such disgust, at the boy’s death, smashed locked doors, scrambled through screens they’d slashed, literally ran for the hills, and me not there to wrestle them back. Pieced it together after, came home at last, rehired them, same pricks, double, triple salary, wrestled them back, still others back on their own, frail, flailing at the door
dropped like flies, ancient servants, to leave, to return, too much, did them in, all but the valet, also his daughter, such a precious baby girl, what delicious soup, eat goddammit. Ignore the wrenching of planks and mortars, the crash
silence in the Italian and African marble, cobalt and amber mosaics, the projecting hemicycle, arcaded side projects, silence there, ribbed vaults, mahogany tables, panels of goddamn ivory damask, all buffeted by oceanic silence. The beeches in the high blue windows, and a cold piss reek
your wife, her contractions closer, delicious soup, please try
creaking in the south wing. Pay no attention. As though foundations were precipitously
1. I believe that writing is the highest resolution medium.
2. I struggle with the difference between what I pledge to myself and what I do finally; or, what I sometimes call my falseness; but when I say after all I'm not being false for wanting to be a certain way, that I just have high goals, I will have to agree that no one else around is false either and say for myself that I have the perpetual condition of falling short.
3. I endeavor, word by word, sentence by sentence, to write myself an adult-sized, customized uterus in which I and invited guests may duck, buck, and float.
4. (I write because) I am interested in dark and stormy nights, syntax and moments of delicate, major humiliation.
5. I ogle, grope, and weep; always in that order.
6. I don't trust fiction with no sense of humor and I know I'm writing it when everything adds just so; I know I'm closer when I'm left holding extra parts—parts I know I need even though the thing runs fine without them.
7. I will be a lion for my own cause.
I danced where the fat girls had danced. I licked the floor where their sweat had been spent, where their drinks were spilled, where they got their men. I licked it like a dog would; face between my hands, hungry. Stale, salty, black, grit, strange. I ate it all up … sucking it from my tongue, and brewing it in my saliva like sex tea.
If you are ever in a situation where you say to yourself, “this feels like a horror movie” then do not get out of your car.
This will save your life.
If you say that thing and you are not in a car, well, stay golden. You might be dead soon.
I say these things because I love you.
I want you safe and gone, alive and well and out of the house before I get home. I love you…
They remembered: burying two dogs, three cats, and killing one deer.
I shot that deer perfect, she said.
I couldn’t believe your mother came with us, he said. I wouldn’t hold a gun and my face was flushed for days.
We ate the meat when Katrina dropped a tree through our house, they said. The power was gone for three weeks, so we had sex often and feverishly. A red star descended the horizon in the evening, a green one in the morning. A half-inch of water pooled on the kitchen floor. It is impossible to explain how wonderful this was.
These people have tried talking. They think it is an effective way to communicate. For personal reasons, they do not talk anymore. If one of them wants something, they bang their skulls together. The theory is that if their brains are closer together, a thought will transfer. If one of them needs something, they cry while doing this.
* Under the tree in the front yard, there is a hole. When I look into it I think, what could it have swallowed to grow so large? I ask the tree to move and it laughs. I ask it what it thinks about the hole and it doesn’t think about it because it doesn’t have a brain. Now I dig up the roots and push the tree over. In the hole there is black. I shout BLACK into the hole. I shout I AM A TREE into the hole and realize too late. The hole is a pit. In it, there is every kind of pigeon. In it, an echo keeps itself company. I circle the pit like a wild animal. The tree says I can make this make
Whenever Dawn thinks of her, she is Dear because it’s the language that creates the illusion; it’s the language that misdirects, that denies the implication that ‘mother’ assumes carrier and caregiver alike. For Dawn, to deny that duality is to say we may be connected, Dear, but we owe each other nothing.I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it - without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgments based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he's a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. That's why I didn't give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshiped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.
And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what's left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny? Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn't acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we're left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves.
Retaining from science only its fundamental precept - that everything is subject to fatal laws, which we cannot freely react to since the laws themselves determine all reactions - and seeing how this precept concurs with the more ancient one of the divine fatality of things, we abdicate from every effort like the weak-bodied from athletic endeavors, and we hunch over the book of sensations like scrupulous scholars of feeling.
Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it's because the poetry or prose we write - devoid of any desire to move anyone else's will or to mold anyone's understanding - is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading.
We're well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect. There's no sunset so lovely it couldn't be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn't bring a yet sounder sleep. And so, contemplations of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses, which when they're finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day.
This isn't the viewpoint of pessimists like Vigny, for whom life was a prison in which he wove straw to keep busy and forget. To be a pessimist is to see everything tragically, an attitude that's both excessive and uncomfortable. While it's true that we ascribe no value to the work we produce and that we produce it to keep busy, we're not like the prisoner who busily weaves straw to forget about his fate; we're like the girl who embroiders pillows for no other reason than to keep busy.
I see life as a roadside inn where I have to stay until the coach from the abyss pulls up. I don't know where it will take me, because I don't know anything. I could see this inn as a prison, for I'm compelled to wait in it; I could see it as a social centre, for it's here that I meet others. But I'm neither impatient nor common. I leave who will to stay shut up in their rooms, sprawled out on beds where they sleeplessly wait, and I leave who will to chat in the parlours, from where their songs and voices conveniently drift out here to me. I'm sitting at the door, feasting my eyes and ears on the colours and sounds of the landscape, and I softly sing - for myself alone - wispy songs I compose while waiting.
Night will fall on us all and the coach will pull up. I enjoy the breeze I'm given and the soul I was given to enjoy it with, and I no longer question or seek. If what I write in the book of travellers can, when read by others at some future date, also entertain them on their journey, then fine. If they don't read it, or are not entertained, that's fine too
Memory is my home. I sing and rot at the same time. The declivities, the eastern kettles and drumlins I visit at the end of summer with Phenobarbital spritzers knocking in my bruised rucksack. The air is grouchy and I love to pet the grass and swing little, slimy frogs by their legs and shout Baudelaire at them.
My notebooks are soiled and worn, but empty. I’ve made some decisions lately that remain fresh up top next to the mush about nuns and penmanship. First—I will do away with the wires, but after I reach Knott’s fork. Second—Chimpanzee will be reclaimed when I use ‘durst’ in a real sentence with a real stranger. Last—trade for another spoon.
I went out of feeling when the green hairs grew from my ears. Tympanum shuddered and I was below. A foundling. My mistress might twitch if I caught her in the oven. She had a bunch of health questions and signals gone wrong after we moved to the triplex with Billy. Billy told me I had the wrong idea about women. Why I threw the barrel of basmati at him is only known to the angels. He went north, the asshole—liked cold and fires and things that did not talk. If I am mawkish, Billy is my greatest regret. My mistress could be anyone, anything. A pencil, a crumpled sock, my little finger.
When warmed, I follow sparrows to the river. I gurgle and ooze underwater—my tears mean enough to drown just after birth. In the long kingdom I have found so many pennies and screws it is ridiculous. Never nails, never newspapers. I’m of a sound weight because of my metals, and I dally into regions that would normally not have me because I have hypochondrias to share and because no one can stand to lick my bones.
When they finalize me I want to go back and touch a man. He doesn’t have to be ruddy or spiky. He can be foreign, belly-swollen, toe-gnarled. I won’t use his ears, but I’ll slip him my heart and he can know that I wasn’t kidding, there was a circular charm where my wishing used to be. Me and him—we’ll go somewhere far. It’ll be like getting out of school on a winter afternoon. We’ll meander towards home and potatoes holding pinkies and feeling good because tomorrow is more of the same.
But that is before the unbloom. Now the sun is falling and I’m spinning. I’m not yet eaten out; I’m faulty—holding onto the ribbons for too long.
I don’t have a chance.
Their ruins under droop-heavy branches buckle
beneath clouds, creaking wind; and how beautiful,
like the body of a soft ripe girl. Hunt her, gather her.
Bring her at dusk to the city of rain; under an awning
of branches take her, push her into the soft dark earth.
Lift that deerskin skirt. And when the huts cave in,
crumpled straw and mud; when footprints swirl under
river surge: deep plunge, open-eyed search. Grasp.
Release. Resurface. Return to the city of sidewalks,
sneakers, stop signs; sideburns fluffed, seek new prey.
My poetry shall consists of attacks, by all means, upon that wild beast, man, and the Creator, who should never have begotten such vermin!
Fucking fuckers fucking little symbols eat equations and questionnaires and pedigrees while president Obama makes face catch a thousand swords knowing carnal little yodels, yodels, frantic little margarine telephones televisions and capitalized specimens. The president of the united spaces of independence eats a meatloaf.
Women whose eyes are water to drink in prison make holy oak of imposter liaison. Liaisons, plural? Who cares, this is not grammar lesson. The common unclean nightflowers do grow in twos and threes and how I wish to deceive the mortuary before grandmother gets home from the hospital. Father forgets his med pills make quick salad and redeye vacation tapioca. Dinner menus and Saturday nights mean nothing in case you mean to graft the licorice of starvation onto the glued hand of obedience anyway.
What you stack whole money hunger waving goodbye grandma, see you grandma, hope you get to feeling better while you still got time to re-up the line and forecast the disagreement between you and dad and fridge and mohair and frankly I think the whole thing is out of sight out of mind out of dynamite.
These allergic reactions. You see? Ask the foundation to grapple with wonderful additions to the aviary or twice now I have called your mother for advice and she hangs up on me! Fucking hangs up on me when I yell out the chess piece makes fourteen haven lockets yellowed by quartz and dagger burger needlepoint excursions. Blood soup. Noodles jury kluge bucket. Radically! Ecstatically! I ambition the frosting and cake the ghouls pleasantly.
Walking spiral hunger grape forage sister wood lawn hyper fragile stabile anyway I hope you get this message. I miss you, squirrel. I miss your language. I miss the way you make bake sake rake fake take Columbus.
CARTWRIGHT, Jeffrey: Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Author (1943–1954)
—from Steven Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse
CASE, Justin: From Caligari to Vlad
—from Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat trilogy
CASIMIR, Jozef: The Life and Precepts of Jozef Casimir, the Wizard of Podolia, as Written by Himself
—from Russell H. Greenan's It Happened in Boston?
