They call me an American poetry bad boy. The groupie of the grotesque. Because I move like a mist, seeking the border that seeks to contain me. I stand at a metro platform, my life's possessions in a bag the size of an attaché, and catch the blowback of a life encased in the tyranny of pulp. A pulp novel called Soft Thighs written for adults only in the year of the stag. I throw down the book and finger the tear in my lamb's wool sweater. The sweater that smells like the jade room at a Korean spa, like the ambience of finery worn by the whole of the zeitgeist.
He’s a deep pause, a slow pace. I was born with pictures of his body rotation, the secret instructions.Through no clear means I survived. Perhaps I fought long and well.
It is possible that this recession haunted man is completely foreign to me. I went to him, to this place that is gone now, regardless of my mouth, because I want to talk.
I went to this place that is gone now, a restaurant of many foreign words and phrases, wet and shallow and finally a number of clay images, blurred. Some guests were surprised to see an absent-minded man: “That he was killed, and remembers to look clean” they whispered.
Perhaps I had not survived. Perhaps I was gone all along.
Food and drink sodas served and suddenly this man I had known from always, this man that was killed, produced his head, soaked in a bag. Now he produced his family, in bags and sacks, every last breath and heart. And little Timmy, his youngest, who just a minute ago was sitting in a comfortable attitude, even with blood leaking from his clothes (until he’d become a bag of shining wet). The man said proudly of his family that his first invention of development was “the stop breathing technique.”
Around me they whispered of the man’s family: “[They] also appeared in [our] food.”
According to later reports they found “six heads in bags” while they whispered of this man, “I never [saw him] …. cut in this way [before]”.
No one spoke nor whispered as they disappeared this man from the restaurant. Silence, from those disappeared into the local jail, is nothing new, previously reserved for members of our family, our community values of love, when one hundred years ago they started drinking too much.
To this report, then, there is no evidence that can be added. Nothing more was heard from the people I’ve known for a very long time. This man I so long knew. This man I never knew.
+
Remixer’s process: Once I decided to mashup these texts by David Ohle and Ben Marcus I set about cutting, combining, and mistranslating them. First, I cut paragraphs from the Marcus story and alternated these with paragraphs from “From: Old Reactor”. I then copied the resulting work into Google Translate (as I have long admired the poetry of certain ESL students of mine who compose with the use of electronic translators) where my process was to translate and retranslate the text from random language to random language. After 10 or so passes through Google, the mistranslated phrasing achieved random spots of a high poetic feeling. I then formed the resulting jumble into the writing before you.
It occurs to me that there are many potential outcomes to this remix process depending upon the combinations of original texts, the exact mistranslation process, and then the decisions made in the refinement process My resulting piece is clearly just one outcome and, very likely, not nearly the finest possible. I freely invite folks to undertake a similar process of mashing and mistranslating these texts and to send me your results pasted inside the body of an email. Direct your messages to kloss[dot]robert1 [at] gmail [dot] com. I don’t know what would come of those efforts, but I am curious.
In the liberated city of Altobello, a jellyhead woman entered the Saposcat’s Deli on Arden Boulevard last night with five severed heads in a suitcase, those of husband, Barry; Muffy and Dale, the twin 10-year olds; Earnest, the blind and deaf son, and George D. Bennett, an uncle visiting from Bunkerville.Observers say she sat down with a calm demeanor, though her clothes were blood soaked and glistening with gel, the suitcase oozing, and ordered a sapsap plate from a trembling waitress. After eating the sapsap and drinking a soda, she suddenly shouted, “Oh, sput! I forgot about little Timmy,” and dashed from the restaurant.
Some of the diners were shocked to see this, others were amused. The frycook stepped from the kitchen and said, “We get this all the time.”
In only a few minutes, the jellyhead returned with little Timmy, her youngest, his head in a soaked and dripping in a cloth bag. Now her family was complete.
As the diners looked on, the frycook opened the suitcase and the bag and said to them, “We’ve got six heads here. Personally speaking, I’ve never seen a jelly bring in more than three at once. Don’t ask me why they sever them like that or why they always drop them off at Saposcat’s. I don’t have a clue.”
The beheadings of loved ones was something new to the native jellies of Altobello, who were formerly devoted to family, to the home, to community values, until they set up an encampment out near the Old Reactor about a hundred years ago and began drinking heavy water. After that, there was no predicting how a given jellyhead might behave.
Small, bitten wings ornament the head.Song whistles from the nostrils:
Breathing in is thrushes, breathing out is cranes.
The eyes are black seeds.
There is a crooked delicacy in the legs.
The pig is a bird of mud.
It nests in wallows and beds of muck,
brooding for open sky.
Flocks of wild pigs migrating
across fields of goldenrod
used to bruise the land each September.
Early explorers wrote in their diaries
of a flush of pigs darkening the hills, pigs
as far as the eye could see.
You can jab your prod in any direction
and get one.
An enclosed pig gives us cagey looks.
Something flightless is cramped in its heart.
My own concept of “avant-garde” has to do with something constant…this constant is a quality of coldness, detachment, ruthless determination to face up to the enormities of ugliness and potential failure within ourselves and in the world around us, and to bring to this exposure a savage or saving comic spirit and the saving beauties of language. The need is to maintain the truth of the fractured picture; to expose, ridicule, attack, but always to create and to throw into new light our potential for violence and absurdity as well as for graceful action.I don’t like soft, loose prose or fiction which tries to cope too directly with life itself or is based indulgently on personal experience.
The smell of women–girlish, matronly–and the smell of meat sauce were the same. As soon as it spread across his plate it went to his nostrils and they might not have bothered with their clothes, with procrastination.…the cat, creature that claws tweed, sits high in the hallway, remains incorrigible upon the death of its mistress, beds itself in the linen or thrusts its enormous head into an alley, now sucked and gagged on the fish as if drawing a peculiar sweetness from the end of a thin bone.
…behind the spectacles the man had watering eyes, eyes nearly awash in the sockets, and he did not blink. On either side of his nose–bookish–were grains of blood and scratches. When he whispered, the saliva behind his lips, between his teeth, was tinted pink with blood constantly trickling into the throat.
The sobs were not sweet. They were short, moist, lower than contralto, louder than she intended; the moanings of a creature no one could love.
Brown and broken yellow, thick and ovarian, his mouth was running with the eggs and sauce while the whiskey glasses of the women were leaving rings.
At three o’clock in the morning she was a girl he had seen through windows in several dreams unremembered, unconfessed, the age of twenty that never passes but lingers in the silvering of the trees and rising fogs. Younger than Syb, fingers bereft of rings, she would come carelessly to any door, to any fellow’s door.
You know,” the painter said, “that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always found that repelling; those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy…Envy is what holds artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything…I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions…I want to say: artists are the great emetic agents of the time, they are always the great, the very greatest emetics…Artists, are they not a devastating army of absurdity, of scum? The infernality of unscrupulousness is something I always meet with the thoughts of artists…But I don’t want any artist’s thoughts anymore, no more of those unnatural thoughts, I want nothing more to do with artists or with art, yes, not with art either, that greatest of all abortions…Do you understand: I want to get right away from that bad smell. Get away from that stink, I always say to myself, and secretly I always thought, get away from that corrosive, shredding, useless lie, get away from that shameless simony…” He said: “Artists are the identical twins of hypocrisy, the identical twins of lowmindedness, the identical twins of licensed exploitation, the greatest licensed exploitation of all time. Artists, as they have shown themselves to me to be,” he said, “are all dull and grandiloquent, nothing but dull and grandiloquent, nothing…
Outside the house the house had sunk into the sidewalk, the sidewalk around the house with all the names cut in it, the sidewalk where so many hours Ricky had ripped the skin off of his body. In turn the sidewalk had sunk into the lawn, the mealy mat of half-conditioned growth so neon brown with all the terror, and the lawn too had moved to kiss the window. Ricky could see the way the wires that had fed the lamp light and the electric duster the will to eat the dust hung on the half-split hull of nowhere that grew in throbbing on the multi-plaid horizon, from which where the gulls had barked up the gray linings of the their intestines to form a barrier or film.In the film, buoyed by the smudge light seeping through the flashlights in the eyes of god, Ricky saw the x-ray of his urethra where he’d hid the idea of his life, and the lidless answer he’d kept buried from his mother to the question she would never, even in sleeping, ask.
Below the cusp of crap the street around the house had sponged against the siding, marbled smooth, no dent or dam or door from which the court of gone blood could recur.
Ricky had seen the dogs and cats and fish and gerbils of the neighborhood dumped from their sack beds or wet bowls in the night. He had heard them flounder in high-power pain there on the pavement through the window from his room— a billion animals as if on fire— their bodies corkscrewed and run through with chill and ache before the lawn had sucked them under. The cats that he’d collected in the evenings had also burst, spraying the soil before they became mustard, the packy gold-brown smarm of each one spattered on the hot heat, ejecting sloughs of stuff Ricky knew he himself had eaten.
In the bowl of the street’s lip now, half hung and blackened, lit by weird light from half-dawn, the house was going under.
Ricky stood and tried to keep standing, his leg muscles gobbled in the wrong gravity the front yard now commanded, having fully lifted the earth up around it and bowed the night sky to a bump around the house from which something other wet was jumping. Ricky felt the weight puddle in his belly, the weight of all his excess blood, the weight of years of nights of breakfast cereal cold one bowl after another with his head against the oven, the weight of every pin he’d snuck from his mother’s pin cushion and worked up into his foot’s sole one by one, knowing the color-flavor of each further incision, all of it hulled inside him now, feedmachines.
Ricky moved toward the window with the glow heaping out of everything he couldn’t see, his eyes coming to focus through the weird light in time to watch the white laddered minivan arrive. The van had no windshield, doors, or mirrors. It came to a rest half moored on the gray-green lawn Ricky had not mowed in several years.
Sometimes when Ricky picked up the telephone there were prods sticking out of the receiver cup but Ricky put his head against it anyway— he’d spent 18 hours as a toddler on the phone with a man from Texas he’d dialed while practicing his counting on the dial pad, when his mother had taken the phone away the man had hung up, after all that.
Ricky had tried for years to record his own voice singing and yet everything he spoke to remained blank— though he swore he could hear himself in the backgrounded layers of the posthumous rapper’s shit-pop single bleeding nightly through the silence of our beef.
In the driveway several men emerged from the car despite that Ricky still could not see any burp in the van’s surface. The men stood on the lawn in some corked configuration. There were several of them altogether and yet Ricky could not count. Their bodies slurred against the shade of evening spreading out, the men’s clothes were white, their heads were tilted, they wore no expressions on their face and yet their eyes were stuck to Ricky unblinked and glossy as he stood on the other side of the morning glass. Ricky with the burn marks in his ear rivets and under the nape of his nose where in his sleep he sniffed and sniffed, Ricky with both thumbs indented with a million microscopic marks where a breed of pest had wandered in and settled, annexing the anterior regions of where he licked to turn the page in books and with which he clicked the button on the TV’s remote control. The men’s arms hung limp at their sides— their index fingers were quite massive, thick as the middle of their arm. He could feel their eyes against him searching the pores. There was a music locked inside the van. Subwoofers, black metal bass, throb vocals— the front bumper was vibrating so hard it knocked the air on both sides of the van in puddles. The men did not move. The men’s hands were in their pockets, watching.
At the window Ricky closed the blinds, the pattern on the blinds were massive flowers each as big as Ricky’s head. The pattern the leaves of the flowers made each held a whole forest of the flowers in them. Ricky leaned his head forward and topped it lightly on the curtain so that through it it touched the hidden glass. Ricky felt the curtain’s print imprinted on his forehead sinking in. He stepped back from the hidden window and judged it from afar. The window on the wall was set a bit off-center to the right. Ricky closed his right eye then his left eye then his right and watched the hidden window jump. Ricky got down on the cold kitchen floor against his stomach and listened for something,
Ricky stood back up and walked into the next room. Ricky made a point not to look out the window that looked onto the front yard at another angle where just before he’d seen the men. He moved with his head held on straight aimed at a point on the far wall toward the TV.
Ricky walked halfway across the room not breathing. His mother was still spread out in the floor, though she’d turned over to face up. Her body had grown at least one quarter bigger. Her tits had sunken back into her, her skin aglow. Her eyes were wide and blinking— the flutter of the lid made the light in the whole room slightly strobe. She was wearing a different dress than she’d had last time. It was the dress she’d had on when she got fucked for making Ricky, except with the color all drained out. The pattern had several thousand stars. The dress was the same white as the men who’d come into the yard. The dress was cut open at the middle and hiked up so that you could see how Ricky’s mother’s vagina had been recently shaved. The clit was swollen neon red, the color the house’s brick, and of the mother after bath time. The lips around the clit were swollen even worse. It looked like a rooster’s head. The air was hung with film.
In the picture of the room hanging in the room behind him everything was exactly as it was there now except in the photo his mother’s body was not there, and in the photo there was a large red cube placed on top of the all-white coffee table. The cube seemed to have no seam. The corners of the cube were sharp and glistened in the white captured photo light. In the spot on the wall of the room in the photo where the photo in the real room hung there was nothing there except more white wall, yet when Ricky touched the spot his mouth roof tickled. Ricky could feel with his tongue the way his mouth roof had lost its ridges, was so smooth. There was a slight metallic tint in his saliva.
Ricky hunched down against his mom again. His ass rested on her tits where something cog-veined wriggled. Ricky put his mouth against his mother’s encased ear. Ricky could feel the billion tiny bones hid there behind the folds of hair and flesh, and Ricky whispered. Ricky moved his mouth to say his mother’s name into her, inside his throat his larynx scattered, and what came out was his own name. Ricky, Ricky said again, again, trying to force his tongue to form the other, he could not think of what the name was. Ricky’s mother’s head inside the hair was spurting foam. The soft slather of it welled through the thread-grain and burned Ricky on the lips. Ricky saw his mother turn her head away and more foam came out the other side. Ricky touched his mother on the shoulder and Ricky's mouth was full of more hair. He kept spitting out the hair onto the carpet, the hair was made of blood, the blood dotted on the carpet here and there some in a pattern, the hair would not get out of Ricky’s mouth. No matter how much he spat his mouth was still full, something else was moving in the chew. Ricky could not roll her body over. He could not find the words to pray.
There were rooms somewhere in buildings, rooms with doors which when opened, opened into Ricky, vibrating through his butt. Ricky could feel their knobs knocking against him in the light, and the footsteps, and the rare air, the gnawing of his bone— so many rooms and all this wanting and still nowhere yet to go.
Ricky stepped over his mother and fell into the loveseat with his whole body. The creaking groin of the couch made lather up against his legs, culled from what he and so many other bodies had given up to it unconscious. Ricky could not find the remote. The window to the front yard hung behind him and in the light balled down from god Ricky could feel the silhouette of the men’s disruption and yet he did not turn around.
The inside of Ricky’s head was itching. Ricky could feel his name writ in the lining of his briefs, burning into his flesh’s waistband. Ricky could not find the remote. Ricky’s dick was hard against his thigh, curving down and inward rather than the usual condition. The head was as big as Ricky’s head. Ricky flicked the tip of his taut corroded prick with both pinkies at once and watched it deflate to a point. Ricky leaned back on the sofa with both his arms slid between the cushions, feeling. Ricky could not find the remote. Ricky’s hand moved across something soft again and something so deep and wet it stretched forever. Ricky felt something bite him and he stood up. The TV was already on.
The TV had a picture of woman that kept her eyes on Ricky either way he went. The woman had a birthmark that covered her entire face with a plum color. The woman was dressed in a man’s suit and sat at a news desk with her hair combed into waxy lines. The way the woman looked into Ricky made his erection sink and curl up into him in inverse. The woman’s eyelids had pictures of something on them but she never kept them down long enough for Ricky to see quite what. The woman held a news report and did not read it. The woman kept looking up from Ricky to the window over his shoulder. The woman’s eyes were so wide. Ricky saw his half-reflection in the sheen of the screen. Behind him the light of the window was so massive. Ricky watched his body turn around toward it.
Through the window from this angle Ricky still could see the men. They had not moved except with their heads slightly to see Ricky. Ricky’s pubic hair was fat with static. It seethed at the wide curve of his gut. Ricky smoothed the bulk of the hair with his right hand until the curls all stayed out straight. Some of the strands of hair were adorned with tiny padlocks with no entrance for a key.
Ricky looked up and saw the men again, he felt the pressure brimming in their eyes. The van still idle in the street behind them had become dented all around itself from the music beating out from the inside. There was the shape of a large hand or head stretched in the surface. The car’s a/c unit gave off a steady stream of liquid under the car. Ricky felt something in him bending. Ricky moved toward the glass. Halfway across the room, Ricky tripped across his mother in the floor still, her body had swollen by a quarter yet again. Her labia in particular resembled two bread loaves. The hem of the dress was coming out. The thread led outward from her body along the carpet into another room. Something was pulling. Ricky’s mother moaned as Ricky nudged his foot up in her side fat. Her fat arm slithered from their prostrate position and went up the tight leg of Ricky’s pant. Her nails caught on his leg hair. Get me a napkin Rick, Ricky’s mother said through her nostrils, I need a napkin in this life several times for certain. A well of goo up from her throat then turned any further words to burble. Her fingers squelched in the mass of clot hair way high up Ricky’s leg.
Ricky shook his mother off and approached the window where now the glass was tacky and stuck to his forearms as he leaned. Ricky waved his chub arms at the men. He flashed gang signs and flicked his thumb and middle fingers. He lit a tiny fireworks and watched it burst before him. He grunted at the beading window and nudged the tremor with his shoulders. The men did not flinch. The men’s hand in their pockets made nice bulges. Ricky breathed his inside air out onto the glass until it was wide enough to know, then with two fat fingers wrote the warning. Ricky threw himself against the glass. Ricky beat the plane with all ten fingers. His belly made a screeching. Somewhere a plane fell out of orbit, a young man with a colostomy bag suddenly became a vacuum, there were apple pies in many ovens overflowing, there was a baseball in our hearts. The men. The men were. Ricky had a.
Ricky walked back through the house. Ricky walked to the front door and opened the front door and Ricky walked out onto the lawn.
On the lawn the light, which from inside had seemed forever now, felt far-off, under a cake dome. There were more men now, perhaps a dozen, their bodies fixed in traction on the lawn, where, now among the light Ricky could see, the lawn had expunged a light brown ring of blood— caked just underneath the lip of grass, Ricky could feel it squish between his toes. He could sniff the animals underneath him all wallowing among their magma. The light held warm and calm.
The men watched Ricky waddle up the wet slope, the driveway having given into the new surface which for years had held below. The men’s heads craned at waning angles, their eyes unflipped and dry, as Ricky walked among them. Their arms did nothing. The air between was small and coarse and stunk of milk. Ricky went to the first man nearest to him and opened his mouth with teeth and tremor but no words would come out. Ricky grunted, inner-shouted, flexed and burped. There was no mode— the man stared on into Ricky as if a cursor. There was some fold behind his eyes. Ricky saw the other men and more now arriving, spread all around him in a circle, from close up the men’s clothes smelled like bleach. Ricky raised his fat arm in the air. Ricky swung down on the first man against the shoulder to shove him and there was a small popping of a bulb inside him. The man did not flinch, though the eyelids blinked once. The man looked at Ricky, same as he had been, the many men around them looking too. The other men around him did not move. Ricky swung down on the man again this time with both arms, and then again. He used his elbow, knuckles, knees. The man could not be bodyslammed. The man would not bend except a little. He seemed very heavy though he was thin.
Back in the house Ricky went to the broom closet. He did not notice how the wood floor in the entry hall was slightly warped— the reflective sheen of the long zone showing not the ceiling above it but several years of sheen of sky and none of Ricky. Ricky rummaged through the hanging clothing for the softball bat he’d found wedged in the guest bathroom sink covered in bile. He took the bat back outside with him and went not to the first man but the man 3.2 yards to the man’s northwest. This man’s face was slightly more tense with age and his half-smiled teeth seemed brittle. The man’s pantleg vibrated from the pressure of the van. The roof of the van had been banged far out from its original shape as if to form another room. There was no wind. Ricky went to the man with the softball bat and in his approach raised the bat swiftly and brought it down swiftly, in a hard arc. He brought it down between the man’s eyes. The bat connected with the faint flush of the man’s unibrowing flesh. There was no sound. The breadth at the bridge of the nose up into the slightly cleaved forehead weathered a little with the impact, smudging as if a thumb had been ran across it during birth— otherwise in the man there was no change. His eyes closed once, saw the inside of their lids, reopened seeing Ricky. Ricky swung the bat onto the man again with the muscles in his shoulders going white— the worms in Ricky’s muscles' tissue spurring and spooling in the pleasure of new heat. The bat connected to the man’s head again and Ricky saw the man’s eyes still looking at him. There were even more men now, so many, all with eyes all on him. Ricky looked to the left and to the right and maybe slightly up. The moon was the whole sky, to the point it seemed a night with no moon.
There was a cluster of some crap hung at the edge of Ricky’s vision, such that as he turned the crap continued hanging just out of his cognition, though it was dark gray and slightly see-through and seemed to have a bell hung in its center.
Ricky swung the bat into the man’s head again. The flesh spot dented, making an oval. Under the flesh Ricky could see a flat gauzy panel a slightly lighter gray, puttied around the flesh around the head that puckered only a little further with each beat. No blood came out, no sputum, and yet Ricky continued again, again, to swing. Ricky did not swing at any other part of the man’s white body, the man did not make a sound.
Ricky saw on his own wide wrist there while his arms were moving how his camping wristwatch had begun to glow, this was feature supplied with the watch to allow the viewing of time marks in the dead of night far from all lighting, in caves and underwater. Ricky had never once been camping, Ricky would never go camping in his future life— the air among the trees in the local water was full of lice and crying, the air had rat’s blood laced in it outside the suburban perimeter, anyone could be smothered in their sleep by enormous unseen babies. The time on the watch read all 8’s, more 8’s than a watch should hold, on and on in columns. Ricky heard a sound like 700 records having the needle dropped down onto their noise.
Ricky with the bat abused the center section of the man until finger grips began to ache. Ricky tried to keep the bat there up above his head, his arms seemed to weigh a fortune. By now the men’s van had malformed into a white metal slur upon the air, a oceanic mansion in which the blast-beat shitstorm reverberated. Ricky could not see how high the van had risen, how the van had moved to scrape against the inseam of the sky.
Ricky’s body wanted to approach the van and yet he did not. Ricky could feel the untying of his shoes. He could feel how now his pubic hair had knitted across the fiber of his deflated dick as if as a bodice or a wig and tugging down tight against his urethra. Ricky looked down and saw that he was leaking— his pants were wet and caked with goo that pooled around him into the yard— where the liquid hit the grass the grass began growing, shooting upward with bright unsatcheled blooms, Ricky’s whole head flushed with dry blood and sand. He moved the bat across his crotch. He turned back again to look at the man he’d dented, the man by now had turned his head. The men were not looking at Ricky any longer, the men were looking toward the front door of Ricky’s mother’s house from which now the front room extolled an ooze, a gelatinous liquid wide and flowing in slow-motion with the mother’s hair floating upon it and long strips of the mother’s shredded gown coursing in rivulets. The liquid lolled through the door and down the house mound into the grass where unlike Ricky’s urine the mother’s liquid made the ground go gold and inside the house the house was glown. The house was three-eighths underneath now. Ricky turned in skin cells screaming to see the way the men were watching but the men were no longer there. The street around the van had also puckered up toward it, the van stretched into the overhead so far Ricky could not see where it ended and where the moon-ruined sky began.
Ricky inside Ricky had the light gushing out around him, through his eye and ear holes, through his nostrils, from his nipples and his balding, from his knees. The light burned spurting between his teeth and out his dick hole, from his anus, from the staple mark ripped in his chest. Light whirred from his pores and small contusions, except where the oil and scarring was too thick and so here instead the light refracted back down into Ricky and became curled, became a gun. Wherever Ricky looked the light was in the way. Whatever Ricky touched.
Dethcicle
There is an echo that is too long to listen to.Everything we have known about each other
changes moment to moment. If it stops
I think we might die. And it took me
by surprise too, how I crumpled into him like a rough napkin
on a mouth. Wasn’t I supposed to love you?
I don’t ever want to come out of here and see the sky.
I want to grab at the particles spinning
in each ream of waterlight until there is no
difference between light and light. Red and blue
things orbit and are closer than you think. I break
my teeth on how beautiful they are. Sometimes
these things fall but burn dark and ashy,
almost completely disappear before touching down.
A bright but quick glow about the rim
of the sky and then nothing. It takes me by the hair
when I realize that so much of what I love
about you is gone before I can touch it.
I want dive and surface. Dive and surface.
I want to take everything about you into me,
everything about you into me and into me.
I want to cease body in the middle of the ocean,
float back to where I once walked,
wash up on shore.
In the sun my gills curve to cantaloupe rinds.
Children poke my abdomen with wiffle bats.
I cut around the anus of the animal and tied off the sphincter with a length of string. I held my blade with the handle placed outward and returned my arm into the cavity. I reached to where the cavity narrowed down along the hips. I turned my blade outward with much care so not to puncture or break the bladder. From across the bladder something crawled across my arm. The animal was tainted from its insides with parasites. The meat of the animal would likely kill the families before their plates were fully cleared. I tried picturing the faces of my family among those who ate weeping or in silence before being led out into the garden for the saying of a final prayer. I recalled the touch of my father’s hand and nothing more. I shook myself from such thoughts and cleaved deeper into the body. I cut backwise and forth along the wall of abdominal cavity. Again I was careful of the bladder. I was careful not to empty any droppings or urine before the bladder was expelled from the body. I touched against the diaphragm at where it separates the lungs and heart from the stomach and intestines. I cut upward from against it and reached with my other arm as far into the chest as possible and took hold of the esophagus. With my free hand I slid my blade into the chest and worked it upward. I cut the esophagus from above the grip of my other hand. I pulled at the heart and lungs and the intestines fell out from behind them. I lifted out my arms and stood alongside the body. I said a prayer for the families. I said a prayer for the animal. I dragged the body out from the woods to where the woods became a road. I kept to the shoulder. The sound of the body against the ground kept me company. It became one sound then another. By the time I reached the village it was every sound I’d ever known.
Mad fathers stalk up and down the boulevards, shouting. Avoid them, or embrace them, or tell them your deepest thoughts — it makes no difference, they have deaf ears. If their dress is covered with sewn-on tin cans and their spittle is like a string of red boiled crayfish running head-to-tail down the front of their tin cans, serious impairment of the left brain is present. If, on the other hand, they are simply barking (no tin cans, spittle held securely in the pouch of the cheek), they have been driven to distraction by the intricacies of living with others. Go up to them and, stilling their wooden clappers by putting your left hand between the hinged parts, say you’re sorry.
A thief charges into a bank with a loaded gun, but he does not ask for money; what he asks for, instead, is the object of greatest significance currently in the possession of each patron. The thief then leaves, and the patrons all survive, but strange things soon begin to happen to them: One survivor’s tattoo jumps off her ankle and chases her around; another wakes up to find that she’s made of candy; and Stacey Hinterland discovers that she’s shrinking, incrementally, a little every day, and nothing that her husband or son do can reverse the process
Anais is an experiment. She always was. It’s a given, a liberty, a fact. They watch Anais. Not just in meetings, social work reviews, court, school or the police cells. They watch her walk through the woods or sat up her tree quietly disappearing. They watch her hang upside down from the longest bough of the Oak, hair trailing to the ground, star shaped sunglasses reflecting wishes as they drift through the woods, breathing in the earthy scent of rotten mulched leaves. They watch her outstare the moon. The moon is a silent O. Anais is unintimidated by its terrrible baldness. They watch her carve her name in trees, spraypaint it on bridges, scrawl it repeatedly on the side of her jotter in class. They watch her pick her nose, they watch her not step on the cracks, they watch her sing, wank, fight, fuck, scream and smash. They watch her draw flying cats and look too clearly and long without flinching. They watch her not say. They watch her in the bath, eyes open underwater blowing smoke rings. The last two shoot quickly through the larger ones, unfurl like wispy art nouveou curls. They watch her not cry. They watch her lie like an angel. They watch her hide her dirty feet. They watch and she knows it and she can’t find anywhere anymore that they can’t see.
If, as they say, poetry is a sign of somethingamong people, then let this be prearranged now,
between us, while we are still peoples: that
at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry
(and wheat and evil and insects and love),
when the entire human race gathers in the flesh,
reconstituted down to the infant’s tiniest fold
and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge
of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you
Thee lay the guinea pigs. There lay the guinea pigs and they waited with blood around their mouths like my sister. There lay the guinea pigs and they smelled bad in the cave. There lay my sister sister and she swelled and ached and throbbed. There lay the guinea pigs and they ached all over and their legs stuck straight up like beetles and they looked depraved and were blue under their eyes as from months of debauchery. My sister puked calmly and indifferently: it ran slowly out of her slack mouth without her moving a single nerve. And the cave was warm as teats and full of autumn leaves and beneath the soil lay the arm of a mannequin. There lay the guinea pigs and ached and were made of dough. There lay the guinea pigs beside the knives that would slice them up like loaves. And my sister with lips of blueberries, soil and mush. In the distance, the siren bleated inhumanly. That is where the guinea pigs lay and waited with blood around their mouths and contorted bodies. They waited. And I was tired in my whole stomach from meat dough and guinea pig loaf and I knew that they would revenge on me.
It was all fishnets and fifties knickers,boys in black nail varnish
and dresses,
axe wielding
sociopaths
who couldn’t stand people
but made them dance anyway,
we played
like we meant it,
our clothes stank of rehearsal
rooms, dust on valve amps
sweat and cigarettes,
we tied each other up
too bored to fuck
rubbed coke on our clits
or our dicks
or our eyeballs
and gums,
walked cobbled
streets with guitars
on our backs
kissed only strangers
in the absinthe
abattoir
where they pound
down the bones.
Peter Gillies could be your cousinbut the last six months he's been barking at the moon
for he's about to become a shape-shifting werewolf
pulling yet another artistic dirty trick
in a never-ending slush pile of misadventures.
Things are getting hairier in his attempt
to take centre stage with grey hair sprouting
all over his thin grizzly hands
so his rise to fame remains less than meteoric:
all cameos, walk on parts and creative lows.
Peter Gillies could be your howling cousin
whose identity crisis means he has to fly out
to a local cafe to quell his blue and black moods.
You could be duelling banjos with him except
since that fad he's gift-aided all his instruments away.
“He was wearing a suit, necktie, and loafers, seldom
considered appropriate for trampoline activities.”
Don’t think too much of this
writing. It’s really a kind of duel,
a testosterone-fulled dialogue
more argument than collaboration.
Some things are still best left unsaid.
Rupert Loydell is not your friend,
he’s too busy standing on your shoulders
trying to reach the sun and be a star.
It’s all about process and form,
never just a drink in the bar.
Don’t think too much of this
sequence of poems. It’s just a joke
without a punchline, a train running
out of steam. If you want real poetry
there are other authors I can suggest.
Rupert Loydell is not your friend,
even if he acts like one. He is simply
trying to blag a book or get an exhibition
out of you. He wants to be friends
with your friends, is happy to forget his.
“I hope you won’t be here for long.”
Not too old, not young anymore,almost three dozen years gone by.
Not a failure, not a success—
my first real job, a job to grow old in.
Some potential, too lazy to use it:
I’d watch TV but I like the window more.
My money gets spent when I have it;
cheap food tastes good too, and a small room’s enough.
Even a smaller room would be fine,
a shelf of old books, guitar with no amp.
The books I just flip through and don’t worry about too much,
the guitar is for noodling around on my own.
Mornings on the bus; I get to the office late.
Evenings it’s back home, go to bed early.
Working out’s too much trouble, and my body’s all right,
some belly to keep me company.
So there you have it, day by day, month after month.
Rereading this poem taped to the wall—
that’s the only reason I wrote it.
No genius, not stupid either.
Drunker than Voyager 1but not as Voyager 2 I rode my blue
bike back through the darkness
to my lonely geode cave of light
awaiting nothing under the punctured
dome. I had achieved escape
velocity drinking clear liquid starlight
at the Thunderbird with a fingerless
Russian hedge fund inspector and one
who called himself The Champ. All
night I felt fine crystals cutting
my lips like rising up through
a hailstorm. And the great vacuum
cleaner that cannot be filled moved
through my chest, gathering
conversation dust and discharging
it through my borehole. During
one of many silences The Champ
took off his face and thus were many
gears to much metallic laughter
revealed. Long ago I forgot
the word which used to mean in truth
but now expresses disbelief. So
quickly did my future come. You who
are floating past me on your inward way,
please inform those glowing faces
who first gave me this shove I have
managed to rotate my brilliant
golden array despite their instructions
First take the tufts of hair the dog chewedoff the fur pillows and bury them outside
to be hidden will be listed soon. It helps
to be on top of a mountain at dusk or to
find the cabinets stocked with English
supplies such as biscuits. The lawyers are
still rich as are the dentists. Everything
else has changed. I look frantically for
something to puzzle me.
In the grip of the NYC sublimeI fell in love out of boredom.
I left the party, thru the French exit
to the smaller one inside
where the cake said
I HAVE NO CONCEPT OF TIME.
Look into my image
distortion disorder and tell me
what you really feel, now
that you’re incomprehensible, Mr.—
tell me “what for.” I love you
but my arms are full.
I opened my face with the door.
It is a house you dream to live in, four bedrooms. Three of them for no one. Every corner of the garden smells of powders to kill insects. Except for the garage - that smelling, sweetly, of root beer. There are dogs in the neighborhood. They howl. Force out dry and crinkled barks, bounce along the gulley banks and vanish into the black night yard. It is hands punching paper bags. The neighbors claim they are strays, the din the city’s responsibility. Unable to sleep through this and the sound of freight and passenger trains clattering mostly west, or inching through your town till dawn; the residents lay awake, picture crates carrying cane, dried fruits, unbutchered sides of beef, rolls of paper towels and unlined writing pads. Other neighbors part thin curtains to gape at plumb-lined trees night-shading either edge of the lighted street. Or they haunt their doorways. Even in summer wearing wooly coats, and olive scarves, as they lean flush against the slats and jambs and smoke and bite their pipes.Most of the houses here are painted gray or black and white, and all develop identical black flakes as the seasons change. The neighbors are known for the number of children they produce, children which play rodent-like in the ruts which score the roadtop. These children wear tight white shirts and reflective fabrics. Their sneakers blink in constant alarm. Cars cut through these side streets, sometimes nearing cruising speed. One summer there was an accident. It took the life of a Campfire Girl. Den mothers ran out of their doorways. Chain smokers clutched their phones. They might have been engaging in a conversation about something as pragmatic as the fact that garbage had not been collected for two weeks. But there was somehow a connection made between the mother and the male voice on the other end, and the talk began to shift into unfamiliar cul-de-sacs. It must have been the address which, when mentioned, first drew the mother out and into mid-conversation, the dispatcher having recognized the name of the street on which the trash had been left stinking, or on which a power line was sagging scarily. Comments where exchanged about the removal of certain trees which had recently been cut in an under-mediated decision. Some of the trees were thought to have prevented motorists from viewing the stop signs which regularly appeared along the street. Because of them several mishaps had been narrowly avoided. Already a number of pets had needed to be speeded to a veterinary hospital as a result of unforeseen collisions. Drivers had been seen to stand beside their cars, wanting to show their concern for the animals they had mangled, until the owners appeared and these drivers began to grow less apologetic and more defensive. Many of the parents in the neighborhood had been witnesses to these collisions and had complained to the city, mentioned the number of schools and children in the vicinity, and demanded that something be done immediately. Within the week workmen were seen in the neighborhood, driving or lunching in their yellow city trucks. There was the sound of a buzz saw and the smell of light construction. Areas of shade began to disappear. Over the course of seven days fifteen of the oldest trees were leveled to stumps upon which the workers poured petroleum. Other stumps were sprayed with a fluorescent paint which slated them for machine extraction. A number of neighbors were outraged at the drastic measures which were so swiftly adopted by the city. They stood in the way of the city employees as they pulled the ropes of their chains saws. There was talk of calling in lawyers and police. There was discussion of the public good. Other neighbors, those taking the opposite side of the issue, were those who walked the dogs, some of these victims still waiting to have their bandages removed. These were large dogs, german shephards, Dobermans, rotweilers. All of them now animal amputees, missing fore or hind paws and limbs, or looking either pathetic or ridiculous because they were instances of breeds intended to keep the tails God gave them. Some neighbors had been moved to tears when seeing a poodle which once had been a show dog. It had been meticulously groomed in the fashion of old Bourbon gardens, the ears the only organ of the animal which could at first glance still be labeled untamed nature. Everything else about this creature — because it truly seemed created — demanded to be viewed as artifice. These haunches like some cauliflower hybrid, these forepaws molded in a muffin tin, this tail shaved back until a toilet brush. As for the hinder parts of the animal, these had been shaved in a manner which lacked the same precision — though these regions too seemed topiary — as the other sections of the animal’s anatomy. There was evidence of urgency in the way the coat had been shorn clear to the skin, and it was in the middle of this quarter of the fur, that there was missing now a mutilated limb. The animal hopped clumsily along and seemed indeed conscious of lost dignity. Many of the neighbors in the area had previously mocked the dog, while one concerned individual had gone so far as to stop the owners on their daily walk and comment on the absurdity of such a coiffure. The owners fought to retain their poise, but the effort was of little avail when they found them selves rudely confronted by an adult male in sandals. They looked down at their brogans and then slowly raised their egg-white faces. Not that the man slandering their show dog was of another race or denomination - though the owners scarcely practiced. But somehow some nerve in them had been pricked. The man made them aware of the way they had hidden their feet and hands and faces. They were scandalized by the sandaled man’s audacity. Practically barefoot. But rather than finding a reply for him, they simply walked on, though they took a path shorter than that which they were used to and they were home in a matter of minutes. But now their dog, beyond being a laughing stock, had also become an object of crass pity. They paid somewhat less attention to its grooming, and this for extra-veterinary reasons. Occasionally this same individual, still in his sandals with their open toes, would cross their path. Upon first seeing the poodle as an amputee, the sandaled man had walked up to the animal and got down on both knees. He took the muzzle into both his hands and let the animal run its tongue over his lips. The owners called the dog by name and fought to pull it back. But the newness of the injury and the probability of the animal’s pain prevented them from doing more than simply pulling the dog off balance. The other, the man in sandals, did not appear to wince at the suffering of the poodle in the same way as its owners did. Nor did he appear to share their shame. All of his attention was directed toward the animal. As for the owners, he never looked their way, as if it were always and everywhere understood that humans – and these were people were human - were incapable of speech. The husband and wife once again failed to bring their dog to heel. They stepped back when the sandaled man crept forward, on his hands and knees. He showed no care for his clothing, only the poodle. He reached slowly forward and touched its living wound. Finally, the sandaled man moved on. It seemed he had been able to communicate deep meanings to the poodle, that he had shared some gnomic wisdom with the animal and then resumed his daily stroll. Several neighbors in the area had witnessed this interaction, and though it was never discussed over the phone, somehow the information traveled along either side of the street.
In partnership with your deepest secrets.
Now, you can watch your dreams unfold on the screen.
Take a good look, that's you talking.
Anytime you need a reason, reach out and it's there.
Imagine your confidence when you step into the river.
If it's medical, we've got it.
When you have to believe yourself more than ever.
Who doesn't like armadillo.
What do you see through your windshield.
You'll love the way they think you feel.
You're always one stop ahead.
Give yourself the chance you've always wanted.
Who can tell? You never will.
Just smell that fresh-baked bread.
Tonight, tomorrow, forever.
Picture their surprise --
They won't be able to stop finding out they're real.
You call the meeting, you set the agenda, you work the trap.
Time will have no meaning for her.
You won't be able to stand still.
As pure and refreshing as sunlight and seafoam.
Get off for good!
It isn't a game until you catch the razor.
Friends, love, and starting over every day.
Never needs pulling or re-orienting.
How much of your paycheck would you like to keep?
It won't happen to you -- again.
Break that five-a-day habit and make money from home!
Just like a fairy godmother, but better.
Hello isn't just a word, it's a way of life.
If it isn't in your heart, we didn't put it in the box.
Here's one about cake, said the computer technology. The computer technology felt smithereened and lady buggish, conscientious objectorish. The man and the woman and the dislodged geography. The uncle and the gardener and we're all ready. Conscientious? Objected, thank you. The open for business sign on the floor, a tree growing in the forest of it. So here we have the lady bug, the cake and the sexy stiletto trot of the woman. The gardener said it. The sexy stiletto trot, smithereened on the floor. The gardener sweeping the open for business sign. And the woman, the man, on the floor, smithereened. There goes the lady bug, the computer technology, the lady bug, under the table and the woman reading it. The man shouts at the tree growing in the forest. The woman must look in her bedroom after dinner, cake. The computer technology in the corner, the uncle on the couch narrating it, tough. So the sexy stiletto trot collecting dust on the floor. The gardener polishes the shoes conscientiously, objectively. The man, the lady bug. The dislodged geography of the woman skips across the tiles. The uncle on the couch said it. Later, the gardener asked why. Tough.
THIS IS WHERE I WOULD LOOK AT YOU AND SHAKE MY HEAD SOME AND THEN NOT SAY ANYTHING
I read something on the train yesterday where the writer talked about “rubbing his penis against her waist” and I thought of you and felt happy and then sad.
I want to murder murder with you, mother would say with Angela Lansbury’s face, do you want to murder murder with me? Do you want to murder murder and murder murderers with me before they murder the murdered then murder the murder we committed? Mother would say to brother and me in our beds. Or, do you want to murder murder through murdering murderers before they murder the murdered then murder the murder we committed, then murder me, then murder the murder you committed, you murderers? Do you want me to murder you? Then there was a little little stillness. Mother would take off Angela Lansbury’s face and fold it on her lap for a while. I don’t want you to murder me and I don’t want to murder you, Mother would say to brother and me and our beds. Mother would laugh until she got it right with her own face. Mother and brother are now dead though not through murder. Me? I have Angela Lansbury's face.
Team Sad is sitting next to you on the train. You are nervous. You don't know what will happen. Team Sad has a question for you. Team Sad is looking right at you. Can't you see? Do you think this is some kind of joke? This isn't a joke. You should know that. You should ride your bike to the ocean & feed each poem to your sweetheart as if your sweetheart was a baby bird. Team Sad thinks your dear one would like that very very much.
I'm scrawling these white sheets whiter,
each word I add
is part of a gigantic subtraction, each step
each breath and possibility. The bookshelves gape
emptier the more books there are,
the closets the more clothes,
the jewelry and safe-deposit boxes,
the shipyards and the dead-weight tonnage.
Love, we're kissing huge holes in each other
and I am releasing my seed
over you like a shroud
and another I, Richard Milhouse Nixon, am releasing bombs
that do not save me, am bombing myself,
BOMBS LIKE A WHITE SHEET OVER MYSELF.
With each moment whoever is alive
is growing emptier and emptier,
isn't it clear
that the world needs antipower?
Not power or dreams of power
but antipower
that will sneak into the voids,
thrive there and people
us with humility and thankfulness and distrust
of a pyramidal blueprint of the world.
I've been making book length portraits of friends and colleagues by inserting them into books and having them printed in editions of two. I call this series Novel Protagonists. Mostly these are classic novels with the main characters replaced, but this has taken other forms as well.
Pig Photo
I was the pig photo because he asked. These ham shirts we’d been blessed in got stuck against our make, and the fridge kept coming open, ruining the Invocation dinner. We’d already lost the pudding and the yurt. On my black back I carried my ten brothers to the location outside Adam’s where we watched the sun unspool and make a halfie. More guests arrived, in seize. My father’s lover, the photographer. The invocation cloth was coming down. In sight of the officiates, I fed the gift pig his photo with my own arms, squealing, then I became the pig again, my best brother, another night. From in the pig I heard our landmine getting cold, its circuits spurting pearl juice in my ham. Still, the cauldrons would not stop screaming. In the ash I raised my hand.
Dog Photo
I was the dog photo for the second ceremony in which the women became cream. I had to hurry up and piddle so there’d be music. The floor rising toward its double: the house above our house above our house. My skin shirt had me on it, wearing another shirt with me on it wearing another shirt advertising assmeat, soaked clear through. Inside the shirt I was already holding the dog photo I would become when this began again, as it would have to. The dog inside the photo inside the shirt had become Adam. The furor of his cut glew in the divots around his “Love Me, Kill Me” smile: spittle fleck in rainbow peel over our Christmas, a ceiling we for some seconds could believe.
Crow Photo
In the crow photo I am fucking the crow from behind with a large white pillbox in the image of my mind. I did not want to fuck the crow; it called and called me over the silicon of my days endlessly and whitelessly until I could no longer feel my brunt or swim away. I came into the smallest room of the local arena of our fine town after Black Dinner, into a ballroom cordoned out of glass. Of the sand the glass was made of the mites will ride and listen while I fuck the crow into a man. Though I am not yet a man myself, I believe in the solemnity of cock, and when the crow spurts there are diamonds, and I cannot control my hands.