CAULFIELD, D.B.: The Secret Goldfish
—from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
CHAMPERS, Tal (Ph.D.): Ernie and Bert in the Boardroom
—from Ed Park's Personal Days
CHAPIN, Paul:
Devil Take the Hindmost
The Iron Heel
—from Rex Stout's The League of Frightened Men
CLARKE, St. John:
Dust Thou Art
E'en the Longest River
Fields of Amaranth
The Heart is Highland
Match me Such Marvel
Mimosa
Never to the Philistines
—from Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
CLIPLIP, H.K. "Kid" (pseudonym for Chipdip K. Kill): Androgynoid
—from John Sladek's "Solar Shoe-Salesman"
CLITHEROW, John: Mr. Bluebird
—from Dean Koontz's Relentless
CONRAD, Udo: Memoirs of a Forgetful Man ("and that other thing about the old conjuror who spirited himself away after his final performance")
—Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
COSCAT, Marcel: Les Robinsonades
—from Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum
COSGROVE, Kenneth: "Tapping a Maple on a Cold Vermont Morning," The Atlantic Monthly; two novels, unpublished, one about a man on an oil rig, another about a widow on a farm; "The Day We Looked at the Picture"; "The Gold Violin"; story or stories in Parabolas
—from Mad Men (TV), season 1, episode 5; season 2, episode 7
COLLUPHID, Oolon:
Where God Went Wrong
Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes
Who Is This God Person, Anyway?
—from Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
COURTNEY, Martin: Sheltered Life ("a rambling, largely autobiographical account of his teenage years"). See also Elliott, Evan.
—from Adrian Tomine's "Alter Ego," in Summer Blonde
CRAYE, Lady Florence: Spindrift
—from P.G. Wodehouse's Joy in the Morning
CREADY, Josh Holt: Manassas
—from Steve Hely's How I Became a Famous Novelist
Question: Boris Yasmilye’s second novel was called The Musala Affair. But what was its working title?
Answer: There were three answers given to this question, all of which were right, excepting Caspar’s, whose motion towards satire obstructed his passage towards truth. The fact is, this novel went through no less than forty-one working titles. Thanks to funded research at the University of Krakow, we can now list them all:
The Hypocritical Rabbit; Over and Out; No One Nose and Ears; Brandishing and Buffetting; Apoplexia; The Goose and the Frog; The Gardener’s Dilemma; The Barn that Burns With Shame; A Right Royal Mess-up; The Old Affair; The New Affair; The Chicken Tikka Affair; The Club Sandwich Affair; The Affair that Speaks No Name; Serenade to Sunlight; Bitter Pills and Francy Frills; Oakspawn; The Rock on Which My True Love Stands; Despair, A True Story; The Snow in Summer Falls With Grace; Monkey Kisses; You, Me and Your Cousin’s Handbag; When did you last brush your teeth?; The Gorge; The Ramp; The Strawberry Milkshake; The Flea of Life; Unholy Traces; A Long Way Around the Block and Back; The Graves of Rochester County; Twelve and Counting; Stale Breath; As Was, Will Be: Forever; Potion for Emotion; One Mighty Grope; The Emerald Scarf; A Tale of Toupees; Sick and Silent; Things They Said Would Never Happen (and why they did); Dancing on Mice; Fourteen Ways to Fry an Antelope…
All of which were tossed away, in due course, in favour of The Musala Affair.
All this effort, incidentally, didn’t help the book, which was Yashmilye’s worst - by a long way. If only he’d stuck with Potion for Emotion. You couldn’t go wrong with a title like that.
The wind howled like the blind dog my mother strangled back in ’64. It was the night (as Daddy put it) that the ‘owl embraced the day’. Or as another wag had it: ‘when that ol’ bitch got what was coming to her’. A trite pun that second one, but not without some truth. Not without some truth indeed. And far be it from me to poke a fat finger into the whole thing by reminding you all that Myopius was male. Far be it. After all, this isn’t about the dog, is it? Nor about my mother (who, not that it matters, I never forgave and have seeking to replace for more than forty years now). No. This is about the wind. The howling wind. Or else the trees, which one might suppose had facilitated, enabled or assisted the striking soundscape. The trees and the wind. The trees and the wind and the rain. Nature’s gloriously messy orchestra. Like pre-school kids on percussion. Like tone-deaf teenagers taking out their frustration though the medium of melody. Harmless, disconcerting.

Silk stockings are priceless. A vice-queen IS n armchair. Worl views are word mixtures. A god IS a hammock. L’art est mort. Viva Dada!
I saw myself standing in an empty room, he says. I was standing at the window, looking out through the cracked pane.
Then I saw my face at the window, behind the cracked pane. Looking out.
There was once an influential dogma in anthropology that stated that myths had their counterpart in rituals and rituals had their counterpart in myth. The images in this case would be taken as an example of that thesis. But putting it in that way makes it all far too systematic, as if in some way if we were all to dance the Jupará we’d be thinking about butterflies and propitiating the forces of nature in order that the sky didn’t fall again. It’s just not like that. The connections aren’t systematic, in the sense of a logical rationale of connections presented as a kind of theology. They don’t form architectonic structures. The fragments are fragmentary, aleatory, gloriously random.
But that doesn’t mean that they are fragile. The exuberance of the connections makes for an endless tangle of associations. Again, calling it a ‘network’ of associations would give it an inappropriate tinge of order. The details tumble around one another. The myth and ritual associations in this example is just one strand, one liana, in the convolvulus tangles.
The narratives *are* confusing. They do seem like a jumble of bits and pieces. Fragments appear in one myth and crop up in another. One person would tell the myth in one way; another person in the same settlement would have a different story line. But, like imagism, or surrealism, or any of the isms that have been part of the century I live in, getting used to the idiom is the simplest remedy to our initial confusion. Just be open to it, relax into it, become familiar with the idiom and so many of the problems disappear. When you come to hear your fiftieth myth the frown of puzzlement has vanished from your brow.
The narratives may be fragmented and straggly, twisting around in forms unfamiliar to us, but the redeeming quality that allows us to connect up is the oldest trick in the narrative book: what happened next? Once we get used to the narrative lines, the bizarre becomes the expected; or rather, nothing is too bizarre. Anything can happen. Hearing the gasps of delight from the listeners confirms that the more bizarre the turn of plot the more it is enjoyed. These are their winter’s tales, which are not supposed to be credible, consistent or concise.
While getting to the stage where you can enjoy the bizarre narrative lines, you’ll have learned one important lesson on the way: that the initial bafflement is not due to the particular version you’ve confronted being corrupted or partial version of a more perfect, complete, rational, logically coherent narrative that lurks somewhere in a missionaries travelogue of two centuries ago. That’s the last hope of the baffled mythographer. There’s no easy salvation somewhere back there when Amerindians were more logical, rational, and architectonic in the way they constructed their storylines. You’ve got to accept the narratives as they are, in all their crazy, fragmented incoherence. It was ever thus.
There certainly are common themes that come up again and again all over Amazonia, although it is perhaps more appropriate to catalogue them as fragments rather than themes; fragments that are shuffled around into different patterns like a kaleidoscope. ‘Getting fire from the Jaguar’, for example, is a common story, but sometimes, even, fire is taken from another creature.
However extensive our catalogue, I think it is unlikely that we’d ever exhaust the possible variations constructed from those variations constructed from those fragments. The variations and transformations just go on and on. Those with a purist itch will keep looking for some kind of complete, definitive version, but that search is a blatant result of literacy, where the most complete text is the version that has the greatest authority. In the woods, there are no texts, just people’s memory.
In May, 1962, Horizon Magazine published a selection of poems by the "Auto-Beatnik": a computer program created by R.M. Worthy and others at the Laboratory for Automata Research of the Librascope Division of General Precision, Inc, a company which manufactured computers and other electronic equipment:
Roses
Few fingers go like narrow laughs.
An ear won't keep few fishes,
Who is that rose in that blind house?
And all slim, gracious, blind planes are coming,
They cry badly along a rose,
To leap is stuffy, to crawl was tender.
Children
Sob suddenly, the bongos are moving.
Or could we find that tall child?
And dividing honestly was like praying badly,
And while the boy is obese, all blasts could climb,
First you become oblong,
To weep is unctuous, to move is poor.
Kites
Yes, so passionately did my bleak worms live underneath the king.
Ah, few sects smell bland.
Mice
The broad sleighs of glass are dashing hungrily,
She is a toilet of dissolute water, and I am those bland melodies.
So, chess was arsenic and gold was beer,
It was a snail of murmuring beer, and I am those angry nets.
He was lustier than the twine and more bold than the shop.
The milk of plates upon many sands of cream was like consummate magnates.
Steeples
Was Milo mewling thrilling radishes?
So, our anchovies are sad but green.
Corsets
Yes, illterate is its rowdy, black is his avenue,
Mine is a hay of these dwarfs.
Does he look like a sin of alabaster?
Moreover, food tastes like coy buttermilk.
Bassoons
Ah, so apologetically did their small rowdies cringe beside a tramp.
Beneath a ballad, should a rooster harangue like the prostitute?
Steaks
Is that the automaton that smells like the tear of grass?
All blows have glue, few toothpicks have wood,
Direct a button but I may battle the ham,
The crafty carnival's kite daintily massacres the scalp.
Yes, we would, you shall,
Shall I not tighten a moose's parasite?
Whales
The iron mother's bouquet did rudely call,
Yes, I am as fine as many murmuring crates.
People was braver than snowy hay.
It was dirtiest who bleeds behind the piano.
Girls
All girls sob like slow snows.
Near a couch, that girl won't weep.
Rains are silly lovers, but I am not shy.
Stumble, moan, go, this girl might sail on the desk.
No foppish, deaf, cool kisses are very humid.
This girl is dumb and soft.
(no title)
My corkscrew is like a hurricane,
Under a lamp the nude is vain.
Quiet is my plumber, cruel is your parade.
Yes, its bed mumbles by a barricade,
Usually does a nourishing cannon ordain,
Like salt, no adulterers were insane.
Like gasoline, some battlefields were volatile,
Thus, their revolt will gently drill.
Early modernists were fascinated by art of early human societies. Picasso, for example, studied early African art. In our work we were venturing even father, or, in Darwin's terms, to the beginning of time. Soon we will make photographs through the eyes of a patato, and paint with brushes tied to tree limbs, collaborating with the wind
which is the hardest language? On balance The Economist would go for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon. It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.
Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.
The only thing of which I am sure, is that the distinction between the organic and inorganic is arbitrary; that it is more coherent with our other ideas, and therefore more acceptable, to start with every molecule as a living thing, and then deduce death as the breaking up of an association or corporation, than to start with inanimate molecules and smuggle life into them.