Dream Photo
You and me and the seven children my brothers plan to make from the same woman and the crow and pig and no one else, all here crowned in the smallest room where the next wedding will take place. The rates for pew and pastor in this day’s dimension are pretty high, but it will be a charming ceremony, full of ardor, and the aphid blood is free. Try the Anatomy Crackers, they are delicious, and will ferment in your heart of hearts a home. Unfortunately, this is not the actual ceremony, and this is not ours. Outside your body still is bone. In this picture of this picture, all my fur is upside-down.
Ram Photo
In the ram photo I am disappearing. There are all these other men. They have taken the ram quite far from me. You can see it in the grain. You can see the bulging in the men’s throats and in the cloth around their pants. They will destroy the ram. The ram was my dearest friend. He gave me anything I asked, despite his own silent, gleaming libido. Had he lived long enough to match you here, I would have took your name and made it his. I would have replaced your name with Cord of the White Brick, From Which All Future Gods Are Burst. You would have had to run through the streets when you were hungry with the termites spitting against any inch where you would walk, and you would grow erect in your clean places, the places of your childhood, and your new name would force you to make fuck: you would fuck weak and praying numbers, in the quiet manner of the whipped. You there at any hole in our fine stupid city of Worship photos. Within the hole of whole of what you forever are. Thank the ram for being removed. Thank me for disappearing inside the rump you left for dead.
Witch
3 cups white evening
3 centimeters shorn mind of the wild idiot by night
3 pulls from the cup of the betrothed father’s worming sample
3 cakes caught in a pill
3 udders sewn from brother leather, stuffed with the evidence of worship of a hole
3 throttles of Gug-Gar brand throatgrease
3 unshot pregnancy films by Anger
3 of my mother
3 of me
Child Photo
I knew the man who took this picture. His indigestion scores the lens. In that version of that year’s end, the balloons were handsome and all mine. I didn’t want to watch this any longer, but dad insisted, wishing for the stammer of the pop, which always got him shitty, my thirty other brothers begging from his testes all the hours of my life. Those aren’t my scratch marks, that’s the pigment. I am the one with the bowtie. The meatmasks in your image are as well my belongings. We ate them in ships we sailed toward upon a curd of titty meat. It was 1100 days before the ground grew back. You would have ate you, too. After the picture, the man, who is my father, confessed to having made love in his old age to a horse he turned to paste.
Horse Photo
Already it was ending and would begin again and end. The colors of the linings of the gifts made purple where I’d wished white over the white. The ascension was ascending. Each ceremony had to hide. Knots grown in along the hair around my new cerebrum ballgown. Already there I was. Already with the knives and all the bunting, calling the Dad back for more smell of my pregnancy nightlife. This horse, I didn’t even get to rub his neckpiece, though you can see that he is sore around the holes. The 13th staircase was a doozy getting jammed on. I was spurting all this milk. I knew the strain Dad put on his own surface soon would render somewhere else for our vacation. By the time we got to here, the box would be beat to cities and the cities sounded and from the sound there were mayonnaise buffets and shirts with [my name] and passion fits that gave us kids. I’d have more than I could take to bed. The heat of the horse’s hide against my vulva made me come more in my mind than he or any man had ever, and, and.
Cat Photo
At the top of the surface, our glands were mink. The prism of someone unfolded in my breast pocket and flew aboveground to kiss and kiss the sore inside that brother-murdered buzz. You could hear it for a thousand meters. Then the blooming rumpled up. Then the groomsmen had their dicks out and beat the mainframe codex from my mind. I knew I wanted to be wed to father. I knew I would stay white. Then the surface strobed in pickle. My cords. My legmeat rubble music. The hole was far. The prism went on and on unfolding, screaming its old glow.
Photo Photo
Dad’s legs of rubber. Dad’s reverse mind. His arms already weighed a house. In each house the animals were doing buttfuck, and I was in them, and beside them, though I no longer was the pig. My mom was with us also, and my ten brothers, and all the women Dad had rubbed. All my lives. Dad’s codex nostrils. Dad’s obliterating thumb. In the houses more were coming. They came out of the spooge. Dogs from pigs and pigs from kittens from the photos from the wash. More than the houses, it was swearwords. It was anything we’d been asked off of by god. The fuzz around Dad’s kidneys. The lash inside his pump. Look at my Dad’s eyes. See how they’re trying. Do it. See the child inside the dump. After this look, he would close them. Do it. The color would be glue. He would never see again, me or mom or any of his wives. This silence would be the all for which through every wedding night he’d prayed.
Grow Photo
In the last I was the Grow photo, in unseason, because that’s who stuck around. I could no longer get my nipples wet, or see the zippers, so I let him have it all. I let him eat the whoops out of my manger and my center and my mutt. The holes left would be Christ. Christ is risen. We’d walk around for hours, have a long lunch. I’d learn a language. It would snow dice. The guns would come down, in my rising and resizing, flame pushed under flame. Here light would mention anybody. Light would let me know.
mark wakes up. he was a cat before he went to sleep and now he is not. 'this is fucked up' he thinks. he is a human now so he says words like 'fuck'. when he was a cat he could almost say the word 'well'. almost was never well enough. mark shakes his head and walks to the bathroom. he falls several times. 'fuck two legs' he thinks. god is laughing. he laughs at humans. mark looks at himself in the mirror and hisses but it sounds like 'fuckkkkk'. cats are always saying 'fuck' god realizes and laughs a bit more. the laughing is unnerving it sounds like television. mark is discovering television for the first time.before mark saw the box as a place to lay that flashed black and white squares at him and emitted a low buzzing sound. this was pleasant. this was not correct. mark curls up awkwardly on a couch and watches television for the first time. somewhere deep in his new mind mark realizes he is fucked. he watches the news. mark wishes he could say 'well' now but he is too busy!!
. 'humans are always too busy' he thinks. he licks himself and watches more television. 'fuck'.
When I met you we were the shape of salt shakers. I married my dad and threw him in the ocean. I dragged him along the bottom as he filled with salt. I opened my legs and a grasshopper was there. Your first home was a house on stilts with butter dishes. I slept in the shape of what you told me about your house. I met you and we became pigeons under the rafters and held on hard. We became barnacle-shaped butter dishes. I met you and you put me on ice and I froze in the corner of your first bed. Spring was coming and the buds lined up for us to enter. I entered you slow as life. You moved into life with a sleeping porch and a butter dish in the corner and my dad moved. There was a feeling among us of a movie star with sideburns sitting and holding a knife. I could stab the walls of your house. I could bleed on your house and my dad would bleed. My grandfather taught me to swim and also how to bale hay. After the wedding we sat by the lake and he threw a small stone in it. I saw him throw a small stone in the lake. Let’s talk about the Fibonacci sequence. Let’s talk about the time you walked around your house and I waited in the park with the sun hitting my jaw. A few albino ants scurried through the grass and your neighbor was waiting to watch us walk into the house. I was not there, not walking, no grandfather, no knife. I was sleeping in your first bed with a butter dish, softening in the late spring. Walk up the hill to your old house and sleep and your neck will be a vein for the city and people will buy vintage ashtrays decorated in roses and the city will sleep in the butter-thick night. The city will be a chorus for you and your neck. Your neck sings and the porch and the subway rattling by like a knife. You want to get to my neck and I’m a subway station filled with knives. I can sit by you on the subway and smell your boots. My grandfather took the subway in from New Jersey most of his life. He didn’t believe in education. He didn’t know what pizza tasted like. I can smell your feet. You think I will lie down in the grass but you are someone who eats butter under the slats. There are three dead people in me.
Our God surpasses the Gypsy god; He is more avuncular and noble, though some of us begrudgingly admit their god is more assertive than our God, whom we haven’t seen or heard from since He rose from His own corpse and promised to rescue us from peril, and He has, though in secret, and if you could witness His wondrous methods you surely would fizzle in awe, so decent and grand is He, our Savior, who speaks in a voice that is no voice, not the song of any bird, not the snap of burning logs or crunch of shoes on sand.”
Listen. Boys be trained like go wait stay shop. They purse and cuss on cue, like
television, and step out through black window dress like doors. I’m a street animal then,
named, turning looking spitting carrying cantering, missing my throat through which
three words saying, My ponytail, my chest, my see-through blouse pass smooth, Baby.
Car horses, car bikes, named Baby. Siren, floral bell, like floral white that serves and will
window from another reflection. Beneath the church porch ivies clutch my blouse. I’m
inside. Take me. Wait there. I’m still inside. I hover. Leave. I hover through, I’m told, and
by.
Our story is broken only
when the tent preachers land,
giving grandma a use for that fancy fan,
making all the bad women
vomit up money. Otherwise, I spend
most days pulling ribbon from the kitten’s
belly. Sometimes the husband
takes up hobbies, like disassembling
radios, and scatters the wire-furred
pieces on every empty surface.
I hammered one of his stray dials
to the cupboard and now
I can imagine the creamed corn
talking to me without
looking crazy. I tuck away
the hope that this is just
an independent movie—
the bad teeth bleach clean,
spackled pockmarks peel.
Times like these, the idea
of children plays double-duty
as wish and shiver. They never work,
but people keep making them anyway,
like hand-held sewing machines
and herbal lozenges. Even the lawn,
sun struck mid-summer, wants to die
a little quicker but can find nowhere
high enough to jump from.
My sister is inside watching a movie and bleeding. I don’t bleed anymore. It’s not something I thought I’d miss.
She had not died. She had not moved either.
I took my jacket off.
She did not shift her body.
She did not speak to me.
I wet her fingers with slow kisses.
She did not stir.
Although she bathed herself every morning, and although her fingers were quite wet, she did not bathe herself now.
She did not drink the coffee I always made for her. She did not eat the muffin I slit and buttered for her.
She had not died and I would not leave her.
I wet one of my fingers and I brushed my teeth.
I smelled like sleep and I wet one of my fingers and I washed the sleep off of me.
I stood there bathing and watching her.
She did not thrash or kick the covers free.
I did not leave her.
She had not died and I did not want her to be awake and alone at the same time.
I dried myself off with dry paper towels. She did not seem to hear me.
I whistled bird sounds. She did not die.
I tried to fill my clothes out with myself. She did not open her eyes.
I turned her head to face the light coming in through the windows. She did not move or thrash.
She had not died.
I pulled the sleeves of the jacket. I tightened my belt a notch. I opened the blinds on the windows.
She did not die. She did not shift her body either.
I tucked my shirt into my pants. She did not stir or move or moan or say my name in the morning although the sun was there and through our blinds and along her hair and in her eyes although her eyes were closed.
My wife did not wake. My wife woke every morning.
Now this morning she did not know—
Now this morning it was no longer morning for my wife.
The sun stoked the fire in the air and we all sat around breathing it. David Bowie tongue-kissed the silence. I pictured his mouth opened wide, all tonsil and tongue.
She asked, "Is he saying, 'fame'?" and I said, "Yes."
He said, "You look like a completely different person with your fingernails painted."
I wondered about that, waved my hands around my face, asked, "What about now?"
He said, "Yes."
I did it again. "Now?"
"Yes."
She said, "I agree. Completely different person."
I thought about it some more. I held my arms out. Wrists bent. Hands pressed against the air. Ten red ovals.
I wanted to say, "But I ate a fried egg this morning," "But I wiped enough times until the brown was gone," "But I put on mascara and thought about how today I probably would feel less happy than the day before." I wanted to say, "Look at my dry elbows."
But I didn't.
I sat there in my skin while they looked at me. So new. Now blonde and well-kempt. Now speaking French. Now petting Great Danes.
They just nodded.
God is a crazy bandaged-up hermaphrodite(?) who disembowels Itself with a jackknife. After It dies in Its own filth, Mother Nature comes out of nowhere and gets Its corpse off. She later births this twitchy bald guy, whom She sends out into the desert to play with the bandit cannibals (Humanity). She later finds the kids picking on Jr. She tries to scold Humanity, but then Humanity burns & ravages Nature & Jr. Then they both get better & She drags Jr off by a umbilical cord.
I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I’m amazed we’re not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.
Then we got drunk on Grappa. I watched the other people flirting and yelling. I took off my headpiece. I became very hot in my sweatsuit, and was ready to go home with the chef when my boyfriend appeared.
“Guess what?” he said. “There’s another Jesus here. But he said I looked way better, so he bought me a beer.”
He smiled. He thought the chef was a fake chef, I could tell.
“Very good,” I said. I put a hand over my glass so the chef could not fill it again, and he, being a man of food and women, understood what the gesture was meant to convey.
We rode the train back to our friends’ apartment. Being from out-of-town, I liked watching things blur together—the lights, the buildings, my silhouette, my boyfriend’s—despite how different one thing is from everything else.
Come upon an elephant mouse what do you say? I am a lesser pyramid
Beside the Pyramid at Giza. I am a Colossus but not the one at Rhodes.
I wonder only mending the other wonderfuls to make myself er.
I stop all lights from not lighting. Some masochists treat the rest of us
According to a bad golden rule. Some sadists keep it to themselves.
My sympathy my empathy my sympathetic empathy is is proximate.
Like on my lap. Like with crazed claws digging into my shoulders
Under a big X over a little. People can be nice and people can be horrible.
Which people do you mean? As a tubular matrix I can be silly.
It depends on how many dimensions in which this occurs.
Twelve in a single sitting— did that really happen? I watched a movie
That explained multiple infinities of differing lengths and sizes.
Afterwards the author did something to himself. I can be this idiotic too
I am the Nebuchadnezzar of whom you speak. In my palace I hung
A bush that bloomed in the winter. I called it Christmas Cactus
But then I saw a real cactus in the Tucson Range near Tucson, AZ.
It is easy to do so. You take a left on Speedway Boulevard and drive
Until it turns into Gates Pass Road. But addressing the saguaro
Is not the same as telling everyone about the nature of the future.
It’s not the voice coming out of your forehead into the microphone
To tell which people they are the good people. To crack a whip
That leaves no mark on this loving body. Impossible now to say
What you wanted to say once forehead into microphone is bumped.
Once whip at hungry lion has been cracked. For at that exact instant
When the rope goes taut, it is traveling faster than the speed of sound.
I Jaw Up to the Ladies like Gregory Peck
I Am the Middle of a Water-rights Feud
I Am the Next Theme Come True
I Am Not an Invention
I Am Elope Imagination
I Am from Asia through Midair
I Am the Etcetera Behavior of Language
I Am a Natural Interim
I, I Am a Natural Wonder
I Am the Heavenly Gift of Honey from Midair
I Am All These Tight Titles
I Am White and Thorough
I Am a Facial Fracture
I Am a Managed Hurdle
I Am Fed New through Jersey
I Am a Miniature Finish
I’m moving to the cloud on December 1st.
So I can spot the clear cell on a cloudy day.
I let the whale’s eye out of the jar.
We can’t be here anymore.
Sometimes enough of what happens
is news folding in on itself under
the northern hemisphere. The placement of my ladder
is the northern most of the ladder. I climb my glasses
to polish them. I climb my daughter to hold her
steady. She keeps her blond wig from blowing
away. Unleash the whale, pull the whale
teeth out of your mouth like fog, like a new
kind of cloud we can live on.
1. Peeled Back
Months and days curl at their ends into nights. Sharks fester ‘round the raft and salt-wounds ripple over skin of Bebe Faye and Platt. Sea algae surround a boat more a forest until a day where distant ships spot wanderers and sail forward in rescue. When asked if the shipmates needed help Bebe Faye and Platt were confused. They looked into the eyes of the fearful on the bigger ship and asked each other who they thought they were? Surely they could not see why such a ship would be in need of so much assistance. Overhead gulls and eagles fly and Bebe Faye knows this flight signals land. For this reason she steers the boat back to sea and Platt, orchard-busy, never cares enough to take issue, nor does he want to know.
2. Blush
Full trees yield a battlefield of apples the birds take to. Into the trees Bebe Faye climbs with her string to tie to the ends of the birds. To snare them, she says, to set a trap. She ties to their feet twine and pulls them their fall from the tree to her cooking pot.
-Dinner tonight, she says to Platt, who kneels before a Senshu, will be apple over gull.
Platt thinks of the eye he will obtain when the land finds them. He thinks of the land that will find them. He thinks of how far the land is and who steers the land away. He looks at Bebe Faye with such hungry eyes she tell him to quiet his look.
-It is dangerous what you are thinking. Be happy, Platt, that you even have a core to peel. -I’d rather we were on Beatrice Looking Forward.
With open palm to cheek Bebe Faye slaps Platt into deep red. He takes by her wrists her arms and grips. They stand locked until a single shark circles and Bebe Faye, too excited to remember her predicament, whispers to Platt her wishes.
He slides from her pocket her knife to slash shark flesh. Together they pull the fish aboard and gut it.
-Forgive me, Faysie Bebe Faye opens her palm for the knife.
3. Lost At Sea
With miles of blue around Platt fosters an insatiable desire. This desire he cannot name nor project onto the sea, so he jumps in. Bebe Faye allows him immersion. When he returns he shouts -Emptiness! into a trail of smoke lifting from Bebe Faye's desalinated water. On a mound she sits Indian-style, silent until Platt salts his apple-blistered hands. -Just tryin' forget yourself awhile. What's an orchard for?
4. Exposition
On the water sun glistens wave crests alight a glow of night before storm. Fish go under a deeper current and leave shallow waters for gulls to suffer starvation. A distant cliff proves another land to steer away from, bird as warning of close calls. Bebe Faye climbs algae trees to see better the coming rain, the sun a gloomy red to fall into the ocean. Standing below, Platt prepares string to kill bird, abandons fishing for fowl. His orchards sway with the winds Bebe Faye feels heavy her back, her body rested in the limbs. When she thinks of the land she will not steer herself from she thinks in shades of green and brown. All the blues of the sky swarm the ocean to storm her mind before the rains. At night she cannot tell between dreams and sight. Which reality leads back to sea?
you are walking past
a cemetery, and you
think, "oh yeah, that's right."
A List of What I'll Write About, Compiled Earlier This Morning.•Pool shadows = whales.
•Blackberry bushes scratch your thighs.
•I am an Indian. Why? (Let’s ask grandma.)
•Soon you’ll ask me to play and I’ll be the one saying I’m too busy.
•The procession of uniformed catholic children walking to church in B.H. during lent.
•Spencer’s photo in Sister Leonella’s office: was it really there?
•Mom’s shrink was dying in Hawaii.
•Pushed off the bench.
•Pneumonia/skin and bones/lips chapped raw. Mom and Louise: “You look so pretty.”
•The meteor shower.
•Mountain man rendezvous.
•“I made that fox pelt quill.” – Mom.
•Muddy Waters and Janis Joplin in Markleeville.
•Mom meets the devil, says no to hell.
•Mom’s lists/Mom’s summary of Mexican history.
•Almost dying in the seaplane on our way to see some lepers.
•Good white wine looks like clear pee.
•The turkey photo: Amy.
•Disney cookbook – I don’t remember making snowballs, but she says we did.
•Pan dulce and Nescafe = Old Mexican ladies with perms and bruises.
•Taco parties.
•The way Lupe chops an onion.
•Spencer stole the koi; I named him Lou.
•Terri on the tennis court.
•Evolution according to Lupe.
•Who set Dad’s tapes on fire? (Mom speculation, like “I think he murdered his wife”?)
•Little Mom behind the barn.
•The bees. Charlie. Barn door raft. Allergic and anorexic and shirtless.
•“I don’t know; I think the world is full of evil now.” – Mom at the B&B.
•Mom’s room/house. Recycled wood gives kids splinters.
•Dad’s room/house. Cold.
•Filling up the bathtub for blue gale.
•“Why can’t you tell me your mantra?”
•Haunted hotel rooms.
•The glass playhouse.
•Mom becomes a catholic.
•Cherokee – oranges, butterflies, roses, swimming, chickens + something else.
•“Remember when you were on a plane that was hijacked?” “No.”
•“They’ll record your breathing before they kill you and then play it through the intercom.”
•“We imitate each other’s faces.” “That’s pretty primitive.”
•Quiqua’s room. Hologram Jesus.
•The red-light in the bathroom.
•Old dogs with bad hips walk like models.
•Pine nuts and rosehips. Baskets.
•Saltwater lake + mocha milkshake = bleeding exema.
•June lake has no bottom.
1.
A camera catches an act of theft. A hand
slides into a purse. A purse is held under
a slot machine. Someone wants a machine
to protect commercial interests. Someone
lies frozen on the couch during a commercial.
Frozen hope leads to lapsed expectations.
Lapsed logic gets lost in a file. A lost voice
won’t return. The senator is screaming
about the return of the steam engine.
The street steams: we need antennae to find
our hotel. Our ancient antennae are useless.
We just stare at each other.
2. For details on corporate corruption we milk the book. For us, books are bricks, though some argue flames or wings. Under the wing of a 747 our house looks tiny. This house is full of anger over the point -count of antlers. The senator points to the birth rate as a sign of his decline. We aren’t convinced. Convinced our obsolete machines are suicidal, his followers push typewriters from bridges. The bridge buckles as an acrobat balances on a wire above an earthquake. During the ground-breaking, the senator kisses a constituent’s neck. We aren’t having fun.
The pebbles grew into stones, the stones into great rocks. The rocks reared up into mountains, which cast their shadows over the land - their cold shadows. Darkness fell on the fields & the town & on the woman pinning sheets onto the line, her mouth full of clothespins & her breasts taut & lifted against her blouse. When her husband looked out the window & saw her, desire rose up in him; & when she came into the house, he laid her down on the unmade bed & covered her body with his own just as the first boulders broke loose from the mountains & the avalanches began.
*
He brought a door with him & placed it against the hilllside. Then he went in & closed it. What happened to him next is not known, because the door was for him alone. Later when they heard him scream, there was nothing anyone could do.
*
There, where the grass was allowed to grow without let or hindrance, children liked to hide from those who might call them home to their lessons. This evening when their mothers went into the towering grass to bring home the fugitives, they found entrances to what appeared to be underground tunnels. Putting their ears to them, they could hear a distant sound like the gnashing of teeth.
i want to pour a carton of orange juice onto my face and body
when i am lying on my bed, in the morning
and I want it to be Sunday and I want to go back to sleep
and when I fall back asleep I want the orange juice to quickly evaporate
and take me with it
1. Eternity
God is like a beast; He does not know time. To know time is man’s alone, it is a weight only the seed of Adam may feel.
3. The Year
The first of their strange children that is born in a year is named and the year is given this same name. It is believed that the child and the year are one,
4. A Month
so each month there is a celebration and a new honor is given to her. Even the old women come to her on their knees and whisper requests. But when the last month comes, and winter begins to set on them, they stone the child, ending the year. Then prepare for the next.
5. A Season
The seasons are another of the Egyptian’s tricks. Their tax collectors with their knotted ropes sectioned off the movements of the great bodies. Like you might separate horses or an enemy’s spears. Still, the wind drags its teeth over the five nations and the Nile satisfies its hunger when it pleases.
7. The Soul
It is from heat that life comes. A lifeless body sealed from predators, but still exposed to the sun, will produce life, flawed and deformed maggots, but life. Our lips grow cold when we are close to death.
In the South there is a species of birds without mouths, which live only on the heat of the sun. At night these birds are so still that they are often thought to be dead, but the heat from even a small fire is enough to make them stir and to blink their eyes, although it is not enough to allow them to fly.
I started this one business that installed padlocks in clouds.
We sent our technicians up in airplanes with their cheeks puffed out. We sent them up wearing protective gear & carrying sawzalls in each hand like cowboys in gasmasks. We sent our technicians to the academy of clouds & they drank from the world by means of sawdust & dew. We sent our technicians into the desert of stifled laughter, to fields of dust. We sent them to the steel-roped tops of bridges & asked them to close their eyes & imagine cracked mirrors. When they returned home, they stayed up all night watching the blank screens of their loved ones’ sleeping faces.
Our offices are wooden barracks of raw walls. We have invested heavily in the traditions of princes. We have no interest in landscape.
Our clients approach us with their palms turned out & with a certain grit to their step. They fill out the initial forms of age, weight & death. They tell us about all the loved ones whose faces have become white tablecloths. They tell us about the knives they have buried in the sand. They tell us the secret names of all the trains that whistle by night. They sketch loosely imagined drawings of the clouds that need to be locked.
The technicians look over the drawings as the airplanes warm up & they pick the splinters from the soles of their feet & they hate the chaos & they feed themselves with their own lost structures of use.
I started this business because I grew tired of the feeling of someone calling & me not answering. I started this business because I grew tired of the sound that I heard when I answered the phone, the sound of breathing into a metal water pitcher. I started this business because everyone walks away.
There is too much behind us. There is so much behind us that the world is lost in every moment that you move through it.
I have no memories of being an adult. Like an ache, I have never stopped moving. When I am happy I feel like I never have to move.
Our technicians are the only ones who know how to lock a cloud. Our technicians are young & wild, with large families with lots of children with lots of names. Our technicians must have pitch black eyes. Our technicians must have sharp white teeth.
To lock a cloud one must know the heart of the cloud, just as one must know how much blood is in a baby. To lock a cloud one must watch the black spot in the middle of their eyesight all day until they come to the canyon. A locked cloud is like a child who only knows his name. A locked cloud blinks & blinks & blinks & blinks.
Our technicians do not lock the clouds; they only install the locks into the clouds. Fifty thousand clouds make up a sky & with our product one can maintain their clouds.
One cannot brand a cloud. One cannot teach a cloud anything more difficult than to cry. It is so cold in the sky that one’s tears turn into glass. The protective gear protects our technicians from all the shattering tears.
What if the spiritual awakening coveted by so many religious seekers is in fact the ultimate doom? What if the object of religious longing might prove to be the very heart of horror? Could salvation, liberation, enlightenment then be achieved only by identifying with that apotheosis of metaphysical loathing?
The opening scene witnesses a young woman (“the virgin”) using rusty scissors to cut through her hymen. Then a bird flies into her window and dies. The rest of the story imagines what between these characters has led up to this moment, and so we are thrust into the charming and uncanny human-bird society that constitutes the world of the novella, in which Walker Geon, bird detective, has been hired by a young woman named Gwen to investigate the murder of six birds.
Mostly the murder mystery doesn’t matter; that is, it doesn’t matter who killed the birds, but it does matter why, and Walker’s investigation functions as an uneasy mask which eventually disintegrates to make visible a horrifying and perversely humorous parable of sexual assault out of which Walker emerges Gwen’s protector.
My sister did her best to keep me away from the toolshed and the awful scene within its warped walls. She feverishly nailed shut the front door, spray painted the musty windows, tried to distract me with promises of honey for my oatmeal, but she soon had to tend to Mother, who awoke suddenly, jerking with pain, shouting hoarsely and rending the bedsheets between her cracked teeth. As my sister dealt with the seizure, I snuck into the backyard, pried away the nails in the doorframe of the toolshed, and then slipped inside to investigate.
I stood in the weak light and saw that Father had completely dismantled himself overnight, had stored his bits and parts around the toolshed, as if he meant for us to use him later on, perhaps to build some heartstopping machinery: his torso, he severed cleanly in half and hung by the door; across the wall, one muddy foot and shinbone twirled from a length of twine; between them, the shiny knob of his shoulder and its rigid arm dangled from a crooked hook.
Here I stood the closest I had ever been to Father. I had always thought of him as a man swollen with gore, a man who carried about more than his fair share of internal organs, a giant of a man held together with sinews and uncorrupted bone. But here, in the tight confines of the toolshed, he looked liked a different man, a man broken apart by forces beyond his control, a cold man, a dust-filled man, a man of makeshift splints and baling wire, all of that ancient, mythic mess that goes into the creation of a man, a man not of this time, a man existing before the men of this reckless era.
I looked at the surface of his skin, the suncrazed, ridged landscape of it, with its hairs and moles and discolored scars. I looked at the hands, at the fingers twisting off of the palms. And I reached up and broke one off, put it in my pocket to celebrate the only way he had ever loved me: the beckoning finger, the shaking finger, the magic finger, the pointing finger, the goose finger, the trigger finger, the walking finger, the puppet finger, the tickle finger, the double-jointed finger, the lightswitch finger, the finger pressed to the soft pulp of my trembling lips.
I SAW YOU at the astronaut fair and your parted hair was everywhere. Your beautiful hair is a mixture of your father’s and your mother’s hair. I used to sing about my crops but I got a lot of flack. Your twins are devoted anusless creatures with little regard for the future of aviation. Legs are photographed shit. Our bodies mingle together like foamy soup. I have unfastened my pants so I may sit more comfortable after eating a large meal. Your once tight groomed hair in recent months has been flowing like high school promises. I have a long nose but that’s just how it goes. I shot my arrow at your back but I guess you already knew that. In the rude unison of pawn shops in the hot concrete of broken skin. The rain creeps in like an agent of darkness its hands are muscular and covered in mucus. I beat your brain with my fingers outstretched like pythons. I feel you are afraid of your own hands that’s okay I eat fish with both hands. I know your dog is afraid of me I don’t have to be a scientist to understand the sense of dread I impose on your dog. Leaving you would set my heart ablaze. Our stormy reunion left me aching deep within my soul. I aim to make you feel an all encompassing pleasure. My rhythmic strokes are that of a seasoned lover. The warm shower fills my ambivalence with the wings of sped up pig copulation.
YOU CAN GET less than eight hours of sleep or more than eight hours of sleep or eight hours of sleep. You can die alone or die addicted or go out to the bar tonight. You can get diabetes or let fame make you boring or shoot hoops shirtless. You can smile more or smile less or appear to be self-monitoring enough already. You can tap on a wall or buy something that beeps or store your paintings on the hallway floor. You can look up words you don’t know or use context clues or you can read a book tonight. You can say a prayer or sing a prayer or eat while it’s hot. You can pay one dollar for one donut or four dollars for six donuts or you can approach the dinner table with a clean conscience. You can eat wax or be a hero or eat glue. You can use me or define me or ask me for my place of origin. You can arrive early or arrive rested or you can think of yourself more as a searcher. You can’t or you won’t, or in a more formal setting, you cannot or will not. You can put down the dog or take her for a walk or finally name her. You can replace the light bulb or live rustic or you can move away forever. You can do a dance or wait to get thrown out or you can put your pants back on. You can, shuck, husk, or befriend. You can shell, scale, or frown over. You can bore, marry, or kill. You can enjoy entertainments, enjoy a mercurial rise, or you can never stop putting bunny ears on loved ones in photos. You’re with us or you’re against us or you made other plans but wish us the best. Rap music is too something or not something enough, which is why some people feel a way about it. I laid out a tarp in the field behind my house and sat in the center, waiting for what.
I’LL CHECK the police report in the morning from Mexico. I’ll slip across the border at Reynosa. I’ll buy a cheap rusted car and a pistol and drive south. I’ll get a room in the mountains. I’ll walk through the pines and kick the fallen needles. I’ll be free. I’ll think about the fire and my finger prints and the neighbors and the severed corpses in the bathtub with blood running the drain. Was it sloppy? Was I sloppy? The mountains will not hold me long with my money. That is the place money goes to burn. I’ll jump a bus to the coast at Tampico. I’ll rent a palapa and lay in a hammock in the shade. I’ll drink quarts of Corona with slices of lime. In the evenings the woman at the inn will slaughter a chicken and roast it over an open flame. The skin will crack and pop as the coals burn bright red below. When the bird is cooked she’ll wrap it in foil. I’ll buy half of the chicken. She’ll bring me a plate of onions, cilantro and lime. She’ll bring me corn tortillas and grilled Serrano peppers. I’ll eat giant mouthfuls, sucking down beer and salty air between bites. I’ll sleep with the inn keeper’s daughter. She’ll be fourteen, but her body will be mature. She’ll smell like cinnamon toasting in a cast-iron pan. My hammock will sway with our sex. I will not stay in Tampico. The beach is corrosive. I’ll take another bus to Oaxaca City. I’ll walk the streets eating chipulenes. Fried grasshoppers with chili and lime. I’ll look at the artwork. Great art in Oaxaca. I’ll get a room at a good hotel. I’ll unpack my luggage into drawers. I’ll look at her dress. Why did I keep it? Will I put it on? I’ll wait for dusk. I’ll shave my face, chest and legs. I’ll enter the street in her dress. I’ll call myself by her name. I’ll walk slow by the men. I’ll hold them in my eyes. They will look at me in turn. They will not know of the bodies. Of the blood. The fire. The drain. If I’m lucky they will take the bait. They will talk to me in their language, their lips moving calm beneath mustaches in the dusk. They will buy me sweet drinks on a patio bar. They will ignore my throat, which will give me away. I will hold my face in my hand. I’ll smile when they tell jokes. Their language so floral. They will take me in horse buggies to the barrios which ache with age. They will take me to their empty homes. They will show me their guitars and sing boleros softly. When the time is right I will take what I came for. I won’t feel sorry for the sad faces trembling. They should have spotted. They should have sensed how I could learn them.
You are driving and trying to find a place to stop. You consider something called The Sea Power Museum, but when you pull in to the gravel driveway, it is empty, and there is a house with a shirtless man on a porch. There are three hound dogs on the porch, too, and as one they raise their heads to look at you. The cheeks on one of the dogs flap. You are listening to the radio, not feeling too good myself, but interpret this cheek-flapping as a bark. It happens again, this cheek-flapping, but they are the cheeks of a second dog. And then it happens to the third. The dogs do not get up, and their tails don’t wag. They just look at your car, and flap their cheeks at you.
The shirtless man is in a rocking chair, rocking toward you and away from you. His dogs flap their cheeks, and he rocks, and the whole thing is far too Deliverance, like your life has ended in reality, and gone off to a tangential world of movie clichés.
This is sometimes how you view life: you are, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, second after second, given choices to make, and you make them, and off you go. And also, you don’t make choices, but those possible paths move off on their own ways, anyway.
In some of those possibilities, life becomes a movie, or it turns out it’s all a book that lives with its own rules, its own relationship to, say, Newtonian physics. It’s a cartoon and you might get hit on the head by a falling anvil.
In Montana, Missoula, he used his deputy’s position to distance himself from men. In his office and patrol car he was a tyrant about silence, his conversation blunt, short, and dead-ended. Well respected though access to him was rare. Just a few years ago Montana, enormous and sparsely populated, its earth and humbling, humorless mountains stretched by horizons into beauty almost devastating to a man, was a force that drew mute isolators, some of them dangerous and armed. And free. You could drive ninety and salute an oncoming highway patrolman with a beer in your hand.
How do we read a book as an object in a network, in a post-book, post-reading, meta-data environment? Seven Controlled Vocabularies models a generic book, a kind of field guide to the arts, wherein distinctions between various aesthetic disciplines are relaxed or dissolved and where avant-garde notions of difficulty are replaced with more relaxing and ambient formats such as yoga, disco, and meditation. Each of the book’s seven sections is devoted to a particular art form—film, photography, painting, the novel, architecture, music, and theory—and includes both text and found photographs as it explores the idea of what it means to be a book in an era when reading is disappearing into a diverse array of cultural products, media formats, and aesthetic practices. Seven Controlled Vocabularies will be available in a variety of print and electronic book delivery systems and formats.
show out of the box each too difficult
to beckon gray, this lightbulb
off begins to spark and becomes president
& in the glow gives birth to the little
number keypad, the slash you scheduled you
cruise to the top of the clever mountain
only available in song sing to me sing to me
I'll give you a quarter it's lucky touched by
druids and fairies and chimneysweeps
all addressing the fine symphony of
your waistcoat, the electric readout
you generate to tell the electricity
you hate it and are
V-Thing—Isn’t that crazy? A little bit of white, a bit of an edge,
Being touched is refreshing when you don’t impress secondary skin.
Where I was crying, at war through moves, teeth fixed, ten years,
“My lucky regimen is effortless,” says the doctor we hired.
Wow! Since then, not overly glam, six-minute curling kind of color,
An iron time back in, secret weapon cheerleader! Voluptuous
Impurities aren’t always compatible! Bravo pours boobs,
A cannon, namesake perfume! Omigod, tiny! A little junk,
A little carrot juice, lots of water mellows into earthy cream.
Blossoming off the wall is not so great. Spilling happened
To me last week, touching up the game, shrugs, has a fan club
With a large mirror, always looking at the flaws. It must
Have been a battery, take that, without defined eyes, off.
Zoom-in love, no re-touching, chocolaty, messed-up heavens!
Hot is sort of over! Let’s cut some bangs! A pushy complex,
Boxes and buns, she’s funny, torn-up pretty. Thanks!
Showered, injected, and clean, I’m like a piece of cherry pie:
I can’t figure out my sacrifice, what’s distributed well!
Away with melting? That’s not vanity!
Bring back the spiked hat, razor! A glow,
Whiten them, come quickly the last few months
All right? Anatomy’s picked out already—
The same pair of jeans, bobbing for apples
In a volcano. Charcoal circles smudge
The switch—as soft as a nightmare—
The scientific cut—champions of tragedy—
The 11th red paisley. Look: The old hulk
Can still draw a gasp. Plenty prom,
The same formulaic rain. Whatever
Oil’s in the cabinet, it’s kind of like a runway.
Cheesy but true, I love her butt!
Her butt, her butt, her sleepy butt!
Thirty feet mid-tempo, with diamond,
He’s never funky shut into the closet.
A surgeon toy, or bright, painting,
Very well, trumps the starched white shirt.
I wake up screaming.
I scream scratching the dog’s belly in bed,
scream seeing the third pillow has fallen to the dusty floor.
I scream during breakfast, wet bananas on lips.
Shaving, I scream. I scream cleaning up the bloody mess.
Scream when the neighbors pound, when the police
come knocking.
I scream on the walk to work, yard ladies gyrate
gardening shorts,
Arabbers hurl eggplant torpedos at me, their horses stomp, dogs bark.
I scream the news grotesque,
football game shooting in Anchorage,
Middle East imploding.
I scream under Manhattan like undigested pork.
The previous day, screaming, I crossed
a small lake in the countryside on a rowboat.
Screaming, I ate a picnic lunch, ants
forming a moustache above my screamhole.
I scream quietly during a polo-shirted
golf match, a drink umbrella catching
on my sore uvula.
My airport
turns on the TV
and falls asleep
in the easy chair.
My bookstore
screws a silencer
onto a pistol.
My insane asylum
plays solitaire
all night long.
The wind whispers to a river,
"Dear Child,
you don't know loneliness yet."
We buy our wedding rings
in a pawnshop.
The past will be redeemed
by the love to come.
You have bluffs
in your soul
where I can stand
and see a hundred miles of you.
I have a hundred years of sorrow
in my eyes.
O Holy Heart,
you will be my joy
on the day the world ends.
And if they cut part of my face off, this is what I’ll tell them: I’ll tell them it was an old war injury, war being football, injury being arbitrary, as no one second-guesses injuries in battle. I’ll tell them about the fractions and the fractures and the fractals that came pouring out, jagged edges found on black and white contrasted X-Rays, mouths looking like poorly split open fish, peaks and valleys, spikes and gaps. I’ll tell you that it was a long time coming, this fusion of myself and metal, that maybe after I degauss I can degauss monitors, causing Technicolor ripples and warping, before snapping back like a skeleton puppet with noodle tubes for skin and elastic string for bones. Or maybe I’ll tell you that it was a construction injury, that a metal beam, no, scaffolding, no air-conditioning duct, no sheet-metal, yes, sheet-metal jumped up from the ground and bit me, creating the smoothest and cleanest cut you ever did see. I got lucky, I’ll say. Or fate has precision, I’ll say. Or I’ll change the subject to how you hate the idea of sharing tactile diaries, that the world is such a strange place with all of this information floating around and no place to put it. Dangerous, you’ll say, and I’ll say it is no more dangerous than helping fathers with construction three days before New Years. I tell myself this is the way of the future.
We walked our final street like mathematicians writing poetry with our bare bodies. This was after the coriander and dulse, the paprika and alum, even the garam masala. Your long black jacket that complemented your hair and the night. This was after calculating the figures we were. Your shoes left marks everywhere but in racquetball courts. The stitches in our clothing and flesh. Your parents said you asked for a ram instead of a pony. The chivalry I feigned and the bones I broke. I did not purposefully hide the flyer about the free hayrides. My subconscious purposefully hid the flyer because it hides all flyers and not because it has anything against riding in free hay. We searched for horseshit in the road. I managed to say nothing in thirty-three syllables. You responded with a gamut of words I’d never heard you use before, including gamut. We inserted interjections. We swallowed insertions. I claimed all of your sentences had three meanings. You claimed you weren’t speaking in sentences. The long black night complemented your jacket and your hair. I memorized the percentage of cotton in each of your shirts. We rode our final train like poets writing equations with our bare feet. Where had all the horseshit gone? I wore shirts made from the percentage of cotton your shirts lacked. The bones I feigned and the chivalry I broke. You kept adding water to dilute the flavor. We figured everything had a solution. We would have made amazing locals. Congratulations would be in order. Everything would be in order. Everybody would say congratulations. We would never learn the word interminable. You taught me how to pronounce and spell interminable. I dog-eared the page. I ate the page. I refused to acknowledge the existence of the page I dog-eared and ate. I played more racquetball. I will only ever play racquetball.
Jack "Big Guy" Fitch is trying to crack his teeth. He swishes a mouthful of ice water, then straightaway throws back slugs of hot coffee.
"Like in Antarctica," he says, where, if you believe what Big Guy tells you, the people are forever cracking their teeth when they come in from the cold and gulp their coffee down.
I believe what Big Guy tells you. I’m his partner in crime, so I’m chewing on the shaved ice, too. I mean, someone that good-looking tells you what to do, you pretty much do what he says.
Big Guy (he is so damn big!) can make you do anything. He made us become blood brothers—brothers, even though I am a girl—back when we were clumsy little dopes playing with jacks. He got a sewing needle and was going to stick our fingers, until I chickened out. I pointed to the sore on his elbow and the abrasions on my knee, and in fact, what we became was scab brothers.
But this business with the teeth—I say Big Guy is asking for it. He hasn’t done something like this since the seventh grade when he ate a cigarette for a dollar. Now when he brushes his teeth at night, he says he treats the gums like the cuticle of a nail. He says he pushes them back with the hard bristles of the brush, laying the enamel clear.
This is a new Big Guy, a bafflement to us all. The old one trimmed the perforated margins from sheets of stamps. He kept a chart posted beside his bed that showed how his water intake varied from day to day. The old Big Guy ate sandwiches with a knife and fork. He wore short-sleeved shirts!
That was before his mother died. She died eight days ago. She did it herself. Big Guy showed me the rope burns in the beam of the ceiling. He said, "Any place I hang myself is home." In the movie version, that is where his father would have slapped him.
But of course his father did not—didn’t slap him, didn’t even hear him. Although Big Guy’s father has probably heard what Big Guy says about the Cubs. It’s the funniest thing he can imagine; it’s what he doesn’t have to imagine, because his father really said it when he had to tell his son what the boy’s mother had done.
Should we speak, then, of the future? This might appear a more avant-garde undertaking. Yet we reject it, too, even more vehemently. Why? Because the concepts, presumptions, and ideologies embedded in this overstuffed and lazy meme—“The Future”—are in need of an urgent and vigorous demolition. Such a demolition is the task this Declaration sets itself. Its contents should, like all INS propaganda, be repeated, modified, distorted, and disseminated as the reader sees fit.
1. The Future, culturally speaking, begins with a car crash. Or rather, an account of one: a disaster always already mediated, archived, and replayed. “We had stayed up all night, my friends and I,” shouts Marinetti from the front page of Le Figaro in February 1909. In a few paragraphs he’ll launch into a lyrical eulogy of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons, of factories, trains, steamers, and aeroplane propellers cheering like enthusiastic crowds as they carry us forward; he’ll incite us to destroy the museums, libraries, and academies, and inform us that time and space died yesterday. But first, the car crash has to be narrated. After their frenzied nocturnal pacing and arguing and their manic and purposeful “scribbling,” the Futurists (as yet unnamed or unannounced: the future-Futurists) hear famished automobiles beckon from outside their windows, and throw themselves into the driving seats. Curling watchdogs under the burning tires of his, facing down death at every turn, Marinetti hurtles toward two cyclists wobbling in the road “like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments”—that is, embodying the old cultural order and its foibles (reason, logic). Pulling up short, he veers, upturned, into a ditch, whose industrial sludge he laps up lovingly, since “it reminded me of the breast of my Sudanese nurse.”