There seems to be no philosophical necessity for food. We can conceive of organized beings living without nourishment, and deriving all the energy they need for the performance of their life functions from the ambient medium. In a crystal we have the clear evidence of the existence of a formative life-principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is none the less a living being. There may be, besides crystals, other such individualized, material systems of beings, perhaps of gaseous constitution, or composed of substance still more tenuous.
It is not obvious that language is the defining characteristic of man. It is equally consistent with the scanty evidence on man's early activities that language is a relatively recent acquisition in man's biological evolution. In either case, if mantras are prior to language, it should be possible to find them in earlier stages of evolution, either in early man or elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Since the sounds of early man are no longer audible and our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates, have not developed much in the way of vocalization, it may be necessary to look further afield. This is not uncommon in the study of biological evolution. To find parallels to certain features of social organization in man, for example, one may have to turn to insects, who represent a phase of biological evolution entirely different from the mammalian phase to which we ourselves belong. Similarly, to find parallels to human music, one should study whales, frogs, insects, and especially birds. And so it may be rewarding to consider birds and bird songs if one searches for parallels to mantras.
Whimpering among blood puddles on the plush-carpeted floor, the lieutenant rubs and puffs and licks his Shinto fetishes, and tries to bribe his countless gods for deliverance, while the handsome vehicle bounces and squeaks on its shocks, and the temblor continues.
I live in a house without a door
Each person who visits must bring a door
on his back. Install it before sitting down
then take it with him when he leaves. My privacy depends on
Visits from these people.
Tumbleweeds and creosote bush growing in crumbling asphalt and cracked cement slabs.
The wood desiccated, black and splintered.
"It doesn't matter."
"More information than I wanted."
resistance 1
a. join the party or the clique
b. get the membership or tattoo
c. embody the ideology, learn the lyrics
d. get the rhythm down, blur contradictions
e. peg a realistic middle distance, stand the foreground
f. follow instructions, marry action
g. subvert self, desire, circumstance
h. live thru others, some alive
resistance 2
a. be your 'self,' someone like whoever you used to be
b. a skeptical side glance at groups, critical toward vocabulary & hierarchy
c. feel 'free' inside the moment, or out of it
d. cold clarity, then a hot red forgetting
e. the irony of doing anything or nothing while others suffer torment & are killed
f. whimsy, kindness & prayer: last refuge of scoundrels
g. various forms of slow suicide, or a couple of the short forms
h. at last joining in (suspicion or idolization of leaders)
i. attitude, especially recycled

Each child begins his or her life as a tree. While they are still able to move the children make a circle near the city hall building. The teachers water the children’s feet every day until they root into the dirt. Soon thereafter their legs fuse together & grow a tough brown coating. Their torsos do the same & the children must hold their arms above their heads as their fingers separate into hundreds of tight green buds & sprout. The canopy of trees grows thick around the city hall building, blocking out the sun. The mayor & the lawyers exit the building each day, not noticing the trees growing larger.
Soon the trees have grown so large the mayor & the lawyers must push their bodies through the spaces between the trees, covering their blue suits in sap. One day the spaces between the trees is so tight that when the mayor & the lawyers try to exit the city hall their bodies get wedged between the trees. Slowly their bodies are coated in sap & the sap dries & winter comes & snow smothers the land & the parents of the children call up the stairs “Wake up Michael.” “Wake up Julia.” Until they remember that those beds are empty & they pull a piece of paper from their pockets & they write something down.
The maiden name—and then a list of the sisters.
Eleanor, the youngest, is first. From afar—the distance between the fencepost and the road, say, or between you and the house—she appears to fall into a well. In fact, she vanishes in the bracken. Audrey is smallest. Fire-irons and a brown wall, a skirt with a nailhead pattern. Drawn curtains are rather less charming than a drowning—as the mother has it. While the sheets, according to an old saying, are the knives of the bed. Blanche, the eldest, is last. They imagine her struggling along, arriving at the wrong house. Or returning to the staircase, now more amply rouged.
The mother sits upright, apart from the father.
Whose brother—Edward, or perhaps Edmond—suffers quite elaborately. His humiliations, then—at a Western elevation, or as a boy, or one day in the fall. They part on a boulevard, at the far end, near a park. Or near a harbor the following summer. And so on, as it rains into the front room. Where his daughter—you might observe, from above, the route of her departure—sits without a suitor. Her name—Gertrude, in blue ink—fails to account for the portrait of horses, the lampshade in the fireplace, the hour.
The grandmother, on the father’s side, weeps in the greenery.
Her sister—Esther—lives on a finer street, east of here, near the river. She addresses herself to the brass doorstop—it is a rat in the purse, it turns out, rather than a mouse—and then to her husband’s ruined shoes. The husband—William, in cursive—is bedridden, or seems unwell, ill, if somewhat better now, curiously so, especially in the evening. On the huntboard is a hand of pork, garnished with black olives—though he prefers green. His plate resembles a gray face, the knife covering the eyes.
The grandfather, on the father’s side, points the blade this way.
His brother—the name is absent—returns at nine o’clock. Ten o’clock, as they imagine it—a train station and a lawn, a mishap on a bridge. Or a burnt hat-rack and a metal hook, his wife attired in a gown of some kind. The wife—Anne, or perhaps Anna—stands rather as your sister does, facing the drapery. Her possessions, then—on the windowsill, on the dressing table, in the bureau drawer. The bedpost, from a more sensible angle, might obscure a portion of the wardrobe, and divide the room in two.
People who wanted to get laid had a tendency to reply to these emotionally ambivalent text messages. When one is horny, there is a need for change. Horny people had a tendency to masturbate to random people’s Facebook profiles. For example: on Walnut Avenue, a young man relieves himself of another godless day.
People whose Facebook profiles where consistently masturbated to by numerous strangers had no idea that such one-way incidents were abound. They went about their ignorant lives the way one should: eating fresh fruit, networking, moving their savings into a more aggressive IRA account, yoga, light television, and flossing.
The main propagators of Facebook profile masturbation were depressed males with grim dispositions who suffered from severe acne. Their Wi-Fi connection pulsed as the center of their nervous system.
The world continued this way for a long time, until the atmosphere filled with carbon monoxide, and humans devolved into midgets. Cities and economies collapsed, Facebook profile masturbation continued:
Who are you?
I came
I’m feeling weird.
Each party was documented extensively using digital cameras. Everybody at the party took pictures of the party—either of other people, or more commonly, of themselves with other people, using a method in which one extends one's arms out at an upward angle, holding the camera at a backwards orientation towards themselves while taking a picture. These photos were often crooked, blurry, and cropped in a arbitrary fashion—formalisms out of which a new aesthetic grew, namely, the ad hoc amateur free spirited party photo. People had a tendency to make strange facial expressions during the taking of these photos to suggest a blend of casualness and frivolity, which is only possible when one is having an exceptionally good time.
As a rule, people turned their flashes off, for the flashes made people's complexions look pale and ghastly, not to mention burned rods in people's retinas. The inadequate lighting made people look mysterious and more attractive, so the non-flash protocol was quickly embraced. Tongues began appearing in more and more photos near the end of the parties: first, a tease on the lip; then, an open mouth tongue display (facial-code for a wonderful time); and finally, the licking of faces in either an erotic or non-erotic way. Due to the amount of food coloring in certain cocktails, many tongues were of unnatural hue.
The following mornings after these parties, people would upload the photos of the party into their computers. The ratio of hours of duration and number of photos was about 1 : 200, such that a party containing 40 people lasting 3.5 hours would incur 28,000 photos. These 28,000 photos, while authored by different people and taken at different angles and times, were not particularly distinct from one another, for they all shared a peculiar motif: 3 - 4 sweaty people making strange facial expressions while 'air groping'—a tactic in which one makes lewd groping gestures without any clear recipient. Of these 28,000 photos 25,000 were chosen to be the most evocative and posted onto social networking sites featuring publicly accessible albums.
The option to comment on these photos were eagerly employed, so each of the 40 party participants (who were all online at once) began the next phase: the legitimization of their own experience by commenting positively on its documentation. Common comments were "that rocked," "you were so wasted," and "ha." As everyone was online at once, people often instant messaged one another about the posting and commenting of these 25,000 photos. The original experience by then had been forgotten. Everyone lived for tomorrow, and each day had one. The legitimization of experience by affirmative comments took two hours, after which each person suddenly felt extremely tired and logged off. After removing laptops from their laps, they felt with their hands how hot their laps had been made, and felt warm.
The parking lot was vacant except for his car. The empty grid of parking spots, if seen from above, would look like a child's drawing of a skeleton. If this child were asked to draw Rene's opulent yet barely furnished apartment, it would be a large square. 'A large square,' Rene thought sadly, and laughed.
He could add one thing to another; he could try to multiply himself over and over. He could buy two things and join them together. He could patiently watch the numbers in his bank account get longer. He could masturbate four or five times a night. He could weave through the shrubbery which lined the building and look for the sparrow that left part of its brain and left eye on his office window.
He didn't do anything. He just stood there in the parking lot and looked at his new Mercedes Benz. The lamp above made it look the wrong color, and the rising warmth in his eyes made the wrong color look wet.
I fell in love with this piece of writ­ing about fif­teen minutes ago when I decided to start writ­ing it. Rather, I fell in love with the idea of writ­ing it, since it didn’t exist yet. But now that I have star­ted writ­ing it, I am offi­cially in love with this piece of writ­ing. The idea I had in the shower was to write a piece of writ­ing that I would be in love with from the begin­ning, and then begin it by declar­ing my love for it. This piece of writ­ing, the one I fell in love with the idea of sev­en­teen minutes ago when I decided to start writ­ing it and sub­sequently fell in love with it itself, is what you are read­ing now. I am in love with this piece of writ­ing, but also that writ­ing is a means of some­thing, that I can have an idea to write a piece of writ­ing I am in love with and then go do it. I was in the shower when I decided to start writ­ing this, I men­tioned that earlier, and now I smell like my deodor­ant. In the shower, I thought to myself, I really can’t believe how much in love with writ­ing I am, I wish I could chan­nel that love into one piece of writ­ing, I wish there was some way to declare it, to get it off my chest, maybe I could write all my love into one par­tic­u­lar piece of writ­ing about my love for writ­ing that piece of writ­ing and this is it.