2. To unpick the complexities of Marinetti’s document would take more space than we have here—indeed, it could take a lifetime. But let’s flag up three things: Firstly, that at the break of the “very first dawn,” the moment of rupture with all pasts, lies an almost Proustian moment of nostalgia. Beyond its racial and colonial overtones, the maid’s remembered breast serves as a sticky, black madeleine. Secondly (and following the Proust-line), that the “event” of Futurism, of futurity, is so tied up with its own writing as to form a matryoshka doll of almost infinite regress: the text narrates the night during which the text was written, both containing and interrupting one another. Thirdly (and following the line of interruption), that the roaring surge toward the future is arrested no sooner than it begins: Tomorrow’s avant-garde derails itself, and celebrates this derailment in the moment it announces itself, as though the derailment formed part of its raison d’être. The crash dramatizes the larger ontological impossibility of Marinetti’s claim: if time and space died yesterday, then where and what is the tomorrow into which we should be moving? The straight path, the highway leading to the future, disappears; what remains is an imploded mulch of pasts and presents, a quite literal entrenchment; even more literally, what remains, precedes, and entirely encloses the event (while simultaneously being partially enclosed by it) is a document, a text—the real black liquid in which Marinetti’s impetus embeds itself, ultimately, is ink—a text that bears within it a catastrophe.
3. Listen: the world is a sign of restless visibility, greater than six miles.
4. It is this organization’s strong contention that our current age—call it “modernity,” “late capitalism,” or the seventh phase of pre-thetan consciousness, according to your disposition—has to be understood through the lens of catastrophe. This is both necessary and impossible: how could we stand outside or beyond the catastrophe? Conversely, it is equally impossible to penetrate its core, experience it fully, merge with it. To phrase it in temporal terms: the time of the catastrophe is not easily graspable. As Blanchot so eloquently puts it in The Writing of the Disaster: “We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.”
5. The INS rejects the Enlightenment’s version of time: of time as progress, a line growing stronger and clearer as it runs from past to future. This version is tied into a narrative of transcendence: in the Hegelian system, of Aufhebung, in which thought and matter ascend to the realm of spirit as the projects of philosophy and art perfect themselves. Against this totalizing (we would say, totalitarian) idealist vision, we pit counter-Hegelians like Georges Bataille, who inverts this upward movement, miring spirit in the trough of base materialism. Or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who, hearing the moronic poet Russel claim that “art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences,” pictures Platonists crawling through Blake’s buttocks to eternity, and silently retorts: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”
6. To phrase it in more directly political terms: the INS rejects the idea of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of dominant socioeconomic narratives of progress. As our Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley has recently argued, the neoliberal versions of capitalism and democracy present themselves as an inevitability, a destiny to whom the future belongs. We resist this ideology of the future, in the name of the sheer radical potentiality of the past, and of the way the past can shape the creative impulses and imaginative landscape of the present. The future of thinking is its past, a thinking which turns its back on the future.
7. As Walter Benjamin correctly notes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” contemplating Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus—a floating figure who stares intently at something he’s moving away from—the angel of history faces backward. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” writes Benjamin, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” What we call progress, Benjamin calls “the storm.”
8. Listen: Babble of voices, 90.3 MHz, internal party dissonance. Several highs from the Atlantic to the Baltic. Ring tones in commercials and screaming hosts of the new generation.
9. Contemporary intellectual follies, part one: “post-humanism.” The desire, as expressed, for example, in the novels of Michel Houellebecq, to leave behind the fury and the mire of human veins, thereby achieving some imagined “freedom” or “autonomy.” This is not post-anything: it is merely Humanism 2.0. To rid the self of its contingency, its meshing in desire and networks of relationships, was humanism’s aspiration in the first place. It’s a reactionary aspiration, one that forecloses any type of genuine agency or ethics. As Levinas so convincingly argues, we are not, nor should we strive to be, discrete or disconnected. As he puts it: “We exist in a circuit of understanding with reality”; “We have one finger caught in the machine.”
10. Consider Beckett’s Krapp, lost in his tape archives: the spools, the reels, the indexes onto which he’s transferred his memories of former years; his fingers hovering over the play, pause, and rewind buttons. Technology’s not there to carry him beyond his old condition, but to return him to it with added intensity. Despite his counting of his birthdays, one after the other, time, for him, moves not forward but rather, like the tapes themselves, in a loop.
11. Consider the same author’s Winnie in Happy Days, buried to her waist in sand as she reenacts the same acts and gestures, day in, day out. By the second act, she’s buried to her neck. Like Krapp, or Marinetti in his ditch, her experience is one not of progress but of entrenchment.
12. Listen: Risperidone and Bupropion for new-onset depression with psychotic features, Filtering the voice of America. Withered into the air.
13. In 1725, as the Enlightenment was gathering its forces for an overall assault on human consciousness, the Italian thinker Giambattista Vico published The New Science, a text that would sit like a time bomb at the heart of the new ideology, exploding a century and a half later in the writings of Nietzsche, Spengler, Foucault, and the like. For Vico, history proceeds in cycles: first comes corso, or “flow,” then ricorso—an ambiguous term that has the double sense of “repetition” and of “retrial” or “appeal.” The point is that, historically speaking, we advance not onto new ground but over old ground in new ways: more consciously, with deeper, more nuanced understanding. In the defining moment of literary modernism, Finnegans Wake, Joyce will use Vico’s system as a trellis on which to grow his vision not only of social and international history but also of culture: both, he tells us in the novel’s opening sentence (which is also the conclusion of its incomplete final one), follow a “commodius vicus of recirculation.”
14. Loops, not lines: already for the early Freud, the time, or temporality, of trauma has the circular structure of a repetition cycle. By the end of his career, he’ll have extended this traumatic logic to encompass consciousness tout court: humans are rear-facing repetition-engines, borne back ceaselessly (as Fitzgerald more lyrically puts it) into the past.
15. Consciousness, as another of our heroes, William S. Burroughs, asserts, moves in a seven-second loop, creating temporary bursts of “now”-ness. Burroughs had a finger caught in the machine as well: he spent whole months experimenting with reel-to-reel cassettes, recording, splicing, and transcribing—an extension of the cut-up techniques he had developed in the old medium of print-on-paper. He believed, not entirely incorrectly, that since the reality we inhabit is so profoundly shaped by media organizations, and by the corporate and governmental bodies hand in hand with which these organizations operate, then to cut into and rearrange script-sequences of this reality would have the effect of short-circuiting it, blowing it up: a new catastrophe to counter the ongoing one of what Burroughs’s counterpart Debord would call “The Spectacle.” The task, for Burroughs or Debord, is not simply to suggest future plotlines for the master script, but rather to expose and subvert the Reality Studio itself. “Let it come down.”
16. In a series of carefully planned and executed media interventions hosted by institutions such as the ICA, the Moderna Museet, Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, and others that must remain anonymous, the INS has deployed Burroughs’s cut-up techniques to produce, by splicing together phrases harvested from newspapers, websites, meteorological reports, and other media sources, sequences that were then read over FM radio. These have been inserted at selected points throughout this Declaration. Burroughs believed that this process could give one glimpses of the future—this last term being understood as something not to come but rather already recorded on another point of the reel being worked over and savaged by the intervention.
17. Listen: Stockholm, within the umbra, 08:40–09:42. Brain injury to the right cerebral hemisphere, dark river-nymph, her name is Echo, and she always answers back, expressed in Terrestrial Dynamic Time. Tomorrow will be three minutes and fifty-seven seconds longer.
18. Contemporary intellectual follies, part two: neuroscience. Or rather, the glib wholesale transferral of the logic of neuroscience to the realm of culture. Another trump card in a narrative of progress that presents itself as absolute, “objective”: the belief that art and literature can be “explained” by a discourse that has no bearing on them whatsoever. As though the endless complexity of thought and interpretation demanded by Hamlet could be substituted by the act of taking a biopsy of Shakespeare’s brain, or the interminable challenges and provocations posed by Inland Empire neutralized by placing electrodes among Lynch’s strangely coiffured hair. Meaning takes place in the symbolic, is constantly negotiated through language (be this spoken or visual), through the dynamism of metaphor, structured by desire, power, gender, and the rest. This process is open, ongoing, and—most important—contestable. That’s why we have art in the first place.
19. Listen: Ovid 251 Fight the Chimera. Winds aloft extended decode. Seminole. Going once going twice.
20. Listen: between cities, countries, and continents, we are going to crash.
21. To loop back to where we started, to the ink-rich ditch we never left: the future ends where it begins—or ends before it begins, pre-ends in anticipation of its eternal recommencement, however you like to put it—with a car crash. Marinetti’s, Camus’s, James Dean’s, Jayne Mansfield’s, Princess Grace of Monaco’s, or Graceless and Dumb of Kensington’s, or the endless anonymous victims who populate the silk screens of Warhol’s repetition compulsion—the identities, ultimately, don’t differentiate themselves, any more than do the scraps of wreckage that pile up before the feet of Benjamin’s angel in the flow and reflow of the storm.
22. This is why, for us, the truest novel of recent modernity is Ballard’s Crash. At the book’s outset he makes two claims: firstly, that we are already surrounded by fictions (lifestyle models, fantasies, sexual roles and identities, all pumped at us, à la Debord/Burroughs, by the media); the writer’s task, he claims (and here we could extend “writer” to encompass artists of all sorts), “is to invent the reality.” This claim we find extremely compelling. The second, less so: Ballard asserts that the ultimate aim of Crash is to serve as a warning against “that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons… from the margins of the technological landscape.” The assertion is unconvincing not simply because the mode throughout Crash, far from being one of warning or disgust, is one of lyric celebration (of dented faces lit by broken rainbows, delicate latticeworks of blood and engine fuel burning in wayside ditches), but also because the novel is obsessed not with any kind of future, dystopian or otherwise, but rather with archives. Vaughan, the central character, gathers research documents from road-research laboratories and reports from forensic journals and from stolen doctors’ logbooks. He collects films of test collisions, which he plays again and again and again. He follows crash victims around armed with a camera, collating albums full of photographs. He is, above all, a curator. “Ballard,” the narrator-character, sees in the dents in windshields records of the people who’ve crashed through or into them; after his accident he describes himself, using Krapp-like diction, as “an emotional cassette, taking my place with all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives—the television newsreels of wars and student riots, natural disasters and police brutality which we vaguely watched on the colour TV as we masturbated one another.”
23. And—here’s the genius of Crash—out of this landscape rises the event: the überaccident that fails to take place, that occurs precisely because it doesn’t happen. Vaughan’s ultimate goal is to die in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor at the precise moment of orgasm. He spends months planning it, down to the last, minutest detail (working out at what time she’ll be passing such and such a spot, the approach angle his car must take toward hers, and so on). But, disastrously, he gets it wrong and misses her car by inches; subsequently, while Taylor stands alone, frozen in ambulance light, touching her gloved hand to her throat, he drowns in his own blood. Vaughan, who has been in thousands of car crashes, has met with his first accident.
24. This, perhaps, approaches what we’re trying to feel our way toward: the breach, the sudden, epiphanic emergence of the genuinely unplanned, the departure from the script. To put it in fashionable Badiouan, the Event. The INS believes in the Event—in the power of the event, and that of art, to carry that event within itself: bring it to pass, or hold it in abeyance, as potentiality. And, paradoxically, the best way that art can do this is by allowing itself to be distracted, gazing in the rear view mirror.
25. A footnote on Ballard: When, in 2006, a range of writers, scientists, artists, architects, and misc. were asked to contribute a sentence each to Hans Ulrich Obrist’s reader on the Future, J. G.’s cleaned the floor with all the rest. While they came up with sweeping, visionary statements on technology, society, the virtual, and every other futurological motif, Ballard confined himself to four words: “The Future is boring.”
26. Listen: Radio Essen, 102.2, from the Atlantic to the Ostsee. Mich aber umsummet die Bieen. Trumpets, Wupertaal. Reuters, down 48, IBM down .84, AT&T down .67. The bees hum around me, and where the plowman makes his furrows, birds sing against the light.
A girl chased a porcupine
up a tree that grew taller and taller
I want those quills she said
but what do you think was up there?
A frog carried the sun above the water
She chased the porcupine so long she forgot
about the ground and then she was somewhere else
A prince and princess were in two different towers
and the wind pushed them together
Some people believe in God but it's not good
to focus on one thing like a dream
with only one person in it
That frog swam for hours to find the sun and it was heavy
A line is forming at the gate
My boss Carl asks me to save his marriage by becoming his wife’s bitch. The way he tells it, she still loves him and their two daughters but a few times a week she needs to rape a man.
He whispers this to me in his locked office, running his beat-up circulation fan as cover. He explains that she’s just not into raping him. He’s too hairy and tall; she wants someone more her size, less masculine.
I wanna be a someone big, you know
I wanna name streets-
Hell, I want the streets to be named after me!
I want the ecstasy of saddling up some steel horse
Throwing a hundred, a thousand, a million
nameless bodies onto a battlefield, a petrol street infected by barriers and shot reason
I want to plant asphalt flower lip imprints on nameless baby heads
I want a nameless crowd lapping up my spilt pennyroyal tea
Jeering and crying and screaming and clapping and going into hysterical fits
Lying on the pavement, common sense running like diarrhea into a collective sess pool
Where they can all chain smoke my candy syllables and hand over their trust
Like a coffee shop twit caked up on too much makeup
Ready to pool her V card over to the first Lyon Burke
I want to mess with the briefcase boy
Act like I’m accidently gonna push the Doomday button
Paint something nuclear, like I do by just being me
Yea, yea I wanna chain hefty bag eyes, common eyes, nameless eyes
To me on the big screen in the big news
Where all the big kids get to stretch under euthanized sunlight
On a playground reserved for gods and overgrown infants
Yea, yea- I wanna be big, I want my name on back pockets
Lace panties, underground posters, action figures
I wanna be the big shot behind the Brazilian import
Wearing some Verdi chapstick
Chomping down on a smoking robust some Latvian doll lights up for me with a selenium zippo
Wait, wait- no
I dream of food I can’t eat:
Food that practically digests itself,
uses very little stomach acid,
comes in a pill
or better yet an IV
rooted inside the intestines,
kicking through the blood
an odorless, tasteless magma
at light speed,
every vein opens up, says: ah.
The Fire Law is stained glass. Not in church but in my eyes, it shines shallow. And the soldiers see the oil between my
fingers, the chains around my music, as I grasp, gasp the words. They poke their swords at my shark skin.
Lame
The Fire Law is polar bear drowning. Not in church but in my mom’s eyes, and only when she looks at me, in a quagmire.
Standing behind the lens, he asks more questions: my best sexual experience, what I love about a woman’s body, and how often I jerk off in any given week. I try my best to lie for every answer. Still, he looks satisfied.
“Do you want to watch a gay or straight porn?”
It feels like a trick question, but I say, “Straight,” without any hesitation.
He puts a disc in his DVD player and leaves the camera rolling as I unbutton my pants.
“I'll fast-forward it to the good parts,” he tells me.
When he presses play, someone's getting fucked in two holes at once. All I can see are stiff poles of meat sliding and stretching skin. It's enough to get my cock hard but closing my eyes would have done the same.
I spit in my palm and rub the saliva around my erection. When I look bored, he tells me to turn around and show my ass. “The casting guys need to see this stuff,” he says. I'm obedient. I even arch my back to make it look more inviting.
“Are you close?” he asks.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“I'll pay you three hundred extra to finish in my mouth.”
Proper girls used to make men buy them a ring before they put out. I'm sure those virgin brides never thought of themselves as whores. But I demand nothing. The money is simply offered to me in exchange for dropping my spunk in something more grateful than a tissue.
So of course I let him swallow me, lick my ass and finger the hole. I wonder if it's my calling in life: to be slightly misled into exchanging my pursuit of pleasure for someone else’s.
Scenes from Jurassic Park 5
Scene 1
I’ve lost track of all the children I left in orphanages of napkins and boxers but I've gotten so used to the squeal of my chair.
Scene 7
The hip huggers makes her vagina look like scalene triangle. She walks like the kind of testicular cancer that gave you something in return. Her children will be named after vodka that comes out of plastic bottles.
Scene 11
Tonight, her wine glass is bulimic. I try staging an intervention but the pinot noir makes it look like a sparrow coughed up blood on my right shirt sleeve. She also punctuates each sentence with her lit cigarette, the ashes leaving an ellipsis on the carpet like bread crumbs. If I lived here, I would clean up the trail to make sure she couldn't find her way back to me.
Scene 17
The swab in my urethra is like a paleontologist dusting clumsily for fossils. I score the scene by grinding my teeth, keeping the "ow"s and "fuck"s to a wisp. When I hear boys say how badly they want to grow up, I will tell them the story of the doctor with slender, rough sticks for fingers, how this doctor steals their dreams by siphoning them through their peeholes.
Scene 29
The woman in front of me at the airport security line guts herself open, her purse, jacket, cellphone spilling into the bin below. She never notices the gapped smile of the bolts holding the bin down or how the “Do Not Use” stenciled on the bottom glares at her in the hot yellow of a father meeting his daughter's tattooed date for the first time. As the woman yanks the bin, the tetanus of insomnia keeps me polite. The hangover wants to feed her to the x-ray machine, slowly.
Closing Credits
The little girl sitting next to me on the plane wears her Mickey Mouse scalp proudly. I want to her to behave like a piñata this morning but her mother fends off the dentistry of my left elbow with coloring books and earphones. I know I will eventually become a father, a lion tamer using Santa and birthdays like a whip and chair but my children will also learn to keep their smiles to themselves; it'll make sense to them when they reach that age where they teach their hands to roam.
I once said to Rowan, “I like you so much I want to shrink you down and put you in my pocket.” And he said, “I don’t believe in that sort of thing.” He didn’t believe in kissing either. Or holding hands. But he once sucked me off in the mesquite and then pretended it never happened.
Rowan was gone for two days after he ran away. I wrote his name on my left thigh. Deep. The pen making me bleed. I tried to show it to him when he returned to school, but he’d quit the basketball team. And he didn’t look at me when we passed in the halls.
She realized the problem had become insurmountable when she began masturbating on the way to work. Bus passengers got suspicious, so she took out a loan and bought a beater car, something she’d not ever have imagined herself in.
Red lights were the biggest obstacles, that glowing cabernet eye a beacon daring her to finger fuck herself. And so she did, several times, in fact. Her record was six orgasms before her first smoke break at nine.
She dated but it wasn’t like that, not what you think at all. This was a compulsion that had nothing to do with sex. It was her burden, her cross, and for some ungodly reason God had tagged her with it. No, she didn’t want any man touching her in that way. The mere thought of a penis disgusted her. Could there be a more grotesque organ? What had God been thinking when he designed that particular repulsion?
No, she dated so people wouldn’t think her odd. She knew doing it for that reason was shallow, but she openly believed all people were shallow, everyone desperately hoping for good gossip about themselves.
Where would it end? She had always figured suicide. There was no other way to tame the beast which, day by day, grew stronger, hairier. She adored fantasy movies far more than romantic comedies because in fantasy — like “Lord of the Rings" — the hero or heroine could be killed but retrieved from the jaws of death, sporting fresh energy and often a more marketable hairdo.
On the TV screen: Teeth—that’s his name, and don’t you forget it—in a mahoganied mask watching a camera watching him, and you could see easily this man he’d been a pretty boy, pretty boy, poly-wanna-fuckin-cracker boy, now older, distinguished, so completely IS—that is, perfect—that as the brown-red of his lips parts the pearly white gates of Heaven could almost be said to to’ve been revealed. With hair like the silver cords of hundreds of souls flash-frozen in goose-step on the astral plane, and eyes, aquamarine, that glint edaciously, he is watching you watching you.
“Hello there,” he says, “and welcome to the great Soul Suck Taste Test! We’re asking people all over this great God-fearin’ land of ours which soul is the best—which has the best flavor, the most depth, the richest bouquet, the fullest body. And we want you viewers out there to know as well. All YOU gotta do is step up here, give a little suck, and let us know which soul you find most satisfyin, reassurin, rectifyin.”
The cameraman plucks another man from the mall shopper’s dream. Teeth steps up to the freshest catch and offers his hand.
“You, sir. Yes, you, sir. You look like a fine American lad, sir. Do the right thing and step right up here, son. Sit down, son. Make yourself comfortable, son.”
He sits in a black wooden chair. On his left, there’s a large table covered by a red cloth. Five round shapes bulge from under the covering.
“What’cha doing out of the hot summer sun, son?” Teeth asks.
“I don’t know. Buying stuff.”
In the absence of purpose Teeth’s smile broadens. “Well, how ‘bout a nice, refreshing drink, son, to help keep you on your feet?”
A silver phallus flashes followed by thunderous CG and generic lightning glinting along some female lips—but he can see none of it, our son, the boy.
Teeth continues: “Today, son, you don’t have to worry about money because we’re giving these things away free! Yes, you heard me right [cue victory music]. Son, this is one hundred percent free. By capitalizing on a little-known loophole in the American Dream, we’re able to give this refreshment away free of charge. All you have to do is try it and give us your opinion. Just do it. Whadda say?”
Pray to me, prey.
Teeth puts his arm around the boy’s shoulder and what was one seen changes: camera focuses in on this and same scene: Camaraderie. The red cloth is pulled away.
A table lined with heads full of eyes looking around looking, but heads locked in place by clear vices. Eyes swivel, looking to escape or not. Five heads in all—black, white, yellow, brown, red—the primary colors of a mass-produced racial consciousness. Each head on a silver plate (luxury) on checkered table cloth (down-home goodness), but each obviously attached to a living body somewhere below the table. How could they live otherwise?
Our boy stands behind these heads so he cannot see their eyes. Our boy looks down on these heads, our boy, marbleized, a statue in the rapture of thought. Teeth stands in the foreground smiling at the camera, at us, at himself.
“You know how they say some are born leaders and some are born followers? Well, I’m here to tell you it ain’t true.” He turns and walks over to our boy. Teeth removes a white-tipped pointer from off camera and uses it to point at the top of our boy’s head.
“You know that soft spot babies are born with on the top of their head? The one that’s supposed to go away as the bones of our skull harden and grow together? We at Soul Suck long ago introduced a special chemical into name brand baby shampoos. This chemical kept this joint of bone soft, a chemical we call Needgeneration™.”
Teeth walks up to our boy and puts something in his hand.
Camera close-up: oh, how that silver phallus flashes again.
“Our titanium-tipped Suck Straw™ is just perfect for piercing that little bit of bone and sucking at the goodness within. Stain and dent resistant, washes easily in warm water. You’ll never need another Suck Straw.”
Our boy breaks from his reverie. As if on cue. “But won’t that kill them?” he asks, nodding towards the heads.
“It’s complicated, and you don’t need to worry about it, son. With just a little training and practice, you’ll be well on you r way to worry-free sucking in no time. We have years of experience in the soul-sucking field. Many have tried our programs and had their lives richly enhanced. In our training program, you learn how to handle the Straw, how to insert it, and how to twist it to get the taste just right. All we ask in return is for you to give us your opinion.”
Teeth holds the Suck Straw in the palm of his soft, tan hand. Camera zooms in. The Straw gleams in the mall and camera lights; a crucifix on a satin pillow couldn’t have gleamed brighter.
Our boy thinks it over. Or appears to. What’s the difference, anyway?
Our boy snatches the Suck Straw out of Teeth’s hand, face rapt with expectation, and plunges it into the nearest skull. A faint pop. The head’s eyes roll back until just the whites are visible, then look forward again for always. Cue heavenly harp music, ecstasy’s wave form to dance across the cerebellum. It was quick; maybe too quick.
We could suspect artifice.
A distant place. A place that leaves no memories. I am there, now, again, in the middle of the night, while the moon squares Libra in another matterless circle.
There are wooden huts. Trees, moving. There’s a man, sitting next to a dark trunk, while I stand there, holding the fingers of my left hand in my right hand.
There are only three remaining. Two have been cut off. They are placed on a silver tray now, black fingers with white figures on their surface. The nails aren’t broken, my hand isn’t hurting.
Everything is in its place, exactly where it is meant to be. What’s left are two questions.
I ask the first, without words, omitting the question mark.
The man stands up, to catch the answer, eventually.
1. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, your honor.
2. Dogs fucked the pope. No fault of mine.
3. I did it! I kidnapped the Lindberg baby!
4. What the hell is in my pants?
5. Hey judge, didn’t you used to be in porn?
6. Dude! I am so stoned.
7. Lawyer? I don’t need no stinking lawyer.
8. If I get bail, I am so gone!
9. Just out of curiosity, does Belize have an extradition treaty with the U.S.?
10. On my planet it’s quite reasonable to dress this way in court.
11. I don’t know, but black may not be your color.
12. I will not put my pants back on!
13. Bail Schmail.
Random chemical processes couldn’t produce enough information to run even a simple cell. Over 500 million years, random molecular shuffling would produce only 194 bits of information, Wesson says.
One possible way around this paradox is the idea that life on Earth was seeded by biological molecules that already had a large information content that survived the journey even though the molecules themselves were killed.
There was only the Viewer, slumped forever in his sour seat, the bald shells of his eyes boiling in pictures, a biblical flood of them, all saturated tones and deep focus, not one life-size, and the hands applauding, always applauding, palms abraded to an open fretwork of gristle and bone, the ruined teeth fixed in a yellowy smile that will not diminish, that will not fade, he's happy, he's being entertained.
Smoldering ruins can occupy a panorama the way from our terrace I witness the olive grove, and the sea beyond it, and beyond the sea the horizon that cuts it, and beyond the horizon the bleeding sun, but eventually even ruin is nothing but gravity.”
There was something incursive in the skin of the apple, which sat on the car seat abandoned like the crust of something at the edge of a place no one ever goes in a world we can’t imagine during a time in the distant future when silver planets rip natural laws all to fuck.
if you remember only one thing i’m telling you—
please avoid naked crying, particularly out of bed
an exception: slumped against the shower wall alone is okay to naked cry
don’t naked dance the salsa or consume small oily fishes like sardines or mullet naked
depending on how you tend to react to bad news, use precaution before doing so naked—
but always be sure to greet happy news clothed whether scantily extravagantly or shabbily
naked, choose clear liquors and cucumbers over broccoli // scotch whiskey
naked, don’t cross your legs please. cross ankles if you must.
never check facebook naked because facebook doesn’t respect your privacy
don’t google anything either naked. twitter’s cool
beware when naked please any tv shows in response to which you tend to shout obscenities.
same rule for people
if you please: this isn’t about sex. we’re past temptation or we are not yet to it
this is about, there is such a thing as decency and a reason it means wearing clothes
furthermore consider decorum in its neoclassical usage: dramatic fitness—
the fit relation of an action to its context
rousseau’s nudes appear clothed in milky paint, they can do anything—
ut still they forebear, and mostly just lounge around, which is okay naked anyway
if you’re rich or poor enough some of these guidelines apply differently or not at all.
one funny thing to do is tell lies naked. what nerve it takes!
i’d probably believe your lies because who’s got that kind of nerve?
an acceptable naked lunch: pate, butter & cornichons on baguette. red grapes. iced tea. cupcake.
thank you in advance.
There is an interesting way the water gathers on the window from the rain outside, where a young couple is kissing and pressing their bodies against the windowpane, and a small insect drowns against their passion. Little squirms and it dies easy. The water droplets make the shapes of boobs. Outside the sound of traffic grows hallow and faraway, just like how Los Angeles would sound years later in the future. Girls drink to see into the future. Hernando is very tired. Love feels like a thing people eventually learn to live without, like tonsils or god. The bar is not a bar. The bar is a place with a big mouth with some big teeth and a smart tongue and if you are willing, everything is willing, the bar will touch anything if you would like. Will do more, if you would like. The people that come here are terrible and angelic, and so the place is a void, somewhere imaginary to fuck or be existential, to be away. People come to come. Here is heaven. Here are angels with genitals. Here they sit, half delirious, on platinum dance floors, and the room fills with people in tight clothing, fancy shoes and serene faces so to talk and talk and come hither. Opium in syringes. Scotch and ice and thin saliva, swirl inside glass cups with lipstick. The halogen light is yellow and thick and alien enough to make you feel nauseous or invincible. It depends on how the girl looks at you, he thinks. Hernando returns from the dirty bathroom back to the dance floor, after vomiting out an entire universe. He wipes his mouth. His body aches. When he woke this morning, all Hernando could feel was his head, all big and pulsing like a tumor, and there is nothing left to do but to stare at himself in the mirror, until breathing became an art form, until art becomes bullshit. Someone pretty and perfect is asking Hernando if he would like to dance but he doesn’t say anything to her and he pushes her away, and she falls down over easily onto the beating crowd behind them. If someone doesn’t react quickly and retrieve her from the floor, there is a cold fear that she could be trampled to death or maybe punctured alive by dancing queens, or the latest craze of the latest pop song. The beautiful pop song. Hernando waits too long before he finally feels guilt, like true guilt, and when he does turn around to apologize to the girl, she has already gone away, departed for someplace else. Some place better maybe. Sound vibrates through Hernando’s body like echoes in a tunnel and despite everything, Hernando cups his hands together and screams out sorry into the crowd, but no one can hear him. He screams and screams at the top of his lungs, standing there, but no one can hear him, because the music is playing so loudly and the DJ is very hot tonight. He asks about what time it is?
Her bible-long fuck rolled on pelts unmade, skin of an Uzi, sockets like a queen,
smell underground of men balled in fertilizer, husband to the till, snow bit land
curling. She got fragged in her garbage. A bowtie slit so askance as to backward
ambulate time through calendars once new. Combed into her own puddle,
stomped to blood, heaped in our eyes like a sequin prayer. We put our arms up her
like a carpet of scream tread stinky we walk, a little witness chewing mud below
the dress hugged somewhat born. What hammy doings. We sit on her stomach
until feathers cough. Craters of son dangle forth, the bark-textured mound passing
wind, salad in the kweef. Another spools her clam with fiddle string. We flute
the gun, slapping river next to us jealous with flow. We slit her body to tell time,
squat and gulp, her tumbling bald by the fistful. Body trafficked soft, she is nearly
loved, nearly welcomed alive. Her gullet cartilage cracks words, beaming symbol
for squirrels, the rape sample good, thinking as we come, mother of chickens purr,
growing fungal in the smell, fish with the carcass, day’s done, making of her a
poor imitation of the lesser statements our parents said. Computed bowels thrust
home, I machine gun holes already there, popped fat and changing posture, the
leak fucked sunset high. The meat is getting into a rare compost of god. Later the
face as it burns squeals from beneath a liquid so sharp to the tongue a filter on how
we see becomes.
Day after day it’s a revolution, or it’s a wonder
that anything exists at all. What can I do?
A plant divided the room into “good” and “bad” and the room became conscious of itself.
A disease that’s bigger than the body—beauty?
I bend from you to touch the ground when grass is read. That’s how it spreads.
On account of the breeze, today’s noon-blue is coffee-thick. It stirs the woman’s longing for that thin morning sky, a longing which has become her hatred for the dead asshole of her dreams. Every night the woman is lulled to sleep by the warm drizzle or driven into nightclubs by it, but there is no escaping him. She finds him in her sleep where she found him in life, perched in a magnolia tree, peering into an endodontist’s open window, crushing the waxy white flowers in his hands and mimicking the painful machinery of root canals. His drill imitation is dead-on. He laughs to see the patients shudder in anticipation, their eyes closed, the doctor’s back turned.
Looking at the ruined blossoms in his hands, the woman notices the green paint that marks his long, flat fingers. This suggests to her waking self that he’s the same asshole who painted the green Whoresign above the doorways of innocent girls, girls he wanted to like—
Waking late again, she decides it’s is time to talk to her friend with the sheep: the country’s chief pride lies in the pastoral, so city ordinances regarding livestock are seldom enforced. “Can you try to kill him again, in your dream?” asks her friend, twisting his pale whiskers between his fingers.
The soldier—a redcoat, by all reports—chokes on a coin or a nail or, more likely, dead bees, three or four of them, shown here in a gray basin and on a white bedsheet. (Better a high bed, as the saying has it, than the sound of blood.) The sound of the blade—the implement is a short dagger rather than a mortuary sword—carries quite well. Or so goes one description of the event, despite the burnt curtains, the slaughtered dog, the music in the attic. (A bruit, for its part, is a noise—a fault—in the heart.) The arms, given this configuration—a martlet proper, at the battlement; shield, pommel, and hilt vert—are thought silent with regard to a falling body, for instance, or a sinking ship.
The crying wife, according to folklore, is carried from a house—a burning house, in those unfortunate drawings—and then down a road and through a town—or across a field and through a forest—in a wooden bed. (The cannons appear rather charmless from this angle.) Thence south, perhaps, in a rainstorm, past the sorrow in the burrows, the jackchain and the shooting wall, and now, near a creek or a lake, the sounds of a drowning. A family stands in the grass—the boards red in the background, the steeples green. (Her heart went white, as the saying has it—or, more precisely, silent.) The nightdress is woolen, a plain design, open at the collar or fastened there with a clasp or a knot or just a common pin, the click of which may suggest an insect. (Hessian flies are Russian, in fact, and are sometimes mistaken for wasps.) Certain marks on a door, often an arrangement of scrapes or engravings, indicate the loss of a daughter.
The orphan swallows a small bird, a finch or a sparrow, even a parakeet, wings clipped, eyes excised—at least as the narrative survives in the upland boroughs and in several of the eastern towns. (Bloodbirds, so-called, are said to produce a rueful sound.) A bloody bone is thunder, in one version, and timber and chimney smoke, in another—or a pile of sticks near a river, just before the war. (Perhaps the treetops seem to shriek.) A rag doll gives way to a stump doll—the face painted red, for the frightened child, or blue, for the dying child—which gives way, in turn, to a toy horse, described in a faltering voice. The rattlebox contains a hook and a blade, and is buried at the margin of the yard.
We had no choice.
Our city will suffer for the men who were lynched. Their charred forms hung torn and naked from the bridge.
Now black skies burp fire and the water boils poisonous. Boot heels collapse the necks of doorknobs. Men go and go missing.
Now we go – follow the river.
With the dim sky out of sight I can almost—finally—be just a dude under tree branches. But I can't stop. Twigs cracking underfoot, backpack filled with clean water and soda crackers. I want to thank someone. Bulging pulse up my neck and I keep the rifle in both hands. To be just outside the circumference of fear, that loosening. I remember sitting down to eat a peanut butter sandwich years earlier, sunlight on my shoes. Water sloshes the plastic. The map is useless to me. I know I'm headed basically north, sour vomit taste in my mouth. So what good is a man's handshake and signature? What's the point of all these formalities? You give someone a ticket to punch so you can ride the goddamn train. It makes sense. But then what? The next thing you know the doctor scalpels a crunchy mole off your neck, the daughters never visit. It's tricky. It's nothing. It's trivia, but it's not. I stop at the edge of a clearing and look through my riflescope for any movement. It's like, the man who turns animals into meat goes home and eats meat. The president, even when alone, is working to impress someone. Look at a man's face and think what the fuck do you know?
You feel closer to terrain modeled than terrain massive. Paul the tour guide cannot stop hitting on Paula the tourist. The halls are color coded. You can't be disoriented if you try. Paula pulls two clementines from her purse and shares with Paul. Because the U.S. is so small beside you, you run your fingers through the Rockies, massage the Mississippi, draw circles around Hawaii. The buttons trigger voices: “This is California, the anxious state. This is New York, the anxious state. This is Kansas, the anxious state.” There were moments when Paula could have come home with you. Tour love is abrupt. In Paula's mouth, the tongue slaps the roof. She says, This place makes me sleepy, and her tongue slaps loud the roof. Even if Paula had offered you the clementine, you hate citrus. You think maybe her tongue-slap is applause. You think maybe in this place, where the carpets are hide-the-stain black plus zigzag greens, where motion activates not just light but brilliant exhibit voices and clacking plastic on tracks, maybe children with packs and sandwiches have known what you're touching, heard histories, ate cold cuts and fruit in syrup. The lights over the map dim and a voice says from obscured speakers, Get out in five minutes or we are locking you in. Paul and Paula glance back like please don't follow, and Paula stumbles into the five-foot Mount Rushmore. The monument splits at the figures' necks and flakes plaster dust on the carpet. You pull the base upright and hope hard security can't see. Paul and Paula are gone. You are the straggler. You lift the mountain's lid above your head. In the walls, the vents cut out, and the thick quiet claps your ears. You step into the base and squat. You wonder if the break line is visible from out there. There is movement.
1. I saw my mom suck my dad’s cock—they were doing sixty-
nine— on my baby blanket. My dad seemed to like it because he was
smiling. My mom seemed to wonder while she was sucking my dad’s
cock why my dad was smiling and not sucking her pussy. My mom
kept sucking his cock. My dad kept smiling. I kind of wondered when
I’d get my blanket back.
2. I saw my sister fuck my grandfather (mom’s side) on a spotted
horse in the field. Whenever the horse trotted my sister grunted
because my grandfather’s cock (mom’s side) stuck inside her even
more. My sister whipped my grandfather because he kept smiling at
her. “Why do you whip me when I fuck you on horseback?” my
grandfather asked her. “Because you forgot to wear your dentures,”
my sister said. Then she whipped him again. My sister’s skin is really
white.
3. I caught my brother and his girlfriend Jacklyn jacking each other
off in the back yard. My brother put his fingers inside his girlfriend
Jacklyn’s pussy. His girlfriend Jacklyn put her fingers around my
brother’s cock. They both kept their clothes on. Our three dogs
watched them do it. I think that Charlie—our spotted Labrador—is
gay, though.
4. My sister likes older men. She let my grandfather (dad’s side)
finger her asshole while grandfather fucked his mistress, a forty year
old woman from the Bronx. The forty year old woman from the Bronx
held my sister close because my sister and the forty year old woman
were about to orgasm at the same time. Although my grandfather is
old, he looks a lot like a girl.
5. My father pulled out his cock in front of my friend Melinda.
Melinda got down on her knees because she thought I had left the
room to go pee. I caught Melinda on her knees in front of my father
with her tongue out. My father held some money or something in his
right hand. Melinda had pulled down her pants just below her ass. I
like my father’s cock, I think. I like Melinda’s ass.
6. My sister sat next to my grandfather (dad’s side), the one who
looks like a girl. She stroked his cock a lot and watched his thirty year
old mistress, Margaret, shove my grandfather’s left foot into her,
Margaret’s, pussy. Margaret’s pussy is really hairy. My sister couldn’t
stop watching Margaret fuck her self with my grandfather’s left foot.
My grandfather shaves his legs, I think.
7. My mom caught my dad with his pants down, holding his cock,
and lifting my aunt’s (mom’s sister) right leg so he could put his cock
inside my aunt’s (mom’s sister) pussy. All my mom did was smile and
close the door behind her.
8. My mom pulled down her pants and showed my uncle (her
brother) her bare pussy. My uncle touched my mom’s breast like he
was petting a dog. My uncle stroked himself on my mom, who got
down real fast to put my uncle’s cock in her mouth. My mom kept
caressing my uncle’s cheek.
9. My gay uncle and my sister and her friend Sally were naked in
the bathroom together. My sister and her friend Sally were holding my
gay uncle up because he was drunk or on poppers or stereo head
cleaner or something. My sister stroked my gay uncle’s cock, who
laughed. “Don’t stop,” my gay uncle said, “I’m gay.” My gay uncle
laughs like a girl. My sister’s friend Sally let my gay uncle use her as
a chair. My gay uncle has a hairy butt.
10. My mom’s older sister, Mabel, let my fat uncle Ron (dad’s side),
put his cock inside her pussy on the couch in the living room. They
were both naked. My mom said, “Leave them alone, honey,” and
added the eggs to the brownie mix. But it was hard for me not to
watch my fat uncle bounce up and down on my mom’s older sister,
who I thought was a lesbian because her girlfriend Judy is napping in
my bed right now.
I love to take a shower at night because if I wash my hair in the morning, shampooing it dries it out. Dry hair makes me look like a fat, pale dickhead. Showering at night gives my hair enough time to re-grease. I don’t want mega-greasy hair, just a slight sheen. Another thing you get to do is go to bed completely clean. Crashing dirty, especially if your house gets hot at night like mine does, is suicide for hygiene. For those six or seven hours of sleep you’re practically stewing in your own greasy juices. You’re also more refreshed, and thus relaxed, when you finally do lie down, which means you fall asleep sooner, which matters, since more hours of sleep means more hours of dreaming, which means a greater regulation of pent up psychological pressure. The more you dream, the more those forces are safely churned and dispersed, like steam released from a valve, into the language and imagery that form the atmosphere of the dream. Finally, I like to shower at night because of some ambiguously artistic reassurance I know I receive from it, yet cannot define. It’s like a quasi-baptism, performable only in the absence of day. And life is to short to be lived in the absence of mysteriously reassuring artistic ritual. Although showering at night is only one example, I like to think of my life as a pinpoint of meaningless biological certainty, but swirling around that is a maelstrom of vaguely reassuring, vaguely artistic, ritual.
IN THE CEMETERY OF Montparnasse, at six in the evening, Rachel gets up
on the tomb of Cesar Vallejo and spreads her legs.
THREE LIRIUM LEAVES fall from the sky and a late drop of semen slides
languidly down her groin. I am completely drained and completely drained I try
to decipher the traps of love in the sky: from that love of light music nothing saves
us, nothing remains. A plane appears in the sky.
I SLIDE MY HAND UNDERNEATH her jeans and feel the cold sweat of
her inner thighs. A white line has been formed in the sky, I see. That sweat with
the aroma of the crypt will take a long time to dry, I think.
--I want to be a fresh mouth, still water, sometimes only rhythm—I say.
TWO PLANES cross in the sky.
WE ARE in the air.
SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE on the planet, is sending a line of planes against
the orange sky, sometimes red, streaked with yellows, stretched in scarlet, almost
ruby.
SOMEONE GETS READY TO DISFIGURE the geometry of the globe,
someone wants to erase the coordinates, someone wants, someone seeks, someone
plans.
SOMEONE GETS READY TO PRESS insistently the delete key and later
the reset button and then they will all be fleeing the line of planes and of the four
pilots of the Apocalypse: the evolution of dust presides over the events of life, we
run towards the dust as if it were our only destiny below the attentive gaze of the
stars.
-I think they are bombing New York
when i see your feather head
my cunt becomes a tickle of a thing
i'm afraid it's going to laugh in public
my hands won't do much good
they're small and my cunt is deep
a trickle of a laugh seeps through my fingers
yours is small
your hands can reach much further
when you touch me
the laugh becomes a silent flutter
like runny chick wings rubbing up
against their egg shells
they never think about what's long-awaited
they can't afford the silence that would follow
they mill around the desks
they look through windows for a moment
counting clouds
and sniffing for the origins
of someone's clover-scented lotion
I heard you gave birth, that you named your kid for a star, but here you are with a beret, in charge of this cadre, and herding us into the basement of our building to be registered, photographed, and given new jobs to support the revolution.
It’s pretty funny and you look great. You just gave birth but your skin is as supple and your eye is as bright when I saw you at that party in February and you were six months pregnant, shiny hair, high heels, aqua scarf that matched your eyes, skin-tight black jersey dress hugging your “bump”. Now even though you’re running the show in the basement I’m close enough to you to see the wrinkles around your eyes and I wonder again how old you are like I did at the party and whether it was hard for you to get pregnant let alone get in charge of a cadre.
I think maybe you are going to get tired of me acting like friends with you while you’re ordering everyone around. I’m not sure yet what kind of revolution this is, nor is anybody else. Is this the kind of revolution that likes or doesn’t like intellectuals? And for how long? The only history I know is literary history and that does not have a nice story to tell about intellectuals and revolution. I wonder what to tell the guy with the computer when I do get to the front of the line and he asks me what I can do, what I can do for the revolution. That guy wears a trench coat and non-descript collared shirt and khaki pants, he looks like an IT guy, which is a kind of intellectual, I guess. He may actually be the guy who ran the tech at our Obama office last summer. Having tech in the Obama office gave us an invaluable, glamorous, indefatigable feeling, as we were told and believed that John McCain had no tech in his offices, even though our office was in Mishawaka, Indiana, a place that in no respect could be described as glamorous but in fact was the nadir of glamour, could strip a star of its glamour, just by sulking nearby.
The skills I can give the revolution include: writing, teaching, editing, and performing. Is that going to work? Good enough? Should I just say no skills, request training? I can’t even cook, I can’t watch babies or keep my car clean. Will you blow my cover? What answer do you want me to give?
The line is long and I’m at the end of it so I have a long time to think about the right answer. Because I feel so collegial with you I can’t keep my mouth shut even when you’re addressing everyone else in the basement. “I’m just excited about the career counseling!” I quip to the crowd, my neighbors, who laugh nervously. You also kind of laugh, but not deeply. How shallow or deep does it need to go in? Is laughter like a needle that can inoculate you, make me safe for you to have around? Is this that kind of revolution?
My mom is also here holding my baby, who’s not really a baby anymore, she’s two. If my mom’s around I don’t look after my baby too much. I wonder what my mom thinks of my baby-minding skills. Well, I don’t have any baby-minding skills. I have art-making skills. Last week I did an art project with my baby instead of turning on the TV, which was like my new year’s resolution for Spring. We dipped colored tissue in glue and stuck it to a card. It looked pretty excellent, like a garden, but when I put it on the wall she freaked out. ‘No painting!’ she whined until I took it down. She rejected the art we made together.
So where’s your baby? I want to ask you but I don’t. I want to joke, having a baby is like a reverse amputation, it’s like a graft, like a protrusion. When I was a kid my brothers had these soldiers cast in some kind of metal, probably lead, they had a seam down their legs where they were made in the mold. That’s what having a kid is like. Not the seam, but the soldier, made of toxic, and soldered to your mold.
Anywhere you turn they’re lined up on the sill of your line of sight, with their sights on you, blocking your view.
Babies.
I don’t say this because it’s not strictly true, I don’t see your baby anywhere, and I can only see my baby out of the corner of my eye in my mom’s lap wearing a dirty white shirt and no pants.
I know, it’s bad the kid has no pants but we had to come down here like immediately and what was I supposed to do? The revolution turned out to be like a tornado, for a couple hours we saw it coming, then it came, then we had to go down in the basement. It must be a pretty intense revolution if it has cells and cadres and chains that reach all the way out to Indiana.
And you look so glamorous here, again dressed in black, with your mascara and lip gloss, glowing like you’re still pregnant, packing us all in, ranking and organizing us, and no baby in sight.
Everyone’s staring at me, I feel like, because I’m not taking care of my baby, so I go over and grab her and plunk her down in a corner where all the other babies are playing with toy cars, toy trucks, toy motorcycles. Every one of these vehicles is plastic and red. Is it that kind of revolution—red? Or—plastic? Or—interested in transport?
When I saw you at the party I wasn’t drunk despite my best efforts. You looked so glamorous, you and your husband had been in Mexico and were buying a house in Chicago, he was receiving serious accolades for a new project based on erasure, but your own project was even more interesting, a stack of index cards with typewritten mottos, which were piled on a pillar in a plasticine box and were taller than a stack of Russian novels, already.
Text was something that could be erased or accrue, and it was really a material thing after all, and you could see it build up over time like a coastline, or ebb away, and there were kelp forests, deep water trenches, feeds of cool fresh water that mixed up the bios, a shipwreck, canneries and hotels and motels and whore houses and strip bars and family aquariums that made a go of it and flourished for awhile and fell into disrepair on the edges of it and finally sunk into the water itself to be reclaimed by the kelp forest
was literature
in so many words.
Now I look down and that kid from school with the stringy blonde hair is about to bite my kid’s arm in a fight over a toy so I pour my water on her head, and her mother comes over and grabs my wrist, and I pour out the rest of my water by accident on the floor, and now I’m worried, because how long are we going to be in this basement I should have saved my water. I look over and my mother is clutching a bottle of water and watching me, so, ok, she’ll give that water to my kid before she drinks any herself, so I know the water thing is covered, I also look at you and you’re drinking from a bottle of water and you hold your lips back a little bit so as not to get any lip gloss on the mouth of the bottle. I can see there’s some flats of tiny water bottles behind you like at a youth soccer game. Are there oranges, too? Are those for the hundred or so of us down here or just for you and the cadre?
This does not appear to be an environmentalist revolution.
I knew your husband first, before I knew you, and actually before you knew him, I don’t remember not knowing your husband, I can only imagine all the shit he’s talked about me over the years, he’s an inveterate gossiper and I love to hear gossip, though then I wonder what kind of gossip he’s going to spread about me, of course I assume I’m boring, have nothing gossip-worthy for him to spread, but that’s what everyone thinks, and my life is hardly perfect, for one I’m a failure as a mother and everyone knows that, partially because I tell them. Are you going to tell him, later, how uncool I acted at the revolution? Because I have been acting very uncool since this whole thing started, I agree. I was certainly acting very uncool at that reading party, you were amazing, magnetic, your bangs made a kind of shelving and I remembered how you had gone to a residency in the Canadian mountains somewhere, its name was onomatopoetic, I asked you, but I couldn’t remember the right onomatopoeia, how was Wham, I asked, or Oof, is it, and you said gorgeous, gorgeous, I got nothing done but it was gorgeous.
I remember once we stopped to have lunch at your apartment while you were at work and we went in your husband’s office, which was long and slim like a laundry closet or something, and we watched a little animation piece he was working on for a local band’s video, which must have taken a ton of time and what’s worth more, time or money? and I saw these books on anxiety disorder tucked up among his art books, so then I didn’t know what that was, research for a project he was working on or did he have anxiety disorder, and he had photos around of when you two went someplace grey in the off season, Nova Scotia, but you didn’t do any Elizabeth Bishop tourism, but the whole thing is Elizabeth Bishop tourism, stand with your toes in the marl and have a drink, the shoreline torn open by the storms like a fish’s gut, noone could breathe inside this root cellar, sorry, wrong poet, wrong flavor of dread.
It is getting hard to breathe inside this basement, psychologically, at any rate, though I can hear a motor and the electricity is on and the airconditioning is keeping us cold as a catch, on ice, for what purpose.
Then I feel so bad for my kid and I take her in my arms and try to hold her close which she hates, she stretches her jaws to bite my shoulder, which she learned from that other kid, so I crouch down and release her and she toddles over to my mother.
You wouldn’t know it, I say to you in my head, but at night she insists on me, she rolls over in her sleep and hooks an arm around my neck and knocks the air out of me, or if I’m sleeping on the floor next to her, she dive bombs from the bed to my chest, she lands on me heavy as reality and wakes me out of whatever dream I’m having, of an aerial bombardment or a revolution or whatever.
Your head turns back and forth, memorizing the crowd. Now I remember when your husband greeted me at that party and said, ‘How’s having a kid?’ and I said, ‘It sucks, don’t do it’ and he said, ‘You know we’re expecting, right?’ and then I glanced over and saw you looking so beautiful in your blonde hair, seablue scarf, bump, and etcetera.
We both laughed as if it were an urbane exchange.
An urbane exchange does not a revolution make. Or?
Once when we were students you said you wanted to write poems like the Sonnets to Orpheus. Or was it the Duino Elegies? Either one seems a bit far fetched, not just for you but for anyone living in this century. Can you have a Rilkean revolution? Are you one of those instructors who assigns Letters to a Young Poet to your undergraduates? Who promotes the apprenticeship as a pedagogical mode?
The revolution is about apprenticeship, that much is true. All revolutions are pedagogical, that much seems sound.
Everyone is stepping into a little glassed-in office to give their information to the man with the computer, several at a time, they can’t seem to restrain themselves, and really you’re being pretty lax, and why shouldn’t you be, we’re not exactly an ornery bunch, women, children, older and younger men, none of us conducting our lives with much of a sense of purpose, most of us just anxious to see how this revolution is going to turn out, what is going to come next, and we’re happy we’re not out there in the elements being exposed to whatever was in that milky rain that showered the crowds we watched on TV. It put those kids to sleep right in the stadiums, and the cameras didn’t stay on them long enough for us to know if they were going to wake up. Maybe the camera crews also passed out, they weren’t in their bio suits just to cover the graduations that were naturally happening across the country this May weekend. Harvard, West Point, The University of Maryland, community colleges alike were hit with this milky rain that panicked those of us watching at home and caused us to just pull back and stay inside and out of it, out of it.
When you arrived to take charge of us, to tell us our part in it, we were relieved.
Finally I manage to get close to you and lean with my elbows against the wall. “I just can’t believe you’ve been part of this revolution and having a baby at the same time! How long have you been involved in this?” I ask you.
“Eighteen months!” you say laughing.
“I just don’t know how you get it all done! I’m so impressed! And you look great, I’m jealous!” I say, and mean it.
“Thanks!” you say. “But I’m still so fat, that’s the one thing.” Up close you look not quite as slim as usual, but, I know, the weight doesn’t come off right away, and actually you look nice this way, you definitely aren’t now nor were you ever fat, with your cheekbones and tiny ankles, I tell you.
“How old can your baby be, anyway?” I ask.
“Five weeks!” you practically squeal. Your lips are this gorgeous color like where liquor and liqueurs meet in a glass, and one of them is fruit, and I never order those, because all I can see when I look at that drink is spill.
“I love your lip gloss!” I say.
But what I mean, is, I love you! I love this revolution!
I was fortunate to find a person who would solve my solitude. She would use her hands on my person until it was soothed. She would chop at my husk, then spoon out my sorrow and be its keeper. I located her at a castle. My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else. It was a tangled area of preening people, mostly diaper free, with real feet and hands, and each was traveling alone. You could ask about the weather there, and people would answer you in English.
The great Horace, childhood lover to Homer the Blind, when asked of love and its effects by the town council, who were conducting their Survey of the Mysteries, gathered his robes, stood up, left the auditorium, and never spoke again.
The time was technical summer, a season that had been achieved by nature so many times, so incessantly, that a clotted arrangement of birds created splotches of ink called shadows, and whole days went by without gunfire. Shadows were simply blind spots that everyone shared. Kill holes were called graves, and apologies known as writing were incised in their surface. Rotten bags were called people. Milk was never sprayed from a fire hose at children until they skittered over the pavement like weevils, but the children wore shields of clothing regardless, and the people who guarded them were often trembling.
There was a chance, however remote, that we—among all the others who also famously walked the earth—would not breathe again, however much our mouths looked wet and ready for action. If we pictured ourselves in the future, we were forced to imagine our coffins shifting on a loosely soiled terrain, slipping into their pre-dug holes.
In short, it was necessary to establish a romantic alliance and to publish the results inside each other’s bodies. In short, when we referred to our fear as “tomorrow,” our only solution was to seek aerial sensations with each other. In short, although we pretended to choose who we would destroy in the name of a relationship, we were instead forced at each other, feigning admiration for the way our bodies lacked fat, hair, and color.
We together conceived of solitude as a math problem, such like the ancients must have encountered when they saw two different suns in the sky: a daytime sun that was hot and burned out the eyes, and an evening sun that was cool, pale, and white. Each would soon have its own name, but for the time being the suns were anonymous, and they careened to a complex logic, and they were frequently misunderstood. People often died of heartbreak because of them. Maps of the dead called snowdrifts gathered in the mountains. An obituary water called rain fell everywhere, and the ancients turned the hammered surface of their faces into it, but still could not feel better.
Questions we did not ask, because Ovid already asked them so well: in what way would commitment to each other differ from a commitment against our own solitude? In what way would our daily compromises, our small shifts against our own nature, build into bulldogs of resentment that we would soon unleash upon each other? In what way would our displays of affection toward each other differ from advertisements of what we most wanted done to ourselves?
A relationship between us—two average-sized people who could not be mistaken for chess pieces, however much our faces looked chiseled and wooden and over-noticed—would be a chance to mutually seek solutions to the dilemma of solitude. Other people, we discovered, had a plus or minus charge, similar to those colored beads called electrons. To be around the minus people was to have one’s solitude erased, whereas the plus people seemed only to add to the solitude, which had a limitless growth potential, a way of swelling inside the skin, creating an aroma called disgust. If one of us experienced a deepening solitude in a crowd, a so-called Spanish Moment, we might conclude that a majority of the crowd was plus capacity, so overflowing with their own solitude that they could do nothing but share it with whoever entered their sphere. These people hated mud. They did not wish to be killed.
We were partners in a puzzle, then. The difficulty level was 9, or 9.3. There were no clues. We would have to wait until we parted from each other to discover whether we had won or lost. This was incentive enough to over-explore each other’s eccentricities, to enter a race toward bored familiarity.
This took place in an area known as the world, where people cannot fly. Cocoons called nightgowns adorn the bodies there. When the cocoons are lifted, an investigation occurs, and the result is often a wetness, a smearing on of fluids. In this country, we breathe into each other’s genitals with a periscope called a straw. We blow on them. We make a fan out of notebook paper and wave it over the area, using the age-old excuse that we simply love to read, and what better narrative than the one inscribed upon the genitals of our familiars? We play pipe organ music out of a stereo that looks like an old wooden shoe. Sex is not an event that someone is invited to, however much we sit by the phone anyway, waiting. Oh, there has been so much wetness between the people that streets have been built to collect the runoff.
As Cicero, the great sage, said: And an old shoe is beaten against the pavement. Yes, when the lovers meet, us destitute ones hide in the road and beat our hard old shoes against it.
We met inside the fat clear globules known as air. There was no fudge in the room. Swimming skills were not required. There were no weapons. A pocket-sized emissary named “Joe” introduced us. I did not love myself.
Afraid of the predictability of my attraction, I started a project with her called “I don’t like you.” It was inter-cut with other popular projects, such as “I am tired and scared,” and “You are so beautiful that I am afraid to have sex with you.” Her project revolved around the “Everything’s fine” model. She held her cookie up high, and I jumped and touched my cheek to it. Through several mutual misunderstandings, we grew to need each other, a need that could be charted on a calendar. The parchment was signed with an evidence stick. Many children clapped.
It was agreed. She would chop at my husk, and I would begin publishing my name inside her mouth.
Courtship is based on hatred, according to one of the great thinkers, Robert Montgomery, a man who ate a series of meals, belched into a well, and then died. Hatred was a tactic the Phoenicians used when they met an enemy, and it has been the reigning wartime model ever since, however plain, however obvious. She and I, my solitude defeater, were no more enemies than any ancient man and woman bagged in cheap skin and fading hair, yet a battle was afoot, employing weaponry such as indifference and laughter, kissing and ambivalence, rubbing upon each other’s bottoms with a bath brush, and waiting to see who would have the honor of starting the first argument. The goal was not to admit that we each suspected a future dependence upon the other. We commenced a theater of attractive indifference in order to seal our obligation to each other. We engaged in a strenuous denial of need. A holiday might one day be made out of this behavior. It would be called “Monday.”
It was not illegal to know each other. It was just difficult. We used different cities as launching pads, when cities were linked by layers of chuff called roads and roads were not called devil carpets.
The ancients were so disloyal that they died and never thought of their loved ones again. Homer called dead people “traitors.” The greatest loves were simply forgotten, and the bodies of leaders and slaves alike began to melt. The love between two people has never been stored in a vial and sold in a shop, yet sometimes she and I, the two of us, on the threshold of no longer caring for each other, a precipice called the Waking Moment, lay together in the bed shaking at each other’s bodies as though we only had water inside us and could be just so easily poured away. We used a wringing technique called a hug, and squeezed at each other with great force, hoping that somewhere on a floor beneath us there was a drain big enough to take the water part of this stranger we had been loving and wash them away, quite far from us, and then further still, until we could only hear the faintest sound, which we might mistake for a river.
The sun said no in the landscape low ochre-black smoke out of ancient gutted cars sinking dead air as Prince Faraway loaded the weapon and thought a pink vagina bled someone’s long fucking tongue.
Fake zinc tiles in the trashed neighborhood while hip hop ominously bump, uh, ah, yeah, exhaust fumes while Prince Faraway tried to steal the tourist woman’s purse huge yellow letters on the disintegrating wall NO MONKEYS brown magenta blood moves sticky on the street, scattered in pools on dusty textured desert avenues jackals and baboons ran away birds flew while soldiers in jeeps listening to rap chew qat laugh Hey boy where some pussy for a brother? Don’t make us kick your childhood in the never.
JFK put on a white chiffon wedding dress and veil for luck while still deafened in the heat one thousand bullets in and out of strangers no he recognized some tribal scars and so he hid waited in fear while flies and flies and flies and feral dogs.
Another time these boys come by the green and dirt hillside Bob Marley Jimi Hendrix and feel good man. And when Fidel starts to rock with his machine-gun, heavy, heavy, noise scares the German Dutch Belgian aidworkers scaredass men trying to be reasonable but their SUV broke down they’re so fucked.
Terminators chewing qat with juicy fruit gum young white women have in their eyes all this unknown which becomes familiar when JFK cuts off that guy’s wrong hands Jimi Hendrix tries on mirrored sunglasses of this bitch white buttocks part just as they run into Prince Faraway and Lebron.
There used to be a village or a trading post with nothing or it had rubber, yeah, and cheetah pelts, monkeys and parrots in cages, unlabeled cans and shit in tilted corrugated tin while Bob Marley thinks Fidel looks way cool in stolen camo, worthless diamonds and colorful money wipe your ass while all the smeary bugs dead birds and snakes, too hot and quickly, Lebron says he’ll go talk to the white men from history’s deserted palace and return soon where fractured music two-three seconds before he dies the bullet like a fly he swats at on his forehead red berries cry from swollen fleshmouth Friday the 13th style be like Jason man.
This magic isn’t powerful enough for shit the i-pod still rhythmically baking while fingers and toes freeze while Bob Marley has gold crazy-glued to his front teeth and Fidel been wounded crying for hours baby baby.
No one pays attention when the rebels loot Nairobi, no it’s not Nairobi it don’t have a motherfuckin’ name might be suburbs of Monrovia or maybe sacrificial pyres burning in Gbanga nigger.
Jimi Hendrix laughs at everything, coldblooded man, filthy, lies, Fidel is just dead while Prince Faraway throws away worthless diamonds for roasted chewy heart-muscle on a stick. Prince Faraway licks his lips sweet warm Coca-Cola doesn’t want the others see he’s bothered by anything but he’s faintly troubled as tremendous oceans split continents never before seen or known so fucking endless but he’s been there before or will be in some other eyeball in his head.
Then all those lions on the nod once on the lost savannah, Prince Faraway knows you must never allow evil demons to gain control of your weapon man… someone with a digital camera asks the grinning woundmouth if.
But wearing the wedding dress and veil from a distant looted alien means no one maybe the bullets won’t in a cartoon JFK closes his weary eyes while Jimi Hendrix tenderly almost friendly passes the spliff seeds popping to Bob Marley. Prince Faraway is thirsty again man three hours raping those blondes next to a pond of tired water hard-ons glistening miles from the bridge over dead river and more insects and corpses in long grass.
See, this tribe will only eat white corn man ‘cause if it’s yellow there’s a spell on it CIA urine fucked us again AIDS was invented in those underground forgotten labs the CIA, oh yeah man the CIA while Prince Faraway adjusts his headphones chafed dick pissing on pale changing body in a blurry snake shape while the lazy beat keeps asking if you want to if you want Fidel’s stripped body becomes an orphan child and Wu Tang Clan beats slow down inside Prince Faraway’s ears he walks veil blowing just the olive pants he stripped from carrying that Mac-10 into this vision he has sometimes of a gigantic palace in unmoving air, big lawn green flowing trees, ostriches pet chimpanzees bright orange and yellow, dark red and pink birds, tigers and Paris Hilton on a leash some gazelle meat sizzling in gray drifting smoke from blown-up cars that’s where he’d just walk down the hall a king through open giant doors no more dread.
Why then in his ancient Antichrist Superstar t-shirt Prince Faraway laughs then he can’t stop no one remembers how those robots in special effects with sick kung fu jumped over everyone, throngs of mine enemies shot down his other universal thought his other mouth of red eyes stream.
Oh he was just driving a silver car down some long street on another planet in the future under some palmtrees that pussy’s gone those schoolgirls little sisters hey their lonesome bodies everyone’s lonesome body when Prince Faraway’s wise older brother materializes head on a stump bumblebees flies buzzing thoughtful in pink smoke can’t find his triggerfinger endless fall slo-mo strings of drool
S has been shown to stave off dementia but only at the expense of unparalleled madness, particularly if what you take is not-S, some apocryphal and undocumented root or malign compote, pestled and rubbed into your head wounds with the ginger animus of a laughing lady or the saccharine angst of diabetic ice-cream models.
Cover your face in good Vaudeville measure and wonder what it is about a marriage that often goes flat when threesomes demand larger primes and years go unturned, simmering in pans of hot fat.
She does like you, though, your ruby mane of acne; she presses on them at night, those elevator buttons to nowhere, wondering if your smile will float when you plummet.
I don't know if I should take S again because my fists always strike their mark, slightly off center, scarcely hitting anything. There is a lucent gild to shower curtain mold that refracts shadows and bends them into draconiform templates that I smear with soap to clean in a pattern that threatens what remains.
She reminds me that my calvous forehead stands on its toes against the rest of my head, blocking the spill of pheromones and putting her girl parts in a sullen ponder.
I have a scrivener's way of documenting her face wrinkles. I'll point to them on my ledger and she'll quickly pull her face taut with her hands. Her skin is like the skin enveloping the belly of a clipped and fly-strewn roadside ungulate, wavering behind the pall of corpse gas and diffracted light, a smear of borrowed lipstick.
Stop it, you malaprop Chinaman, I say. This discomfits her faux Midwestern Tiananmen way of dancing over my small talk. And then she swats at the air with karate chops she could have gotten from any misprint picture book on stage combat and I dance, my eyes focusing on the space in between her lips where the yelling comes out. Her arm hair floats like corn silk and reminds me of autumn.
You are giving me a flare up, she says, demanding her flare up medicine. She lands a chop against the side of my neck.
I gave her a wobbling bag of martlets for our six month anniversary; I thought she might use them for that ‘coat-of-arms’ shadow box she’d been mentioning. Her hand whistled ungratefully as it threw every one into the closet, for later. I wanted to retract my hand bones up through my arms so that when I took a swing at her it would be perceived as playful badinage, the whipping of pink scarves.
I paid a twenty to my martlet guy in the hallway; keep ‘em coming, I said.
Hope burns with a xanthic curl of smoke until otherwise labeled on the white hot junction box of her encouragement zone.
Dear, the dompteuse has arrived!
She sometimes has the medianic wherewithal to chronicle future fumblings and then, after they occur, to chastise me for lethargy in the face of retrospective foreknowledge. You find this unfair.
Regarding the bedroom, I am ground-to-ceiling nude white lightning; her eyes are yellow fog lamps burning away the seeping moorish fog of foreplay. She dozes in a weather all her own.
I make rainbows on the malacoid filigree of her thighs which she then effaces as she sleepwalks away without vocabulary.
The davenport shoulders the dompteuse you hired to domesticate the capybara we purchased for a song at the terrier rescue, and so she sings, with a great flapping of mouth, and makes you wear a cowboy hat for wrangling soda and merlot from the drinks cupboard.
Juxtaposed to my own flickering light cone is Tomás’s light come which extends and jangles brightly and occasionally falls upon hers, which has a sideways lean that makes a mockery of my entire horizontal event space, sending entangled messages to my past about the unlikelihood of my present, which is kind of a fucking downer, smearing the claphound of my entire ontology onto some scotopic future's inevitable burnt biscuit.
Can he paint rainbows with his left hand, this Tomás? Probably, she says. Can you?, I ask.
Tomás works at a hardware store-slash-delicatessen and has fit calves that teem with promiscuous self-regard. Doubtless he is a pachyglossal hammer-jockey of limited swing; nevertheless, he has her eye and to hear tell he sells a mean sandwich, slices a mean pastrami.
The dompteuse has festooned the capybara with education and so he now looks at me for diversion, getting in my face and squeaking aphorisms in the language of rewinding cassette spools.
I should take another dose of S, she blinks.
We should take S together and so stave an epistemology of oranges from rolling out of our armpits and into the open mouths of sleeping pirates.
Take S alone and use the orange basket instead, or close your arms as might a man shimmying through the walls of a dark stalag with oranges.
We
You
The dompteuse has gone. Tomás is oppressed by shadow.
My martlet guy is beating on the buzzer. He slides my screaming fake orange ‘twenty’ under the door. I step on his hand when he reaches for my feet.
Things are beginning to go sour now that the S is gone, I say.
And now we have no oranges either….
And the capybara, bloated with merlot and frenzy, seeks respite and a sense of object permanence by snuffing at your groin….
And I have concerns of my own, she says, now that the bathroom wall has fallen backwards into my lover’s light.
It is impossible to read the Book of Glass without spilling blood. The reader pulls it out of the tower with special tongs and sets it on the ground. A dagger sticks out of the cover and it is stained with the blood of previous readers. Smaller glass daggers stick out of the larger dagger making it impossible to touch any point on the larger dagger without wounding hands. The blood against the yellow and purple glass of the larger and smaller daggers, when hit by sunlight, is stunning to the eye. You will have to take my word for this: it’s so beautiful it causes the reader to lose her senses and she can’t help but try to open the book. The reader grabs for the cover, and the blood that is then drawn forms the text of the book, which is filled with the blood of previous readers. The reader’s blood swirls across these first pages and the blood informs us that the text is about writing itself: here the writers are readers and they have gone too far with their own mortality. They die to read, die to write, and in the blood that swirls around the page and mixes with the blood of previous writers and readers there is the image of a massacre: the readers are rounded up by a God-man and some are forced into rocks and some into caves and some into mountains and some into rivers; and the water and earth and grass and leaves and air are dead and filled with the murmurs of the lovers who wait for that silence where thought refuses to think. To die to read, to die to write: the Book of Glass is a constant reminder that when people die their words unravel, flow out of their mouths like poison, and when their words hit the earth the soil loses all of its nutrients, the rivers dry up and the readers are thirsty. Or so it says in the Book of Glass, whose final chapter, written with the sharp edges of broken bottles, tells of a man who dreams of his own death in the pages of the Book of Glass. In this tale the Book of Glass is enormous, and the man is tiny in comparison. He needs a crane to help him open the cover, and when he finally gets it open he hops onto a page. On one corner of the page, there is a tower of sharp glass, which reads: in order to continue you must climb this tower. The man hoists himself onto the tower, and with each step he takes blood is drawn from his feet, hands, legs, chest, arms, and fingers. The blood drips down the tower, wells up on the page between the deadly glass formations and coagulates into a sentence that says something along the lines of: the book will end when there are no longer any readers; your job, dear reader, is to disappear to make the words possible, to make the blood possible, to make the destruction of the book possible, and this can only occur if you live forever and die on this page at the same time. The man continues to climb the tower of glass and as he climbs he feels himself becoming a parable about a parable that does not know if it is reality or parable. He lives like this for many decades until finally he forgets about himself, which is to say that in the final scene birds carry him away and drop him in a field of strawberries or sunflowers, where he forever murmurs the question: what is the weight of light?
The reader who opens the Book of Forgotten Bodies finds nothing. There are no horses galloping through deserted villages in search of the men who used to ride them. There are no children crying for their parents who were thrown out of air planes and into the sea. There are no soldiers who had their arms sliced off for refusing to obliterate innocent bodies. There are no rich men leaning against paradise trees as the drunk bodies of poor men stumble up to their houses to kill them. There are no bodies of hopeless virgins smashed on city streets by Mercedes Benzes cruising through the gentle drizzle of a foggy day. There are no bodies abandoned on beaches. There are no corpses floating down rivers. There are no bodies hanging in the military barracks on island XYZ off the coast of nation ABC. There are no bodies that pound rock against rock. No bodies that stand on one leg with hoods over their mouths mumbling words we don’t understand. No bodies covered in mud murmuring to the bodies who lie on top of them. There are no bodies that smell of chemicals and rest in puddles in the rain waiting for flowers to fall on their heads. No blind bodies that are painted by artists who value aesthetics over breath. No bodies that imagine their children’s bodies as ghosts and cadavers and skeletons. No bodies that live in bodies that no longer know if they are bodies. No bodies that fall from windows as they try to catch glimpses of the bodies that have fallen before them. There are no bodies discovered by rabid dogs in houses abandoned before they could even be built. No bodies surrounded by barbed wire as the countries die in the distance. No bodies whose skin burns in the strange machines that buzz like tropical nights. No bodies that burn in buildings that have been set on fire by bodies with no reason to live. There are no bodies that fry in the sun, that drown in the shadows, that roast on gas, that ooze algae and moss, that are covered in black rags as the lakes and the mountains die. No bodies that hunt or are hunted, that murder out of charity, that are murdered out of charity. No bodies that shutter the windows and hang themselves in libraries of their favorite books. There are no soul-less bodies, no frozen bodies, no bodies gnawed to death by insects. There are no practical bodies, no transient bodies, no empty bodies, no blank bodies that twist between forgotten body and dream.
The table is set for four, four dinner plates as a nest for four salad plates, four glasses for water and four for wine, red, wide open mouths better for the breathing, four salad forks to the left of four dinner forks and on the other side four spoon, midway between soup and tea, and four butter knives, below those silvered utensils—the real deal, not that fake stuff—four bright green, emerald, cloth napkins, linen. The tablecloth is white, also linen. The chairs are a deep stained brown, simple and modern, with very clean lines, the table stashed beneath the cloth matches, Martha can tell by its legs, also four, which barely emerge from their covering.
Doctor Bowen the male wears a tweed jacket, grey, a pale blue oxford under it, a bow tie to tie it all together, peach, and trousers, tan. He is instantaneously professorial: he plays his role well. They are younger than she imagined, not that she had a clear image of either, and Doctor Bowen the male still excessively charming. He wears wired glasses, barely visible, his brown hair covers up any grey, his face is thin and stern and very smart, not unlike Simon. He has bad posture though, the kind of spine that has served too long in battle, only Doctor Bowen the male has warred only with books and Rank and Tenure committees, his hands are deceptively small. They drum against the tablecloth on the top of the table, impatient.
Doctor Bowen the female is beautiful and trim, elegant, long brown wavy hair, and she dresses in a manner all too reminiscent of her table: a loose linen shirt, white, it’s simple, nothing flagrant, an unassuming cut that emphasizes the slight size of her waist, curving up to the curve of her breasts, which are firm, she is a sight!, and linen pants, a shockingly bold green, like fresh grass, the newest grass, they’re loose on her, hanging practically, and sensible sandals, brown leather.
The Bowen family is photographic in their pristine veneer.
The table, despite being set for four, with four of everything, two couples two pairs four squares, spreads enough food for forty. It would seem the Doctors Bowen are trying to challenge Martha.
Everything looks like wax, not like it’s fake, no, just that it’s perfect, too perfect to be gobbled up like she wants to shovel it in by the wheelbarrel, if she could, though that’s not polite, so she shows some restraint, a rarity for Martha. Every dish is garnished, every single one with an appropriate ladle or ladling device: they’re not Cro-Magnons! The dishes are simple enough though nothing is ever simple, let’s be fair here. Set on the table are three types of lasagna, one without meat, they had no way to knowing her dietary restriction—although upon seeing her they could tell she had none, not even a one—and vegetarianism is just so faddish, impossible to predict when and how you’ll have one surprise you at your own table, better to be prepared, Doctor Bowen the female always says, her voice trilling, and apricot-braised lamp, two whole racks of them, and roasted potatoes rubbed with rosemary and thyme, though without the accompanying parsley and sage, too many herbs drown the flavors she always says, green beans with yellow mustard seed and whole grains of sea salt, Dover sol in a delicate lemon butter sauce, char grilled skewers of shrimp, brussel sprouts baked with stone ground mustard, steak tartar, and gazpacho soup, and dessert obviously stashed away, hidden from the main courses, no no food first, then dessert, it can’t be placed with the dinner spread, how appalling!, their table is enormous to accommodate so much food, and salads, there were four different choices: the typical dinner salad, butter lettuce with some romaine cut in, chickpeas, red bell pepper, mushroom, tomato, carrots, and an unlikely suspect, grapes, the perfect ingredient to tie the flavors together!, with a easy balsamic vinaigrette, and a roasted beet and goat cheese salad, a mozzarella basil tomato salad, sure, and a cob salad, easy easy, and with it, four variations on bread, each one equally delicious, two of which Martha could hardly even pronounce, Doctor Bowen the female’s wavering voice reminding her to ease up on the bread, lest she become too full before the real meal even begins, and in the middle of the table, the center piece of it all, something prepared especially for her taste buds, a slap to her provincial tasteless white trash roots: a tub of fried chicken, Doctor Bowen the male putting piece after piece on her plate while the Bowen family abstained from that one dish alone, and she didn’t any doctor anything to explain to her why.
Martha eats like she can’t be sated, the food so scrumptious it’s sexy, she’s turned on, all this food, each bite taking her closer to delirium, but she has to retain her composure, the Doctors Bowen judging, throwing question after question at her, Simon goofy grinning, they
were in love: Simon with his parents’ misery and Martha with all this food.
A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF SEX ACTUALLY FEELS BAD.
With a piece of the sidewalk nailed behind my face, I'd still find a way to lift my face.
With a piece of the sidewalk nailed behind my face, nothing would change.
I'd still lift my face and keep it off the ground.
I'd still change nothing.
With two lives I would use the first to figure out how to make the next one even worse.
Do you believe me.
We can meet in the corner of space where people forget to check--where I do things I have to do with my eyes closed.
The fifth orgasm rips the groin the bestest and I am a beautiful human.
I eat jewelery and give nothing in return.
And youth is the thing that keeps ending.
Unlikely future.
No one has to protect the animal with the big jaw from the cross-eyed palsey holding a bb gun.
The cross-eyed palsey with the bb gun threatens nothing.
The ground will get cold soon and I'm waiting to be there, to freeze with it and be cold until the sun tries its best to get beneath and cook me.
I actually feel ill with how negative I have become. But I don't have any negative feelings about the carpet in my apartment.
And I don't have any positive feelings about cleaning it.
I only have interest in continuing to rub my feet on it then sending electricity through my nose to my roomate's cat's nose to give my roommate's cat braindamage (hopefully [wink wink]).
All things keep ending.
Do you believe me.
Purcell slouched beneath a dark cloud and his yellow parasol. The cloud was rippled long like a lion’s rib cage. The cloud breathes, he thought. Then he thought of his own breath and how it had been thinning like his memories of his mother.
Purcell punched two holes in the air. The holes howled deeply—a finger beneath the hammer, a drunken child—echoing inside themselves, pink wormholes, membranes vibrating all the way to the cloud’s stomach. The cloud breathes. The cloud chokes.
I have exited houses into a common backyard and had no idea which house I came out of. I have entered homes that were not the one I came out of.
I have extracted a beer from the refrigerator, searched through a drawer for a bottle opener, and pulled up a seat at the kitchen table.
I wandered out of the back yard of one party and through the back door of another. One of the strangers at the kitchen table asked me, “So how do you know Darren?”
“Who?”
“Darren. It’s his party.”
“I think maybe I was at a different party,” I said.
Be with your mind. I’m talking meditative practice. Every feeling should be the strongest. For example, I used to see these guys riding motorcycles in t-shirts. Get passed by ‘em. Seaming two lanes of traffic. And it’s beautiful to watch the way a cotton tee blusters at the pace of the freeway. Big patch of back skin exposed. And I remember always being shocked by that back skin, even though I see ‘em all the time. Weekend hoggers, breezy on their toys. But no matter how many I saw, I was always whoa. Now that I’m being with my mind, though, I see that all beauty’s the student of beauty before it. All beauty stands before the world, you might say. All I’m saying is that surprise is fine, don’t lemme jerk you around, but try being with your mind. Like what if those ads on buses for TV shows didn’t have the time or channel. Not even the name of the show, even. Nothing but the hook. The woman with a blowtorch.
A man can lose himself behind the wheel of a car.
Anthony slams his brakes. The blood on the ground is B negative, and the last thing they saw was Anthony. Dead men cackle and shake their bones at Anthony, and when he looks at the fields, he can only see sand.
Anthony sits on the side of the road and waits, reopens the scars on his lips.
They came with new eyes in a plastic bucket, like fish bait, bobbing and rolling in murky water. One guy motioned to a small room and I followed. Thirteen steps. I counted each one. Eight of nine doors in the corridor were closed. Mine was the open one. Must be an epidemic, I thought. A loudspeaker in the ceiling announced the death of Michel Foucault. I thought back to the death of Andy Kaufman a month earlier and wondered who would be next. Celebrity deaths always came in threes. They told me to have a seat and relax. The chair looked like it belonged in a dentist’s office so I leaned back and opened my mouth. The bucket-carrying man laughed. The other two guys didn’t find it funny. They slipped latex gloves onto their hands and snapped the wrists.
I told them I wasn’t seeing things straight lately. I said there was a lot of confusion out there, or maybe there wasn’t any confusion at all but my eyes were seeing things as confusing, so for all practical purposes there was a lot of confusion out there. They said a lot of people had complained of the same thing lately. They blamed it on Madonna and MTV. They said everything would be better soon. They said I’d be seeing clearly in no time. That made me feel better. I asked what they intended to do with my old eyes. A woman came in and handed me a clipboard. I filled in the blanks and signed my name at the bottom. They didn’t answer my question.
They spoke to me through white surgical masks. One of them pointed to a poster on the wall and asked me to describe what I saw. I told them about the big smiling heads and the long tropical feathers and the castanets and the barely-concealed breasts. I told them I’d seen a lot of breasts and big heads lately; that, and the most confusing image of all. They said, Boy George? I said, Yes. They said a lot of people were confused about that one. I asked if Newvision worked for everyone. They said yes. They said the most disorienting thing was for people to let their eyes wander. They said Newvision was a cure for wandering eyes.
The bucket-carrying man reached into the water and palmed out a pair of eyeballs. He held them out for the masked guys to see. They nodded and each took one. They extracted my eyes with what looked like a sorbet scooper. I didn’t feel a thing. They said that was normal. I felt a slight twist as they screwed new eyeballs into my head. They said that was normal too. They said the right twist was what corrected the vision. One of them pointed to the poster on the wall and asked me to describe what I saw. I told them about the wind-curled American flag and the smiling face of Ronald Reagan. I told them how he gazed out of the poster as if into the future. I told them he reminded me of my grandfather. They said he was everyone’s grandfather. They said he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past. They said this about Ronald Reagan. I recalled reading something like that before, but not about Ronald Reagan.
The two guys removed the latex gloves and white surgical masks. They said my vision was corrected. I asked again what would happen with my old eyes. We’ll send them to Brazil, one of them said, to go in those giant carnival heads you saw in the poster. The other guy laughed, joined by the first one, and I knew they were pulling my leg. The bucket-carrying guy dropped my old eyes in the murky water and left the room. I asked if I could use the bathroom. They showed me to the last door on the left. From behind me a woman called my name. I turned to find the clipboard woman striding in my direction. She handed me a pair of dark eyeglasses. Wear these for one hour, she said. I asked why but she turned without reply and marched down the corridor.
The bathroom door opened and out came the bucket-carrying man, minus the bucket. He pointed to the glasses in my hand, then to his own eyes, and nodded with a smile. I understood his gesture and slid the dark glasses on my head. The bucket-carrying man approached me, a wicker basket of breasts in one hand and a pair of castanets in the other. He registered my confusion and removed the glasses from my head. Bread and wine, he said. He was correct. The wicker basket contained three loaves of bread, and in his other hand, two bottles of red wine. Even Newvision doctors need to eat, he said. From behind me the clipboard woman yelled. One hour, she said. I returned the glasses to my head.
In the bathroom I paused at the sink. Latin music played through a speaker in the ceiling. I turned to make sure the door was closed, and once confirmed, removed the dark glasses. I saw myself not as a reflection in the mirror but as if looking at myself from the mirror, as if standing there I was the reflection. I returned the glasses to my head, counted the seconds until the hour passed, and removed the glasses. The works of John Philip Sousa played through a speaker in the ceiling. I saw nothing around me, nothing behind me or in front of me, nothing to my left or my right, only me as the reflection of my reflection. They were right. My vision was corrected.
I lose the room in another pocket.
She is coddled by scoundrels in tandem.
I twist the stilts into an open belly. My own.
It’s Friday afternoon. The patrons clap.
I applaud to keep them happy, but puke wood.
This causes me to fall over. I step
out of my mouth with flowers.
She exposes her breasts. My job here
is done.
There is no country but the country within. No matter the streets alive with stray dogs and pigs, wandering and rooting and masticating bodies, those men shot through by command of the king after a dream insisted. No matter the rats and their fleas. No matter the tanks swiveling and shaking all buildings as they patrol, as they gather bodies. Our city is wild with plague, but the only virus is the virus within.
Outside, amidst towers, red skies and radio signals, I drift and disperse. I fill all voids. Mounded against shop windows, my one time membrane, and stray dogs fill their mouths, fat. They slink past with low hung bellies while from manholes, alligators howl like hissing steam. Beneath our feet, how they float with yellow eyes. Their armored parade.
Days follow and I gather those clumps of skin. Pink meat wailing in my netting and I bundle them in burlap sacks. Before they can breathe, I force them into coffee tins with an iron poker. Soaked and lit, they curl into soot and ash and they disperse how they began, as flakes of meat, like feathers of an exploded bird.
If only from the man’s hands, years ago, the spray of fuel oil and the flash of a match, but the woman gathered first my flecks and motes into her folds. Once inside I lost her face, her hands, and I knew only moist warmth while her kisses issued in whispers. From the davenport, the man’s canisters hissed and seethed, his tubes, his clotted eyes, his yellow teeth. Powerless to end what his detritus had become.
Our city is alive with shotgun blasts and the sullen plummet of pigeons. With wild boars devouring detritus in the ditches and soot faced children prowling the streets with bolt guns, children firing bolt guns into ditches, children eating hogs raw by the wayside, splattered with blood and flecks of skin. As a culture we are losing more skin than ever before. Our city is clouded with skin, with children cutting free from our nets, with children wandering, alone and armed with bolt guns, with dogs and alligators and hogs.
Outside, my bones become as flecks of teeth and neighbors are dragged from their houses and shot against brick walls. Everywhere armed soldiers in ski masks and everywhere skin dispersing.
Outside there are forced marches under moonlight. Outside there are cattle cars and mounds of detritus like pillars of salt.
Outside lonely children shoot hogs for spending cash.
Outside I think.
Outside against a brick wall, the howling of dogs and the sounds of silent anticipation, of fingers preparing to squeeze. I hear the decay of detritus, of urine and skin and blood, of teeth and skull. I hear a world to come.
When my body is gone I will take on a form of rust and mosaics of tiling, a tomb of decay and drip where all is lit with florescence. Beneath the ash of all valleys will remain my valley of alligators.
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.
1. Did he posture expression selectively?
He stained himself along what passed for night until architecture was deemed blasphemous.
2. Dressed up little slogans and named them boy?
Universe was the blindfold of his decapitation.
3. What criminal requisite did he envision helping mankind self-exterminate?
The laws by which his image once was feigned.
4. And did he mistake the screaming for a marriage proposal?
He filled a carriage with calendars—a collective diaper.
5. Why do you drink the hydrocephalic runoff of your loved ones?
The color of my hand is really just a radio. My radio is radio-colored. I put it on a trampoline instead of voting. Because I have a background in pornography.
6. Did you get your hysterectomy at Toys R Us?
I met a girl who danced like a rare disease. She unwound masking tape in place of any drum. She whistled like a grenade in bed. We used a stove timer. Now we are in love; our bodies no longer require food.
7. A dog bites its own tail until gangrene sets in—is this how you make love?
Love with more pigment.
8. Some girl’s face convinces you to throw milk at a wall—is portraiture happening?
Another whiff of sainthood might kill this flavor.
9. Is your life the mistake of a sob for laughter?
Seems like a technical problem or maybe I am lonely.
10. Is beating my wife good for the economy?
The first contraceptive was old age. The second was your face.
11. My blood pressure is your daily news?
Let me explain. Your face is a trampoline for syphilis.
12. Was that you impersonating insecticide by Third St.?
Your face is the eulogy of our generation. Your face is a port-a-potty for the mafia.
13. Why do you make a habit of corners and excuse your tardiness with lewd photography?
You engrave intention on a wet badge of ancestry.
14. Why can’t I stop touching you?
Because you are disgusted.
15. Why do I let you touch me?
Because you don’t like being touched.
16. Why imagine a nuclear power plant when I go down?
Your underwear runs like a diseased egg through the humidity of my palm.
17. I sleep with your father. I sleep with your best friend. I fellate your assault rifle. Do you announce your candidacy for president?
You love me with too much of your history intact.
18. When you close your eyes, do you see a war zone – how many war zones do you see?
Children holding fish build deities in the snow by accident. It rains. The desert burns us. Neck high in swamp. We lie down and are silent but alive.
19. Which physicists endure anemometric digestion for machines that imitate sleep?
Gravity will be substituted with Reaganomics.
20. Did you then administer electricity to improve sub-atomic structure by testing weight?
Gravity will be replaced by AIDS.
21. How has nanotechnology revolutionized the enema?
They pretend to be insects, but are really the veins of your eye.
22. What recommends invalidating time with stochastic hotness?
They fine you with pink ribbons. They rub medicine on your house. They know how to stage a good sex crime. You wade in thievery. They surgically remove your suck. They travel up your daughter until she accidentally expels an older version of herself.
23. Do you express joy by accident?
Traffic, by the way, is how you were circumcised.
24. Reflective surfaces have always been a problem for you. Are accordions involved?
90% of the time. 90% of time does not exist.
25. I conjure machine and here is a girl swallowing the globe with formaldehyde. To cure what?
You miss her. With limitations.
26. Her self-inflicted birthmarks on continuous display. Do we know death by kissing telephones?
You’ve been loved with such perverse generosity you assuage nothing.
27. Lost in a forest, I address and bow to each tree like it is my grave. Lost in a supermarket, I am born so much a second belly button develops. Where?
You apply ether as lipstick and call make-up another dermatozoon.
28. I conjure pond and go to sleep without ears. My kissing her is interrupted by rigor mortis. Say what?
Stop puckering, you might evolve.
29. Who likes me with finer precision than anyone has in both our lives?
No one likes you.