The feeling of being slow connected to the feeling of distance connected to the feeling of intolerance connected to the feeling of being incomplete connected to the feeling of speaking through language. The feeling of being kept alive by circumstance connected to the feeling of circumventing ugliness connected to the feeling of frozen purpose. The feeling of calling out the last sentence connected to the feeling of echoing over me connected to the feeling of a rush of departures connected to the feeling of passing people I can't look at. The feeling of truth connected to the feeling of happening through who is looking. The feeling of hollow opportunity connected to the feeling of unlimited capacity connected to the feeling of speechless apathy connected to the feeling of small detours connected to the feeling of turning sideways connected to the feeling of enormous space. The feeling of shrinking connected to the feeling of flying connected to the feeling of ripping out connected to the feeling of reaching in connected to the feeling of finding. The feeling of choking connected to the feeling of drowning connected to the feeling of sinking connected to the feeling of burning connected to the feeling of breathing in connected to the feeling of being washed away. The feeling of being gigantic connected to the feeling of being insignificant. The feeling of cutting open connected to the feeling of spilling out connected to the feeling of sucking in connected to the feeling of licking connected to the feeling of chewing connected to the feeling of scraping connected to the feeling of bleeding. The feeling of dying connected to the feeling of smiling connected to the feeling of killing. The feeling of sliding connected to the feeling of slipping under. The feeling of confusion connected to the feeling of being left out connected to the feeling of being kept from knowing. The feeling of losing connected to the feeling of forgetting. The feeling of being weighted down connected to the feeling of floating connected to the feeling of drifting. The feeling of separation connected to the feeling of tenderness. The feeling of seeing connected to the feeling of splitting connected to the feeling of grasping connected to the feeling of taking. The feeling of leaving connected to the feeling of falling connected to the feeling of catching connected to the feeling of being caught. The feeling of smashing connected to the feeling of crushing connected to the feeling of spurting connected to the feeling of running connected to the feeling of stealing connected to the feeling of being stolen from. The feeling of being built up piece by piece connected to the feeling of unwanted images connected to the feeling of erased thoughts. The feeling of blown out of proportion connected to the feeling of missing the point. The feeling of listening connected to the feeling of talking out loud connected to the feeling of biting my tongue. The feeling of success connected to the feeling of failure connected to the feeling of digging through connected to the feeling of delicate alliances. The feeling of swirling up connected to the feeling of decrying heaven sent objects connected to the feeling of destroying critical lessons learned connected to the feeling of kept disasters connected to the feeling of following wrecked hopes connected to the feeling of being buried alive. The feeling of looking over my shoulder connected to the feeling of slinking away connected to the feeling of pushing my luck. The feeling of living in a glass house connected to the feeling of a lawless aptitude for getting even. I look down into a whirling mass of fragments and walk straight ahead passing people in cars, passing people walking, they are speaking, whispering, shouting, sighing, driving, holding one another, separated, touching, not touching, nodding, watching, ignoring, hands clenched, jumping, laughing, waving, running, singing, and being silent, there are huge reckonings of flooded desires. I am not that person; I am the other one, a blank mood of torpor, a jealous feeling of emptiness, an explosion of good lucks.
I want to be kept from dissolving, from the fate of chemistry, from the last minute of changeability before changing into something else while disappearing through a fierce opening and that fierce opening closes as if I was coming up against an impenetrable barrier. I go around it but it reforms like a mass of dark lines converging, as if I was passing through an elongated landscape lit up at one end, as if a fiery explosion had occurred there which filled everything with a black shadowy vibration extending longer and longer until losing any sense of holding together. I keep breathing in short gulps of air and that air turns into a white liquid and spills out.
Here’s the thing. The sex was unbelievable. Brad will do anything as far I can tell, but he’s definitely a bottom. He never got hard, but he sure acted like he was into it. He has the hottest, sweetest little ass, especially if you like them a little used like I do. I must have eaten out his hole for an hour. I got four fingers inside him. I couldn’t fuck him hard and deep enough. I spanked him, and not softly either. I pinched and twisted the hell out of his nipples. Nothing fazed him. All the time his cute boy face looked at me with his mouth wide open and made these sounds like he was scared to death and turned on at the same time. I came twice, first in his mouth and then up his ass. I should say that I never practice unsafe sex, but I just couldn’t help it. I’m HIV-, however.
Here’s where the problems started. He didnÂ’t want to stop. It’s like he couldn’t get himself out of whatever zone he was in. I was afraid he’d lost his mind. It was very spooky. I didn’t know what to do with him. I let him sleep over because he didn’t seem dangerous, but I fell asleep to the sound of him whimpering and thrashing around. I left $200 for him on the dresser, and when I woke up, he and the money were gone. There was a note from him with his phone number on it saying to please call him or tell my friends about him. Overall, it was great, but once is enough for me.
You: I’m a middle-aged, overweight top into teenaged street trade, the cuter and skinnier the better.
Decked out bowtie suited and car driving fast through market waving cigarette fingers, horn honking blinker blinking brakes braking chandeliers. Then one scream, two scream, three scream through window I go. Sorry made the bed and left the crumbs to lean on, to be on, to one-two-three shatter.
No one asks for speed reasons when lung burst looms and no more parties. Just drive fast. Blood more better looks on cold grey sidewalks than in warm blue veins on television.
Badger in the checkout line a woman red-haired dressed in medical scrubs. Diagnosis? Help! Diagnosis! Put keys in soft off with one sluggish ignition. Soda sip. Prognosis: blue sky and pancreatic lemonades. Mother nowhere to be seen. Switch off the censors. Your instincts, trust. Me, Father told. Choices right choices, I'd made how many? I made many. Not few. Not many. Not me not lie not lie not me.
But me not ten out of nine times true wrong choices I make. Pushed my Sister where we knew lived three hungry bears into the mouth of a cave. To do my own projects, Father not Dad trusted me never nor let borrow nor touch nor have conversation.
Tattooed and bulletproof this porch invisible. Dogs see or hear cats. Mice and antelope ignore. Through binoculars see bikinis on thin women spread legged and wide open car wrecks are simply unavoidable. Frontal full on action, tanned thighs! Reaction? Also men muscled and greased-up too are exposed. Meet dashboard dipstick deadhead drip drop the elevated hard on.
The pipedream mentioned never once did the neurosurgeon. Full on guts in buckets aiding sorrow and abetting my tomorrow—this is the what of the what of hope no hope no fear.
But not Father, who the man I call Dad plus never did I say his real name fully. Like archipelagos or salacious. And fury. All face red and sweating. Bulging. Arms clarinet bodies forged aluminum arms and arms and a tiny mouth-trumpet, as if not Dad, Father, meant only polite to be such a disaster. Never to visit. Knowing not what the meaning is—only.
Proper distance when if I could how many times total she policed did my mother the scene like Kong, king of gorillas. Forget spankings. Nightsticks and Tazerguns, run for the kitchen. Eat cereal and school scramble or clubhouse hide or frolic or flounder or hide. Lock the imaginary door. Here is the where of the fortress.
Besides the paint filled basement long ago. Clutching yarn ends drowning. Select the most locker room unjust spit in your face indecency. Then times it times a million. And just drive fast to make the sunrise fold down the awning of forget.
Where now I am on sunshine walking hallways filled with doors. Place it Midwest to water separating Canada from my perch. Where ghosts may not seek me, here I am unnoticed. What doctors say nothing in the end means only the beginning has begun and nothing cheats death whether begs the whole earth in unison like wave global, like sunlight bounces back to God, bounces laughter like hot air balloons. Whose proof is what most goes unnoticed to Mother. So confusing is truth. So immortal. So fling far from the proof the truth unnoticed. Unspoken. As a tree is my car in the broken of night. Goodbye tomorrow, goodbye tonight.
No more concerts after cow-tipping, crawdads for supper. To work take thermos soup full and hot. Maybe muffin or biscuit or umbrella for fruit eating behavior: a peach, a pear, a chain-smoking disingenuous pinch on the cheek from however many unnamed sources. Try organizing shards of story get slivers of glass everywhere. Make sense make leads follow many, many.
Mother, if the flimflam man allows it. How heartbroken is the furniture? Look. See sad faces in seat cushions, quilts on smolder; shadows on seatbacks thin long giraffe neck, only pineapples against ray guns on foreign planets. Sticky notes. Forgone appetites pressed from the hammock to turn a mirror into a party of blisters. Hard knob slicing juniper trees with action. Detox. Get clean. Arrest the century and break the tangled throat of a coma with a tissue. Wish a woman for too much dough and after work walk and about talk, nothing more, and when off break we to our way go individual, not one exchange of kiss or hug. Not one glitch brainwave sex part electrocuted. Mother is below. Monster is the sinister. Ship abandoned. Book stack knee-dive deep into a tropical climate: cloud lips chapped the bosoms whisper, sweet tongue, miss me, never mind the pictures.
If luck was a coin in my pocket I would spend it.
What desire you things and more? Messages torrid back and forth whenever the lights go on and on and off. Sick? I am not. It is flicker. Clear. Where daily grubs squiggle in the earth I pick for church makes money off my Mother. In the rafters hiding, looking through binoculars: Father not Dad and from school two girls naked across him straddled one on his face and one on his lap, one grinding one bouncing. Pictures I take, I take many. Two pockets blackmail-filled and bulging only to find: proof? Never believed nothing called proof did my Mother. Even after Father, not Dad, fucked all the girls and got them pregnant.
Another day at the coffin. Soggy crackers. In mouth tubes like sucking sound. Too much weak good luck cartoon mistakes for channel switching. Up dries the visitors. Weapons on them every one. My Sister blackened soot monster, oil-stained hair buzzed and clothing permission. In the blouse folds strawberries. Yes from me. Yes.
Only to love if a road is this. Which fast down I am driving. Most builds yet in layers, rather timber as a gift not a door. In my drink slip drops of fentanyl. The whodunit car wreck. Wicked poor face to face meeting with my Sister in the hour after murder gets an award. The glass and chug it. Mouth wipe sleeve stained purple from the grape juice. Wash it down, don't spit it out. Off with the gas tank. Mock up no one knowing television everyone. In my most hearty echo say no not no not never never more.
Here is disappearing candy from the grocery store. Minus surveillance cameras or detectives of privacy dancing snooping rummaging the garbage of my secrecy.
How many in my ear whispered hall of getaways? Atlanta? Why make found glowing ruby, as glass shattered glass on the front page of a rainy day and hard loud bursts of ink called long distance everywhere? Or else a newspaper of night like all hours.
Hands pray as wheels squeal, rubber melts in fire. Skull busts skin peels chestnut broken skeleton. Jaw cracks ribs like ice cube trays and folding-chair legs and wow all the rumors. Grows wings my tailbone, elbows and ankles bloom tiny fireworks. For this assemblage, this apology: Sorry fountain. Sorry future. I am no longer alone.
you have a paradise in your eyes but what you've got inside
is more than a good enough reason for hell
resign yourself to your fate and be happy
leaves in a wood bewildered by the wind
isolate me
send fog send haze
a long wintern let it be
isolate me
I will return my stupid cardiac muscle
to the inventor of every desert
i will return my stupid cardiac muscle
because it can't keep time
“Welcome to this situation,” a group of six people said in unison to greet me, ending with the auditory flourish of a sharp intake of breath; then they slowly backed off, all the while facing me, and froze into unnatural positions. At which point one of the group recited a quotation: “In 1958, somebody said, ‘The income that men derive producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence.’ ” Jumping off from that statement, the conversationalists — Sehgal refers to them as “interpreters” — began a lively back and forth. Occasionally one of the six might turn to a gallery visitor and utter a compliment or say, “Or what do you think?” and then incorporate that person’s comment into the exchange of words. Mostly they seemed content to natter at high velocity among themselves. It all continued until the moment when a new visitor arrived, an event that acted as a sort of rewind button. “Welcome to this situation,” they chanted again, breathing in and backing off as they had done before and then assuming another stylized stance. A new quotation was dropped and another discussion commenced.
The theme of my sermon, seeker, is that we’ve done in death. Through a combination of copyright and indifferent self-regard, the nature of mortality is no more awful than any long Sunday afternoon. Stingless, pointless, your not remains, terminal as a bus stop, shiningly patent as my guilt, and precious as honey milked from weeds. And now that we’ve done away with all deep audits, the exit interview’s a mere formality, though we will be going through your box of personality, checking for office property, and six will escort you to the door, which does not, despite rumors to the contrary, swing both ways. In your last moments, before the next set, you will unspool what’s left of your soul, shitting a well-formed personal essay on the log-point of your pointlessness, pricked with your etceteras, licked clean by your wasted time. There may be a sob. You will die, holding a plastic man in your plastic hand. You will die, your conceit conceded, your obviousness entirely manifest, the sheet folded over the blanket and your nails yellow with age. Or you will have a list of things to do tomorrow, important things which must be done, or you will be just a boy, your cranium still stuffed with sweet sugared clouds. You will die, and it will be horrible. You will burn, or rot, your skin will blister black and boil until it is brought pink off the bone, the chemical you will spark all sorts of hues, your copper will burn blue-green, your potassium will purple, what is soft will grow hard, what is hard will go soft, gums will bubble and Vulcanize, silicon will shellac, shell’ll weave and warp and twist into a model’s frozen motion. You will sit up, to no one’s notice, a pathetic final attempt to rise. Then you will be fully checked, crushed, and run through a sieve, your annihilation complete. Or you will pale and purple as your blood drains and pools and the bacteria within you begins to move, you will serve the hot center of your sentence with blue bottle flies tickling your eyes and buzzing the confines of your putrification while their maggots root in the warm hot muck where was your stomach. Your flesh will grow sticky and creamy as cheese and the body will black and the heat will rise with the smell insects find delicious, your belly will bloat with its own blue meat, as excrement runs from your anus as vomit from your nose and blood-frothed mouth. Your eyelids will swell, your mouth will pout. Your swollen tongue will fall from your split broken lips. Your hair and skin will loose in sheets, and your eyes will liquify. Your heart will become flabby, your lungs honey-combed, your brain will turn mush as your ballooed gut will finally burst like old fruit, hitting the ground. You will stink, for only money does not smell, and you will mold, and grow dry and the beetles will come to chew through your ligaments and what’s left of your skin. And then you will be bone and a little hair to wrap her in. You will die, and you will not be terrified, and this is most horrible.
Stevie Pierson believes her home looks just like her. Stevie Pierson drags one leg through the street. Stevie Pierson has turned her back into an occasional table. Stevie Pierson looks to the trenched sky for meaning. Stevie Pierson believes in human nature. Stevie Pierson is nude. Stevie Pierson believes in the inverted phiale and the glass omphalos. Stevie Pierson was very clever. Stevie Pierson once met someone with a cat named Flo. Stevie Pierson is ashamed of human nature. Stevie Pierson originally left her home to buy something, but she can’t remember what. Stevie Pierson does not smoke, though many around her do. Stevie Pierson likes milk chocolate, hot or cold. Stevie Pierson wanted something, but can’t remember what. Stevie Pierson wishes she could find her shoes. Stevie Pierson had many friends, but they all seem to have flown the coop. Stevie Pierson wants human nature. Stevie Pierson has offended the gods, and must be destroyed.
In death, she became, like everyone else, willing to be photographed.
In the meantime I postpone my morning suicidal proclivities and settle for being a deadbeat in the afternoon, until I extinguish all my energies throughout the day then delve into my unconsciousness by night and wake into a suicidal case the next morning. It’s my own personal touch, though not an original one, on the cycle of starting from the esthetic, growing into the ethical, and maturing into the religious, that is, I fluctuate from what I am immediately, to what I am as a thinker, and then to what I am as a wandering wonderer. But still there’s no money involved but every now and then I strike it rich and find a beautiful woman in my bed. I’m tempted to get on with the humiliation and tell her that I was broke, and that I’m not worth my weight in gold unless she’s broke too and has the same pre-historic, homo-sapient concepts and values that I do.
astrologers have secret meetings
in one of the emperor's chambers shaped like a honeycomb
where they fashion the future into prepared events
to translate love into pain.

the horse is eating night's snake
the garden put on imperial decorations
starry wedding dress - let
me kill in infinities, at night, your faithful flesh
By the time Antinous Bellori encounters angels in what we can euphemistically call the flesh, the creatures are no longer those divine messengers familiar from the Old Testament. Nor have they yet mutated into the chubby, rosy-cheeked babies hoisting puffy clouds that Tiepolo et al. gloried in depicting. The eleven-year-old Antinous, lost in the darkening forest near his northern Italian home circa 1562, stumbles on a pair of the flickering fallen ones just as they're sinking their bared teeth into a raw fish. The sight is horrible, more sublime than miraculous: "Their faces are white and skull-like, their eye sockets deep, cheekbones high, lips bloodless. They have long, fair hair, thin necks, slender wrists, clawlike fingers. And they're shaking. One of them has hands that shake." As they devour their sushi, their rolled-back eyeballs make them look blind—or even dead. Then with a dazzling light they depart; for Antinous, the experience is transformative.
There is a whole forest of tree machines in central Maine that have been programmed to turn on me. I’m certain of it. When I am absolutely silent, I can hear them plotting. It sounds like a gentle wind. There hasn’t been a moon for 3 weeks and I think they got to it. It had been moving through their limbs like a ghost, making shadows. Let me remind you: these are not real trees. They have learned to make other tree machines, and they have completely surrounded my ranch style home. It is now a log cabin. Sometimes they call me on the phone and whisper things. Give us the man suit, Carlos. Just give us the man suit.
This limit-experience might seem to be a rare, extraordinary occurrence; but in fact it happens every day. I could only be a fixed self, with a unique, unchanging identity, if I were never to act, never to desire, never to experience anything new. The God of monotheism indeed sees souls in this way, sub specie aeternitatis. For he exists just to absorb and neutralize excess; as Schreber puts it, he only understands corpses, not living beings. But the god of this world is not the monotheistic one; he is rather the Baphomet, the "prince of modifications." As Klossowski explains, the Baphomet presides over an unstable and polycentric universe, an anarchy of metamorphosis and metempsychosis. William Burroughs maintains the regulative principle that we must regard every event as being willed by some agency, as being the expression of an intention. Klossowski proposes a complementary principle: he suggests that every intention is an external event, a modification of my being, and hence a sort of demonic possession. Each thought or desire is an alteration of my previous state; it is an intrusion of the outside, a whispering in my ear, a breath that I inhale and exhale, an alien spirit prompting me from offstage or insinuating itself within me.
As Burroughs knows, there's no getting around it: "To speak is to lie--to live is to collaborate." The only way out is the same way we came in. With postmodernism, as with drugs and pornography, the only way to get anywhere is to immerse yourself in it as much as possible, as mindlessly and as abjectly as possible, and then just sit back and enjoy it. One fix after another, one purchase after another, one orgasm after another; for there is no end to the accumulation: "the lonely hour of the 'last instance' never arrives" (Althusser). All we can do with words and images is appropriate them, distort them, turn them against themselves. All we can do is borrow them and waste them: spend what we haven't earned, and what we don't even possess. That's my definition of postmodern culture, but it's also Citibank's definition of a healthy economy, Jacques Lacan's definition of love, and J. G. Ballard's definition of life in the postindustrial ruins. It's a relief to realize that culture is after all empty, that its imposing edifices are just ruins or sound stage facades, that bodies are extremely plastic, that facial expressions are masks, that words in fact have nothing to express. For bodies and words are merely exchange-value: commodities or money

Hell-o.
This on?
Think I'm hearin me. Me.
This reverbin either in the buildin or in my head. Whatever. Ha.
Nobody listnin anyways right?
Mos all you out the building by now, an who listens to the announcements they makin evry five minutes like they tryin to give all of evybody in the whole Bronx a holla or somethin anyway.
Thing is, this NOT your principal speakin.
This. Is. Nessa. And today I didn do nothin.
I'm jus a surge cloud, thas all.
Yeah. I didn't ever hear of it either till last week when miss wahzerfuck—EXCUSE ME, miss whazerface, said something bout it in science.
I'm passin that one. I even turn in summa the homework and if she don't pass me, she gonna have to see me in there again nex year, and you know she don't want that cause Ima surge cloud.
She say it's this super hot air that comes offa lava. Like outta a volcano. An it jus as deadly as the lava itself. It can kill. Even though it's invisible it can kill. How you like that? Ha, Yeah. I like that. That is me. Ima get it tattooed.
All I'm sayin is people best watch out. All I'm sayin is if somebody got burnt, not my fault. I didn do nothin. Is just my invisible hotness.
I kill dogs with lesbian underwear.
I always fake holding your hand.
I bake lovecakes of insecticide.
I strangle chairs with homosexual sleep.
There is too much hair in the world.
I keep your sperm in alcohol.
I pronounce your birth a prison rape.
I tape your stomach down with chemotherapy.
You broke my tumor with lullabies.
If walking begins in the city you were born,
I will find you there and hand myself to you.