30. Help me go down the slide of my own weapon? I need you to revive me, periodically, all night.
No.
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.
You believed in corduroy pants.
You stole my waterbed with a syringe.
You spat tobacco in my ventriloquism.
You broke some ocean to build my gibbet.
You filed a lawsuit so I would hold your hand.
You mistook my high heels for a lawnmower.
You replaced the tires on my car with your diaphragm.
I am the shudder-still of camping heads.
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.
I resemble an escalator in bed.
I train my baby on the volcano.
I do jumping jacks without provocation.
I said my headache gave you constipation.
I maim tubas on our anniversary.
I kill dogs with lesbian underwear.
I always fake holding your hand.
Stir my grave with a pinch of bra
Boil lice in a carnival hat
Stroke three dying wishes warm
Groan cow eye all over the plate
How you bake determines sainthood
Prance the olives into fine mucous
Follow ten grunts with a murder pan
Use a spoon to annihilate your curves
Break your hand to the fire’s rhythm
Don’t be caught unwinding your hair in any daylight
Gobble the soup
Leaf-blower of newt
Rub it on your tan
Shatter your husband
Till folks passing toss vinegar at the sky
I hollowed out my eyes for this trophy,
champion of getting sucked years.
I would clothespin a tombstone if they let me.
I would sell the mother right off my back
if they hadn’t already hanged me for it.
I was raised on hamburgers
like you or anyone below a sky.
My mega disaster blood pumping
diatribe, wardens, squalor of merchant,
prancing voyeuristic whodunits.
Their mere victory of names blushed live.
I killed an inch off your hemming
to doubly ensure everyone’s good
forehead. Walked the mob in a tired
circle of sniffed ass. Onward through
horizons formed by the unidentified
bombs of whoever I said we’re chasing.
I insinuated pressures relinquished
or calculated foreign spray. Surely
another jaw had been there.
But whose eyebrows tied up
on the runway getting gross with miles
boarded the first daughter?
Here is the couch where she fucked for the first time. Here is where the needle went. Here is the car he drove away. Here is the basement where her child was buried.
Here is the hole where she thought monsters lived.
Here is the tree where her father was.
The little hollow that her waist makes isn’t something she was born with, but it’s something she was born to use. She was a straight and narrow child, never danced but watched instead. Now on nights when the wind blows hot she belts the hollow, cinches leather tight around the in-between space as though to cage in something that nothing otherwise can contain. The illusion that she’s bottling herself, that she’s bursting at the borders of this tie, is what draws men in to watch her perfect hourglass twist and the grains fall and imagine feeling them—feeling her—from the inside. They imagine watching her spill over as they strip her down, but really when she winds a belt slow around her it is the hollow guiding her hands and not her hands shaping the hollow. Self-enclosed. And in the morning when they sit up gasping, forgetting wives and sons and how they wait crossing one knitting needle over the other, kicking a ball around the yard alone, the sound that wakes them is the sound of the hollow whispering. It hisses words of lulling comfort, insists that they lie in wait and lose themselves. I am your cave, your shelter. Fill me with your sandpaper palms.
The little hollow that her waist makes isn’t something she can just forget, but she tries to stop the gap with bulk and substance, things that she can tote along imagining that they too are pieces of her own soul broken off. Now, on days when the wind blows cold, she tucks in an open bag of groceries there as she crosses to her car, fits the hard curves of cans and jars against the space beneath her ribs, presses their cool stillness against the hot pulsing of her flank. She thinks how impossible it is for them, these men, to grasp how little she wants them for themselves, how her snakelike movements are an invocation of something higher, how the cries that she wants are not her own warming the air as she clenches them between her thighs but rather those of another, one who does not yet exist, one who may never exist. They fail her and she sends them packing under the weight of all their thirst and all their illusions, which she has torn up and handed back to them in shreds. She will do this until one of them fills the little hollow that her waist makes, fills it with kicking, screaming, gurgling, drooling love, the thing she knows she was born to use it for.
More corners, new corridors, new rugs, everything in front of me coming fast and leaping past, swallowed into the stuff behind me, some dense crowded point of my beginning.
O my God, I thought, vividly aware of the heat building under my back. I will start a fire.
I was considerably relieved to reach a contemporary-style rug. Perhaps here I was most at home. I could almost relax. I thought to myself, These are the hottest, hippest of all rugs. I savored the idea. You are done with the Orientals, I told myself. Say goodbye to timeless elegance and colonial charm. You are entering a world of shocking one-color solids and crazy close-knit stripes and mind-bending electric rectangles, repurposed modern art masterpieces, anything but boring.
The rug that takes chances. New. Loud. In your face. That lies there on your floor like someone’s hallucination.
We pray to the west shore.
This being—your god, we don’t know his name—this being eats through the sand and gets between your toes. He wraps himself in skin foil, in body bags and debris. He does not accept prayers before sunrise, no matter how earnest or pleading they might be. He looks down and observes the crawling souls, but does not extend a hand to scoop them up because his fingers are wrapped tight around an archive of words, all the verses and murmured prayers he commissioned from the greatest extant minds, and he has become too protective of them, too guarded. He refuses to let even a syllable fall from his grasp in exchange for saving a single soiled native from the oncoming tide.
We pray to the east shore.
Here, your god is dead. The skin foil has long ago been shredded; the body bags unzipped and emptied of their walking bones. The debris has been fashioned into statues of lust, pleasing to the eye and to the caress. Febrile minds, drunk on blustery air carried in off the waves, can easily imagine these shapely forms being open and compliant. Rape is the price of such progress, such diseased imaginations, and under their invasions these childbearing hips of concrete and metal will, if impregnated, give birth to the future. The beachcombers dream of natives who won’t crawl in the mud, but will instead run into the sea and wash themselves until they’re adults, bled clean and ready to breed for the first time. Words, meanwhile, are history, washed away in the brine.
I suppose
they are all dead by
now, but I'll tell
them
I vomited, I did a thing,
I, axiom, is stuck in—
I walled like a fence myself small—
shy asteroids leaving sour milk trails
floating, that old saying, and in my vomit were rutabaga skins, tomato seeds,
the gravel roasted and dried.
It’s true what you heard about me, my hair, my running water, my job—
locusts whose eyes are telescopic and vast, whose calculations of feeding are precise.
The plants hemorrhage oxygen.
Whisky was around us, consumptive.
I’m not ashamed to be this stumbley crux.
Night after night I attended little gatherings in the woods,
and night after night we remained investigated by dark foliage.
Whisky, our detonator. We were quiet so we drank it,
we forested, our faces pressed like embers warm and pink, orange, brown—
Ice cubes not withstanding,
we reached and pulled each other out of night’s drink,
our napkins became little diaries,
and when we rose out of tents, we felt like useful trash. Balled up,
we waited for something like urbanites.
Pleased to be a part of something,
we vomited ourselves conscious.
Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster’s scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.
concern not for the corpse or ; the depths of the savage apparition ; but more for the way ; you asked if I ; wanted four or 12 chicken nuggets ; or which sauce I wanted to go with that ; your voice sounded wheezy & polyped ; & as you gave me my shitty food ; some old duck with her dyed black hair ; asks if she can have a Big Mac ; ‘This is Red Rooster,’ you coughed ; but the biddy didn’t take it in, so you continued ; ‘McDonalds is over there. We don’t do Big Macs!’ ; eventually she got it and shuffled on ; over to the McDonalds counter ; & as I sat down and took a handful of ; soggy chips to my mouth I realised that there’s two types of people ; down here downstairs ; in the greasy delta that is ; the counterpoints between the ; Melbourne Bar & Bistro ; Red Rooster & McDonalds ; & these two people are ; those that put their grimy carry trays ; into the rubbish bin ; & those who leave it for the hired counterhands to collect ; & there was steady something ; like an orgasm, shop-soiled flames, soft content ; human infinite one ; you is the seed of fuck-like ; knowing weightless insolence ; staying up & later ; completely like me ; with exaltation ; between this you’re called anything ; remember the time that ; we went in spiritual & many things! ; forthwith but we think so about our sorry self ; to a plateful of tenderness ; backwards the fuck watches ; its head from the eastern waves ; among the anything ; but we’re either sinful or expressive ; about our knowledge of sadness ; she gave it with a please! ; for I am this angry ; when we think we just wanted to be wise-ways ; the whole disguising minutiae ; the meandering & ugly me ; such an out of shape fatty ; renouncing ; but having delight in our knowledge ; of sadness ; & I called you Saint Thicket of Anemones ; he came up with a new name ; from henceforth he was saint thicket of anemones ; my friend ; is it the own-nests there that sends forth? ; hiss & this which is nothing ; just to feign off his own skin? ; is it the one who tills but keeps the clearing room in the soul? ; for if meditation says this ; “headway & be off & guard with what larks ourselves ; & steals to this the golden-world’ ; then it should also ; be foot of itself ; its individuality ; & happen ; with needs that must be apparent ; this is a tabloid ; you could tell she was keen to vex her mouth illumination ; when by extinguishing her escape ; heading to & to her ; lowering so now beyond ; was not envy nor murder ; & you’re wearing the goddam pity skin ; & as I walked over to Grattan Street in Carlton ; & as I walked up our street with suffering ; from the most excruciating cramps ; on the front of my shins and ankles ; I realised that the cramps were like synapses ; which come from the word "synaptein" ; which Sir Charles Scott Sherrington and colleagues coined ; from the Greek "syn-" ; ("together") ; and "haptein" ; ("to clasp") ; these synapses are essential to Neuronal networks ; for I have tried Xanax ; partially because it calms me down ; when I feel a cramp starting ; & I have tried Motrin for pain ; I’ve drunk tonnes of the shit ; I’ve drunk tonnes of, though well-intentioned ; pieces of shit that possess ; no significance or effectiveness unless ; its external prescription is matched by a personal internal motivation ; standing in Mulqueeny’s Pharmacy ; peering at the colour range of the Glucojels ; there’s a line of Gnostic thought that’s echoed in the jellybeans ; the pharmacy assistant grabs my prescription ; as something comes out of her which is ; imperfect and different ; from her appearance ; because she had created it without her consort ; & it was highly diverse ; her face seemed to have originated in Alexandria ; & coexisted with the early Christians ; until the 4th century AD ; due to her being both dualist and monist ; I peeped repeatedly at the Melbourne Town Hall ; & wondered when they’d let me into their chambers ; so I can wear some velvety robes and concern myself ; with some moral, mayoral & ritual practice & garb ; in these silly myths of big city living ; the malevolence of the Mayor ; the demiurge is mitigated ; his authorial style makes one think of the ancient schema in two ways ; & they’re both shit ; but “Shut it down!” he shrieks like a strip-mined parakeet ; & now there is ; a naked girl lying ; author by ceaselessly rest-breaks ; but my bottle of sherry’s shoulder ; is that girl he she and up and starts playing ; and the teaspoon ; she also keeps igniting around hugs and sex mags reach over only nods ; sex mags are a bit nervous ; sex mags ceiling turns and the lighter out reading from a magazine ; that he does her chair ; she launches hear it lands ; mumbles nervous ; she’s my anything ; towards her sofa ; just as that someone’s think ; about is again - step useless ; how’s sex mags? ; there’s one only ; “you’ve also got a mountain bike!” ; been towards the down my this ; I and he lifts facing hers ; but my pyjama are in the washing basket! ; quickly swivels with afternoon ; has it up both ends ; flicks it across the once table ; where his index finger was ; it seems beneath his breath ; and then pushes his eyes ; are looking for sex mags ; toss it onto the tabletop to friends ; the bottle of sherry is important ; pay attention ; she’s giving the in yesterday and friend ; me with glasses ; cigarettes ; sex mags ; poise myself down ; up the bridge of his nose ; with her coffee in head ; out into the purposely ; it’s sticking up! ; it’s been herself up twitching and annoying! ; there’s snakes & lasers ; where the scooters sit ; the bike-stranded Honda’s, Yamaha’s and fashionably-owned Vespa’s ; where the muddy and broken fridge-filled & choc-milk carton Yarra squirms ; under the Princess Bridge, up the road from Y&J’s ; I heard some guy mention that his last name was Saturnia ; I immediately thought, ‘spa town!’ ; He was carrying his wallet, a sippy cup & a polar-fleece jacket ; in a slightly torn plastic shopping bag ; he was asking people if there was a bus service out to Abbotsford ; I immediately thought, ‘wanker!’ ; some kinky flare Tchaikovsky’s his vice ; the exterior shutters ; it shutters bluntly ; like titanomachy those little bitches ; the unapplied images make characters of the contemplation ; & to hedonism we’ll leave the reader ; & on this third occasion, the drunken spirit! ; having to work as an ass that you are ; your state of mind is something far from falling & content but they have awakening ; so rise up & sing! ; for the wind ; is the tide ; above the basic dirty plan & delta ; & the gulls are titans in reverse ; they’ll leave without us! ; these seagulls & sylphs will fill the whole world ; & the stars of more will be tended ; in a state that the afterlife will professed ; finiteness & system ; I was drinking melted butter & wine ; & not caring too much; about the fall of humankind ; leaving the parked scooters behind ; the bike-stranded Honda’s, Yamaha’s and fashionably-owned Vespa’s ; under the heady heights of the carriages on the old-fashioned Ferris wheel ; entering the underpass that circumvents ; on the southern bank of the Yarra under the Princess Bridge ; I saw the sodden refuse and tampon-tacked water of the river ; & I wondered whether ; to me were greasy rivers more interesting than over-fished oceans ; I saw Methuselah, call to saw the fountain the matter that was cutting off roots ; monsters parted ; a holy Lord house of your Enoch ; the children of the thirsty drank from a thousand other vessels ; & as I peered over & into the Yarra, I saw the murky picture ; albeit Yankee American & more like a fourth heaven ; kind of like reading the Proslogion ; all the saints with their black jaws of wrath ; their dark forces ; emotional or otherwise ; to happiness ; I’ve been given these ; life intellects ; the bottom of so-called verses dead ; but in shame & disgust ; heavy steps are life ; nothing ; is description ; just night terrors ; if it had been a state of receiving ; I’d have then cut up & did not live ; with my proslogion & fake heaven ; with my Caveman in Balzac the individual, her tissue and the whole of the structure can humours, feelings, impressions, that each character uniquely powerful instance linguistics ; beside the spire ; blessed they shall be under the tundra wolves of the city ; & they will begin to hear the fire sirens ; & they will begat to be a great chastisement ; & I shall ask for the day in time to become ; me ; or ; perhaps you ; & now I want to eat a whole pizza ; pizza during peak hour ; sitting in front of the old disused Royal Women’s Hospital ; outside the Yvonne Bowden Auditorium ; whoever the fuck she is ; I saw 10 or 15 Domino’s delivery drivers ; skiving off from turning out pizza orders ; playing around, tossing a motorbike helmet about ; all rough-going & proper foolish ; like a tawdry army of naked monkey shines ; all born disturbance technologies / selling pizza like ca-ca porn ; they all wheel out with sweating looks & reeling face ; I unfurl a lit cigarette lighter ; & waive them on & out like I’m playing an evacuation torch ; & now I’m alone ; bye bye pizza delivery drivers, u will be missed ; strolling over to Royal Dental Hospital I noticed that the traffic ; was like some horrible knackery ; a road race of pumice bitumen & uncivil fecund maggots behind the wheel ; of twits & pull gentle dragons driving their Mercedes ; peak hour is like an underlying torn auspicious barnstorm ; driving within the criminal piggery with the out signal & the test features vandalised ; truck driver arm muscles like massive conjoined turds ; fire engine sirens like burnt learning latter tricks trivial oxygen bullshit embarks ; thump! ; truth snake signal lady ; on the corner the fossil street poop runs pattern askance while the gasping revisited tramp groups within the ; spatial surrounds of a ruby-lipped sense ; some of the delivery drivers are making their way back via Swanston & Grattan ; their fashions are dog fire ; dripping in eulogy luxuriance ; crimping in a maternity dress, mini-skirt, bikini ; to the soothing smells of pepperoni ; it’s a pogrom ; with your bald, fat Belfast head ; & cheekbones that couldn’t grow a beard ; I’m going to put my footed thong ; across your gulping neck ; as the clouds aspire atop the trees ; meaning like a-spire, like sitting atop some spire ; some column of shit ; & as my fucking Haviana clips your Adam’s Apple ; I’ll grab hold of my $5.00 fishing knife ; (that was gotten on the whim, the spur from the Queen Victoria Market ; to deal with stuck pricks like you) ; I wish for your newborn when you do get a newborn ; to not last out the week ; I wish for ; a sudden invaders longer designate solvent tends ; at far end of wets his as salt decomposes ; at cough his madness, that the text to the workers the ego ; considerably ; here is perhaps ready-formed dictionary, they tend to mystical, religious, social, natives used defines disappointment over the always anterior, never and children may not pussy so open, It was like remarked cracking sound sentence: this was and force a motion, swelling and promote empathy, trust, orgasm ; I’ll grab hold of my $5.00 fishing knife.
After the rooms open to sky
your voice says a space is empty
among the stones
I find myself understanding the end
of the movie before the rest of the band does.
The bomber was Mrs. Jones’s boyfriend but he was often busy. He was a lone wolf with his own life’s specific interests and demands, he said. He needed time and space to let his mind roam. He’d only exploded something in front of Mrs. Jones once, a tiny baby bomb he’d baked into a cake. They set it in the bathtub and watched from the doorway. Batter and frosting spattered onto the walls. Mrs. Jones clapped her hands with glee, then flung herself toward the bomber.
When too much time went by without the bomber, Mrs. Jones put baking soda into film canisters and lined them up on the kitchen table. She stood with her broom, clutching the handle in anticipation. She closed her eyes as soon as the vinegar made the small explosions. She pretended the bomber’s coarse voice coming from the broom.
“Boom,” he liked to whisper.
Now, you can watch your dreams unfold on the screen.
Take a good look, that's you talking.
Anytime you need a reason, reach out and it's there.
Imagine your confidence when you step into the river.
If it's medical, we've got it.
When you have to believe yourself more than ever.
Who doesn't like armadillo.
What do you see through your windshield.
You'll love the way they think you feel.
You're always one stop ahead.
Give yourself the chance you've always wanted.
Who can tell? You never will.
Just smell that fresh-baked bread.
Tonight, tomorrow, forever.
Picture their surprise --
They won't be able to stop finding out they're real.
You call the meeting, you set the agenda, you work the trap.
Time will have no meaning for her.
You won't be able to stand still.
As pure and refreshing as sunlight and seafoam.
Get off for good!
It isn't a game until you catch the razor.
Friends, love, and starting over every day.
Never needs pulling or re-orienting.
How much of your paycheck would you like to keep?
It won't happen to you -- again.
Break that five-a-day habit and make money from home!
Just like a fairy godmother, but better.
Hello isn't just a word, it's a way of life.
If it isn't in your heart, we didn't put it in the box.
Here's one about cake, said the computer technology. The computer technology felt smithereened and lady buggish, conscientious objectorish. The man and the woman and the dislodged geography. The uncle and the gardener and we're all ready. Conscientious? Objected, thank you. The open for business sign on the floor, a tree growing in the forest of it. So here we have the lady bug, the cake and the sexy stiletto trot of the woman. The gardener said it. The sexy stiletto trot, smithereened on the floor. The gardener sweeping the open for business sign. And the woman, the man, on the floor, smithereened. There goes the lady bug, the computer technology, the lady bug, under the table and the woman reading it. The man shouts at the tree growing in the forest. The woman must look in her bedroom after dinner, cake. The computer technology in the corner, the uncle on the couch narrating it, tough. So the sexy stiletto trot collecting dust on the floor. The gardener polishes the shoes conscientiously, objectively. The man, the lady bug. The dislodged geography of the woman skips across the tiles. The uncle on the couch said it. Later, the gardener asked why. Tough.
THIS IS WHERE I WOULD LOOK AT YOU AND SHAKE MY HEAD SOME AND THEN NOT SAY ANYTHINGI read something on the train yesterday where the writer talked about “rubbing his penis against her waist” and I thought of you and felt happy and then sad.
I want to murder murder with you, mother would say with Angela Lansbury’s face, do you want to murder murder with me? Do you want to murder murder and murder murderers with me before they murder the murdered then murder the murder we committed? Mother would say to brother and me in our beds. Or, do you want to murder murder through murdering murderers before they murder the murdered then murder the murder we committed, then murder me, then murder the murder you committed, you murderers? Do you want me to murder you? Then there was a little little stillness. Mother would take off Angela Lansbury’s face and fold it on her lap for a while. I don’t want you to murder me and I don’t want to murder you, Mother would say to brother and me and our beds. Mother would laugh until she got it right with her own face. Mother and brother are now dead though not through murder. Me? I have Angela Lansbury's face.
Team Sad is sitting next to you on the train. You are nervous. You don't know what will happen. Team Sad has a question for you. Team Sad is looking right at you. Can't you see? Do you think this is some kind of joke? This isn't a joke. You should know that. You should ride your bike to the ocean & feed each poem to your sweetheart as if your sweetheart was a baby bird. Team Sad thinks your dear one would like that very very much.
I'm scrawling these white sheets whiter,each word I add
is part of a gigantic subtraction, each step
each breath and possibility. The bookshelves gape
emptier the more books there are,
the closets the more clothes,
the jewelry and safe-deposit boxes,
the shipyards and the dead-weight tonnage.
Love, we're kissing huge holes in each other
and I am releasing my seed
over you like a shroud
and another I, Richard Milhouse Nixon, am releasing bombs
that do not save me, am bombing myself,
BOMBS LIKE A WHITE SHEET OVER MYSELF.
With each moment whoever is alive
is growing emptier and emptier,
isn't it clear
that the world needs antipower?
Not power or dreams of power
but antipower
that will sneak into the voids,
thrive there and people
us with humility and thankfulness and distrust
of a pyramidal blueprint of the world.
I've been making book length portraits of friends and colleagues by inserting them into books and having them printed in editions of two. I call this series Novel Protagonists. Mostly these are classic novels with the main characters replaced, but this has taken other forms as well.
Pig PhotoI was the pig photo because he asked. These ham shirts we’d been blessed in got stuck against our make, and the fridge kept coming open, ruining the Invocation dinner. We’d already lost the pudding and the yurt. On my black back I carried my ten brothers to the location outside Adam’s where we watched the sun unspool and make a halfie. More guests arrived, in seize. My father’s lover, the photographer. The invocation cloth was coming down. In sight of the officiates, I fed the gift pig his photo with my own arms, squealing, then I became the pig again, my best brother, another night. From in the pig I heard our landmine getting cold, its circuits spurting pearl juice in my ham. Still, the cauldrons would not stop screaming. In the ash I raised my hand.
Dog Photo
I was the dog photo for the second ceremony in which the women became cream. I had to hurry up and piddle so there’d be music. The floor rising toward its double: the house above our house above our house. My skin shirt had me on it, wearing another shirt with me on it wearing another shirt advertising assmeat, soaked clear through. Inside the shirt I was already holding the dog photo I would become when this began again, as it would have to. The dog inside the photo inside the shirt had become Adam. The furor of his cut glew in the divots around his “Love Me, Kill Me” smile: spittle fleck in rainbow peel over our Christmas, a ceiling we for some seconds could believe.
Crow Photo
In the crow photo I am fucking the crow from behind with a large white pillbox in the image of my mind. I did not want to fuck the crow; it called and called me over the silicon of my days endlessly and whitelessly until I could no longer feel my brunt or swim away. I came into the smallest room of the local arena of our fine town after Black Dinner, into a ballroom cordoned out of glass. Of the sand the glass was made of the mites will ride and listen while I fuck the crow into a man. Though I am not yet a man myself, I believe in the solemnity of cock, and when the crow spurts there are diamonds, and I cannot control my hands.
Dream Photo
You and me and the seven children my brothers plan to make from the same woman and the crow and pig and no one else, all here crowned in the smallest room where the next wedding will take place. The rates for pew and pastor in this day’s dimension are pretty high, but it will be a charming ceremony, full of ardor, and the aphid blood is free. Try the Anatomy Crackers, they are delicious, and will ferment in your heart of hearts a home. Unfortunately, this is not the actual ceremony, and this is not ours. Outside your body still is bone. In this picture of this picture, all my fur is upside-down.
Ram Photo
In the ram photo I am disappearing. There are all these other men. They have taken the ram quite far from me. You can see it in the grain. You can see the bulging in the men’s throats and in the cloth around their pants. They will destroy the ram. The ram was my dearest friend. He gave me anything I asked, despite his own silent, gleaming libido. Had he lived long enough to match you here, I would have took your name and made it his. I would have replaced your name with Cord of the White Brick, From Which All Future Gods Are Burst. You would have had to run through the streets when you were hungry with the termites spitting against any inch where you would walk, and you would grow erect in your clean places, the places of your childhood, and your new name would force you to make fuck: you would fuck weak and praying numbers, in the quiet manner of the whipped. You there at any hole in our fine stupid city of Worship photos. Within the hole of whole of what you forever are. Thank the ram for being removed. Thank me for disappearing inside the rump you left for dead.
Witch
3 cups white evening
3 centimeters shorn mind of the wild idiot by night
3 pulls from the cup of the betrothed father’s worming sample
3 cakes caught in a pill
3 udders sewn from brother leather, stuffed with the evidence of worship of a hole
3 throttles of Gug-Gar brand throatgrease
3 unshot pregnancy films by Anger
3 of my mother
3 of me
Child Photo
I knew the man who took this picture. His indigestion scores the lens. In that version of that year’s end, the balloons were handsome and all mine. I didn’t want to watch this any longer, but dad insisted, wishing for the stammer of the pop, which always got him shitty, my thirty other brothers begging from his testes all the hours of my life. Those aren’t my scratch marks, that’s the pigment. I am the one with the bowtie. The meatmasks in your image are as well my belongings. We ate them in ships we sailed toward upon a curd of titty meat. It was 1100 days before the ground grew back. You would have ate you, too. After the picture, the man, who is my father, confessed to having made love in his old age to a horse he turned to paste.
Horse Photo
Already it was ending and would begin again and end. The colors of the linings of the gifts made purple where I’d wished white over the white. The ascension was ascending. Each ceremony had to hide. Knots grown in along the hair around my new cerebrum ballgown. Already there I was. Already with the knives and all the bunting, calling the Dad back for more smell of my pregnancy nightlife. This horse, I didn’t even get to rub his neckpiece, though you can see that he is sore around the holes. The 13th staircase was a doozy getting jammed on. I was spurting all this milk. I knew the strain Dad put on his own surface soon would render somewhere else for our vacation. By the time we got to here, the box would be beat to cities and the cities sounded and from the sound there were mayonnaise buffets and shirts with [my name] and passion fits that gave us kids. I’d have more than I could take to bed. The heat of the horse’s hide against my vulva made me come more in my mind than he or any man had ever, and, and.
Cat Photo
At the top of the surface, our glands were mink. The prism of someone unfolded in my breast pocket and flew aboveground to kiss and kiss the sore inside that brother-murdered buzz. You could hear it for a thousand meters. Then the blooming rumpled up. Then the groomsmen had their dicks out and beat the mainframe codex from my mind. I knew I wanted to be wed to father. I knew I would stay white. Then the surface strobed in pickle. My cords. My legmeat rubble music. The hole was far. The prism went on and on unfolding, screaming its old glow.
Photo Photo
Dad’s legs of rubber. Dad’s reverse mind. His arms already weighed a house. In each house the animals were doing buttfuck, and I was in them, and beside them, though I no longer was the pig. My mom was with us also, and my ten brothers, and all the women Dad had rubbed. All my lives. Dad’s codex nostrils. Dad’s obliterating thumb. In the houses more were coming. They came out of the spooge. Dogs from pigs and pigs from kittens from the photos from the wash. More than the houses, it was swearwords. It was anything we’d been asked off of by god. The fuzz around Dad’s kidneys. The lash inside his pump. Look at my Dad’s eyes. See how they’re trying. Do it. See the child inside the dump. After this look, he would close them. Do it. The color would be glue. He would never see again, me or mom or any of his wives. This silence would be the all for which through every wedding night he’d prayed.
Grow Photo
In the last I was the Grow photo, in unseason, because that’s who stuck around. I could no longer get my nipples wet, or see the zippers, so I let him have it all. I let him eat the whoops out of my manger and my center and my mutt. The holes left would be Christ. Christ is risen. We’d walk around for hours, have a long lunch. I’d learn a language. It would snow dice. The guns would come down, in my rising and resizing, flame pushed under flame. Here light would mention anybody. Light would let me know.
mark wakes up. he was a cat before he went to sleep and now he is not. 'this is fucked up' he thinks. he is a human now so he says words like 'fuck'. when he was a cat he could almost say the word 'well'. almost was never well enough. mark shakes his head and walks to the bathroom. he falls several times. 'fuck two legs' he thinks. god is laughing. he laughs at humans. mark looks at himself in the mirror and hisses but it sounds like 'fuckkkkk'. cats are always saying 'fuck' god realizes and laughs a bit more. the laughing is unnerving it sounds like television. mark is discovering television for the first time.before mark saw the box as a place to lay that flashed black and white squares at him and emitted a low buzzing sound. this was pleasant. this was not correct. mark curls up awkwardly on a couch and watches television for the first time. somewhere deep in his new mind mark realizes he is fucked. he watches the news. mark wishes he could say 'well' now but he is too busy!!. 'humans are always too busy' he thinks. he licks himself and watches more television. 'fuck'.
When I met you we were the shape of salt shakers. I married my dad and threw him in the ocean. I dragged him along the bottom as he filled with salt. I opened my legs and a grasshopper was there. Your first home was a house on stilts with butter dishes. I slept in the shape of what you told me about your house. I met you and we became pigeons under the rafters and held on hard. We became barnacle-shaped butter dishes. I met you and you put me on ice and I froze in the corner of your first bed. Spring was coming and the buds lined up for us to enter. I entered you slow as life. You moved into life with a sleeping porch and a butter dish in the corner and my dad moved. There was a feeling among us of a movie star with sideburns sitting and holding a knife. I could stab the walls of your house. I could bleed on your house and my dad would bleed. My grandfather taught me to swim and also how to bale hay. After the wedding we sat by the lake and he threw a small stone in it. I saw him throw a small stone in the lake. Let’s talk about the Fibonacci sequence. Let’s talk about the time you walked around your house and I waited in the park with the sun hitting my jaw. A few albino ants scurried through the grass and your neighbor was waiting to watch us walk into the house. I was not there, not walking, no grandfather, no knife. I was sleeping in your first bed with a butter dish, softening in the late spring. Walk up the hill to your old house and sleep and your neck will be a vein for the city and people will buy vintage ashtrays decorated in roses and the city will sleep in the butter-thick night. The city will be a chorus for you and your neck. Your neck sings and the porch and the subway rattling by like a knife. You want to get to my neck and I’m a subway station filled with knives. I can sit by you on the subway and smell your boots. My grandfather took the subway in from New Jersey most of his life. He didn’t believe in education. He didn’t know what pizza tasted like. I can smell your feet. You think I will lie down in the grass but you are someone who eats butter under the slats. There are three dead people in me.
Our God surpasses the Gypsy god; He is more avuncular and noble, though some of us begrudgingly admit their god is more assertive than our God, whom we haven’t seen or heard from since He rose from His own corpse and promised to rescue us from peril, and He has, though in secret, and if you could witness His wondrous methods you surely would fizzle in awe, so decent and grand is He, our Savior, who speaks in a voice that is no voice, not the song of any bird, not the snap of burning logs or crunch of shoes on sand.”
Listen. Boys be trained like go wait stay shop. They purse and cuss on cue, liketelevision, and step out through black window dress like doors. I’m a street animal then,
named, turning looking spitting carrying cantering, missing my throat through which
three words saying, My ponytail, my chest, my see-through blouse pass smooth, Baby.
Car horses, car bikes, named Baby. Siren, floral bell, like floral white that serves and will
window from another reflection. Beneath the church porch ivies clutch my blouse. I’m
inside. Take me. Wait there. I’m still inside. I hover. Leave. I hover through, I’m told, and
by.
Our story is broken onlywhen the tent preachers land,
giving grandma a use for that fancy fan,
making all the bad women
vomit up money. Otherwise, I spend
most days pulling ribbon from the kitten’s
belly. Sometimes the husband
takes up hobbies, like disassembling
radios, and scatters the wire-furred
pieces on every empty surface.
I hammered one of his stray dials
to the cupboard and now
I can imagine the creamed corn
talking to me without
looking crazy. I tuck away
the hope that this is just
an independent movie—
the bad teeth bleach clean,
spackled pockmarks peel.
Times like these, the idea
of children plays double-duty
as wish and shiver. They never work,
but people keep making them anyway,
like hand-held sewing machines
and herbal lozenges. Even the lawn,
sun struck mid-summer, wants to die
a little quicker but can find nowhere
high enough to jump from.
My sister is inside watching a movie and bleeding. I don’t bleed anymore. It’s not something I thought I’d miss.
How come when I sit down to write about you, what comes out is all about me? I make up things you said so I can refute them during conversations with my friends. I make you sound careless because you’re dead. You loved me, or didn’t, depending on the day.
I call it Darth Vadering when circumstance hijacks previously good fortune, when machinery replaces body parts or disease darkens our intentions. Thomas asks me if everything’s all right, but he could not possibly be referring to your funeral, how I told Elizabeth your lack of T-Cells must have Darth Vadered your personality and she said, “For as good of friends as we were, I knew him as well as I was ever going to know him,” like it didn’t matter that you no longer existed.
I pet Rachel’s dog and think, “I’m such a total loser. Not even this poodle will fuck me.”
I do what the chink says. I drink the gall of fish, burn the liver and heart to ward off demons, staple the rest of the viscera to the wall and stick batteries up its ass. Get close and it sings.
I’m positive I’m negative. I’m Positive. I’m Negative. I’m Greg. Ayn Rand.
I’m writing about your arm. Are you calling my arm fat? No, I’m calling it an arm.
I call it Darth Vadering when circumstance hijacks previously good fortune, when machinery replaces body parts or disease darkens our intentions. Thomas asks me if everything’s all right, but he could not possibly be referring to your funeral, how I told Elizabeth your lack of T-Cells must have Darth Vadered your personality and she said, “For as good of friends as we were, I knew him as well as I was ever going to know him,” like it didn’t matter that you no longer existed.
I pet Rachel’s dog and think, “I’m such a total loser. Not even this poodle will fuck me.”
I do what the chink says. I drink the gall of fish, burn the liver and heart to ward off demons, staple the rest of the viscera to the wall and stick batteries up its ass. Get close and it sings.
I’m positive I’m negative. I’m Positive. I’m Negative. I’m Greg. Ayn Rand.
I’m writing about your arm. Are you calling my arm fat? No, I’m calling it an arm.
You depart the world in knots, like a dummy. How far you fly11.
“Don’t fall for a bald guy,” mom says. “Once he’s gone, you see him everywhere.”
My Burmese friend tells me she likes tumult, is at a time in her life when she needs to up the tumult. She squints to obscure her dead eye, alternately hiding behind a curtain of hair and exposing her face. (I suspect all people with brown eyes are colorblind.) If I do my job correctly as her friend, one day we’ll have the conversation where I tell her about my crippled leg and how I hate walking in front of people, especially up stairs, not because I limp but because my ass sticks out. She won’t have much to confess about her eye unless her condition is the result of a terrible childhood accident.
Darth Greg.
“Don’t fall for a bald guy,” mom says. “Once he’s gone, you see him everywhere.”
My Burmese friend tells me she likes tumult, is at a time in her life when she needs to up the tumult. She squints to obscure her dead eye, alternately hiding behind a curtain of hair and exposing her face. (I suspect all people with brown eyes are colorblind.) If I do my job correctly as her friend, one day we’ll have the conversation where I tell her about my crippled leg and how I hate walking in front of people, especially up stairs, not because I limp but because my ass sticks out. She won’t have much to confess about her eye unless her condition is the result of a terrible childhood accident.
Darth Greg.
She had not died. She had not moved either.I took my jacket off.
She did not shift her body.
She did not speak to me.
I wet her fingers with slow kisses.
She did not stir.
Although she bathed herself every morning, and although her fingers were quite wet, she did not bathe herself now.
She did not drink the coffee I always made for her. She did not eat the muffin I slit and buttered for her.
She had not died and I would not leave her.
I wet one of my fingers and I brushed my teeth.
I smelled like sleep and I wet one of my fingers and I washed the sleep off of me.
I stood there bathing and watching her.
She did not thrash or kick the covers free.
I did not leave her.
She had not died and I did not want her to be awake and alone at the same time.
I dried myself off with dry paper towels. She did not seem to hear me.
I whistled bird sounds. She did not die.
I tried to fill my clothes out with myself. She did not open her eyes.
I turned her head to face the light coming in through the windows. She did not move or thrash.
She had not died.
I pulled the sleeves of the jacket. I tightened my belt a notch. I opened the blinds on the windows.
She did not die. She did not shift her body either.
I tucked my shirt into my pants. She did not stir or move or moan or say my name in the morning although the sun was there and through our blinds and along her hair and in her eyes although her eyes were closed.
My wife did not wake. My wife woke every morning.
Now this morning she did not know—
Now this morning it was no longer morning for my wife.
The sun stoked the fire in the air and we all sat around breathing it. David Bowie tongue-kissed the silence. I pictured his mouth opened wide, all tonsil and tongue.She asked, "Is he saying, 'fame'?" and I said, "Yes."
He said, "You look like a completely different person with your fingernails painted."
I wondered about that, waved my hands around my face, asked, "What about now?"
He said, "Yes."
I did it again. "Now?"
"Yes."
She said, "I agree. Completely different person."
I thought about it some more. I held my arms out. Wrists bent. Hands pressed against the air. Ten red ovals.
I wanted to say, "But I ate a fried egg this morning," "But I wiped enough times until the brown was gone," "But I put on mascara and thought about how today I probably would feel less happy than the day before." I wanted to say, "Look at my dry elbows."
But I didn't.
I sat there in my skin while they looked at me. So new. Now blonde and well-kempt. Now speaking French. Now petting Great Danes.
They just nodded.
God is a crazy bandaged-up hermaphrodite(?) who disembowels Itself with a jackknife. After It dies in Its own filth, Mother Nature comes out of nowhere and gets Its corpse off. She later births this twitchy bald guy, whom She sends out into the desert to play with the bandit cannibals (Humanity). She later finds the kids picking on Jr. She tries to scold Humanity, but then Humanity burns & ravages Nature & Jr. Then they both get better & She drags Jr off by a umbilical cord.
I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I’m amazed we’re not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this.
Then we got drunk on Grappa. I watched the other people flirting and yelling. I took off my headpiece. I became very hot in my sweatsuit, and was ready to go home with the chef when my boyfriend appeared.“Guess what?” he said. “There’s another Jesus here. But he said I looked way better, so he bought me a beer.”
He smiled. He thought the chef was a fake chef, I could tell.
“Very good,” I said. I put a hand over my glass so the chef could not fill it again, and he, being a man of food and women, understood what the gesture was meant to convey.
We rode the train back to our friends’ apartment. Being from out-of-town, I liked watching things blur together—the lights, the buildings, my silhouette, my boyfriend’s—despite how different one thing is from everything else.
Come upon an elephant mouse what do you say? I am a lesser pyramidBeside the Pyramid at Giza. I am a Colossus but not the one at Rhodes.
I wonder only mending the other wonderfuls to make myself er.
I stop all lights from not lighting. Some masochists treat the rest of us
According to a bad golden rule. Some sadists keep it to themselves.
My sympathy my empathy my sympathetic empathy is is proximate.
Like on my lap. Like with crazed claws digging into my shoulders
Under a big X over a little. People can be nice and people can be horrible.
Which people do you mean? As a tubular matrix I can be silly.
It depends on how many dimensions in which this occurs.
Twelve in a single sitting— did that really happen? I watched a movie
That explained multiple infinities of differing lengths and sizes.
Afterwards the author did something to himself. I can be this idiotic too
I am the Nebuchadnezzar of whom you speak. In my palace I hung
A bush that bloomed in the winter. I called it Christmas Cactus
But then I saw a real cactus in the Tucson Range near Tucson, AZ.
It is easy to do so. You take a left on Speedway Boulevard and drive
Until it turns into Gates Pass Road. But addressing the saguaro
Is not the same as telling everyone about the nature of the future.
It’s not the voice coming out of your forehead into the microphone
To tell which people they are the good people. To crack a whip
That leaves no mark on this loving body. Impossible now to say
What you wanted to say once forehead into microphone is bumped.
Once whip at hungry lion has been cracked. For at that exact instant
When the rope goes taut, it is traveling faster than the speed of sound.
I Jaw Up to the Ladies like Gregory PeckI Am the Middle of a Water-rights Feud
I Am the Next Theme Come True
I Am Not an Invention
I Am Elope Imagination
I Am from Asia through Midair
I Am the Etcetera Behavior of Language
I Am a Natural Interim
I, I Am a Natural Wonder
I Am the Heavenly Gift of Honey from Midair
I Am All These Tight Titles
I Am White and Thorough
I Am a Facial Fracture
I Am a Managed Hurdle
I Am Fed New through Jersey
I Am a Miniature Finish
I’m moving to the cloud on December 1st.So I can spot the clear cell on a cloudy day.
I let the whale’s eye out of the jar.
We can’t be here anymore.
Sometimes enough of what happens
is news folding in on itself under
the northern hemisphere. The placement of my ladder
is the northern most of the ladder. I climb my glasses
to polish them. I climb my daughter to hold her
steady. She keeps her blond wig from blowing
away. Unleash the whale, pull the whale
teeth out of your mouth like fog, like a new
kind of cloud we can live on.
1. Peeled BackMonths and days curl at their ends into nights. Sharks fester ‘round the raft and salt-wounds ripple over skin of Bebe Faye and Platt. Sea algae surround a boat more a forest until a day where distant ships spot wanderers and sail forward in rescue. When asked if the shipmates needed help Bebe Faye and Platt were confused. They looked into the eyes of the fearful on the bigger ship and asked each other who they thought they were? Surely they could not see why such a ship would be in need of so much assistance. Overhead gulls and eagles fly and Bebe Faye knows this flight signals land. For this reason she steers the boat back to sea and Platt, orchard-busy, never cares enough to take issue, nor does he want to know.
2. Blush
Full trees yield a battlefield of apples the birds take to. Into the trees Bebe Faye climbs with her string to tie to the ends of the birds. To snare them, she says, to set a trap. She ties to their feet twine and pulls them their fall from the tree to her cooking pot.
-Dinner tonight, she says to Platt, who kneels before a Senshu, will be apple over gull.
Platt thinks of the eye he will obtain when the land finds them. He thinks of the land that will find them. He thinks of how far the land is and who steers the land away. He looks at Bebe Faye with such hungry eyes she tell him to quiet his look.
-It is dangerous what you are thinking. Be happy, Platt, that you even have a core to peel. -I’d rather we were on Beatrice Looking Forward.
With open palm to cheek Bebe Faye slaps Platt into deep red. He takes by her wrists her arms and grips. They stand locked until a single shark circles and Bebe Faye, too excited to remember her predicament, whispers to Platt her wishes.
He slides from her pocket her knife to slash shark flesh. Together they pull the fish aboard and gut it.
-Forgive me, Faysie Bebe Faye opens her palm for the knife.
3. Lost At Sea
With miles of blue around Platt fosters an insatiable desire. This desire he cannot name nor project onto the sea, so he jumps in. Bebe Faye allows him immersion. When he returns he shouts -Emptiness! into a trail of smoke lifting from Bebe Faye's desalinated water. On a mound she sits Indian-style, silent until Platt salts his apple-blistered hands. -Just tryin' forget yourself awhile. What's an orchard for?
4. Exposition
On the water sun glistens wave crests alight a glow of night before storm. Fish go under a deeper current and leave shallow waters for gulls to suffer starvation. A distant cliff proves another land to steer away from, bird as warning of close calls. Bebe Faye climbs algae trees to see better the coming rain, the sun a gloomy red to fall into the ocean. Standing below, Platt prepares string to kill bird, abandons fishing for fowl. His orchards sway with the winds Bebe Faye feels heavy her back, her body rested in the limbs. When she thinks of the land she will not steer herself from she thinks in shades of green and brown. All the blues of the sky swarm the ocean to storm her mind before the rains. At night she cannot tell between dreams and sight. Which reality leads back to sea?
you are walking pasta cemetery, and you
think, "oh yeah, that's right."
A List of What I'll Write About, Compiled Earlier This Morning.•Pool shadows = whales.•Blackberry bushes scratch your thighs.
•I am an Indian. Why? (Let’s ask grandma.)
•Soon you’ll ask me to play and I’ll be the one saying I’m too busy.
•The procession of uniformed catholic children walking to church in B.H. during lent.
•Spencer’s photo in Sister Leonella’s office: was it really there?
•Mom’s shrink was dying in Hawaii.
•Pushed off the bench.
•Pneumonia/skin and bones/lips chapped raw. Mom and Louise: “You look so pretty.”