Greater objects deserve that kiss.
If you bend over,
travel is no longer allowed.
You called the train a piece of lipstick.
90% of time does not exist.
My medical training is limited both to the proximity of the wounds I create for myself and to the punctuality of human rot—a minor self-injurious culture of my own accumulation. I know, for instance, enemy means anyone. I refer to the mating process. As a doctor, I am no fan of self-administered lobotomies, or of reducing body counts. Alas, the young lovers I have divided myself into (surgically) can be replaced by every combination of response and potential meaning. This will thankfully admonish any argument for reliability, validity, and standardization. Truth is only an obstruction to the proper psychometrics.
We must chart instead this couple’s happiness, if nothing else, and try to mimic the corresponding birthmarks. Soon you will know touching him in a house not created for the purpose of any community. Her syncopated lifespan occurs through the borrowed memories of a deceased giraffe. The nightmare of their bodies unified will no longer be a public nuisance. There are incestuous clues, reeking of size.
It is advisable to keep a dictionary of your own audiences at hand, if a fire is nearby. The dictionary will be thin and burn as fast as human hair. That you, the no one who is reading this, don’t believe mannequins are designed to be more attractive than people implies you may scoff if I raped a mannequin. Would you disavow the following application because I am insane? Ah, emphatic “yes” from all angles. But I don’t have sex with mannequins. I don’t go around having sex with a lot of people or mannequins.
I believe that "revolution" is - and has been for a long time - a malignant ghost for the left, and one of the regrettable effects of Badiou and Zizek has been to revive it. The fact that Badiou no longer thinks that either a Jacobin or a Leninist revolution is possible, that all we can hope for is some miserable "autonomy" from Capital, only compounds this impasse. The effect of continually invoking the violent theatre of Jacobin revolt can only make small zones of autonomy appear even more paltry, producing a sense of gloomy resignation very far from the "encouragement" that Badiou seeks to engender. But the alternative to this resignation is not Zizek's relentless litany of Robespierre-Lenin-Mao; Badiou is surely right that the time for that kind of politics is long gone.
Zizek should be taken at his word; a real repetition of Lenin would entail a break from Lenin - and, I would add, from the co-ordinates of that exhausted tradition. When Badiou says that we must invent the "communist hypothesis" again, from nothing, that is also correct, provided that the word "communist" - alongside "emancipatory", "progressive", "radical" - can itself be dispensed with: such words, dulled by their ceaseless circulation in the cultural left and by their appropriation in Capital's NuLanguage, taste stale in our mouths. Badiou is nowhere more inspiring than when he writes of how "exalting" the task of inventing a new politics in the current conditions can be. And Zizek is right when he says that the very apparent hopelessness of the current situation ought to licence an experimental attitude towards politics.
So let's be clear. I'm very far from saying that nothing can ever change. There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn't pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life - it is what Zizek would call the "spontaneous unreflective ideology" of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity). Far from nothing ever changing, something already has changed, massively - the bank crisis was an event without a subject, whose implications are yet to be played out. The terrain - the crashed present, littered with the ideological rubble of failed projects - is there to be fought over. And I believe that it can be seized by those who have been most deeply cooked in neo-liberalism and post-Fordism, not the French immobilisers, the nostaglic 68ers, the hay bale agragrians, or anyone else resigned to playing Canute to the rising tide of Capital. We can only win if we reclaim modernization.
He told the citizens stories of quiet insects of soft foods of hair-limbs of lazy of red trees of porch chairs of windrows of pinking shears of lavender of loose sleeves of a sweater that grew from trees of wind of tremor of transport of archive of crystal-glint of lunar surface of honey of typewritten notes of names going rusty from non-use of wind of wind of wind. They closed their eyes to go. And from the collective weight of so many eyelids collapsing, the pilings started to sink. They would soon be underground, the soldier would soon report that he had watched their houses retract, until low-growth covered the roofs. He whistled and their dogs followed him back to his weapons. The streetlights glistened against the greasepaint on his face.
The woman down the hall is not dead, but her apartment is a mausoleum. She has erected statues in her own image, one for every year of her adult life. This is something she began decades ago when she dreamt of being an art student at the university. Certainly, her creations are nothing original—they’re nothing more than facsimiles of herself—but she’s accurate. Each pore on her skin is accounted for, each hair defined.
Since then, this woman down the hall purchases large chunks of marble or wood or clay and on a specified day each year, she begins a new version of herself, life-scaled and nude. She is always nude. It takes her three-quarters of the year to complete herself, and by the time it is finished, she has already changed. There are additional wrinkles and sags.
Once a year, the woman down the hall invites us into her home for the unveiling of her new statue. We wind our way through all these manifestations, a garden of women, all paying some sort of homage to her, waiting for her to die so they alone can remain the original.
The journey of the hero always looking for a bird that glows through night, a creature that he knows exists only from a feather. The hero travels the globe wide and high, reaching true North then falling into deep craters, tumbling somersaults with giggles of joy. The hero has no leash, no time limits, and so he continues his journey until he forgets why he journeys. Without purpose, he walks into the ocean & beautiful electric tentacles cover his skin blue until he stops

You feigning mysterious cool & telling me how you're feigning mysterious cool & I am a sucker for that kind of self-knowledge & I am a sucker for feigners mysterious cool & you didn't know it then or maybe you did but I thought you were pretty great even then even before you were you lover before you even touched me lover I didn't think you were feigning even though you said you were I knew you were really at least a little bit a small part of you was real mysterious cool.
He laughed, he laughed. The boy laughed till his head came clean off. The minister set a cloth over the uncoupled head and ended the service with a prayer. The mourners chanted Amen and rose and folded the white plastic chairs and then returned home where they exchanged their black jackets and black dresses for summer colors. They met later in a park and an uncle arrived with the boy's head tucked under his arm. Still laughing, the boy's head. The mourners kicked the head around for an hour, playing soccer, scoring goals.
I was familiar with Kopf's work, in particular the contusions and dislocations of the early period, and the so-called ectomies of the middle period. At the millennium festival, I attended his Exit Wound Scenario and watched with fascination as the bullets ripped through him, but in the end I thought the ballistic image rather pedestrian. True, he was turning his insides out in the name of art, and I applauded him for that, but for all the blood and guts, and all the removed organs, I felt he was only showing us the pieces and parts—until now, until Intersection.
Sitting in the grandstand, I consider the idea of artist as martyr, but I dismiss this notion once Kopf takes his place in the avenue. I follow Kopf's defiant glare to the truck idling down the block. There is nothing of the martyr in Kopf, I thought, there is everything of the provocateur. See how he scowls at us. See how he mirrors our cool contempt. Kopf has moved into his late period and now he will show us something, I thought, watching the truck shift into gear. Now we will see what Kopf is made of, I thought, leaning forward, watching Kopf.
News kept breaking and no one could fix it. There was a rash of elderly kidnappings and a string of dollhouse arsons that had everyone swiveting. My landlord impregnated another tenant's teenaged granddaughter, then repentant, hung himself upside down on a homemade cross in the boiler room. They buried him the next day in an unmarked grave in the anonymous cemetery and then his brother assumed lordship. This brother looked like a man who'd returned from somewhere difficult. He admitted to being destroyed by recent events but collected our money just the same. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you."
Days passed, weeks mounted. The town newspaper folded. My room was dark and televisionless.
Where my boyfriend lives, the grass grows sideways — not up but into itself, like fingers entwined, like slow hula dancers. In his town, the people sing when they are dying. His mama makes roses bloom when she whispers to them; his dad keeps fire in a jar on his bedside table and releases it at night, sneaking up on it again in the morning when it has tired.
Where my boyfriend lives I visited just once, on a Thursday, when the streets are cleaned and a young man, hair slicked back by spit, stands just outside the doorway of the barbershop and hands out free candy to folks walking by. I took one, a chalky peppermint truffle, light as air. For the rest of the day I shot icicles out of the ends of my fingers. My boyfriend laughed at me and stepped on the heels of my shoes. That night we watched lightning, his dad's jar flames skipping across the sky, tripping over each other, eager to find a party.
Where my boyfriend lives, letters are written on banana peels. The ones my boyfriend sends me talk about ordinary things like the color of my eyes, the sound of steel digging into dirt, the need for everything to have a name. The letters are short and sometimes long. They talk about how when we are older we will move somewhere exotic.
All my girlfriends are hunchbacks:
They love their mothers.
All my animals are obligatory,
They have furniture feet
And window hands.
The wind is bent out of shape,
It needs a suit made to measure,
Measureless.
That’s why
I tell the truth without telling it.
Dear Wigleaf,
I get why you fucked my best friend: she's rather attractive with her boarded body and promise of superficial lacerations. I get why you fucked my boyfriend: I have, after all, stopped fucking him. Did you also find him a disappointment? His cock, above average, but he's no good on top. He's rocky, his movement unpredictable. I get why you fucked my mother. Freud and all.
But Wigleaf, I wonder: what's wrong with me? I don't wear a chastity belt, and you have no standards.
But Wigleaf, know this: I'm not making you an offer.
But Wigleaf, when you arrive at my apartment door later tonight tomorrow and the next day, candied with want, I won't be home. I will never be home again.
Love,
Lily
There was a time when all men lived in the water. Back then, there were more than ten species of human, some of whom have survived, such as men, mermen, and arguably, prophets and storytellers. There are many who have gone extinct. Poets and philosophers were the first to die off, their lungs unable to withstand the gravitational weight when they emerged from the deep ocean. They were delicate creatures and not particularly smart. They were much akin to goats and sheep of today. They would follow each other, without a clear leader, huddling in packs, pushing each other forward. It was the force of that push that allowed any sort of movement at all. If a poet was pushed westward, the whole pack would follow, and it was quite common for these species of man to be particularly vulnerable to bruises and skin breaks. Often, a poet or philosopher would cut his own skin and let his blood lead the pack, and they, faithful followers, would shimmy their loose bodies around the water, meandering behind the blood, until the blood, being thicker than water, floated upwards and upwards, until the humen felt their small bodies expand and contract, but they could not discern this as pain. They continued their mission, pursuing the strand of blood until their bodies started to retreat into themselves. First, their skin would sink into the muscles, diving deeply into their own pores. Then, the muscles would dissolve into the bones until even the bones had nowhere left to go. As the bones floated away, the surviving poets or philosophers would follow and follow until nothing remained of them but a large number of free floating bones.