•The meteor shower.
•Mountain man rendezvous.
•“I made that fox pelt quill.” – Mom.
•Muddy Waters and Janis Joplin in Markleeville.
•Mom meets the devil, says no to hell.
•Mom’s lists/Mom’s summary of Mexican history.
•Almost dying in the seaplane on our way to see some lepers.
•Good white wine looks like clear pee.
•The turkey photo: Amy.
•Disney cookbook – I don’t remember making snowballs, but she says we did.
•Pan dulce and Nescafe = Old Mexican ladies with perms and bruises.
•Taco parties.
•The way Lupe chops an onion.
•Spencer stole the koi; I named him Lou.
•Terri on the tennis court.
•Evolution according to Lupe.
•Who set Dad’s tapes on fire? (Mom speculation, like “I think he murdered his wife”?)
•Little Mom behind the barn.
•The bees. Charlie. Barn door raft. Allergic and anorexic and shirtless.
•“I don’t know; I think the world is full of evil now.” – Mom at the B&B.
•Mom’s room/house. Recycled wood gives kids splinters.
•Dad’s room/house. Cold.
•Filling up the bathtub for blue gale.
•“Why can’t you tell me your mantra?”
•Haunted hotel rooms.
•The glass playhouse.
•Mom becomes a catholic.
•Cherokee – oranges, butterflies, roses, swimming, chickens + something else.
•“Remember when you were on a plane that was hijacked?” “No.”
•“They’ll record your breathing before they kill you and then play it through the intercom.”
•“We imitate each other’s faces.” “That’s pretty primitive.”
•Quiqua’s room. Hologram Jesus.
•The red-light in the bathroom.
•Old dogs with bad hips walk like models.
•Pine nuts and rosehips. Baskets.
•Saltwater lake + mocha milkshake = bleeding exema.
•June lake has no bottom.
1.
A camera catches an act of theft. A hand
slides into a purse. A purse is held under
a slot machine. Someone wants a machine
to protect commercial interests. Someone
lies frozen on the couch during a commercial.
Frozen hope leads to lapsed expectations.
Lapsed logic gets lost in a file. A lost voice
won’t return. The senator is screaming
about the return of the steam engine.
The street steams: we need antennae to find
our hotel. Our ancient antennae are useless.
We just stare at each other.2. For details on corporate corruption we milk the book. For us, books are bricks, though some argue flames or wings. Under the wing of a 747 our house looks tiny. This house is full of anger over the point -count of antlers. The senator points to the birth rate as a sign of his decline. We aren’t convinced. Convinced our obsolete machines are suicidal, his followers push typewriters from bridges. The bridge buckles as an acrobat balances on a wire above an earthquake. During the ground-breaking, the senator kisses a constituent’s neck. We aren’t having fun.
The pebbles grew into stones, the stones into great rocks. The rocks reared up into mountains, which cast their shadows over the land - their cold shadows. Darkness fell on the fields & the town & on the woman pinning sheets onto the line, her mouth full of clothespins & her breasts taut & lifted against her blouse. When her husband looked out the window & saw her, desire rose up in him; & when she came into the house, he laid her down on the unmade bed & covered her body with his own just as the first boulders broke loose from the mountains & the avalanches began.*
He brought a door with him & placed it against the hilllside. Then he went in & closed it. What happened to him next is not known, because the door was for him alone. Later when they heard him scream, there was nothing anyone could do.
*
There, where the grass was allowed to grow without let or hindrance, children liked to hide from those who might call them home to their lessons. This evening when their mothers went into the towering grass to bring home the fugitives, they found entrances to what appeared to be underground tunnels. Putting their ears to them, they could hear a distant sound like the gnashing of teeth.
i want to pour a carton of orange juice onto my face and bodywhen i am lying on my bed, in the morning
and I want it to be Sunday and I want to go back to sleep
and when I fall back asleep I want the orange juice to quickly evaporate
and take me with it
1. EternityGod is like a beast; He does not know time. To know time is man’s alone, it is a weight only the seed of Adam may feel.
3. The Year
The first of their strange children that is born in a year is named and the year is given this same name. It is believed that the child and the year are one,
4. A Month
so each month there is a celebration and a new honor is given to her. Even the old women come to her on their knees and whisper requests. But when the last month comes, and winter begins to set on them, they stone the child, ending the year. Then prepare for the next.
5. A Season
The seasons are another of the Egyptian’s tricks. Their tax collectors with their knotted ropes sectioned off the movements of the great bodies. Like you might separate horses or an enemy’s spears. Still, the wind drags its teeth over the five nations and the Nile satisfies its hunger when it pleases.
7. The Soul
It is from heat that life comes. A lifeless body sealed from predators, but still exposed to the sun, will produce life, flawed and deformed maggots, but life. Our lips grow cold when we are close to death.
In the South there is a species of birds without mouths, which live only on the heat of the sun. At night these birds are so still that they are often thought to be dead, but the heat from even a small fire is enough to make them stir and to blink their eyes, although it is not enough to allow them to fly.
I started this one business that installed padlocks in clouds.
We sent our technicians up in airplanes with their cheeks puffed out. We sent them up wearing protective gear & carrying sawzalls in each hand like cowboys in gasmasks. We sent our technicians to the academy of clouds & they drank from the world by means of sawdust & dew. We sent our technicians into the desert of stifled laughter, to fields of dust. We sent them to the steel-roped tops of bridges & asked them to close their eyes & imagine cracked mirrors. When they returned home, they stayed up all night watching the blank screens of their loved ones’ sleeping faces.
Our offices are wooden barracks of raw walls. We have invested heavily in the traditions of princes. We have no interest in landscape.
Our clients approach us with their palms turned out & with a certain grit to their step. They fill out the initial forms of age, weight & death. They tell us about all the loved ones whose faces have become white tablecloths. They tell us about the knives they have buried in the sand. They tell us the secret names of all the trains that whistle by night. They sketch loosely imagined drawings of the clouds that need to be locked.
The technicians look over the drawings as the airplanes warm up & they pick the splinters from the soles of their feet & they hate the chaos & they feed themselves with their own lost structures of use.
I started this business because I grew tired of the feeling of someone calling & me not answering. I started this business because I grew tired of the sound that I heard when I answered the phone, the sound of breathing into a metal water pitcher. I started this business because everyone walks away.
There is too much behind us. There is so much behind us that the world is lost in every moment that you move through it.
I have no memories of being an adult. Like an ache, I have never stopped moving. When I am happy I feel like I never have to move.
Our technicians are the only ones who know how to lock a cloud. Our technicians are young & wild, with large families with lots of children with lots of names. Our technicians must have pitch black eyes. Our technicians must have sharp white teeth.
To lock a cloud one must know the heart of the cloud, just as one must know how much blood is in a baby. To lock a cloud one must watch the black spot in the middle of their eyesight all day until they come to the canyon. A locked cloud is like a child who only knows his name. A locked cloud blinks & blinks & blinks & blinks.
Our technicians do not lock the clouds; they only install the locks into the clouds. Fifty thousand clouds make up a sky & with our product one can maintain their clouds.
One cannot brand a cloud. One cannot teach a cloud anything more difficult than to cry. It is so cold in the sky that one’s tears turn into glass. The protective gear protects our technicians from all the shattering tears.
What if the spiritual awakening coveted by so many religious seekers is in fact the ultimate doom? What if the object of religious longing might prove to be the very heart of horror? Could salvation, liberation, enlightenment then be achieved only by identifying with that apotheosis of metaphysical loathing?
The opening scene witnesses a young woman (“the virgin”) using rusty scissors to cut through her hymen. Then a bird flies into her window and dies. The rest of the story imagines what between these characters has led up to this moment, and so we are thrust into the charming and uncanny human-bird society that constitutes the world of the novella, in which Walker Geon, bird detective, has been hired by a young woman named Gwen to investigate the murder of six birds.Mostly the murder mystery doesn’t matter; that is, it doesn’t matter who killed the birds, but it does matter why, and Walker’s investigation functions as an uneasy mask which eventually disintegrates to make visible a horrifying and perversely humorous parable of sexual assault out of which Walker emerges Gwen’s protector.
My sister did her best to keep me away from the toolshed and the awful scene within its warped walls. She feverishly nailed shut the front door, spray painted the musty windows, tried to distract me with promises of honey for my oatmeal, but she soon had to tend to Mother, who awoke suddenly, jerking with pain, shouting hoarsely and rending the bedsheets between her cracked teeth. As my sister dealt with the seizure, I snuck into the backyard, pried away the nails in the doorframe of the toolshed, and then slipped inside to investigate.I stood in the weak light and saw that Father had completely dismantled himself overnight, had stored his bits and parts around the toolshed, as if he meant for us to use him later on, perhaps to build some heartstopping machinery: his torso, he severed cleanly in half and hung by the door; across the wall, one muddy foot and shinbone twirled from a length of twine; between them, the shiny knob of his shoulder and its rigid arm dangled from a crooked hook.
Here I stood the closest I had ever been to Father. I had always thought of him as a man swollen with gore, a man who carried about more than his fair share of internal organs, a giant of a man held together with sinews and uncorrupted bone. But here, in the tight confines of the toolshed, he looked liked a different man, a man broken apart by forces beyond his control, a cold man, a dust-filled man, a man of makeshift splints and baling wire, all of that ancient, mythic mess that goes into the creation of a man, a man not of this time, a man existing before the men of this reckless era.
I looked at the surface of his skin, the suncrazed, ridged landscape of it, with its hairs and moles and discolored scars. I looked at the hands, at the fingers twisting off of the palms. And I reached up and broke one off, put it in my pocket to celebrate the only way he had ever loved me: the beckoning finger, the shaking finger, the magic finger, the pointing finger, the goose finger, the trigger finger, the walking finger, the puppet finger, the tickle finger, the double-jointed finger, the lightswitch finger, the finger pressed to the soft pulp of my trembling lips.
I SAW YOU at the astronaut fair and your parted hair was everywhere. Your beautiful hair is a mixture of your father’s and your mother’s hair. I used to sing about my crops but I got a lot of flack. Your twins are devoted anusless creatures with little regard for the future of aviation. Legs are photographed shit. Our bodies mingle together like foamy soup. I have unfastened my pants so I may sit more comfortable after eating a large meal. Your once tight groomed hair in recent months has been flowing like high school promises. I have a long nose but that’s just how it goes. I shot my arrow at your back but I guess you already knew that. In the rude unison of pawn shops in the hot concrete of broken skin. The rain creeps in like an agent of darkness its hands are muscular and covered in mucus. I beat your brain with my fingers outstretched like pythons. I feel you are afraid of your own hands that’s okay I eat fish with both hands. I know your dog is afraid of me I don’t have to be a scientist to understand the sense of dread I impose on your dog. Leaving you would set my heart ablaze. Our stormy reunion left me aching deep within my soul. I aim to make you feel an all encompassing pleasure. My rhythmic strokes are that of a seasoned lover. The warm shower fills my ambivalence with the wings of sped up pig copulation.
YOU CAN GET less than eight hours of sleep or more than eight hours of sleep or eight hours of sleep. You can die alone or die addicted or go out to the bar tonight. You can get diabetes or let fame make you boring or shoot hoops shirtless. You can smile more or smile less or appear to be self-monitoring enough already. You can tap on a wall or buy something that beeps or store your paintings on the hallway floor. You can look up words you don’t know or use context clues or you can read a book tonight. You can say a prayer or sing a prayer or eat while it’s hot. You can pay one dollar for one donut or four dollars for six donuts or you can approach the dinner table with a clean conscience. You can eat wax or be a hero or eat glue. You can use me or define me or ask me for my place of origin. You can arrive early or arrive rested or you can think of yourself more as a searcher. You can’t or you won’t, or in a more formal setting, you cannot or will not. You can put down the dog or take her for a walk or finally name her. You can replace the light bulb or live rustic or you can move away forever. You can do a dance or wait to get thrown out or you can put your pants back on. You can, shuck, husk, or befriend. You can shell, scale, or frown over. You can bore, marry, or kill. You can enjoy entertainments, enjoy a mercurial rise, or you can never stop putting bunny ears on loved ones in photos. You’re with us or you’re against us or you made other plans but wish us the best. Rap music is too something or not something enough, which is why some people feel a way about it. I laid out a tarp in the field behind my house and sat in the center, waiting for what.
I’LL CHECK the police report in the morning from Mexico. I’ll slip across the border at Reynosa. I’ll buy a cheap rusted car and a pistol and drive south. I’ll get a room in the mountains. I’ll walk through the pines and kick the fallen needles. I’ll be free. I’ll think about the fire and my finger prints and the neighbors and the severed corpses in the bathtub with blood running the drain. Was it sloppy? Was I sloppy? The mountains will not hold me long with my money. That is the place money goes to burn. I’ll jump a bus to the coast at Tampico. I’ll rent a palapa and lay in a hammock in the shade. I’ll drink quarts of Corona with slices of lime. In the evenings the woman at the inn will slaughter a chicken and roast it over an open flame. The skin will crack and pop as the coals burn bright red below. When the bird is cooked she’ll wrap it in foil. I’ll buy half of the chicken. She’ll bring me a plate of onions, cilantro and lime. She’ll bring me corn tortillas and grilled Serrano peppers. I’ll eat giant mouthfuls, sucking down beer and salty air between bites. I’ll sleep with the inn keeper’s daughter. She’ll be fourteen, but her body will be mature. She’ll smell like cinnamon toasting in a cast-iron pan. My hammock will sway with our sex. I will not stay in Tampico. The beach is corrosive. I’ll take another bus to Oaxaca City. I’ll walk the streets eating chipulenes. Fried grasshoppers with chili and lime. I’ll look at the artwork. Great art in Oaxaca. I’ll get a room at a good hotel. I’ll unpack my luggage into drawers. I’ll look at her dress. Why did I keep it? Will I put it on? I’ll wait for dusk. I’ll shave my face, chest and legs. I’ll enter the street in her dress. I’ll call myself by her name. I’ll walk slow by the men. I’ll hold them in my eyes. They will look at me in turn. They will not know of the bodies. Of the blood. The fire. The drain. If I’m lucky they will take the bait. They will talk to me in their language, their lips moving calm beneath mustaches in the dusk. They will buy me sweet drinks on a patio bar. They will ignore my throat, which will give me away. I will hold my face in my hand. I’ll smile when they tell jokes. Their language so floral. They will take me in horse buggies to the barrios which ache with age. They will take me to their empty homes. They will show me their guitars and sing boleros softly. When the time is right I will take what I came for. I won’t feel sorry for the sad faces trembling. They should have spotted. They should have sensed how I could learn them.
You are driving and trying to find a place to stop. You consider something called The Sea Power Museum, but when you pull in to the gravel driveway, it is empty, and there is a house with a shirtless man on a porch. There are three hound dogs on the porch, too, and as one they raise their heads to look at you. The cheeks on one of the dogs flap. You are listening to the radio, not feeling too good myself, but interpret this cheek-flapping as a bark. It happens again, this cheek-flapping, but they are the cheeks of a second dog. And then it happens to the third. The dogs do not get up, and their tails don’t wag. They just look at your car, and flap their cheeks at you.The shirtless man is in a rocking chair, rocking toward you and away from you. His dogs flap their cheeks, and he rocks, and the whole thing is far too Deliverance, like your life has ended in reality, and gone off to a tangential world of movie clichés.
This is sometimes how you view life: you are, day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute, second after second, given choices to make, and you make them, and off you go. And also, you don’t make choices, but those possible paths move off on their own ways, anyway.
In some of those possibilities, life becomes a movie, or it turns out it’s all a book that lives with its own rules, its own relationship to, say, Newtonian physics. It’s a cartoon and you might get hit on the head by a falling anvil.
In Montana, Missoula, he used his deputy’s position to distance himself from men. In his office and patrol car he was a tyrant about silence, his conversation blunt, short, and dead-ended. Well respected though access to him was rare. Just a few years ago Montana, enormous and sparsely populated, its earth and humbling, humorless mountains stretched by horizons into beauty almost devastating to a man, was a force that drew mute isolators, some of them dangerous and armed. And free. You could drive ninety and salute an oncoming highway patrolman with a beer in your hand.
How do we read a book as an object in a network, in a post-book, post-reading, meta-data environment? Seven Controlled Vocabularies models a generic book, a kind of field guide to the arts, wherein distinctions between various aesthetic disciplines are relaxed or dissolved and where avant-garde notions of difficulty are replaced with more relaxing and ambient formats such as yoga, disco, and meditation. Each of the book’s seven sections is devoted to a particular art form—film, photography, painting, the novel, architecture, music, and theory—and includes both text and found photographs as it explores the idea of what it means to be a book in an era when reading is disappearing into a diverse array of cultural products, media formats, and aesthetic practices. Seven Controlled Vocabularies will be available in a variety of print and electronic book delivery systems and formats.
show out of the box each too difficultto beckon gray, this lightbulb
off begins to spark and becomes president
& in the glow gives birth to the little
number keypad, the slash you scheduled you
cruise to the top of the clever mountain
only available in song sing to me sing to me
I'll give you a quarter it's lucky touched by
druids and fairies and chimneysweeps
all addressing the fine symphony of
your waistcoat, the electric readout
you generate to tell the electricity
you hate it and are
V-Thing—Isn’t that crazy? A little bit of white, a bit of an edge,Being touched is refreshing when you don’t impress secondary skin.
Where I was crying, at war through moves, teeth fixed, ten years,
“My lucky regimen is effortless,” says the doctor we hired.
Wow! Since then, not overly glam, six-minute curling kind of color,
An iron time back in, secret weapon cheerleader! Voluptuous
Impurities aren’t always compatible! Bravo pours boobs,
A cannon, namesake perfume! Omigod, tiny! A little junk,
A little carrot juice, lots of water mellows into earthy cream.
Blossoming off the wall is not so great. Spilling happened
To me last week, touching up the game, shrugs, has a fan club
With a large mirror, always looking at the flaws. It must
Have been a battery, take that, without defined eyes, off.
Zoom-in love, no re-touching, chocolaty, messed-up heavens!
Hot is sort of over! Let’s cut some bangs! A pushy complex,
Boxes and buns, she’s funny, torn-up pretty. Thanks!
Showered, injected, and clean, I’m like a piece of cherry pie:
I can’t figure out my sacrifice, what’s distributed well!
Away with melting? That’s not vanity!
Bring back the spiked hat, razor! A glow,
Whiten them, come quickly the last few months
All right? Anatomy’s picked out already—
The same pair of jeans, bobbing for apples
In a volcano. Charcoal circles smudge
The switch—as soft as a nightmare—
The scientific cut—champions of tragedy—
The 11th red paisley. Look: The old hulk
Can still draw a gasp. Plenty prom,
The same formulaic rain. Whatever
Oil’s in the cabinet, it’s kind of like a runway.
Cheesy but true, I love her butt!
Her butt, her butt, her sleepy butt!
Thirty feet mid-tempo, with diamond,
He’s never funky shut into the closet.
A surgeon toy, or bright, painting,
Very well, trumps the starched white shirt.
I wake up screaming.I scream scratching the dog’s belly in bed,
scream seeing the third pillow has fallen to the dusty floor.
I scream during breakfast, wet bananas on lips.
Shaving, I scream. I scream cleaning up the bloody mess.
Scream when the neighbors pound, when the police
come knocking.
I scream on the walk to work, yard ladies gyrate
gardening shorts,
Arabbers hurl eggplant torpedos at me, their horses stomp, dogs bark.
I scream the news grotesque,
football game shooting in Anchorage,
Middle East imploding.
I scream under Manhattan like undigested pork.
The previous day, screaming, I crossed
a small lake in the countryside on a rowboat.
Screaming, I ate a picnic lunch, ants
forming a moustache above my screamhole.
I scream quietly during a polo-shirted
golf match, a drink umbrella catching
on my sore uvula.
My airportturns on the TV
and falls asleep
in the easy chair.
My bookstore
screws a silencer
onto a pistol.
My insane asylum
plays solitaire
all night long.
The wind whispers to a river,
"Dear Child,
you don't know loneliness yet."
We buy our wedding rings
in a pawnshop.
The past will be redeemed
by the love to come.
You have bluffs
in your soul
where I can stand
and see a hundred miles of you.
I have a hundred years of sorrow
in my eyes.
O Holy Heart,
you will be my joy
on the day the world ends.
And if they cut part of my face off, this is what I’ll tell them: I’ll tell them it was an old war injury, war being football, injury being arbitrary, as no one second-guesses injuries in battle. I’ll tell them about the fractions and the fractures and the fractals that came pouring out, jagged edges found on black and white contrasted X-Rays, mouths looking like poorly split open fish, peaks and valleys, spikes and gaps. I’ll tell you that it was a long time coming, this fusion of myself and metal, that maybe after I degauss I can degauss monitors, causing Technicolor ripples and warping, before snapping back like a skeleton puppet with noodle tubes for skin and elastic string for bones. Or maybe I’ll tell you that it was a construction injury, that a metal beam, no, scaffolding, no air-conditioning duct, no sheet-metal, yes, sheet-metal jumped up from the ground and bit me, creating the smoothest and cleanest cut you ever did see. I got lucky, I’ll say. Or fate has precision, I’ll say. Or I’ll change the subject to how you hate the idea of sharing tactile diaries, that the world is such a strange place with all of this information floating around and no place to put it. Dangerous, you’ll say, and I’ll say it is no more dangerous than helping fathers with construction three days before New Years. I tell myself this is the way of the future.
We walked our final street like mathematicians writing poetry with our bare bodies. This was after the coriander and dulse, the paprika and alum, even the garam masala. Your long black jacket that complemented your hair and the night. This was after calculating the figures we were. Your shoes left marks everywhere but in racquetball courts. The stitches in our clothing and flesh. Your parents said you asked for a ram instead of a pony. The chivalry I feigned and the bones I broke. I did not purposefully hide the flyer about the free hayrides. My subconscious purposefully hid the flyer because it hides all flyers and not because it has anything against riding in free hay. We searched for horseshit in the road. I managed to say nothing in thirty-three syllables. You responded with a gamut of words I’d never heard you use before, including gamut. We inserted interjections. We swallowed insertions. I claimed all of your sentences had three meanings. You claimed you weren’t speaking in sentences. The long black night complemented your jacket and your hair. I memorized the percentage of cotton in each of your shirts. We rode our final train like poets writing equations with our bare feet. Where had all the horseshit gone? I wore shirts made from the percentage of cotton your shirts lacked. The bones I feigned and the chivalry I broke. You kept adding water to dilute the flavor. We figured everything had a solution. We would have made amazing locals. Congratulations would be in order. Everything would be in order. Everybody would say congratulations. We would never learn the word interminable. You taught me how to pronounce and spell interminable. I dog-eared the page. I ate the page. I refused to acknowledge the existence of the page I dog-eared and ate. I played more racquetball. I will only ever play racquetball.
Jack "Big Guy" Fitch is trying to crack his teeth. He swishes a mouthful of ice water, then straightaway throws back slugs of hot coffee."Like in Antarctica," he says, where, if you believe what Big Guy tells you, the people are forever cracking their teeth when they come in from the cold and gulp their coffee down.
I believe what Big Guy tells you. I’m his partner in crime, so I’m chewing on the shaved ice, too. I mean, someone that good-looking tells you what to do, you pretty much do what he says.
Big Guy (he is so damn big!) can make you do anything. He made us become blood brothers—brothers, even though I am a girl—back when we were clumsy little dopes playing with jacks. He got a sewing needle and was going to stick our fingers, until I chickened out. I pointed to the sore on his elbow and the abrasions on my knee, and in fact, what we became was scab brothers.
But this business with the teeth—I say Big Guy is asking for it. He hasn’t done something like this since the seventh grade when he ate a cigarette for a dollar. Now when he brushes his teeth at night, he says he treats the gums like the cuticle of a nail. He says he pushes them back with the hard bristles of the brush, laying the enamel clear.
This is a new Big Guy, a bafflement to us all. The old one trimmed the perforated margins from sheets of stamps. He kept a chart posted beside his bed that showed how his water intake varied from day to day. The old Big Guy ate sandwiches with a knife and fork. He wore short-sleeved shirts!
That was before his mother died. She died eight days ago. She did it herself. Big Guy showed me the rope burns in the beam of the ceiling. He said, "Any place I hang myself is home." In the movie version, that is where his father would have slapped him.
But of course his father did not—didn’t slap him, didn’t even hear him. Although Big Guy’s father has probably heard what Big Guy says about the Cubs. It’s the funniest thing he can imagine; it’s what he doesn’t have to imagine, because his father really said it when he had to tell his son what the boy’s mother had done.
Should we speak, then, of the future? This might appear a more avant-garde undertaking. Yet we reject it, too, even more vehemently. Why? Because the concepts, presumptions, and ideologies embedded in this overstuffed and lazy meme—“The Future”—are in need of an urgent and vigorous demolition. Such a demolition is the task this Declaration sets itself. Its contents should, like all INS propaganda, be repeated, modified, distorted, and disseminated as the reader sees fit.1. The Future, culturally speaking, begins with a car crash. Or rather, an account of one: a disaster always already mediated, archived, and replayed. “We had stayed up all night, my friends and I,” shouts Marinetti from the front page of Le Figaro in February 1909. In a few paragraphs he’ll launch into a lyrical eulogy of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons, of factories, trains, steamers, and aeroplane propellers cheering like enthusiastic crowds as they carry us forward; he’ll incite us to destroy the museums, libraries, and academies, and inform us that time and space died yesterday. But first, the car crash has to be narrated. After their frenzied nocturnal pacing and arguing and their manic and purposeful “scribbling,” the Futurists (as yet unnamed or unannounced: the future-Futurists) hear famished automobiles beckon from outside their windows, and throw themselves into the driving seats. Curling watchdogs under the burning tires of his, facing down death at every turn, Marinetti hurtles toward two cyclists wobbling in the road “like two equally convincing but nevertheless contradictory arguments”—that is, embodying the old cultural order and its foibles (reason, logic). Pulling up short, he veers, upturned, into a ditch, whose industrial sludge he laps up lovingly, since “it reminded me of the breast of my Sudanese nurse.”
2. To unpick the complexities of Marinetti’s document would take more space than we have here—indeed, it could take a lifetime. But let’s flag up three things: Firstly, that at the break of the “very first dawn,” the moment of rupture with all pasts, lies an almost Proustian moment of nostalgia. Beyond its racial and colonial overtones, the maid’s remembered breast serves as a sticky, black madeleine. Secondly (and following the Proust-line), that the “event” of Futurism, of futurity, is so tied up with its own writing as to form a matryoshka doll of almost infinite regress: the text narrates the night during which the text was written, both containing and interrupting one another. Thirdly (and following the line of interruption), that the roaring surge toward the future is arrested no sooner than it begins: Tomorrow’s avant-garde derails itself, and celebrates this derailment in the moment it announces itself, as though the derailment formed part of its raison d’être. The crash dramatizes the larger ontological impossibility of Marinetti’s claim: if time and space died yesterday, then where and what is the tomorrow into which we should be moving? The straight path, the highway leading to the future, disappears; what remains is an imploded mulch of pasts and presents, a quite literal entrenchment; even more literally, what remains, precedes, and entirely encloses the event (while simultaneously being partially enclosed by it) is a document, a text—the real black liquid in which Marinetti’s impetus embeds itself, ultimately, is ink—a text that bears within it a catastrophe.
3. Listen: the world is a sign of restless visibility, greater than six miles.
4. It is this organization’s strong contention that our current age—call it “modernity,” “late capitalism,” or the seventh phase of pre-thetan consciousness, according to your disposition—has to be understood through the lens of catastrophe. This is both necessary and impossible: how could we stand outside or beyond the catastrophe? Conversely, it is equally impossible to penetrate its core, experience it fully, merge with it. To phrase it in temporal terms: the time of the catastrophe is not easily graspable. As Blanchot so eloquently puts it in The Writing of the Disaster: “We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future—that which is yet to come—if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.”
5. The INS rejects the Enlightenment’s version of time: of time as progress, a line growing stronger and clearer as it runs from past to future. This version is tied into a narrative of transcendence: in the Hegelian system, of Aufhebung, in which thought and matter ascend to the realm of spirit as the projects of philosophy and art perfect themselves. Against this totalizing (we would say, totalitarian) idealist vision, we pit counter-Hegelians like Georges Bataille, who inverts this upward movement, miring spirit in the trough of base materialism. Or Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, who, hearing the moronic poet Russel claim that “art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences,” pictures Platonists crawling through Blake’s buttocks to eternity, and silently retorts: “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.”
6. To phrase it in more directly political terms: the INS rejects the idea of the future, which is always the ultimate trump card of dominant socioeconomic narratives of progress. As our Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley has recently argued, the neoliberal versions of capitalism and democracy present themselves as an inevitability, a destiny to whom the future belongs. We resist this ideology of the future, in the name of the sheer radical potentiality of the past, and of the way the past can shape the creative impulses and imaginative landscape of the present. The future of thinking is its past, a thinking which turns its back on the future.
7. As Walter Benjamin correctly notes in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” contemplating Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus—a floating figure who stares intently at something he’s moving away from—the angel of history faces backward. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” writes Benjamin, “he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” What we call progress, Benjamin calls “the storm.”
8. Listen: Babble of voices, 90.3 MHz, internal party dissonance. Several highs from the Atlantic to the Baltic. Ring tones in commercials and screaming hosts of the new generation.
9. Contemporary intellectual follies, part one: “post-humanism.” The desire, as expressed, for example, in the novels of Michel Houellebecq, to leave behind the fury and the mire of human veins, thereby achieving some imagined “freedom” or “autonomy.” This is not post-anything: it is merely Humanism 2.0. To rid the self of its contingency, its meshing in desire and networks of relationships, was humanism’s aspiration in the first place. It’s a reactionary aspiration, one that forecloses any type of genuine agency or ethics. As Levinas so convincingly argues, we are not, nor should we strive to be, discrete or disconnected. As he puts it: “We exist in a circuit of understanding with reality”; “We have one finger caught in the machine.”
10. Consider Beckett’s Krapp, lost in his tape archives: the spools, the reels, the indexes onto which he’s transferred his memories of former years; his fingers hovering over the play, pause, and rewind buttons. Technology’s not there to carry him beyond his old condition, but to return him to it with added intensity. Despite his counting of his birthdays, one after the other, time, for him, moves not forward but rather, like the tapes themselves, in a loop.
11. Consider the same author’s Winnie in Happy Days, buried to her waist in sand as she reenacts the same acts and gestures, day in, day out. By the second act, she’s buried to her neck. Like Krapp, or Marinetti in his ditch, her experience is one not of progress but of entrenchment.
12. Listen: Risperidone and Bupropion for new-onset depression with psychotic features, Filtering the voice of America. Withered into the air.
13. In 1725, as the Enlightenment was gathering its forces for an overall assault on human consciousness, the Italian thinker Giambattista Vico published The New Science, a text that would sit like a time bomb at the heart of the new ideology, exploding a century and a half later in the writings of Nietzsche, Spengler, Foucault, and the like. For Vico, history proceeds in cycles: first comes corso, or “flow,” then ricorso—an ambiguous term that has the double sense of “repetition” and of “retrial” or “appeal.” The point is that, historically speaking, we advance not onto new ground but over old ground in new ways: more consciously, with deeper, more nuanced understanding. In the defining moment of literary modernism, Finnegans Wake, Joyce will use Vico’s system as a trellis on which to grow his vision not only of social and international history but also of culture: both, he tells us in the novel’s opening sentence (which is also the conclusion of its incomplete final one), follow a “commodius vicus of recirculation.”
14. Loops, not lines: already for the early Freud, the time, or temporality, of trauma has the circular structure of a repetition cycle. By the end of his career, he’ll have extended this traumatic logic to encompass consciousness tout court: humans are rear-facing repetition-engines, borne back ceaselessly (as Fitzgerald more lyrically puts it) into the past.
15. Consciousness, as another of our heroes, William S. Burroughs, asserts, moves in a seven-second loop, creating temporary bursts of “now”-ness. Burroughs had a finger caught in the machine as well: he spent whole months experimenting with reel-to-reel cassettes, recording, splicing, and transcribing—an extension of the cut-up techniques he had developed in the old medium of print-on-paper. He believed, not entirely incorrectly, that since the reality we inhabit is so profoundly shaped by media organizations, and by the corporate and governmental bodies hand in hand with which these organizations operate, then to cut into and rearrange script-sequences of this reality would have the effect of short-circuiting it, blowing it up: a new catastrophe to counter the ongoing one of what Burroughs’s counterpart Debord would call “The Spectacle.” The task, for Burroughs or Debord, is not simply to suggest future plotlines for the master script, but rather to expose and subvert the Reality Studio itself. “Let it come down.”
16. In a series of carefully planned and executed media interventions hosted by institutions such as the ICA, the Moderna Museet, Hartware MedienKunstVerein Dortmund, and others that must remain anonymous, the INS has deployed Burroughs’s cut-up techniques to produce, by splicing together phrases harvested from newspapers, websites, meteorological reports, and other media sources, sequences that were then read over FM radio. These have been inserted at selected points throughout this Declaration. Burroughs believed that this process could give one glimpses of the future—this last term being understood as something not to come but rather already recorded on another point of the reel being worked over and savaged by the intervention.
17. Listen: Stockholm, within the umbra, 08:40–09:42. Brain injury to the right cerebral hemisphere, dark river-nymph, her name is Echo, and she always answers back, expressed in Terrestrial Dynamic Time. Tomorrow will be three minutes and fifty-seven seconds longer.
18. Contemporary intellectual follies, part two: neuroscience. Or rather, the glib wholesale transferral of the logic of neuroscience to the realm of culture. Another trump card in a narrative of progress that presents itself as absolute, “objective”: the belief that art and literature can be “explained” by a discourse that has no bearing on them whatsoever. As though the endless complexity of thought and interpretation demanded by Hamlet could be substituted by the act of taking a biopsy of Shakespeare’s brain, or the interminable challenges and provocations posed by Inland Empire neutralized by placing electrodes among Lynch’s strangely coiffured hair. Meaning takes place in the symbolic, is constantly negotiated through language (be this spoken or visual), through the dynamism of metaphor, structured by desire, power, gender, and the rest. This process is open, ongoing, and—most important—contestable. That’s why we have art in the first place.
19. Listen: Ovid 251 Fight the Chimera. Winds aloft extended decode. Seminole. Going once going twice.
20. Listen: between cities, countries, and continents, we are going to crash.
21. To loop back to where we started, to the ink-rich ditch we never left: the future ends where it begins—or ends before it begins, pre-ends in anticipation of its eternal recommencement, however you like to put it—with a car crash. Marinetti’s, Camus’s, James Dean’s, Jayne Mansfield’s, Princess Grace of Monaco’s, or Graceless and Dumb of Kensington’s, or the endless anonymous victims who populate the silk screens of Warhol’s repetition compulsion—the identities, ultimately, don’t differentiate themselves, any more than do the scraps of wreckage that pile up before the feet of Benjamin’s angel in the flow and reflow of the storm.
22. This is why, for us, the truest novel of recent modernity is Ballard’s Crash. At the book’s outset he makes two claims: firstly, that we are already surrounded by fictions (lifestyle models, fantasies, sexual roles and identities, all pumped at us, à la Debord/Burroughs, by the media); the writer’s task, he claims (and here we could extend “writer” to encompass artists of all sorts), “is to invent the reality.” This claim we find extremely compelling. The second, less so: Ballard asserts that the ultimate aim of Crash is to serve as a warning against “that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons… from the margins of the technological landscape.” The assertion is unconvincing not simply because the mode throughout Crash, far from being one of warning or disgust, is one of lyric celebration (of dented faces lit by broken rainbows, delicate latticeworks of blood and engine fuel burning in wayside ditches), but also because the novel is obsessed not with any kind of future, dystopian or otherwise, but rather with archives. Vaughan, the central character, gathers research documents from road-research laboratories and reports from forensic journals and from stolen doctors’ logbooks. He collects films of test collisions, which he plays again and again and again. He follows crash victims around armed with a camera, collating albums full of photographs. He is, above all, a curator. “Ballard,” the narrator-character, sees in the dents in windshields records of the people who’ve crashed through or into them; after his accident he describes himself, using Krapp-like diction, as “an emotional cassette, taking my place with all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives—the television newsreels of wars and student riots, natural disasters and police brutality which we vaguely watched on the colour TV as we masturbated one another.”
23. And—here’s the genius of Crash—out of this landscape rises the event: the überaccident that fails to take place, that occurs precisely because it doesn’t happen. Vaughan’s ultimate goal is to die in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor at the precise moment of orgasm. He spends months planning it, down to the last, minutest detail (working out at what time she’ll be passing such and such a spot, the approach angle his car must take toward hers, and so on). But, disastrously, he gets it wrong and misses her car by inches; subsequently, while Taylor stands alone, frozen in ambulance light, touching her gloved hand to her throat, he drowns in his own blood. Vaughan, who has been in thousands of car crashes, has met with his first accident.
24. This, perhaps, approaches what we’re trying to feel our way toward: the breach, the sudden, epiphanic emergence of the genuinely unplanned, the departure from the script. To put it in fashionable Badiouan, the Event. The INS believes in the Event—in the power of the event, and that of art, to carry that event within itself: bring it to pass, or hold it in abeyance, as potentiality. And, paradoxically, the best way that art can do this is by allowing itself to be distracted, gazing in the rear view mirror.
25. A footnote on Ballard: When, in 2006, a range of writers, scientists, artists, architects, and misc. were asked to contribute a sentence each to Hans Ulrich Obrist’s reader on the Future, J. G.’s cleaned the floor with all the rest. While they came up with sweeping, visionary statements on technology, society, the virtual, and every other futurological motif, Ballard confined himself to four words: “The Future is boring.”
26. Listen: Radio Essen, 102.2, from the Atlantic to the Ostsee. Mich aber umsummet die Bieen. Trumpets, Wupertaal. Reuters, down 48, IBM down .84, AT&T down .67. The bees hum around me, and where the plowman makes his furrows, birds sing against the light.
A girl chased a porcupineup a tree that grew taller and taller
I want those quills she said
but what do you think was up there?
A frog carried the sun above the water
She chased the porcupine so long she forgot
about the ground and then she was somewhere else
A prince and princess were in two different towers
and the wind pushed them together
Some people believe in God but it's not good
to focus on one thing like a dream
with only one person in it
That frog swam for hours to find the sun and it was heavy
A line is forming at the gate
My boss Carl asks me to save his marriage by becoming his wife’s bitch. The way he tells it, she still loves him and their two daughters but a few times a week she needs to rape a man.He whispers this to me in his locked office, running his beat-up circulation fan as cover. He explains that she’s just not into raping him. He’s too hairy and tall; she wants someone more her size, less masculine.
I wanna be a someone big, you knowI wanna name streets-
Hell, I want the streets to be named after me!
I want the ecstasy of saddling up some steel horse
Throwing a hundred, a thousand, a million
nameless bodies onto a battlefield, a petrol street infected by barriers and shot reason
I want to plant asphalt flower lip imprints on nameless baby heads
I want a nameless crowd lapping up my spilt pennyroyal tea
Jeering and crying and screaming and clapping and going into hysterical fits
Lying on the pavement, common sense running like diarrhea into a collective sess pool
Where they can all chain smoke my candy syllables and hand over their trust
Like a coffee shop twit caked up on too much makeup
Ready to pool her V card over to the first Lyon Burke
I want to mess with the briefcase boy
Act like I’m accidently gonna push the Doomday button
Paint something nuclear, like I do by just being me
Yea, yea I wanna chain hefty bag eyes, common eyes, nameless eyes
To me on the big screen in the big news
Where all the big kids get to stretch under euthanized sunlight
On a playground reserved for gods and overgrown infants
Yea, yea- I wanna be big, I want my name on back pockets
Lace panties, underground posters, action figures
I wanna be the big shot behind the Brazilian import
Wearing some Verdi chapstick
Chomping down on a smoking robust some Latvian doll lights up for me with a selenium zippo
Wait, wait- no
I dream of food I can’t eat:Food that practically digests itself,
uses very little stomach acid,
comes in a pill
or better yet an IV
rooted inside the intestines,
kicking through the blood
an odorless, tasteless magma
at light speed,
every vein opens up, says: ah.
The Fire Law is stained glass. Not in church but in my eyes, it shines shallow. And the soldiers see the oil between myfingers, the chains around my music, as I grasp, gasp the words. They poke their swords at my shark skin.
Lame
The Fire Law is polar bear drowning. Not in church but in my mom’s eyes, and only when she looks at me, in a quagmire.
Standing behind the lens, he asks more questions: my best sexual experience, what I love about a woman’s body, and how often I jerk off in any given week. I try my best to lie for every answer. Still, he looks satisfied.“Do you want to watch a gay or straight porn?”
It feels like a trick question, but I say, “Straight,” without any hesitation.
He puts a disc in his DVD player and leaves the camera rolling as I unbutton my pants.
“I'll fast-forward it to the good parts,” he tells me.
When he presses play, someone's getting fucked in two holes at once. All I can see are stiff poles of meat sliding and stretching skin. It's enough to get my cock hard but closing my eyes would have done the same.
I spit in my palm and rub the saliva around my erection. When I look bored, he tells me to turn around and show my ass. “The casting guys need to see this stuff,” he says. I'm obedient. I even arch my back to make it look more inviting.
“Are you close?” he asks.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“I'll pay you three hundred extra to finish in my mouth.”
Proper girls used to make men buy them a ring before they put out. I'm sure those virgin brides never thought of themselves as whores. But I demand nothing. The money is simply offered to me in exchange for dropping my spunk in something more grateful than a tissue.
So of course I let him swallow me, lick my ass and finger the hole. I wonder if it's my calling in life: to be slightly misled into exchanging my pursuit of pleasure for someone else’s.
Scenes from Jurassic Park 5Scene 1
I’ve lost track of all the children I left in orphanages of napkins and boxers but I've gotten so used to the squeal of my chair.
Scene 7
The hip huggers makes her vagina look like scalene triangle. She walks like the kind of testicular cancer that gave you something in return. Her children will be named after vodka that comes out of plastic bottles.
Scene 11
Tonight, her wine glass is bulimic. I try staging an intervention but the pinot noir makes it look like a sparrow coughed up blood on my right shirt sleeve. She also punctuates each sentence with her lit cigarette, the ashes leaving an ellipsis on the carpet like bread crumbs. If I lived here, I would clean up the trail to make sure she couldn't find her way back to me.
Scene 17
The swab in my urethra is like a paleontologist dusting clumsily for fossils. I score the scene by grinding my teeth, keeping the "ow"s and "fuck"s to a wisp. When I hear boys say how badly they want to grow up, I will tell them the story of the doctor with slender, rough sticks for fingers, how this doctor steals their dreams by siphoning them through their peeholes.
Scene 29
The woman in front of me at the airport security line guts herself open, her purse, jacket, cellphone spilling into the bin below. She never notices the gapped smile of the bolts holding the bin down or how the “Do Not Use” stenciled on the bottom glares at her in the hot yellow of a father meeting his daughter's tattooed date for the first time. As the woman yanks the bin, the tetanus of insomnia keeps me polite. The hangover wants to feed her to the x-ray machine, slowly.
Closing Credits
The little girl sitting next to me on the plane wears her Mickey Mouse scalp proudly. I want to her to behave like a piñata this morning but her mother fends off the dentistry of my left elbow with coloring books and earphones. I know I will eventually become a father, a lion tamer using Santa and birthdays like a whip and chair but my children will also learn to keep their smiles to themselves; it'll make sense to them when they reach that age where they teach their hands to roam.
I once said to Rowan, “I like you so much I want to shrink you down and put you in my pocket.” And he said, “I don’t believe in that sort of thing.” He didn’t believe in kissing either. Or holding hands. But he once sucked me off in the mesquite and then pretended it never happened.Rowan was gone for two days after he ran away. I wrote his name on my left thigh. Deep. The pen making me bleed. I tried to show it to him when he returned to school, but he’d quit the basketball team. And he didn’t look at me when we passed in the halls.
She realized the problem had become insurmountable when she began masturbating on the way to work. Bus passengers got suspicious, so she took out a loan and bought a beater car, something she’d not ever have imagined herself in.Red lights were the biggest obstacles, that glowing cabernet eye a beacon daring her to finger fuck herself. And so she did, several times, in fact. Her record was six orgasms before her first smoke break at nine.
She dated but it wasn’t like that, not what you think at all. This was a compulsion that had nothing to do with sex. It was her burden, her cross, and for some ungodly reason God had tagged her with it. No, she didn’t want any man touching her in that way. The mere thought of a penis disgusted her. Could there be a more grotesque organ? What had God been thinking when he designed that particular repulsion?
No, she dated so people wouldn’t think her odd. She knew doing it for that reason was shallow, but she openly believed all people were shallow, everyone desperately hoping for good gossip about themselves.
Where would it end? She had always figured suicide. There was no other way to tame the beast which, day by day, grew stronger, hairier. She adored fantasy movies far more than romantic comedies because in fantasy — like “Lord of the Rings" — the hero or heroine could be killed but retrieved from the jaws of death, sporting fresh energy and often a more marketable hairdo.
On the TV screen: Teeth—that’s his name, and don’t you forget it—in a mahoganied mask watching a camera watching him, and you could see easily this man he’d been a pretty boy, pretty boy, poly-wanna-fuckin-cracker boy, now older, distinguished, so completely IS—that is, perfect—that as the brown-red of his lips parts the pearly white gates of Heaven could almost be said to to’ve been revealed. With hair like the silver cords of hundreds of souls flash-frozen in goose-step on the astral plane, and eyes, aquamarine, that glint edaciously, he is watching you watching you.“Hello there,” he says, “and welcome to the great Soul Suck Taste Test! We’re asking people all over this great God-fearin’ land of ours which soul is the best—which has the best flavor, the most depth, the richest bouquet, the fullest body. And we want you viewers out there to know as well. All YOU gotta do is step up here, give a little suck, and let us know which soul you find most satisfyin, reassurin, rectifyin.”
The cameraman plucks another man from the mall shopper’s dream. Teeth steps up to the freshest catch and offers his hand.
“You, sir. Yes, you, sir. You look like a fine American lad, sir. Do the right thing and step right up here, son. Sit down, son. Make yourself comfortable, son.”
He sits in a black wooden chair. On his left, there’s a large table covered by a red cloth. Five round shapes bulge from under the covering.
“What’cha doing out of the hot summer sun, son?” Teeth asks.
“I don’t know. Buying stuff.”
In the absence of purpose Teeth’s smile broadens. “Well, how ‘bout a nice, refreshing drink, son, to help keep you on your feet?”
A silver phallus flashes followed by thunderous CG and generic lightning glinting along some female lips—but he can see none of it, our son, the boy.
Teeth continues: “Today, son, you don’t have to worry about money because we’re giving these things away free! Yes, you heard me right [cue victory music]. Son, this is one hundred percent free. By capitalizing on a little-known loophole in the American Dream, we’re able to give this refreshment away free of charge. All you have to do is try it and give us your opinion. Just do it. Whadda say?”
Pray to me, prey.
Teeth puts his arm around the boy’s shoulder and what was one seen changes: camera focuses in on this and same scene: Camaraderie. The red cloth is pulled away.
A table lined with heads full of eyes looking around looking, but heads locked in place by clear vices. Eyes swivel, looking to escape or not. Five heads in all—black, white, yellow, brown, red—the primary colors of a mass-produced racial consciousness. Each head on a silver plate (luxury) on checkered table cloth (down-home goodness), but each obviously attached to a living body somewhere below the table. How could they live otherwise?
Our boy stands behind these heads so he cannot see their eyes. Our boy looks down on these heads, our boy, marbleized, a statue in the rapture of thought. Teeth stands in the foreground smiling at the camera, at us, at himself.
“You know how they say some are born leaders and some are born followers? Well, I’m here to tell you it ain’t true.” He turns and walks over to our boy. Teeth removes a white-tipped pointer from off camera and uses it to point at the top of our boy’s head.
“You know that soft spot babies are born with on the top of their head? The one that’s supposed to go away as the bones of our skull harden and grow together? We at Soul Suck long ago introduced a special chemical into name brand baby shampoos. This chemical kept this joint of bone soft, a chemical we call Needgeneration™.”
Teeth walks up to our boy and puts something in his hand.
Camera close-up: oh, how that silver phallus flashes again.
“Our titanium-tipped Suck Straw™ is just perfect for piercing that little bit of bone and sucking at the goodness within. Stain and dent resistant, washes easily in warm water. You’ll never need another Suck Straw.”
Our boy breaks from his reverie. As if on cue. “But won’t that kill them?” he asks, nodding towards the heads.
“It’s complicated, and you don’t need to worry about it, son. With just a little training and practice, you’ll be well on you r way to worry-free sucking in no time. We have years of experience in the soul-sucking field. Many have tried our programs and had their lives richly enhanced. In our training program, you learn how to handle the Straw, how to insert it, and how to twist it to get the taste just right. All we ask in return is for you to give us your opinion.”
Teeth holds the Suck Straw in the palm of his soft, tan hand. Camera zooms in. The Straw gleams in the mall and camera lights; a crucifix on a satin pillow couldn’t have gleamed brighter.
Our boy thinks it over. Or appears to. What’s the difference, anyway?
Our boy snatches the Suck Straw out of Teeth’s hand, face rapt with expectation, and plunges it into the nearest skull. A faint pop. The head’s eyes roll back until just the whites are visible, then look forward again for always. Cue heavenly harp music, ecstasy’s wave form to dance across the cerebellum. It was quick; maybe too quick.
We could suspect artifice.
A distant place. A place that leaves no memories. I am there, now, again, in the middle of the night, while the moon squares Libra in another matterless circle.There are wooden huts. Trees, moving. There’s a man, sitting next to a dark trunk, while I stand there, holding the fingers of my left hand in my right hand.
There are only three remaining. Two have been cut off. They are placed on a silver tray now, black fingers with white figures on their surface. The nails aren’t broken, my hand isn’t hurting.
Everything is in its place, exactly where it is meant to be. What’s left are two questions.
I ask the first, without words, omitting the question mark.
The man stands up, to catch the answer, eventually.
1. Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that, your honor.2. Dogs fucked the pope. No fault of mine.
3. I did it! I kidnapped the Lindberg baby!
4. What the hell is in my pants?
5. Hey judge, didn’t you used to be in porn?
6. Dude! I am so stoned.
7. Lawyer? I don’t need no stinking lawyer.
8. If I get bail, I am so gone!
9. Just out of curiosity, does Belize have an extradition treaty with the U.S.?
10. On my planet it’s quite reasonable to dress this way in court.
11. I don’t know, but black may not be your color.
12. I will not put my pants back on!
13. Bail Schmail.
Random chemical processes couldn’t produce enough information to run even a simple cell. Over 500 million years, random molecular shuffling would produce only 194 bits of information, Wesson says.One possible way around this paradox is the idea that life on Earth was seeded by biological molecules that already had a large information content that survived the journey even though the molecules themselves were killed.
There was only the Viewer, slumped forever in his sour seat, the bald shells of his eyes boiling in pictures, a biblical flood of them, all saturated tones and deep focus, not one life-size, and the hands applauding, always applauding, palms abraded to an open fretwork of gristle and bone, the ruined teeth fixed in a yellowy smile that will not diminish, that will not fade, he's happy, he's being entertained.
Smoldering ruins can occupy a panorama the way from our terrace I witness the olive grove, and the sea beyond it, and beyond the sea the horizon that cuts it, and beyond the horizon the bleeding sun, but eventually even ruin is nothing but gravity.”
There was something incursive in the skin of the apple, which sat on the car seat abandoned like the crust of something at the edge of a place no one ever goes in a world we can’t imagine during a time in the distant future when silver planets rip natural laws all to fuck.
if you remember only one thing i’m telling you—please avoid naked crying, particularly out of bed
an exception: slumped against the shower wall alone is okay to naked cry
don’t naked dance the salsa or consume small oily fishes like sardines or mullet naked
depending on how you tend to react to bad news, use precaution before doing so naked—
but always be sure to greet happy news clothed whether scantily extravagantly or shabbily
naked, choose clear liquors and cucumbers over broccoli // scotch whiskey
naked, don’t cross your legs please. cross ankles if you must.
never check facebook naked because facebook doesn’t respect your privacy
don’t google anything either naked. twitter’s cool
beware when naked please any tv shows in response to which you tend to shout obscenities.
same rule for people
if you please: this isn’t about sex. we’re past temptation or we are not yet to it
this is about, there is such a thing as decency and a reason it means wearing clothes
furthermore consider decorum in its neoclassical usage: dramatic fitness—
the fit relation of an action to its context
rousseau’s nudes appear clothed in milky paint, they can do anything—
ut still they forebear, and mostly just lounge around, which is okay naked anyway
if you’re rich or poor enough some of these guidelines apply differently or not at all.
one funny thing to do is tell lies naked. what nerve it takes!
i’d probably believe your lies because who’s got that kind of nerve?
an acceptable naked lunch: pate, butter & cornichons on baguette. red grapes. iced tea. cupcake.
thank you in advance.
There is an interesting way the water gathers on the window from the rain outside, where a young couple is kissing and pressing their bodies against the windowpane, and a small insect drowns against their passion. Little squirms and it dies easy. The water droplets make the shapes of boobs. Outside the sound of traffic grows hallow and faraway, just like how Los Angeles would sound years later in the future. Girls drink to see into the future. Hernando is very tired. Love feels like a thing people eventually learn to live without, like tonsils or god. The bar is not a bar. The bar is a place with a big mouth with some big teeth and a smart tongue and if you are willing, everything is willing, the bar will touch anything if you would like. Will do more, if you would like. The people that come here are terrible and angelic, and so the place is a void, somewhere imaginary to fuck or be existential, to be away. People come to come. Here is heaven. Here are angels with genitals. Here they sit, half delirious, on platinum dance floors, and the room fills with people in tight clothing, fancy shoes and serene faces so to talk and talk and come hither. Opium in syringes. Scotch and ice and thin saliva, swirl inside glass cups with lipstick. The halogen light is yellow and thick and alien enough to make you feel nauseous or invincible. It depends on how the girl looks at you, he thinks. Hernando returns from the dirty bathroom back to the dance floor, after vomiting out an entire universe. He wipes his mouth. His body aches. When he woke this morning, all Hernando could feel was his head, all big and pulsing like a tumor, and there is nothing left to do but to stare at himself in the mirror, until breathing became an art form, until art becomes bullshit. Someone pretty and perfect is asking Hernando if he would like to dance but he doesn’t say anything to her and he pushes her away, and she falls down over easily onto the beating crowd behind them. If someone doesn’t react quickly and retrieve her from the floor, there is a cold fear that she could be trampled to death or maybe punctured alive by dancing queens, or the latest craze of the latest pop song. The beautiful pop song. Hernando waits too long before he finally feels guilt, like true guilt, and when he does turn around to apologize to the girl, she has already gone away, departed for someplace else. Some place better maybe. Sound vibrates through Hernando’s body like echoes in a tunnel and despite everything, Hernando cups his hands together and screams out sorry into the crowd, but no one can hear him. He screams and screams at the top of his lungs, standing there, but no one can hear him, because the music is playing so loudly and the DJ is very hot tonight. He asks about what time it is?
Her bible-long fuck rolled on pelts unmade, skin of an Uzi, sockets like a queen,smell underground of men balled in fertilizer, husband to the till, snow bit land
curling. She got fragged in her garbage. A bowtie slit so askance as to backward
ambulate time through calendars once new. Combed into her own puddle,
stomped to blood, heaped in our eyes like a sequin prayer. We put our arms up her
like a carpet of scream tread stinky we walk, a little witness chewing mud below
the dress hugged somewhat born. What hammy doings. We sit on her stomach
until feathers cough. Craters of son dangle forth, the bark-textured mound passing
wind, salad in the kweef. Another spools her clam with fiddle string. We flute
the gun, slapping river next to us jealous with flow. We slit her body to tell time,
squat and gulp, her tumbling bald by the fistful. Body trafficked soft, she is nearly
loved, nearly welcomed alive. Her gullet cartilage cracks words, beaming symbol
for squirrels, the rape sample good, thinking as we come, mother of chickens purr,
growing fungal in the smell, fish with the carcass, day’s done, making of her a
poor imitation of the lesser statements our parents said. Computed bowels thrust
home, I machine gun holes already there, popped fat and changing posture, the
leak fucked sunset high. The meat is getting into a rare compost of god. Later the
face as it burns squeals from beneath a liquid so sharp to the tongue a filter on how
we see becomes.
Day after day it’s a revolution, or it’s a wonderthat anything exists at all. What can I do?
A plant divided the room into “good” and “bad” and the room became conscious of itself.A disease that’s bigger than the body—beauty?
I bend from you to touch the ground when grass is read. That’s how it spreads.
On account of the breeze, today’s noon-blue is coffee-thick. It stirs the woman’s longing for that thin morning sky, a longing which has become her hatred for the dead asshole of her dreams. Every night the woman is lulled to sleep by the warm drizzle or driven into nightclubs by it, but there is no escaping him. She finds him in her sleep where she found him in life, perched in a magnolia tree, peering into an endodontist’s open window, crushing the waxy white flowers in his hands and mimicking the painful machinery of root canals. His drill imitation is dead-on. He laughs to see the patients shudder in anticipation, their eyes closed, the doctor’s back turned.Looking at the ruined blossoms in his hands, the woman notices the green paint that marks his long, flat fingers. This suggests to her waking self that he’s the same asshole who painted the green Whoresign above the doorways of innocent girls, girls he wanted to like—
Waking late again, she decides it’s is time to talk to her friend with the sheep: the country’s chief pride lies in the pastoral, so city ordinances regarding livestock are seldom enforced. “Can you try to kill him again, in your dream?” asks her friend, twisting his pale whiskers between his fingers.
The soldier—a redcoat, by all reports—chokes on a coin or a nail or, more likely, dead bees, three or four of them, shown here in a gray basin and on a white bedsheet. (Better a high bed, as the saying has it, than the sound of blood.) The sound of the blade—the implement is a short dagger rather than a mortuary sword—carries quite well. Or so goes one description of the event, despite the burnt curtains, the slaughtered dog, the music in the attic. (A bruit, for its part, is a noise—a fault—in the heart.) The arms, given this configuration—a martlet proper, at the battlement; shield, pommel, and hilt vert—are thought silent with regard to a falling body, for instance, or a sinking ship.The crying wife, according to folklore, is carried from a house—a burning house, in those unfortunate drawings—and then down a road and through a town—or across a field and through a forest—in a wooden bed. (The cannons appear rather charmless from this angle.) Thence south, perhaps, in a rainstorm, past the sorrow in the burrows, the jackchain and the shooting wall, and now, near a creek or a lake, the sounds of a drowning. A family stands in the grass—the boards red in the background, the steeples green. (Her heart went white, as the saying has it—or, more precisely, silent.) The nightdress is woolen, a plain design, open at the collar or fastened there with a clasp or a knot or just a common pin, the click of which may suggest an insect. (Hessian flies are Russian, in fact, and are sometimes mistaken for wasps.) Certain marks on a door, often an arrangement of scrapes or engravings, indicate the loss of a daughter.
The orphan swallows a small bird, a finch or a sparrow, even a parakeet, wings clipped, eyes excised—at least as the narrative survives in the upland boroughs and in several of the eastern towns. (Bloodbirds, so-called, are said to produce a rueful sound.) A bloody bone is thunder, in one version, and timber and chimney smoke, in another—or a pile of sticks near a river, just before the war. (Perhaps the treetops seem to shriek.) A rag doll gives way to a stump doll—the face painted red, for the frightened child, or blue, for the dying child—which gives way, in turn, to a toy horse, described in a faltering voice. The rattlebox contains a hook and a blade, and is buried at the margin of the yard.
We had no choice.Our city will suffer for the men who were lynched. Their charred forms hung torn and naked from the bridge.
Now black skies burp fire and the water boils poisonous. Boot heels collapse the necks of doorknobs. Men go and go missing.
Now we go – follow the river.
With the dim sky out of sight I can almost—finally—be just a dude under tree branches. But I can't stop. Twigs cracking underfoot, backpack filled with clean water and soda crackers. I want to thank someone. Bulging pulse up my neck and I keep the rifle in both hands. To be just outside the circumference of fear, that loosening. I remember sitting down to eat a peanut butter sandwich years earlier, sunlight on my shoes. Water sloshes the plastic. The map is useless to me. I know I'm headed basically north, sour vomit taste in my mouth. So what good is a man's handshake and signature? What's the point of all these formalities? You give someone a ticket to punch so you can ride the goddamn train. It makes sense. But then what? The next thing you know the doctor scalpels a crunchy mole off your neck, the daughters never visit. It's tricky. It's nothing. It's trivia, but it's not. I stop at the edge of a clearing and look through my riflescope for any movement. It's like, the man who turns animals into meat goes home and eats meat. The president, even when alone, is working to impress someone. Look at a man's face and think what the fuck do you know?
You feel closer to terrain modeled than terrain massive. Paul the tour guide cannot stop hitting on Paula the tourist. The halls are color coded. You can't be disoriented if you try. Paula pulls two clementines from her purse and shares with Paul. Because the U.S. is so small beside you, you run your fingers through the Rockies, massage the Mississippi, draw circles around Hawaii. The buttons trigger voices: “This is California, the anxious state. This is New York, the anxious state. This is Kansas, the anxious state.” There were moments when Paula could have come home with you. Tour love is abrupt. In Paula's mouth, the tongue slaps the roof. She says, This place makes me sleepy, and her tongue slaps loud the roof. Even if Paula had offered you the clementine, you hate citrus. You think maybe her tongue-slap is applause. You think maybe in this place, where the carpets are hide-the-stain black plus zigzag greens, where motion activates not just light but brilliant exhibit voices and clacking plastic on tracks, maybe children with packs and sandwiches have known what you're touching, heard histories, ate cold cuts and fruit in syrup. The lights over the map dim and a voice says from obscured speakers, Get out in five minutes or we are locking you in. Paul and Paula glance back like please don't follow, and Paula stumbles into the five-foot Mount Rushmore. The monument splits at the figures' necks and flakes plaster dust on the carpet. You pull the base upright and hope hard security can't see. Paul and Paula are gone. You are the straggler. You lift the mountain's lid above your head. In the walls, the vents cut out, and the thick quiet claps your ears. You step into the base and squat. You wonder if the break line is visible from out there. There is movement.
1. I saw my mom suck my dad’s cock—they were doing sixty-nine— on my baby blanket. My dad seemed to like it because he was
smiling. My mom seemed to wonder while she was sucking my dad’s
cock why my dad was smiling and not sucking her pussy. My mom
kept sucking his cock. My dad kept smiling. I kind of wondered when
I’d get my blanket back.
2. I saw my sister fuck my grandfather (mom’s side) on a spotted
horse in the field. Whenever the horse trotted my sister grunted
because my grandfather’s cock (mom’s side) stuck inside her even
more. My sister whipped my grandfather because he kept smiling at
her. “Why do you whip me when I fuck you on horseback?” my
grandfather asked her. “Because you forgot to wear your dentures,”
my sister said. Then she whipped him again. My sister’s skin is really
white.
3. I caught my brother and his girlfriend Jacklyn jacking each other
off in the back yard. My brother put his fingers inside his girlfriend
Jacklyn’s pussy. His girlfriend Jacklyn put her fingers around my
brother’s cock. They both kept their clothes on. Our three dogs
watched them do it. I think that Charlie—our spotted Labrador—is
gay, though.
4. My sister likes older men. She let my grandfather (dad’s side)
finger her asshole while grandfather fucked his mistress, a forty year
old woman from the Bronx. The forty year old woman from the Bronx
held my sister close because my sister and the forty year old woman
were about to orgasm at the same time. Although my grandfather is
old, he looks a lot like a girl.
5. My father pulled out his cock in front of my friend Melinda.
Melinda got down on her knees because she thought I had left the
room to go pee. I caught Melinda on her knees in front of my father
with her tongue out. My father held some money or something in his
right hand. Melinda had pulled down her pants just below her ass. I
like my father’s cock, I think. I like Melinda’s ass.
6. My sister sat next to my grandfather (dad’s side), the one who
looks like a girl. She stroked his cock a lot and watched his thirty year
old mistress, Margaret, shove my grandfather’s left foot into her,
Margaret’s, pussy. Margaret’s pussy is really hairy. My sister couldn’t
stop watching Margaret fuck her self with my grandfather’s left foot.
My grandfather shaves his legs, I think.
7. My mom caught my dad with his pants down, holding his cock,
and lifting my aunt’s (mom’s sister) right leg so he could put his cock
inside my aunt’s (mom’s sister) pussy. All my mom did was smile and
close the door behind her.
8. My mom pulled down her pants and showed my uncle (her
brother) her bare pussy. My uncle touched my mom’s breast like he
was petting a dog. My uncle stroked himself on my mom, who got
down real fast to put my uncle’s cock in her mouth. My mom kept
caressing my uncle’s cheek.
9. My gay uncle and my sister and her friend Sally were naked in
the bathroom together. My sister and her friend Sally were holding my
gay uncle up because he was drunk or on poppers or stereo head
cleaner or something. My sister stroked my gay uncle’s cock, who
laughed. “Don’t stop,” my gay uncle said, “I’m gay.” My gay uncle
laughs like a girl. My sister’s friend Sally let my gay uncle use her as
a chair. My gay uncle has a hairy butt.
10. My mom’s older sister, Mabel, let my fat uncle Ron (dad’s side),
put his cock inside her pussy on the couch in the living room. They
were both naked. My mom said, “Leave them alone, honey,” and
added the eggs to the brownie mix. But it was hard for me not to
watch my fat uncle bounce up and down on my mom’s older sister,
who I thought was a lesbian because her girlfriend Judy is napping in
my bed right now.
I love to take a shower at night because if I wash my hair in the morning, shampooing it dries it out. Dry hair makes me look like a fat, pale dickhead. Showering at night gives my hair enough time to re-grease. I don’t want mega-greasy hair, just a slight sheen. Another thing you get to do is go to bed completely clean. Crashing dirty, especially if your house gets hot at night like mine does, is suicide for hygiene. For those six or seven hours of sleep you’re practically stewing in your own greasy juices. You’re also more refreshed, and thus relaxed, when you finally do lie down, which means you fall asleep sooner, which matters, since more hours of sleep means more hours of dreaming, which means a greater regulation of pent up psychological pressure. The more you dream, the more those forces are safely churned and dispersed, like steam released from a valve, into the language and imagery that form the atmosphere of the dream. Finally, I like to shower at night because of some ambiguously artistic reassurance I know I receive from it, yet cannot define. It’s like a quasi-baptism, performable only in the absence of day. And life is to short to be lived in the absence of mysteriously reassuring artistic ritual. Although showering at night is only one example, I like to think of my life as a pinpoint of meaningless biological certainty, but swirling around that is a maelstrom of vaguely reassuring, vaguely artistic, ritual.
IN THE CEMETERY OF Montparnasse, at six in the evening, Rachel gets upon the tomb of Cesar Vallejo and spreads her legs.
THREE LIRIUM LEAVES fall from the sky and a late drop of semen slides
languidly down her groin. I am completely drained and completely drained I try
to decipher the traps of love in the sky: from that love of light music nothing saves
us, nothing remains. A plane appears in the sky.
I SLIDE MY HAND UNDERNEATH her jeans and feel the cold sweat of
her inner thighs. A white line has been formed in the sky, I see. That sweat with
the aroma of the crypt will take a long time to dry, I think.
--I want to be a fresh mouth, still water, sometimes only rhythm—I say.
TWO PLANES cross in the sky.
WE ARE in the air.
SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE on the planet, is sending a line of planes against
the orange sky, sometimes red, streaked with yellows, stretched in scarlet, almost
ruby.
SOMEONE GETS READY TO DISFIGURE the geometry of the globe,
someone wants to erase the coordinates, someone wants, someone seeks, someone
plans.
SOMEONE GETS READY TO PRESS insistently the delete key and later
the reset button and then they will all be fleeing the line of planes and of the four
pilots of the Apocalypse: the evolution of dust presides over the events of life, we
run towards the dust as if it were our only destiny below the attentive gaze of the
stars.
-I think they are bombing New York
when i see your feather headmy cunt becomes a tickle of a thing
i'm afraid it's going to laugh in public
my hands won't do much good
they're small and my cunt is deep
a trickle of a laugh seeps through my fingers
yours is small
your hands can reach much further
when you touch me
the laugh becomes a silent flutter
like runny chick wings rubbing up
against their egg shells
they never think about what's long-awaited
they can't afford the silence that would follow
they mill around the desks
they look through windows for a moment
counting clouds
and sniffing for the origins
of someone's clover-scented lotion
I heard you gave birth, that you named your kid for a star, but here you are with a beret, in charge of this cadre, and herding us into the basement of our building to be registered, photographed, and given new jobs to support the revolution.It’s pretty funny and you look great. You just gave birth but your skin is as supple and your eye is as bright when I saw you at that party in February and you were six months pregnant, shiny hair, high heels, aqua scarf that matched your eyes, skin-tight black jersey dress hugging your “bump”. Now even though you’re running the show in the basement I’m close enough to you to see the wrinkles around your eyes and I wonder again how old you are like I did at the party and whether it was hard for you to get pregnant let alone get in charge of a cadre.
I think maybe you are going to get tired of me acting like friends with you while you’re ordering everyone around. I’m not sure yet what kind of revolution this is, nor is anybody else. Is this the kind of revolution that likes or doesn’t like intellectuals? And for how long? The only history I know is literary history and that does not have a nice story to tell about intellectuals and revolution. I wonder what to tell the guy with the computer when I do get to the front of the line and he asks me what I can do, what I can do for the revolution. That guy wears a trench coat and non-descript collared shirt and khaki pants, he looks like an IT guy, which is a kind of intellectual, I guess. He may actually be the guy who ran the tech at our Obama office last summer. Having tech in the Obama office gave us an invaluable, glamorous, indefatigable feeling, as we were told and believed that John McCain had no tech in his offices, even though our office was in Mishawaka, Indiana, a place that in no respect could be described as glamorous but in fact was the nadir of glamour, could strip a star of its glamour, just by sulking nearby.
The skills I can give the revolution include: writing, teaching, editing, and performing. Is that going to work? Good enough? Should I just say no skills, request training? I can’t even cook, I can’t watch babies or keep my car clean. Will you blow my cover? What answer do you want me to give?
The line is long and I’m at the end of it so I have a long time to think about the right answer. Because I feel so collegial with you I can’t keep my mouth shut even when you’re addressing everyone else in the basement. “I’m just excited about the career counseling!” I quip to the crowd, my neighbors, who laugh nervously. You also kind of laugh, but not deeply. How shallow or deep does it need to go in? Is laughter like a needle that can inoculate you, make me safe for you to have around? Is this that kind of revolution?
My mom is also here holding my baby, who’s not really a baby anymore, she’s two. If my mom’s around I don’t look after my baby too much. I wonder what my mom thinks of my baby-minding skills. Well, I don’t have any baby-minding skills. I have art-making skills. Last week I did an art project with my baby instead of turning on the TV, which was like my new year’s resolution for Spring. We dipped colored tissue in glue and stuck it to a card. It looked pretty excellent, like a garden, but when I put it on the wall she freaked out. ‘No painting!’ she whined until I took it down. She rejected the art we made together.
So where’s your baby? I want to ask you but I don’t. I want to joke, having a baby is like a reverse amputation, it’s like a graft, like a protrusion. When I was a kid my brothers had these soldiers cast in some kind of metal, probably lead, they had a seam down their legs where they were made in the mold. That’s what having a kid is like. Not the seam, but the soldier, made of toxic, and soldered to your mold.
Anywhere you turn they’re lined up on the sill of your line of sight, with their sights on you, blocking your view.
Babies.
I don’t say this because it’s not strictly true, I don’t see your baby anywhere, and I can only see my baby out of the corner of my eye in my mom’s lap wearing a dirty white shirt and no pants.
I know, it’s bad the kid has no pants but we had to come down here like immediately and what was I supposed to do? The revolution turned out to be like a tornado, for a couple hours we saw it coming, then it came, then we had to go down in the basement. It must be a pretty intense revolution if it has cells and cadres and chains that reach all the way out to Indiana.
And you look so glamorous here, again dressed in black, with your mascara and lip gloss, glowing like you’re still pregnant, packing us all in, ranking and organizing us, and no baby in sight.
Everyone’s staring at me, I feel like, because I’m not taking care of my baby, so I go over and grab her and plunk her down in a corner where all the other babies are playing with toy cars, toy trucks, toy motorcycles. Every one of these vehicles is plastic and red. Is it that kind of revolution—red? Or—plastic? Or—interested in transport?
When I saw you at the party I wasn’t drunk despite my best efforts. You looked so glamorous, you and your husband had been in Mexico and were buying a house in Chicago, he was receiving serious accolades for a new project based on erasure, but your own project was even more interesting, a stack of index cards with typewritten mottos, which were piled on a pillar in a plasticine box and were taller than a stack of Russian novels, already.
Text was something that could be erased or accrue, and it was really a material thing after all, and you could see it build up over time like a coastline, or ebb away, and there were kelp forests, deep water trenches, feeds of cool fresh water that mixed up the bios, a shipwreck, canneries and hotels and motels and whore houses and strip bars and family aquariums that made a go of it and flourished for awhile and fell into disrepair on the edges of it and finally sunk into the water itself to be reclaimed by the kelp forest
was literature
in so many words.
Now I look down and that kid from school with the stringy blonde hair is about to bite my kid’s arm in a fight over a toy so I pour my water on her head, and her mother comes over and grabs my wrist, and I pour out the rest of my water by accident on the floor, and now I’m worried, because how long are we going to be in this basement I should have saved my water. I look over and my mother is clutching a bottle of water and watching me, so, ok, she’ll give that water to my kid before she drinks any herself, so I know the water thing is covered, I also look at you and you’re drinking from a bottle of water and you hold your lips back a little bit so as not to get any lip gloss on the mouth of the bottle. I can see there’s some flats of tiny water bottles behind you like at a youth soccer game. Are there oranges, too? Are those for the hundred or so of us down here or just for you and the cadre?
This does not appear to be an environmentalist revolution.
I knew your husband first, before I knew you, and actually before you knew him, I don’t remember not knowing your husband, I can only imagine all the shit he’s talked about me over the years, he’s an inveterate gossiper and I love to hear gossip, though then I wonder what kind of gossip he’s going to spread about me, of course I assume I’m boring, have nothing gossip-worthy for him to spread, but that’s what everyone thinks, and my life is hardly perfect, for one I’m a failure as a mother and everyone knows that, partially because I tell them. Are you going to tell him, later, how uncool I acted at the revolution? Because I have been acting very uncool since this whole thing started, I agree. I was certainly acting very uncool at that reading party, you were amazing, magnetic, your bangs made a kind of shelving and I remembered how you had gone to a residency in the Canadian mountains somewhere, its name was onomatopoetic, I asked you, but I couldn’t remember the right onomatopoeia, how was Wham, I asked, or Oof, is it, and you said gorgeous, gorgeous, I got nothing done but it was gorgeous.
I remember once we stopped to have lunch at your apartment while you were at work and we went in your husband’s office, which was long and slim like a laundry closet or something, and we watched a little animation piece he was working on for a local band’s video, which must have taken a ton of time and what’s worth more, time or money? and I saw these books on anxiety disorder tucked up among his art books, so then I didn’t know what that was, research for a project he was working on or did he have anxiety disorder, and he had photos around of when you two went someplace grey in the off season, Nova Scotia, but you didn’t do any Elizabeth Bishop tourism, but the whole thing is Elizabeth Bishop tourism, stand with your toes in the marl and have a drink, the shoreline torn open by the storms like a fish’s gut, noone could breathe inside this root cellar, sorry, wrong poet, wrong flavor of dread.
It is getting hard to breathe inside this basement, psychologically, at any rate, though I can hear a motor and the electricity is on and the airconditioning is keeping us cold as a catch, on ice, for what purpose.
Then I feel so bad for my kid and I take her in my arms and try to hold her close which she hates, she stretches her jaws to bite my shoulder, which she learned from that other kid, so I crouch down and release her and she toddles over to my mother.
You wouldn’t know it, I say to you in my head, but at night she insists on me, she rolls over in her sleep and hooks an arm around my neck and knocks the air out of me, or if I’m sleeping on the floor next to her, she dive bombs from the bed to my chest, she lands on me heavy as reality and wakes me out of whatever dream I’m having, of an aerial bombardment or a revolution or whatever.
Your head turns back and forth, memorizing the crowd. Now I remember when your husband greeted me at that party and said, ‘How’s having a kid?’ and I said, ‘It sucks, don’t do it’ and he said, ‘You know we’re expecting, right?’ and then I glanced over and saw you looking so beautiful in your blonde hair, seablue scarf, bump, and etcetera.
We both laughed as if it were an urbane exchange.
An urbane exchange does not a revolution make. Or?
Once when we were students you said you wanted to write poems like the Sonnets to Orpheus. Or was it the Duino Elegies? Either one seems a bit far fetched, not just for you but for anyone living in this century. Can you have a Rilkean revolution? Are you one of those instructors who assigns Letters to a Young Poet to your undergraduates? Who promotes the apprenticeship as a pedagogical mode?
The revolution is about apprenticeship, that much is true. All revolutions are pedagogical, that much seems sound.
Everyone is stepping into a little glassed-in office to give their information to the man with the computer, several at a time, they can’t seem to restrain themselves, and really you’re being pretty lax, and why shouldn’t you be, we’re not exactly an ornery bunch, women, children, older and younger men, none of us conducting our lives with much of a sense of purpose, most of us just anxious to see how this revolution is going to turn out, what is going to come next, and we’re happy we’re not out there in the elements being exposed to whatever was in that milky rain that showered the crowds we watched on TV. It put those kids to sleep right in the stadiums, and the cameras didn’t stay on them long enough for us to know if they were going to wake up. Maybe the camera crews also passed out, they weren’t in their bio suits just to cover the graduations that were naturally happening across the country this May weekend. Harvard, West Point, The University of Maryland, community colleges alike were hit with this milky rain that panicked those of us watching at home and caused us to just pull back and stay inside and out of it, out of it.
When you arrived to take charge of us, to tell us our part in it, we were relieved.
Finally I manage to get close to you and lean with my elbows against the wall. “I just can’t believe you’ve been part of this revolution and having a baby at the same time! How long have you been involved in this?” I ask you.
“Eighteen months!” you say laughing.
“I just don’t know how you get it all done! I’m so impressed! And you look great, I’m jealous!” I say, and mean it.
“Thanks!” you say. “But I’m still so fat, that’s the one thing.” Up close you look not quite as slim as usual, but, I know, the weight doesn’t come off right away, and actually you look nice this way, you definitely aren’t now nor were you ever fat, with your cheekbones and tiny ankles, I tell you.
“How old can your baby be, anyway?” I ask.
“Five weeks!” you practically squeal. Your lips are this gorgeous color like where liquor and liqueurs meet in a glass, and one of them is fruit, and I never order those, because all I can see when I look at that drink is spill.
“I love your lip gloss!” I say.
But what I mean, is, I love you! I love this revolution!
I was fortunate to find a person who would solve my solitude. She would use her hands on my person until it was soothed. She would chop at my husk, then spoon out my sorrow and be its keeper. I located her at a castle. My intention had not been to find her, for I had been busy being lonely with someone else. It was a tangled area of preening people, mostly diaper free, with real feet and hands, and each was traveling alone. You could ask about the weather there, and people would answer you in English.The great Horace, childhood lover to Homer the Blind, when asked of love and its effects by the town council, who were conducting their Survey of the Mysteries, gathered his robes, stood up, left the auditorium, and never spoke again.
The time was technical summer, a season that had been achieved by nature so many times, so incessantly, that a clotted arrangement of birds created splotches of ink called shadows, and whole days went by without gunfire. Shadows were simply blind spots that everyone shared. Kill holes were called graves, and apologies known as writing were incised in their surface. Rotten bags were called people. Milk was never sprayed from a fire hose at children until they skittered over the pavement like weevils, but the children wore shields of clothing regardless, and the people who guarded them were often trembling.
There was a chance, however remote, that we—among all the others who also famously walked the earth—would not breathe again, however much our mouths looked wet and ready for action. If we pictured ourselves in the future, we were forced to imagine our coffins shifting on a loosely soiled terrain, slipping into their pre-dug holes.
In short, it was necessary to establish a romantic alliance and to publish the results inside each other’s bodies. In short, when we referred to our fear as “tomorrow,” our only solution was to seek aerial sensations with each other. In short, although we pretended to choose who we would destroy in the name of a relationship, we were instead forced at each other, feigning admiration for the way our bodies lacked fat, hair, and color.
We together conceived of solitude as a math problem, such like the ancients must have encountered when they saw two different suns in the sky: a daytime sun that was hot and burned out the eyes, and an evening sun that was cool, pale, and white. Each would soon have its own name, but for the time being the suns were anonymous, and they careened to a complex logic, and they were frequently misunderstood. People often died of heartbreak because of them. Maps of the dead called snowdrifts gathered in the mountains. An obituary water called rain fell everywhere, and the ancients turned the hammered surface of their faces into it, but still could not feel better.
Questions we did not ask, because Ovid already asked them so well: in what way would commitment to each other differ from a commitment against our own solitude? In what way would our daily compromises, our small shifts against our own nature, build into bulldogs of resentment that we would soon unleash upon each other? In what way would our displays of affection toward each other differ from advertisements of what we most wanted done to ourselves?
A relationship between us—two average-sized people who could not be mistaken for chess pieces, however much our faces looked chiseled and wooden and over-noticed—would be a chance to mutually seek solutions to the dilemma of solitude. Other people, we discovered, had a plus or minus charge, similar to those colored beads called electrons. To be around the minus people was to have one’s solitude erased, whereas the plus people seemed only to add to the solitude, which had a limitless growth potential, a way of swelling inside the skin, creating an aroma called disgust. If one of us experienced a deepening solitude in a crowd, a so-called Spanish Moment, we might conclude that a majority of the crowd was plus capacity, so overflowing with their own solitude that they could do nothing but share it with whoever entered their sphere. These people hated mud. They did not wish to be killed.
We were partners in a puzzle, then. The difficulty level was 9, or 9.3. There were no clues. We would have to wait until we parted from each other to discover whether we had won or lost. This was incentive enough to over-explore each other’s eccentricities, to enter a race toward bored familiarity.
This took place in an area known as the world, where people cannot fly. Cocoons called nightgowns adorn the bodies there. When the cocoons are lifted, an investigation occurs, and the result is often a wetness, a smearing on of fluids. In this country, we breathe into each other’s genitals with a periscope called a straw. We blow on them. We make a fan out of notebook paper and wave it over the area, using the age-old excuse that we simply love to read, and what better narrative than the one inscribed upon the genitals of our familiars? We play pipe organ music out of a stereo that looks like an old wooden shoe. Sex is not an event that someone is invited to, however much we sit by the phone anyway, waiting. Oh, there has been so much wetness between the people that streets have been built to collect the runoff.
As Cicero, the great sage, said: And an old shoe is beaten against the pavement. Yes, when the lovers meet, us destitute ones hide in the road and beat our hard old shoes against it.
We met inside the fat clear globules known as air. There was no fudge in the room. Swimming skills were not required. There were no weapons. A pocket-sized emissary named “Joe” introduced us. I did not love myself.
Afraid of the predictability of my attraction, I started a project with her called “I don’t like you.” It was inter-cut with other popular projects, such as “I am tired and scared,” and “You are so beautiful that I am afraid to have sex with you.” Her project revolved around the “Everything’s fine” model. She held her cookie up high, and I jumped and touched my cheek to it. Through several mutual misunderstandings, we grew to need each other, a need that could be charted on a calendar. The parchment was signed with an evidence stick. Many children clapped.
It was agreed. She would chop at my husk, and I would begin publishing my name inside her mouth.
Courtship is based on hatred, according to one of the great thinkers, Robert Montgomery, a man who ate a series of meals, belched into a well, and then died. Hatred was a tactic the Phoenicians used when they met an enemy, and it has been the reigning wartime model ever since, however plain, however obvious. She and I, my solitude defeater, were no more enemies than any ancient man and woman bagged in cheap skin and fading hair, yet a battle was afoot, employing weaponry such as indifference and laughter, kissing and ambivalence, rubbing upon each other’s bottoms with a bath brush, and waiting to see who would have the honor of starting the first argument. The goal was not to admit that we each suspected a future dependence upon the other. We commenced a theater of attractive indifference in order to seal our obligation to each other. We engaged in a strenuous denial of need. A holiday might one day be made out of this behavior. It would be called “Monday.”
It was not illegal to know each other. It was just difficult. We used different cities as launching pads, when cities were linked by layers of chuff called roads and roads were not called devil carpets.
The ancients were so disloyal that they died and never thought of their loved ones again. Homer called dead people “traitors.” The greatest loves were simply forgotten, and the bodies of leaders and slaves alike began to melt. The love between two people has never been stored in a vial and sold in a shop, yet sometimes she and I, the two of us, on the threshold of no longer caring for each other, a precipice called the Waking Moment, lay together in the bed shaking at each other’s bodies as though we only had water inside us and could be just so easily poured away. We used a wringing technique called a hug, and squeezed at each other with great force, hoping that somewhere on a floor beneath us there was a drain big enough to take the water part of this stranger we had been loving and wash them away, quite far from us, and then further still, until we could only hear the faintest sound, which we might mistake for a river.
The sun said no in the landscape low ochre-black smoke out of ancient gutted cars sinking dead air as Prince Faraway loaded the weapon and thought a pink vagina bled someone’s long fucking tongue.Fake zinc tiles in the trashed neighborhood while hip hop ominously bump, uh, ah, yeah, exhaust fumes while Prince Faraway tried to steal the tourist woman’s purse huge yellow letters on the disintegrating wall NO MONKEYS brown magenta blood moves sticky on the street, scattered in pools on dusty textured desert avenues jackals and baboons ran away birds flew while soldiers in jeeps listening to rap chew qat laugh Hey boy where some pussy for a brother? Don’t make us kick your childhood in the never.
JFK put on a white chiffon wedding dress and veil for luck while still deafened in the heat one thousand bullets in and out of strangers no he recognized some tribal scars and so he hid waited in fear while flies and flies and flies and feral dogs.
Another time these boys come by the green and dirt hillside Bob Marley Jimi Hendrix and feel good man. And when Fidel starts to rock with his machine-gun, heavy, heavy, noise scares the German Dutch Belgian aidworkers scaredass men trying to be reasonable but their SUV broke down they’re so fucked.
Terminators chewing qat with juicy fruit gum young white women have in their eyes all this unknown which becomes familiar when JFK cuts off that guy’s wrong hands Jimi Hendrix tries on mirrored sunglasses of this bitch white buttocks part just as they run into Prince Faraway and Lebron.
There used to be a village or a trading post with nothing or it had rubber, yeah, and cheetah pelts, monkeys and parrots in cages, unlabeled cans and shit in tilted corrugated tin while Bob Marley thinks Fidel looks way cool in stolen camo, worthless diamonds and colorful money wipe your ass while all the smeary bugs dead birds and snakes, too hot and quickly, Lebron says he’ll go talk to the white men from history’s deserted palace and return soon where fractured music two-three seconds before he dies the bullet like a fly he swats at on his forehead red berries cry from swollen fleshmouth Friday the 13th style be like Jason man.
This magic isn’t powerful enough for shit the i-pod still rhythmically baking while fingers and toes freeze while Bob Marley has gold crazy-glued to his front teeth and Fidel been wounded crying for hours baby baby.
No one pays attention when the rebels loot Nairobi, no it’s not Nairobi it don’t have a motherfuckin’ name might be suburbs of Monrovia or maybe sacrificial pyres burning in Gbanga nigger.
Jimi Hendrix laughs at everything, coldblooded man, filthy, lies, Fidel is just dead while Prince Faraway throws away worthless diamonds for roasted chewy heart-muscle on a stick. Prince Faraway licks his lips sweet warm Coca-Cola doesn’t want the others see he’s bothered by anything but he’s faintly troubled as tremendous oceans split continents never before seen or known so fucking endless but he’s been there before or will be in some other eyeball in his head.
Then all those lions on the nod once on the lost savannah, Prince Faraway knows you must never allow evil demons to gain control of your weapon man… someone with a digital camera asks the grinning woundmouth if.
But wearing the wedding dress and veil from a distant looted alien means no one maybe the bullets won’t in a cartoon JFK closes his weary eyes while Jimi Hendrix tenderly almost friendly passes the spliff seeds popping to Bob Marley. Prince Faraway is thirsty again man three hours raping those blondes next to a pond of tired water hard-ons glistening miles from the bridge over dead river and more insects and corpses in long grass.
See, this tribe will only eat white corn man ‘cause if it’s yellow there’s a spell on it CIA urine fucked us again AIDS was invented in those underground forgotten labs the CIA, oh yeah man the CIA while Prince Faraway adjusts his headphones chafed dick pissing on pale changing body in a blurry snake shape while the lazy beat keeps asking if you want to if you want Fidel’s stripped body becomes an orphan child and Wu Tang Clan beats slow down inside Prince Faraway’s ears he walks veil blowing just the olive pants he stripped from carrying that Mac-10 into this vision he has sometimes of a gigantic palace in unmoving air, big lawn green flowing trees, ostriches pet chimpanzees bright orange and yellow, dark red and pink birds, tigers and Paris Hilton on a leash some gazelle meat sizzling in gray drifting smoke from blown-up cars that’s where he’d just walk down the hall a king through open giant doors no more dread.