It is said, however, that the souls of these poets and philosophers still reside in those bones, that they have managed to reincarnate themselves, but this is merely speculation, a rumor that we can neither prove nor deny.
Because I wonder what genre you sleep in.
Dust is mud that weighs the same as light.
The idea of plural was invented by a man in Thebes. Before him, one showed a manyness by repeating himself.
Oak leaf like a small map of the spring.
When the food line did not have melon, I had a banana instead, and realized that what I had wanted was the shape.
Wrist like a rudder wagging through the afternoon.
To speak in birds and the wrecked sunlight on your forehead.
The way a machine memorizes itself.
How everyone from Michigan points to their hand and says I am from here.
These are the erotics of trying to stay upright: hackles, seatbacks, trying to see over what is in front of you—
Manyness is another way to say crossroads. As in: sooner or later, we all go down to the manyness.
Sometimes the birds are still and the sky moves back and forth very quickly behind them.
Sometimes we weep ashes.
We put things in the ground to grow or forget.
Honey like the shadow of your lover going down your throat.
He began this strange behavior at a very early age by going his own way and finding such evident pleasure in being alone. In later years he recalled very clearly that nobody had made him aware of such things. All by itself the strange need to be alone and apart had appeared, and was there. All alone he drew from within himself the thought that it is beautiful to shut oneself off so as to gain fresh desire and feel renewed longing for being open and for going out harmlessly among men. It was a kind of calculation that he made, a kind of task that he set himself. He had moved into a wretched, half-destroyed house on the Bergstrasse; he lived there in a shabby little room, which was equipped and decorated with a remarkable lack of furnishings. Even though it was winter, he would have no heating. He did not want any comforts. 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. He considered himself to be at a kind of upper-level school. He went to university there, as a weird and wild student. For him it was a question of observing how far he ought risk pushing himself, how daring he might be. Every once in a while, fear entered his room and grazed him with the cold crêpe of despair. But he had taken up the dare to become peculiar, and he had to keep it up, almost against his will. The oddities take whoever has set foot among them, lead him further, pull him away, never again let him go. His days and his nights he spent alone. Two small children lay in the next room, right against the wall. He would often hear them crying pitiably. He lay sleeplessly during entire long dark nights, as if sleep were an enemy, frightened and fleeing from him, and as if wakefulness were a good friend, unable to tear himself away from him. Every day he went on the same walk through the frozen winter meadows and felt as though he were on a day-long hike through unknown and unfamiliar regions. Each day resembled the next. No young person would have been able to find this way of life beautiful. He, however, wanted it thus; he ordered himself to consider this way of life beautiful. Since he wanted to see attractions, he saw them; since he was searching for depth, he found it; since he wanted to get to know misery, it revealed itself to him. He endured all so-called boredom with joy and pride. To him the sameness and the one and only color seemed beautiful, and that single tone was his life. He wanted to have nothing to do with boredom. So for him it did not exist. He governed himself thus. Thus did he live. He kept company with those calm women, the hours, as though with sensuous and physical beings. They came and went, and Oskar, that was his name, never lost patience. To him impatience meant death. Perseverance, into which he freely and voluptuously sank, was his life as a man. Swathing and surrounding him with sweet fragrance of roses was the thought that he was poor. He belonged to the poor with body and soul, and with all his thoughts and feelings and with his whole heart. He loved the hidden paths between the high hedges, and the evenings were his friends. He knew no higher joy than the joy of day and night.
Brought to surface acre, a monument bodily. Dissuade him. Do not ring. Fearing mental hills, mineral fires, ground waters for the entirety of called life. To incur before she died mother did lament “they are burning.” The cradle is burning of civilization. This . . . memoir, enemy pleasure. They demand that you read Marx “correctly.” Why don’t you? You small thin tongue civility, the doctor where needed used a chisel. Oh comrade you know how to use the hammer. Of fascia sometimes upon the flesh and bone of a miner or a logger. Oh comrade why isn’t it all as written? Oh redemptive mark-maker Marx. Why hast thou insufficiently. End it doctor will operate constantly. The insane philosopher will diagnose. Crest of the people who are getting hurt oh mother. Pelvis oh patient, there is nothing to worry about don’t touch me there. Pain, it is sad. You are depressed but don’t turn it into suffering comrade you are you and words are only. Don’t suffer me so your goodness, so like malice. Your authority, so.
twenty years ago
siamese twins
were carefully removed from a woman
and became a jar
of human yogurt
everything glows inside itself
a spoon is the size of god

Zilch is a kind of factory or industrial enterprise, for which writers produce and deliver daily, perhaps even hourly, with steadfast zeal. It is better to deliver than merely to enter upon pointless discussions about delivery or in chatterboxious prattle about service. Here and there even poets will create for Zilch the Cat, telling themselves that they find it more sensible to do something than to refrain. Whoever does something for her, for that quintessence of commercialization, does it for her enigmatic eyes. You know the Cat and you don’t; she will slumber and purr with pleasure in her sleep, and looking for an explanation, one is faced with an impenetrable riddle. Although it is recognized that the Cat jeopardizes something like personal development, one seems unable to get on without her, for Zilch is the very time in which we live, that for which we labor, which gives us work to do, the banks, the restaurants, the publishing houses, the schools, the Leviathan of business, the phenomenal range of manufacturing activity, all this (and more if I were to list in numerical order—a thing that just might happen—all I consider redundant) is Zilch, Zilch. Zilch to me is not merely anything that is good for the running of things, that is of any kind of value to the machinery of civilization, but she is rather, as I have said, the whole works themselves. And only such items could possibly aspire to be exempt from Zilchery as can demonstrate so-called eternal values, as for example the masterpieces of art or the deeds that tower high over the hum and drum, the rush and roar of the day. Whatever is not eroded and consumed by favor and distaste—by the Cat in other words, who assuredly is an august entity—may be taken to be lasting and to gain the port of a remote posterity, much like some vessel of freight or state. My colleague Binggeli in my opinion writes for Zilch in every respect, even though his prose and verse are extremely demanding. Regarding the Zilchitude of his otherwise doubtless excellent literary output, Dinggelari (who calls a ravishingly beautiful woman his conjugal own, who dines and sups famously, takes splendid promenades every day, inhabits a flat in a romantic setting) is a prey to egregious error in that he persists in thinking that the Cat will have nothing to do with him. While she considers him her own, he strains to think that he is unsuitable in her eyes; which by no means squares with the facts.
Ann Mcdarmont threw herself out
of a window on the 20th floor the police are convinced
it’s suicide her beautiful body
takes up even more space now it is there and there
and even there
i don't like to talk. every time i go somewhere with a friend they always expect me to talk to them. i like to sit quietly. when i watch a movie or read a poem i don't like to discuss it with anyone. i like to watch movies and then maybe sleep. no talking. occasionally i watch the same movie over and over again until i fall asleep. i prefer watching movies alone. i prefer reading alone. i prefer eating alone. i prefer walking alone. i prefer listening to music alone. i prefer singing alone. i prefer swimming alone. i prefer to eat small children alone. i like it when sean reads me poetry but i just like to listen quietly and not comment afterwards. sometimes i feel this makes him uncomfortable.
today i bought a small pink flower. whenever i go to the florist and ask for a single flower she gets confused. she always adds baby's breath and ferns to my flower thinking that she is making it look nicer. today she wrapped my flower in ugly paper with a big ugly bow. it made me angry. why can't i buy a single flower with no paper or ferns or bows? i don't mind the free baby's breath because now that my hair is growing longer i can stick it in my hair.
on my walk back from the florist i stopped on the middle of the bridge and pulled out the ferns. i threw them over the rail and watched them spin down into the water.
when i got home i took the clear paper that was wrapped over top of the ugly paper and wrapped it around my face tight enough to restrict my breathing. it was fun.
After we replaced every possible electrical and mechanical part in the van and it still wouldn’t start, we decided to go after the man who wrote the Black Jack Automotive Repair Manual. According to the publisher he lived somewhere in the middle of Utah only accessible by horse or burro.
We took a bus to Salt Lake City and started asking around. We met Rick, a vigilante tracker who had been trying to locate the writer for two years since he had replaced 2,000 parts on his Ford and it still wouldn’t start. We set out on horseback into the dusty hills with a jug of water and an inkling of hope. When we finally found the man who had written the manual, he looked old, tired and non-automotive. Rick lost control. He threatened the man with numerous words from the manual used in a different context. The hermit had nothing to say. We brought him to the nearest town where the mayor, who lost his arm trying to replace a headlamp, under the guidance of the Black Jack Automotive Repair manual, suggested a hanging.
In moments when we were alone with the author, we tried to pry information from him about our van. He only looked at us with a crooked brow and limp shoulders. People from miles around came to the little town when word got out that the author was in custody.
This morning on NPR there was a story about a stir-stick you can stick in your drink to test it for caffeine. If the stick turns orange, you’re good to go. If it stays green, find another cup of joe. No word, they reported, if the stick also determined whether or not the cup of coffee was pregnant, and would give birth to another, “smaller cup of coffee.”
It was something he saw in a gallery.
He felt a strong feeling when he approached.
Viewers were permitted to enter
and when he did a numbness rushed over him.
He wanted the piece and decided to buy it.
He had it attached to the side of his house.
After living with it for a short while
he had the house removed.
Now it was just the piece.
I never would have been President if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota.
the german film has a beautiful title: the moon and other lovers. the heroine is blind from birth. she asks her lovers to tell her about the moon. each one tells about it differently. one compared the moon to east germany and the sun to west germany. one told her, you are not blind, this is just a lunar eclipse. and one just stayed silent. he was an american. his last name was moon. this was not a happy ending.
•the canadian film continental has a subtitle: a film without guns. it is very chekhovian. everything appears and then quickly disappears. even the audience disappears. at the end, a soviet champagne bottle is shot into death.
•in the american film ballast one of the twin boys commits suicide. the other twin soon tries to follow that same path. but he is saved. the surviving twin tries to live his life for both of them. he begins to watch two televisions. he sleeps with two women. he drinks two cups of coffee every morning. he almost accidentally kills himself in the same way his twin brother killed himself. his twin brother’s suicide happened on september 11. they called themselves the twin towers.
a russian girl lived in cuba for many years. in her third year, she got pregnant. in her third year, she covered all of her walls with posters of snow-covered trees, penguins, frozen lakes, polar bears. there is no winter in cuba. the cold glass jaw eternally bites the unborn children of russian women.
•on the table is some fake snow that only knows itself when it is next to a melting snowflake. it is ice cream for the stupid snowman. a pooch named snowball.
•animal rights activists throw red paint on fur coats then violently tear them off of the women who wear them. the skinned women then flail about inside the cold flaying house of the television.
marlene dietrich removes her teeth to appear more aristocratic. shadows on her face are the same as on her neck if her neck grew teeth.
•in one of ingmar bergman’s films, a shadow of stairs is cast on a face. there is a smile. sweden’s thin grey lips falling all over the body of finland.
•in the past 50 years of japanese cinema special roles were given to actors to play shadows. these actors were in the credits along with the regular actors. when the streets were foggy no one knew the shadow actors were there. kurosawa once called them the reverse side of the sun.
Here we are again kneeling down towards the sky, as if
we had another name for it, as if it might say something to us.
Lovely pill, one more time down my throat you will go,
and before long I'll be home—half real with people
on my tv. Swallow. Clean up. Return. And if I
keep doing it, that's what we call my life.
yesterday i was talking to myself and i told myself that i was going to write a book and give it to you so i put paper in my bag and put a pen in my bag and rode my bike to the river bank and then sat on the ground and thought 'i will never write a book' and watched ducks swim away from me
Use shoes as a pillow beside the lake,
and sleep, sleep, beneath the airplanes sleep
on the moist grass, until the clouds become criminal.
You have suffered armored wings for twenty years.
Eating and dancing like an orangutan, you are mired
in the crops. In your pathetic armor
you are like a fat man fallen partway through the floor
while watching TV.
Passion! Passion! You can unfurl your passion.
Churches are less forcefull now.
You can pretend to have serious phantoms.
I am all alone, writing this on a swing.
I can’t stop looking up.
It kills the mind.
A cloud looks like a pig and a rat embracing.
They’re breaking up.
I wonder if you can see it.
I wonder how much you miss me.
At night I make a little sound.
It sounds like a witch opening a birthday present.
Poisonous Snake Bite
While visiting your wife’s family in La Guajira a snake bites you. You listen to your dirge as delivered by your wife and her family, before dying on stretcher. It doesn’t feel like much except stinging, which you guess is okay, or was okay.
H1N1
You blow off what you think is a cold and it kills you.
AIDS
Sleep with a prostitute in Quibdó the color of melon and sand. Be drunk enough to believe she likes you and wants it more personal, and that’s why she begs for you to take it off, but really she just despises the krinkly condoms in her innards. That night leaves you guessing.
Stab Wound
A hallucinating homeless man stabs you in your lower back with a knife made more soldered aluminum, after you refuse to give him money. You don’t feel pain, but know at best, you’ll be stuck on a dialysis machine for the rest of your life. At worst, you’ll be dead.
Witchcraft
After two bottles of aguardiente you get the hiccups. Everyone shouts out how you should get rid of it, but it’s your friend’s father-in-law who just touches your neck then the bottoms of your feet, and instantly it goes away. The next day they find you. Dead.
But behind the rich, almost cinematic
certainties that history has given us
about the war, concerning the people,
the relationships, the materials, the
time frame, the technology, lies an
impenetrable area of shadow. No one
has ever explained how a con-
scientious public allowed this to happen,
or why.
When you die
a secret is revealed to you.
This happens to everyone.
But I think I already know
what the secret is.
Probably I am dead.
Maybe birth is the real death.
Maybe living is the secret.
At the edge of the pond
someone who looks like me
is holding hands
with someone who looks like you.
I begin to wonder who I am
because I don’t look like me.

How do you tell someone
their family is
tiny insects?
How do you tell someone
their boy is
a hummingbird?
Mother could not find her cane. She had a cane, but she could not find her special cane. Her special cane had a handle that was the head of a dog. Then she remembered: Jane had her cane. Jane had come to visit. Jane had needed a cane to get back home. That was two years ago. Mother called Jane. She told Jane she needed her cane. Jane came with a cane.Nickerson, Sandra. (1952). Not so much a magician as a madwoman, Sandra was, nevertheless, a madwoman with flair, and there is something to that. She performed in a nightgown on a stage that looked much like your kitchen. The show would start with her beheading several chickens (to the dismay of the children in the audience). Then she miraculously reattached them (to the pleasure of the children), but the heads would roll off a few moments later and the whole mess had to be swept off stage. Her finale typically involved a levitation. She would lift herself a bit off the ground and a smile would slowly crack across her face. Then, suddenly, she would throw herself against the doors and windows, brutally beating them until her little flight would putter out and she would slump to the floor with what could be interpreted as a bow.
Trick eggs. There are so many trick eggs. A partial list could include: eggs from which full grown pigeons emerge; hollow eggs with silks hidden inside; eggs so heavy two men would be needed to lift them; eggs so light they float an inch over the table; unbreakable eggs; eggs which can wobble and walk on their own; eggs which when broken scream out.Another of capital’s means of assimilation is the earworm, an infectious tune which by the way it gets stuck in your head is form of sonic branding. The earworm is very difficult to remove. Ikonika’s tunes are undoubted and sophisticated responses to earworm invasion. ‘Please’ and ‘Sahara Michael’ are both made of bent refrains which penetrate and lodge in the brain and create the earworm’s cognitive itch, an urge replay the tune where the trap is the more you scratch the more you itch. Ikonika’s particular mutation of the earworm is such that it is very hard properly to scratch: just try singing her pitchbent and treacherously modulated dubstep/RnB/hardcore derivations to yourself.
Whilst many people might simply look back on a psilocybin experience with awe and wonder but be unable to weigh up the experience or integrate their insights back into ‘normal reality', it seems clear enough to me that such a thing can be achieved and, moreover, that such integration requires that the concept of natural intelligence be taken on board and be fleshed out as far as possible. As far as I can see, the issue really boils down to language. Words like intelligence, technology, invention, design and creativity are typically seen as human attributes. The inference that they exist within Nature is usually branded as being an instance of anthropomorphism. But one can equally argue that to reserve words like intelligence and mind solely to ourselves is equally, if not more, anthropocentric. But if we are not permitted to speak of bio-logic in terms of natural intelligence then how else are we to adequately appraise the remarkably sophisticated behaviour of bio-logic?
According to Wasik, the Internet doesn’t change culture as much as it accelerates it. It also creates subcultures that, due to Internet communities catering to niche interests, are made up of members who no longer feel like members of subcultures.
Ghost armies, sonic bombs used in the Israel/Palestine conflict, imperialist anti-terror torture, manic military commanders and secret research units all appear in the history of sonic warfare, beginning even before technological innovation in the First World War and the thinking of Luigi Russolo and the Futurists, and later theorists like Paul Virilio and Jacques Attali. The sheer extent to which sonic innovation has been generated by actual warfare is quite disturbing. But Goodman’s insistence is on futurity, and in a temporality which he develops from his favourite philosophers he urges a present that depends on the pastness of the past, and always contains its future moment.
Affect and vibration are his central concepts. The ecology of fear is the result of sonic technology’s increasingly microscopic power to manipulate and produce fear, and by producing fear to dominate and control. The possibilities presented are dystopian, including paralysing, mind-arresting sonic viruses, hand-held sound devices to target ‘antisocial’ behaviour, and signaturised holosonic control and audio branding to target consumers. The need for futurity in sonic culture is even greater, Goodman argues, because capital is already beginning to find means of pre-emptive branding, of making consumers want products which may not even yet exist.
Fear is produced in ‘affective tonality’, a mode of affect where affect is understood as the impact of bodies on one another.
To understand what Verlinde is proposing, consider the concept of fluidity in water. Individual molecules have no fluidity, but collectively they do. Similarly, the force of gravity is not something ingrained in matter itself. It is an extra physical effect, emerging from the interplay of mass, time and space, says Verlinde. His idea of gravity as an "entropic force" is based on these first principles of thermodynamics - but works within an exotic description of space-time called holography.
My employer was killed in a starship accident
arranged by rebel forces. I am a piece of water in a tank.

I should probably tell you,” she said, swallowing coffee. “I’m about to lose my skin.

Each new day, when they come out from the far side of the barn, it is like the next act, or the start of an entirely new play.
Sometimes Frances was afraid for no real reason, it seemed. Oftentimes, waking in the middle of the night, she was uncertain who she was. Frances did not like that. Stumbling to the bathroom, she feared that who or whatever she was would be inappropriate or cause a calamity of some kind—and that was the most frightening thing of all. Standing on a little foot-rug, she would calm herself by rubbing her limbs briskly, hoping the heat would fill out her body and make it more dimensional.His body worked differently from others'; it was new and it hurt, and then it stopped hurting, or he got strong enough to outpower its hurts. Brigg wanted to stow the body and its parts somewhere, maybe in a private den for a while or possibly in eternity, so as to learn at last what nature really was, with its tireless hybridity.

Sitting or standing, moving or taking a stance. There are 49 in the room, and 21 know each other by name. The music, something technical from Europe, is loud and the walls are bare save for the iconic Newman whose edges are imperceptible, wall and canvas the same pale ivory, and the black vertical line could be a wire, could be leading to a speaker producing the sounds , it is perceptible after 10 minutes, that aggregate feedback of the conversations in the room, phrases scrambled, words and sources distinguishable, issuing from 7 speakers and 2 subwoofers, the sounds of glasses, of chairs moving, of heels on abstract parquetry, and doors, and of dishes on the glass tables scrambled into an interval-system that supplies rhythm to the voices, a metronomic rhythm, a pulse-interval the system of whose governing program might be recognized critically sometime this new century.
The 21 known names are of 1 through 7 syllables, and the names in use are both given and family names, and there are 3 names with foreign prefixes, one honorific. The 28 unknown names sit, stand, move, or take stances. The correlation of the music to these motions could be measured, were there adequate space, scaffolding and instrumentation. Correlating the motions and the utterances of the 49 known names to these correlations could be measured only provisionally and discretely, for instance:
As D, a known, released himself from 3-minutes with his former spouse and business partner, he inhaled and exhaled deeply 2 feet from C, an unknown, who had taken a stand near the drinks table, but whom the music had stimulated to move without conscious objective, and he was aiming at the same 5 sq. of parquetry to which the exhaling D was turning from his encounter with the well-known, and the awkwardness of their near-collision caused them both to chuckle and look into each others green eyes and moderately-anxious faces while lightly restraining each other with fingers on each others' shoulders, allowing the fingers to trail down and linger on forearm and bicep, as each uttered, unsynchronized, "Well hello," caught by the music and diffused throughout the huge room while C and D took stances faces to face in their space.