Why then in his ancient Antichrist Superstar t-shirt Prince Faraway laughs then he can’t stop no one remembers how those robots in special effects with sick kung fu jumped over everyone, throngs of mine enemies shot down his other universal thought his other mouth of red eyes stream.
Oh he was just driving a silver car down some long street on another planet in the future under some palmtrees that pussy’s gone those schoolgirls little sisters hey their lonesome bodies everyone’s lonesome body when Prince Faraway’s wise older brother materializes head on a stump bumblebees flies buzzing thoughtful in pink smoke can’t find his triggerfinger endless fall slo-mo strings of drool
S has been shown to stave off dementia but only at the expense of unparalleled madness, particularly if what you take is not-S, some apocryphal and undocumented root or malign compote, pestled and rubbed into your head wounds with the ginger animus of a laughing lady or the saccharine angst of diabetic ice-cream models.Cover your face in good Vaudeville measure and wonder what it is about a marriage that often goes flat when threesomes demand larger primes and years go unturned, simmering in pans of hot fat.
She does like you, though, your ruby mane of acne; she presses on them at night, those elevator buttons to nowhere, wondering if your smile will float when you plummet.
I don't know if I should take S again because my fists always strike their mark, slightly off center, scarcely hitting anything. There is a lucent gild to shower curtain mold that refracts shadows and bends them into draconiform templates that I smear with soap to clean in a pattern that threatens what remains.
She reminds me that my calvous forehead stands on its toes against the rest of my head, blocking the spill of pheromones and putting her girl parts in a sullen ponder.
I have a scrivener's way of documenting her face wrinkles. I'll point to them on my ledger and she'll quickly pull her face taut with her hands. Her skin is like the skin enveloping the belly of a clipped and fly-strewn roadside ungulate, wavering behind the pall of corpse gas and diffracted light, a smear of borrowed lipstick.
Stop it, you malaprop Chinaman, I say. This discomfits her faux Midwestern Tiananmen way of dancing over my small talk. And then she swats at the air with karate chops she could have gotten from any misprint picture book on stage combat and I dance, my eyes focusing on the space in between her lips where the yelling comes out. Her arm hair floats like corn silk and reminds me of autumn.
You are giving me a flare up, she says, demanding her flare up medicine. She lands a chop against the side of my neck.
I gave her a wobbling bag of martlets for our six month anniversary; I thought she might use them for that ‘coat-of-arms’ shadow box she’d been mentioning. Her hand whistled ungratefully as it threw every one into the closet, for later. I wanted to retract my hand bones up through my arms so that when I took a swing at her it would be perceived as playful badinage, the whipping of pink scarves.
I paid a twenty to my martlet guy in the hallway; keep ‘em coming, I said.
Hope burns with a xanthic curl of smoke until otherwise labeled on the white hot junction box of her encouragement zone.
Dear, the dompteuse has arrived!
She sometimes has the medianic wherewithal to chronicle future fumblings and then, after they occur, to chastise me for lethargy in the face of retrospective foreknowledge. You find this unfair.
Regarding the bedroom, I am ground-to-ceiling nude white lightning; her eyes are yellow fog lamps burning away the seeping moorish fog of foreplay. She dozes in a weather all her own.
I make rainbows on the malacoid filigree of her thighs which she then effaces as she sleepwalks away without vocabulary.
The davenport shoulders the dompteuse you hired to domesticate the capybara we purchased for a song at the terrier rescue, and so she sings, with a great flapping of mouth, and makes you wear a cowboy hat for wrangling soda and merlot from the drinks cupboard.
Juxtaposed to my own flickering light cone is Tomás’s light come which extends and jangles brightly and occasionally falls upon hers, which has a sideways lean that makes a mockery of my entire horizontal event space, sending entangled messages to my past about the unlikelihood of my present, which is kind of a fucking downer, smearing the claphound of my entire ontology onto some scotopic future's inevitable burnt biscuit.
Can he paint rainbows with his left hand, this Tomás? Probably, she says. Can you?, I ask.
Tomás works at a hardware store-slash-delicatessen and has fit calves that teem with promiscuous self-regard. Doubtless he is a pachyglossal hammer-jockey of limited swing; nevertheless, he has her eye and to hear tell he sells a mean sandwich, slices a mean pastrami.
The dompteuse has festooned the capybara with education and so he now looks at me for diversion, getting in my face and squeaking aphorisms in the language of rewinding cassette spools.
I should take another dose of S, she blinks.
We should take S together and so stave an epistemology of oranges from rolling out of our armpits and into the open mouths of sleeping pirates.
Take S alone and use the orange basket instead, or close your arms as might a man shimmying through the walls of a dark stalag with oranges.
We
You
The dompteuse has gone. Tomás is oppressed by shadow.
My martlet guy is beating on the buzzer. He slides my screaming fake orange ‘twenty’ under the door. I step on his hand when he reaches for my feet.
Things are beginning to go sour now that the S is gone, I say.
And now we have no oranges either….
And the capybara, bloated with merlot and frenzy, seeks respite and a sense of object permanence by snuffing at your groin….
And I have concerns of my own, she says, now that the bathroom wall has fallen backwards into my lover’s light.
It is impossible to read the Book of Glass without spilling blood. The reader pulls it out of the tower with special tongs and sets it on the ground. A dagger sticks out of the cover and it is stained with the blood of previous readers. Smaller glass daggers stick out of the larger dagger making it impossible to touch any point on the larger dagger without wounding hands. The blood against the yellow and purple glass of the larger and smaller daggers, when hit by sunlight, is stunning to the eye. You will have to take my word for this: it’s so beautiful it causes the reader to lose her senses and she can’t help but try to open the book. The reader grabs for the cover, and the blood that is then drawn forms the text of the book, which is filled with the blood of previous readers. The reader’s blood swirls across these first pages and the blood informs us that the text is about writing itself: here the writers are readers and they have gone too far with their own mortality. They die to read, die to write, and in the blood that swirls around the page and mixes with the blood of previous writers and readers there is the image of a massacre: the readers are rounded up by a God-man and some are forced into rocks and some into caves and some into mountains and some into rivers; and the water and earth and grass and leaves and air are dead and filled with the murmurs of the lovers who wait for that silence where thought refuses to think. To die to read, to die to write: the Book of Glass is a constant reminder that when people die their words unravel, flow out of their mouths like poison, and when their words hit the earth the soil loses all of its nutrients, the rivers dry up and the readers are thirsty. Or so it says in the Book of Glass, whose final chapter, written with the sharp edges of broken bottles, tells of a man who dreams of his own death in the pages of the Book of Glass. In this tale the Book of Glass is enormous, and the man is tiny in comparison. He needs a crane to help him open the cover, and when he finally gets it open he hops onto a page. On one corner of the page, there is a tower of sharp glass, which reads: in order to continue you must climb this tower. The man hoists himself onto the tower, and with each step he takes blood is drawn from his feet, hands, legs, chest, arms, and fingers. The blood drips down the tower, wells up on the page between the deadly glass formations and coagulates into a sentence that says something along the lines of: the book will end when there are no longer any readers; your job, dear reader, is to disappear to make the words possible, to make the blood possible, to make the destruction of the book possible, and this can only occur if you live forever and die on this page at the same time. The man continues to climb the tower of glass and as he climbs he feels himself becoming a parable about a parable that does not know if it is reality or parable. He lives like this for many decades until finally he forgets about himself, which is to say that in the final scene birds carry him away and drop him in a field of strawberries or sunflowers, where he forever murmurs the question: what is the weight of light?The reader who opens the Book of Forgotten Bodies finds nothing. There are no horses galloping through deserted villages in search of the men who used to ride them. There are no children crying for their parents who were thrown out of air planes and into the sea. There are no soldiers who had their arms sliced off for refusing to obliterate innocent bodies. There are no rich men leaning against paradise trees as the drunk bodies of poor men stumble up to their houses to kill them. There are no bodies of hopeless virgins smashed on city streets by Mercedes Benzes cruising through the gentle drizzle of a foggy day. There are no bodies abandoned on beaches. There are no corpses floating down rivers. There are no bodies hanging in the military barracks on island XYZ off the coast of nation ABC. There are no bodies that pound rock against rock. No bodies that stand on one leg with hoods over their mouths mumbling words we don’t understand. No bodies covered in mud murmuring to the bodies who lie on top of them. There are no bodies that smell of chemicals and rest in puddles in the rain waiting for flowers to fall on their heads. No blind bodies that are painted by artists who value aesthetics over breath. No bodies that imagine their children’s bodies as ghosts and cadavers and skeletons. No bodies that live in bodies that no longer know if they are bodies. No bodies that fall from windows as they try to catch glimpses of the bodies that have fallen before them. There are no bodies discovered by rabid dogs in houses abandoned before they could even be built. No bodies surrounded by barbed wire as the countries die in the distance. No bodies whose skin burns in the strange machines that buzz like tropical nights. No bodies that burn in buildings that have been set on fire by bodies with no reason to live. There are no bodies that fry in the sun, that drown in the shadows, that roast on gas, that ooze algae and moss, that are covered in black rags as the lakes and the mountains die. No bodies that hunt or are hunted, that murder out of charity, that are murdered out of charity. No bodies that shutter the windows and hang themselves in libraries of their favorite books. There are no soul-less bodies, no frozen bodies, no bodies gnawed to death by insects. There are no practical bodies, no transient bodies, no empty bodies, no blank bodies that twist between forgotten body and dream.
The table is set for four, four dinner plates as a nest for four salad plates, four glasses for water and four for wine, red, wide open mouths better for the breathing, four salad forks to the left of four dinner forks and on the other side four spoon, midway between soup and tea, and four butter knives, below those silvered utensils—the real deal, not that fake stuff—four bright green, emerald, cloth napkins, linen. The tablecloth is white, also linen. The chairs are a deep stained brown, simple and modern, with very clean lines, the table stashed beneath the cloth matches, Martha can tell by its legs, also four, which barely emerge from their covering.Doctor Bowen the male wears a tweed jacket, grey, a pale blue oxford under it, a bow tie to tie it all together, peach, and trousers, tan. He is instantaneously professorial: he plays his role well. They are younger than she imagined, not that she had a clear image of either, and Doctor Bowen the male still excessively charming. He wears wired glasses, barely visible, his brown hair covers up any grey, his face is thin and stern and very smart, not unlike Simon. He has bad posture though, the kind of spine that has served too long in battle, only Doctor Bowen the male has warred only with books and Rank and Tenure committees, his hands are deceptively small. They drum against the tablecloth on the top of the table, impatient.
Doctor Bowen the female is beautiful and trim, elegant, long brown wavy hair, and she dresses in a manner all too reminiscent of her table: a loose linen shirt, white, it’s simple, nothing flagrant, an unassuming cut that emphasizes the slight size of her waist, curving up to the curve of her breasts, which are firm, she is a sight!, and linen pants, a shockingly bold green, like fresh grass, the newest grass, they’re loose on her, hanging practically, and sensible sandals, brown leather.
The Bowen family is photographic in their pristine veneer.
The table, despite being set for four, with four of everything, two couples two pairs four squares, spreads enough food for forty. It would seem the Doctors Bowen are trying to challenge Martha.
Everything looks like wax, not like it’s fake, no, just that it’s perfect, too perfect to be gobbled up like she wants to shovel it in by the wheelbarrel, if she could, though that’s not polite, so she shows some restraint, a rarity for Martha. Every dish is garnished, every single one with an appropriate ladle or ladling device: they’re not Cro-Magnons! The dishes are simple enough though nothing is ever simple, let’s be fair here. Set on the table are three types of lasagna, one without meat, they had no way to knowing her dietary restriction—although upon seeing her they could tell she had none, not even a one—and vegetarianism is just so faddish, impossible to predict when and how you’ll have one surprise you at your own table, better to be prepared, Doctor Bowen the female always says, her voice trilling, and apricot-braised lamp, two whole racks of them, and roasted potatoes rubbed with rosemary and thyme, though without the accompanying parsley and sage, too many herbs drown the flavors she always says, green beans with yellow mustard seed and whole grains of sea salt, Dover sol in a delicate lemon butter sauce, char grilled skewers of shrimp, brussel sprouts baked with stone ground mustard, steak tartar, and gazpacho soup, and dessert obviously stashed away, hidden from the main courses, no no food first, then dessert, it can’t be placed with the dinner spread, how appalling!, their table is enormous to accommodate so much food, and salads, there were four different choices: the typical dinner salad, butter lettuce with some romaine cut in, chickpeas, red bell pepper, mushroom, tomato, carrots, and an unlikely suspect, grapes, the perfect ingredient to tie the flavors together!, with a easy balsamic vinaigrette, and a roasted beet and goat cheese salad, a mozzarella basil tomato salad, sure, and a cob salad, easy easy, and with it, four variations on bread, each one equally delicious, two of which Martha could hardly even pronounce, Doctor Bowen the female’s wavering voice reminding her to ease up on the bread, lest she become too full before the real meal even begins, and in the middle of the table, the center piece of it all, something prepared especially for her taste buds, a slap to her provincial tasteless white trash roots: a tub of fried chicken, Doctor Bowen the male putting piece after piece on her plate while the Bowen family abstained from that one dish alone, and she didn’t any doctor anything to explain to her why.
Martha eats like she can’t be sated, the food so scrumptious it’s sexy, she’s turned on, all this food, each bite taking her closer to delirium, but she has to retain her composure, the Doctors Bowen judging, throwing question after question at her, Simon goofy grinning, they
were in love: Simon with his parents’ misery and Martha with all this food.
A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF SEX ACTUALLY FEELS BAD.With a piece of the sidewalk nailed behind my face, I'd still find a way to lift my face.
With a piece of the sidewalk nailed behind my face, nothing would change.
I'd still lift my face and keep it off the ground.
I'd still change nothing.
With two lives I would use the first to figure out how to make the next one even worse.
Do you believe me.
We can meet in the corner of space where people forget to check--where I do things I have to do with my eyes closed.
The fifth orgasm rips the groin the bestest and I am a beautiful human.
I eat jewelery and give nothing in return.
And youth is the thing that keeps ending.
Unlikely future.
No one has to protect the animal with the big jaw from the cross-eyed palsey holding a bb gun.
The cross-eyed palsey with the bb gun threatens nothing.
The ground will get cold soon and I'm waiting to be there, to freeze with it and be cold until the sun tries its best to get beneath and cook me.
I actually feel ill with how negative I have become. But I don't have any negative feelings about the carpet in my apartment.
And I don't have any positive feelings about cleaning it.
I only have interest in continuing to rub my feet on it then sending electricity through my nose to my roomate's cat's nose to give my roommate's cat braindamage (hopefully [wink wink]).
All things keep ending.
Do you believe me.
Purcell slouched beneath a dark cloud and his yellow parasol. The cloud was rippled long like a lion’s rib cage. The cloud breathes, he thought. Then he thought of his own breath and how it had been thinning like his memories of his mother.Purcell punched two holes in the air. The holes howled deeply—a finger beneath the hammer, a drunken child—echoing inside themselves, pink wormholes, membranes vibrating all the way to the cloud’s stomach. The cloud breathes. The cloud chokes.
I have exited houses into a common backyard and had no idea which house I came out of. I have entered homes that were not the one I came out of.I have extracted a beer from the refrigerator, searched through a drawer for a bottle opener, and pulled up a seat at the kitchen table.
I wandered out of the back yard of one party and through the back door of another. One of the strangers at the kitchen table asked me, “So how do you know Darren?”
“Who?”
“Darren. It’s his party.”
“I think maybe I was at a different party,” I said.
Be with your mind. I’m talking meditative practice. Every feeling should be the strongest. For example, I used to see these guys riding motorcycles in t-shirts. Get passed by ‘em. Seaming two lanes of traffic. And it’s beautiful to watch the way a cotton tee blusters at the pace of the freeway. Big patch of back skin exposed. And I remember always being shocked by that back skin, even though I see ‘em all the time. Weekend hoggers, breezy on their toys. But no matter how many I saw, I was always whoa. Now that I’m being with my mind, though, I see that all beauty’s the student of beauty before it. All beauty stands before the world, you might say. All I’m saying is that surprise is fine, don’t lemme jerk you around, but try being with your mind. Like what if those ads on buses for TV shows didn’t have the time or channel. Not even the name of the show, even. Nothing but the hook. The woman with a blowtorch.
A man can lose himself behind the wheel of a car.Anthony slams his brakes. The blood on the ground is B negative, and the last thing they saw was Anthony. Dead men cackle and shake their bones at Anthony, and when he looks at the fields, he can only see sand.
Anthony sits on the side of the road and waits, reopens the scars on his lips.
They came with new eyes in a plastic bucket, like fish bait, bobbing and rolling in murky water. One guy motioned to a small room and I followed. Thirteen steps. I counted each one. Eight of nine doors in the corridor were closed. Mine was the open one. Must be an epidemic, I thought. A loudspeaker in the ceiling announced the death of Michel Foucault. I thought back to the death of Andy Kaufman a month earlier and wondered who would be next. Celebrity deaths always came in threes. They told me to have a seat and relax. The chair looked like it belonged in a dentist’s office so I leaned back and opened my mouth. The bucket-carrying man laughed. The other two guys didn’t find it funny. They slipped latex gloves onto their hands and snapped the wrists.I told them I wasn’t seeing things straight lately. I said there was a lot of confusion out there, or maybe there wasn’t any confusion at all but my eyes were seeing things as confusing, so for all practical purposes there was a lot of confusion out there. They said a lot of people had complained of the same thing lately. They blamed it on Madonna and MTV. They said everything would be better soon. They said I’d be seeing clearly in no time. That made me feel better. I asked what they intended to do with my old eyes. A woman came in and handed me a clipboard. I filled in the blanks and signed my name at the bottom. They didn’t answer my question.
They spoke to me through white surgical masks. One of them pointed to a poster on the wall and asked me to describe what I saw. I told them about the big smiling heads and the long tropical feathers and the castanets and the barely-concealed breasts. I told them I’d seen a lot of breasts and big heads lately; that, and the most confusing image of all. They said, Boy George? I said, Yes. They said a lot of people were confused about that one. I asked if Newvision worked for everyone. They said yes. They said the most disorienting thing was for people to let their eyes wander. They said Newvision was a cure for wandering eyes.
The bucket-carrying man reached into the water and palmed out a pair of eyeballs. He held them out for the masked guys to see. They nodded and each took one. They extracted my eyes with what looked like a sorbet scooper. I didn’t feel a thing. They said that was normal. I felt a slight twist as they screwed new eyeballs into my head. They said that was normal too. They said the right twist was what corrected the vision. One of them pointed to the poster on the wall and asked me to describe what I saw. I told them about the wind-curled American flag and the smiling face of Ronald Reagan. I told them how he gazed out of the poster as if into the future. I told them he reminded me of my grandfather. They said he was everyone’s grandfather. They said he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past. They said this about Ronald Reagan. I recalled reading something like that before, but not about Ronald Reagan.
The two guys removed the latex gloves and white surgical masks. They said my vision was corrected. I asked again what would happen with my old eyes. We’ll send them to Brazil, one of them said, to go in those giant carnival heads you saw in the poster. The other guy laughed, joined by the first one, and I knew they were pulling my leg. The bucket-carrying guy dropped my old eyes in the murky water and left the room. I asked if I could use the bathroom. They showed me to the last door on the left. From behind me a woman called my name. I turned to find the clipboard woman striding in my direction. She handed me a pair of dark eyeglasses. Wear these for one hour, she said. I asked why but she turned without reply and marched down the corridor.
The bathroom door opened and out came the bucket-carrying man, minus the bucket. He pointed to the glasses in my hand, then to his own eyes, and nodded with a smile. I understood his gesture and slid the dark glasses on my head. The bucket-carrying man approached me, a wicker basket of breasts in one hand and a pair of castanets in the other. He registered my confusion and removed the glasses from my head. Bread and wine, he said. He was correct. The wicker basket contained three loaves of bread, and in his other hand, two bottles of red wine. Even Newvision doctors need to eat, he said. From behind me the clipboard woman yelled. One hour, she said. I returned the glasses to my head.
In the bathroom I paused at the sink. Latin music played through a speaker in the ceiling. I turned to make sure the door was closed, and once confirmed, removed the dark glasses. I saw myself not as a reflection in the mirror but as if looking at myself from the mirror, as if standing there I was the reflection. I returned the glasses to my head, counted the seconds until the hour passed, and removed the glasses. The works of John Philip Sousa played through a speaker in the ceiling. I saw nothing around me, nothing behind me or in front of me, nothing to my left or my right, only me as the reflection of my reflection. They were right. My vision was corrected.
I lose the room in another pocket.She is coddled by scoundrels in tandem.
I twist the stilts into an open belly. My own.
It’s Friday afternoon. The patrons clap.
I applaud to keep them happy, but puke wood.
This causes me to fall over. I step
out of my mouth with flowers.
She exposes her breasts. My job here
is done.
There is no country but the country within. No matter the streets alive with stray dogs and pigs, wandering and rooting and masticating bodies, those men shot through by command of the king after a dream insisted. No matter the rats and their fleas. No matter the tanks swiveling and shaking all buildings as they patrol, as they gather bodies. Our city is wild with plague, but the only virus is the virus within.Outside, amidst towers, red skies and radio signals, I drift and disperse. I fill all voids. Mounded against shop windows, my one time membrane, and stray dogs fill their mouths, fat. They slink past with low hung bellies while from manholes, alligators howl like hissing steam. Beneath our feet, how they float with yellow eyes. Their armored parade.
Days follow and I gather those clumps of skin. Pink meat wailing in my netting and I bundle them in burlap sacks. Before they can breathe, I force them into coffee tins with an iron poker. Soaked and lit, they curl into soot and ash and they disperse how they began, as flakes of meat, like feathers of an exploded bird.
If only from the man’s hands, years ago, the spray of fuel oil and the flash of a match, but the woman gathered first my flecks and motes into her folds. Once inside I lost her face, her hands, and I knew only moist warmth while her kisses issued in whispers. From the davenport, the man’s canisters hissed and seethed, his tubes, his clotted eyes, his yellow teeth. Powerless to end what his detritus had become.
Our city is alive with shotgun blasts and the sullen plummet of pigeons. With wild boars devouring detritus in the ditches and soot faced children prowling the streets with bolt guns, children firing bolt guns into ditches, children eating hogs raw by the wayside, splattered with blood and flecks of skin. As a culture we are losing more skin than ever before. Our city is clouded with skin, with children cutting free from our nets, with children wandering, alone and armed with bolt guns, with dogs and alligators and hogs.
Outside, my bones become as flecks of teeth and neighbors are dragged from their houses and shot against brick walls. Everywhere armed soldiers in ski masks and everywhere skin dispersing.
Outside there are forced marches under moonlight. Outside there are cattle cars and mounds of detritus like pillars of salt.
Outside lonely children shoot hogs for spending cash.
Outside I think.
Outside against a brick wall, the howling of dogs and the sounds of silent anticipation, of fingers preparing to squeeze. I hear the decay of detritus, of urine and skin and blood, of teeth and skull. I hear a world to come.
When my body is gone I will take on a form of rust and mosaics of tiling, a tomb of decay and drip where all is lit with florescence. Beneath the ash of all valleys will remain my valley of alligators.
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.
1. Did he posture expression selectively?
He stained himself along what passed for night until architecture was deemed blasphemous.
2. Dressed up little slogans and named them boy?
Universe was the blindfold of his decapitation.
3. What criminal requisite did he envision helping mankind self-exterminate?
The laws by which his image once was feigned.
4. And did he mistake the screaming for a marriage proposal?
He filled a carriage with calendars—a collective diaper.
5. Why do you drink the hydrocephalic runoff of your loved ones?
The color of my hand is really just a radio. My radio is radio-colored. I put it on a trampoline instead of voting. Because I have a background in pornography.
6. Did you get your hysterectomy at Toys R Us?
I met a girl who danced like a rare disease. She unwound masking tape in place of any drum. She whistled like a grenade in bed. We used a stove timer. Now we are in love; our bodies no longer require food.
7. A dog bites its own tail until gangrene sets in—is this how you make love?
Love with more pigment.
8. Some girl’s face convinces you to throw milk at a wall—is portraiture happening?
Another whiff of sainthood might kill this flavor.
9. Is your life the mistake of a sob for laughter?
Seems like a technical problem or maybe I am lonely.
10. Is beating my wife good for the economy?
The first contraceptive was old age. The second was your face.
11. My blood pressure is your daily news?
Let me explain. Your face is a trampoline for syphilis.
12. Was that you impersonating insecticide by Third St.?
Your face is the eulogy of our generation. Your face is a port-a-potty for the mafia.
13. Why do you make a habit of corners and excuse your tardiness with lewd photography?
You engrave intention on a wet badge of ancestry.
14. Why can’t I stop touching you?
Because you are disgusted.
15. Why do I let you touch me?
Because you don’t like being touched.
16. Why imagine a nuclear power plant when I go down?
Your underwear runs like a diseased egg through the humidity of my palm.
17. I sleep with your father. I sleep with your best friend. I fellate your assault rifle. Do you announce your candidacy for president?
You love me with too much of your history intact.
18. When you close your eyes, do you see a war zone – how many war zones do you see?
Children holding fish build deities in the snow by accident. It rains. The desert burns us. Neck high in swamp. We lie down and are silent but alive.
19. Which physicists endure anemometric digestion for machines that imitate sleep?
Gravity will be substituted with Reaganomics.
20. Did you then administer electricity to improve sub-atomic structure by testing weight?
Gravity will be replaced by AIDS.
21. How has nanotechnology revolutionized the enema?
They pretend to be insects, but are really the veins of your eye.
22. What recommends invalidating time with stochastic hotness?
They fine you with pink ribbons. They rub medicine on your house. They know how to stage a good sex crime. You wade in thievery. They surgically remove your suck. They travel up your daughter until she accidentally expels an older version of herself.
23. Do you express joy by accident?
Traffic, by the way, is how you were circumcised.
24. Reflective surfaces have always been a problem for you. Are accordions involved?
90% of the time. 90% of time does not exist.
25. I conjure machine and here is a girl swallowing the globe with formaldehyde. To cure what?
You miss her. With limitations.
26. Her self-inflicted birthmarks on continuous display. Do we know death by kissing telephones?
You’ve been loved with such perverse generosity you assuage nothing.
27. Lost in a forest, I address and bow to each tree like it is my grave. Lost in a supermarket, I am born so much a second belly button develops. Where?
You apply ether as lipstick and call make-up another dermatozoon.
28. I conjure pond and go to sleep without ears. My kissing her is interrupted by rigor mortis. Say what?
Stop puckering, you might evolve.
29. Who likes me with finer precision than anyone has in both our lives?
No one likes you.
30. Help me go down the slide of my own weapon? I need you to revive me, periodically, all night.
No.
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.
You believed in corduroy pants.
You stole my waterbed with a syringe.
You spat tobacco in my ventriloquism.
You broke some ocean to build my gibbet.
You filed a lawsuit so I would hold your hand.
You mistook my high heels for a lawnmower.
You replaced the tires on my car with your diaphragm.
I am the shudder-still of camping heads.
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.
I resemble an escalator in bed.
I train my baby on the volcano.
I do jumping jacks without provocation.
I said my headache gave you constipation.
I maim tubas on our anniversary.
I kill dogs with lesbian underwear.
I always fake holding your hand.
Stir my grave with a pinch of bra
Boil lice in a carnival hat
Stroke three dying wishes warm
Groan cow eye all over the plate
How you bake determines sainthood
Prance the olives into fine mucous
Follow ten grunts with a murder pan
Use a spoon to annihilate your curves
Break your hand to the fire’s rhythm
Don’t be caught unwinding your hair in any daylight
Gobble the soup
Leaf-blower of newt
Rub it on your tan
Shatter your husband
Till folks passing toss vinegar at the sky
I hollowed out my eyes for this trophy,
champion of getting sucked years.
I would clothespin a tombstone if they let me.
I would sell the mother right off my back
if they hadn’t already hanged me for it.
I was raised on hamburgers
like you or anyone below a sky.
My mega disaster blood pumping
diatribe, wardens, squalor of merchant,
prancing voyeuristic whodunits.
Their mere victory of names blushed live.
I killed an inch off your hemming
to doubly ensure everyone’s good
forehead. Walked the mob in a tired
circle of sniffed ass. Onward through
horizons formed by the unidentified
bombs of whoever I said we’re chasing.
I insinuated pressures relinquished
or calculated foreign spray. Surely
another jaw had been there.
But whose eyebrows tied up
on the runway getting gross with miles
boarded the first daughter?
Here is the couch where she fucked for the first time. Here is where the needle went. Here is the car he drove away. Here is the basement where her child was buried.
Here is the hole where she thought monsters lived.
Here is the tree where her father was.
The little hollow that her waist makes isn’t something she was born with, but it’s something she was born to use. She was a straight and narrow child, never danced but watched instead. Now on nights when the wind blows hot she belts the hollow, cinches leather tight around the in-between space as though to cage in something that nothing otherwise can contain. The illusion that she’s bottling herself, that she’s bursting at the borders of this tie, is what draws men in to watch her perfect hourglass twist and the grains fall and imagine feeling them—feeling her—from the inside. They imagine watching her spill over as they strip her down, but really when she winds a belt slow around her it is the hollow guiding her hands and not her hands shaping the hollow. Self-enclosed. And in the morning when they sit up gasping, forgetting wives and sons and how they wait crossing one knitting needle over the other, kicking a ball around the yard alone, the sound that wakes them is the sound of the hollow whispering. It hisses words of lulling comfort, insists that they lie in wait and lose themselves. I am your cave, your shelter. Fill me with your sandpaper palms.
The little hollow that her waist makes isn’t something she can just forget, but she tries to stop the gap with bulk and substance, things that she can tote along imagining that they too are pieces of her own soul broken off. Now, on days when the wind blows cold, she tucks in an open bag of groceries there as she crosses to her car, fits the hard curves of cans and jars against the space beneath her ribs, presses their cool stillness against the hot pulsing of her flank. She thinks how impossible it is for them, these men, to grasp how little she wants them for themselves, how her snakelike movements are an invocation of something higher, how the cries that she wants are not her own warming the air as she clenches them between her thighs but rather those of another, one who does not yet exist, one who may never exist. They fail her and she sends them packing under the weight of all their thirst and all their illusions, which she has torn up and handed back to them in shreds. She will do this until one of them fills the little hollow that her waist makes, fills it with kicking, screaming, gurgling, drooling love, the thing she knows she was born to use it for.
More corners, new corridors, new rugs, everything in front of me coming fast and leaping past, swallowed into the stuff behind me, some dense crowded point of my beginning.O my God, I thought, vividly aware of the heat building under my back. I will start a fire.
I was considerably relieved to reach a contemporary-style rug. Perhaps here I was most at home. I could almost relax. I thought to myself, These are the hottest, hippest of all rugs. I savored the idea. You are done with the Orientals, I told myself. Say goodbye to timeless elegance and colonial charm. You are entering a world of shocking one-color solids and crazy close-knit stripes and mind-bending electric rectangles, repurposed modern art masterpieces, anything but boring.
The rug that takes chances. New. Loud. In your face. That lies there on your floor like someone’s hallucination.
We pray to the west shore.This being—your god, we don’t know his name—this being eats through the sand and gets between your toes. He wraps himself in skin foil, in body bags and debris. He does not accept prayers before sunrise, no matter how earnest or pleading they might be. He looks down and observes the crawling souls, but does not extend a hand to scoop them up because his fingers are wrapped tight around an archive of words, all the verses and murmured prayers he commissioned from the greatest extant minds, and he has become too protective of them, too guarded. He refuses to let even a syllable fall from his grasp in exchange for saving a single soiled native from the oncoming tide.
We pray to the east shore.
Here, your god is dead. The skin foil has long ago been shredded; the body bags unzipped and emptied of their walking bones. The debris has been fashioned into statues of lust, pleasing to the eye and to the caress. Febrile minds, drunk on blustery air carried in off the waves, can easily imagine these shapely forms being open and compliant. Rape is the price of such progress, such diseased imaginations, and under their invasions these childbearing hips of concrete and metal will, if impregnated, give birth to the future. The beachcombers dream of natives who won’t crawl in the mud, but will instead run into the sea and wash themselves until they’re adults, bled clean and ready to breed for the first time. Words, meanwhile, are history, washed away in the brine.
I supposethey are all dead by
now, but I'll tell
them
I vomited, I did a thing,I, axiom, is stuck in—
I walled like a fence myself small—
shy asteroids leaving sour milk trails
floating, that old saying, and in my vomit were rutabaga skins, tomato seeds,
the gravel roasted and dried.
It’s true what you heard about me, my hair, my running water, my job—
locusts whose eyes are telescopic and vast, whose calculations of feeding are precise.
The plants hemorrhage oxygen.
Whisky was around us, consumptive.
I’m not ashamed to be this stumbley crux.
Night after night I attended little gatherings in the woods,
and night after night we remained investigated by dark foliage.
Whisky, our detonator. We were quiet so we drank it,
we forested, our faces pressed like embers warm and pink, orange, brown—
Ice cubes not withstanding,
we reached and pulled each other out of night’s drink,
our napkins became little diaries,
and when we rose out of tents, we felt like useful trash. Balled up,
we waited for something like urbanites.
Pleased to be a part of something,
we vomited ourselves conscious.
Love does not traffic in a marketplace, nor use a huckster’s scales. Its joy, like the joy of the intellect, is to feel itself alive. The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less. You were my enemy: such an enemy as no man ever had. I had given you all my life, and to gratify the lowest and most contemptible of all human passions, hatred and vanity and greed, you had thrown it away. In less than three years you had entirely ruined me in every point of view. For my own sake there was nothing for me to do but to love you.
concern not for the corpse or ; the depths of the savage apparition ; but more for the way ; you asked if I ; wanted four or 12 chicken nuggets ; or which sauce I wanted to go with that ; your voice sounded wheezy & polyped ; & as you gave me my shitty food ; some old duck with her dyed black hair ; asks if she can have a Big Mac ; ‘This is Red Rooster,’ you coughed ; but the biddy didn’t take it in, so you continued ; ‘McDonalds is over there. We don’t do Big Macs!’ ; eventually she got it and shuffled on ; over to the McDonalds counter ; & as I sat down and took a handful of ; soggy chips to my mouth I realised that there’s two types of people ; down here downstairs ; in the greasy delta that is ; the counterpoints between the ; Melbourne Bar & Bistro ; Red Rooster & McDonalds ; & these two people are ; those that put their grimy carry trays ; into the rubbish bin ; & those who leave it for the hired counterhands to collect ; & there was steady something ; like an orgasm, shop-soiled flames, soft content ; human infinite one ; you is the seed of fuck-like ; knowing weightless insolence ; staying up & later ; completely like me ; with exaltation ; between this you’re called anything ; remember the time that ; we went in spiritual & many things! ; forthwith but we think so about our sorry self ; to a plateful of tenderness ; backwards the fuck watches ; its head from the eastern waves ; among the anything ; but we’re either sinful or expressive ; about our knowledge of sadness ; she gave it with a please! ; for I am this angry ; when we think we just wanted to be wise-ways ; the whole disguising minutiae ; the meandering & ugly me ; such an out of shape fatty ; renouncing ; but having delight in our knowledge ; of sadness ; & I called you Saint Thicket of Anemones ; he came up with a new name ; from henceforth he was saint thicket of anemones ; my friend ; is it the own-nests there that sends forth? ; hiss & this which is nothing ; just to feign off his own skin? ; is it the one who tills but keeps the clearing room in the soul? ; for if meditation says this ; “headway & be off & guard with what larks ourselves ; & steals to this the golden-world’ ; then it should also ; be foot of itself ; its individuality ; & happen ; with needs that must be apparent ; this is a tabloid ; you could tell she was keen to vex her mouth illumination ; when by extinguishing her escape ; heading to & to her ; lowering so now beyond ; was not envy nor murder ; & you’re wearing the goddam pity skin ; & as I walked over to Grattan Street in Carlton ; & as I walked up our street with suffering ; from the most excruciating cramps ; on the front of my shins and ankles ; I realised that the cramps were like synapses ; which come from the word "synaptein" ; which Sir Charles Scott Sherrington and colleagues coined ; from the Greek "syn-" ; ("together") ; and "haptein" ; ("to clasp") ; these synapses are essential to Neuronal networks ; for I have tried Xanax ; partially because it calms me down ; when I feel a cramp starting ; & I have tried Motrin for pain ; I’ve drunk tonnes of the shit ; I’ve drunk tonnes of, though well-intentioned ; pieces of shit that possess ; no significance or effectiveness unless ; its external prescription is matched by a personal internal motivation ; standing in Mulqueeny’s Pharmacy ; peering at the colour range of the Glucojels ; there’s a line of Gnostic thought that’s echoed in the jellybeans ; the pharmacy assistant grabs my prescription ; as something comes out of her which is ; imperfect and different ; from her appearance ; because she had created it without her consort ; & it was highly diverse ; her face seemed to have originated in Alexandria ; & coexisted with the early Christians ; until the 4th century AD ; due to her being both dualist and monist ; I peeped repeatedly at the Melbourne Town Hall ; & wondered when they’d let me into their chambers ; so I can wear some velvety robes and concern myself ; with some moral, mayoral & ritual practice & garb ; in these silly myths of big city living ; the malevolence of the Mayor ; the demiurge is mitigated ; his authorial style makes one think of the ancient schema in two ways ; & they’re both shit ; but “Shut it down!” he shrieks like a strip-mined parakeet ; & now there is ; a naked girl lying ; author by ceaselessly rest-breaks ; but my bottle of sherry’s shoulder ; is that girl he she and up and starts playing ; and the teaspoon ; she also keeps igniting around hugs and sex mags reach over only nods ; sex mags are a bit nervous ; sex mags ceiling turns and the lighter out reading from a magazine ; that he does her chair ; she launches hear it lands ; mumbles nervous ; she’s my anything ; towards her sofa ; just as that someone’s think ; about is again - step useless ; how’s sex mags? ; there’s one only ; “you’ve also got a mountain bike!” ; been towards the down my this ; I and he lifts facing hers ; but my pyjama are in the washing basket! ; quickly swivels with afternoon ; has it up both ends ; flicks it across the once table ; where his index finger was ; it seems beneath his breath ; and then pushes his eyes ; are looking for sex mags ; toss it onto the tabletop to friends ; the bottle of sherry is important ; pay attention ; she’s giving the in yesterday and friend ; me with glasses ; cigarettes ; sex mags ; poise myself down ; up the bridge of his nose ; with her coffee in head ; out into the purposely ; it’s sticking up! ; it’s been herself up twitching and annoying! ; there’s snakes & lasers ; where the scooters sit ; the bike-stranded Honda’s, Yamaha’s and fashionably-owned Vespa’s ; where the muddy and broken fridge-filled & choc-milk carton Yarra squirms ; under the Princess Bridge, up the road from Y&J’s ; I heard some guy mention that his last name was Saturnia ; I immediately thought, ‘spa town!’ ; He was carrying his wallet, a sippy cup & a polar-fleece jacket ; in a slightly torn plastic shopping bag ; he was asking people if there was a bus service out to Abbotsford ; I immediately thought, ‘wanker!’ ; some kinky flare Tchaikovsky’s his vice ; the exterior shutters ; it shutters bluntly ; like titanomachy those little bitches ; the unapplied images make characters of the contemplation ; & to hedonism we’ll leave the reader ; & on this third occasion, the drunken spirit! ; having to work as an ass that you are ; your state of mind is something far from falling & content but they have awakening ; so rise up & sing! ; for the wind ; is the tide ; above the basic dirty plan & delta ; & the gulls are titans in reverse ; they’ll leave without us! ; these seagulls & sylphs will fill the whole world ; & the stars of more will be tended ; in a state that the afterlife will professed ; finiteness & system ; I was drinking melted butter & wine ; & not caring too much; about the fall of humankind ; leaving the parked scooters behind ; the bike-stranded Honda’s, Yamaha’s and fashionably-owned Vespa’s ; under the heady heights of the carriages on the old-fashioned Ferris wheel ; entering the underpass that circumvents ; on the southern bank of the Yarra under the Princess Bridge ; I saw the sodden refuse and tampon-tacked water of the river ; & I wondered whether ; to me were greasy rivers more interesting than over-fished oceans ; I saw Methuselah, call to saw the fountain the matter that was cutting off roots ; monsters parted ; a holy Lord house of your Enoch ; the children of the thirsty drank from a thousand other vessels ; & as I peered over & into the Yarra, I saw the murky picture ; albeit Yankee American & more like a fourth heaven ; kind of like reading the Proslogion ; all the saints with their black jaws of wrath ; their dark forces ; emotional or otherwise ; to happiness ; I’ve been given these ; life intellects ; the bottom of so-called verses dead ; but in shame & disgust ; heavy steps are life ; nothing ; is description ; just night terrors ; if it had been a state of receiving ; I’d have then cut up & did not live ; with my proslogion & fake heaven ; with my Caveman in Balzac the individual, her tissue and the whole of the structure can humours, feelings, impressions, that each character uniquely powerful instance linguistics ; beside the spire ; blessed they shall be under the tundra wolves of the city ; & they will begin to hear the fire sirens ; & they will begat to be a great chastisement ; & I shall ask for the day in time to become ; me ; or ; perhaps you ; & now I want to eat a whole pizza ; pizza during peak hour ; sitting in front of the old disused Royal Women’s Hospital ; outside the Yvonne Bowden Auditorium ; whoever the fuck she is ; I saw 10 or 15 Domino’s delivery drivers ; skiving off from turning out pizza orders ; playing around, tossing a motorbike helmet about ; all rough-going & proper foolish ; like a tawdry army of naked monkey shines ; all born disturbance technologies / selling pizza like ca-ca porn ; they all wheel out with sweating looks & reeling face ; I unfurl a lit cigarette lighter ; & waive them on & out like I’m playing an evacuation torch ; & now I’m alone ; bye bye pizza delivery drivers, u will be missed ; strolling over to Royal Dental Hospital I noticed that the traffic ; was like some horrible knackery ; a road race of pumice bitumen & uncivil fecund maggots behind the wheel ; of twits & pull gentle dragons driving their Mercedes ; peak hour is like an underlying torn auspicious barnstorm ; driving within the criminal piggery with the out signal & the test features vandalised ; truck driver arm muscles like massive conjoined turds ; fire engine sirens like burnt learning latter tricks trivial oxygen bullshit embarks ; thump! ; truth snake signal lady ; on the corner the fossil street poop runs pattern askance while the gasping revisited tramp groups within the ; spatial surrounds of a ruby-lipped sense ; some of the delivery drivers are making their way back via Swanston & Grattan ; their fashions are dog fire ; dripping in eulogy luxuriance ; crimping in a maternity dress, mini-skirt, bikini ; to the soothing smells of pepperoni ; it’s a pogrom ; with your bald, fat Belfast head ; & cheekbones that couldn’t grow a beard ; I’m going to put my footed thong ; across your gulping neck ; as the clouds aspire atop the trees ; meaning like a-spire, like sitting atop some spire ; some column of shit ; & as my fucking Haviana clips your Adam’s Apple ; I’ll grab hold of my $5.00 fishing knife ; (that was gotten on the whim, the spur from the Queen Victoria Market ; to deal with stuck pricks like you) ; I wish for your newborn when you do get a newborn ; to not last out the week ; I wish for ; a sudden invaders longer designate solvent tends ; at far end of wets his as salt decomposes ; at cough his madness, that the text to the workers the ego ; considerably ; here is perhaps ready-formed dictionary, they tend to mystical, religious, social, natives used defines disappointment over the always anterior, never and children may not pussy so open, It was like remarked cracking sound sentence: this was and force a motion, swelling and promote empathy, trust, orgasm ; I’ll grab hold of my $5.00 fishing knife.
After the rooms open to skyyour voice says a space is empty
among the stones
I find myself understanding the endof the movie before the rest of the band does.
The bomber was Mrs. Jones’s boyfriend but he was often busy. He was a lone wolf with his own life’s specific interests and demands, he said. He needed time and space to let his mind roam. He’d only exploded something in front of Mrs. Jones once, a tiny baby bomb he’d baked into a cake. They set it in the bathtub and watched from the doorway. Batter and frosting spattered onto the walls. Mrs. Jones clapped her hands with glee, then flung herself toward the bomber.When too much time went by without the bomber, Mrs. Jones put baking soda into film canisters and lined them up on the kitchen table. She stood with her broom, clutching the handle in anticipation. She closed her eyes as soon as the vinegar made the small explosions. She pretended the bomber’s coarse voice coming from the broom.
“Boom,” he liked to whisper.
Sometimes I think about fake diamonds running thru everything
Like people's blood with not-real diamonds inside
And beds made with fake diamonds within pillows
Would you dream a glittering icy sun
Under such a thing
Dad is outside of the soil
relaxing a new kind of animal.
“One leg might be enough,” Dad says.
“One leg might be confusing,” I say.
“For you, maybe,” Dad says, “but this one seems okay.”
Dad pats the new animal's one and only paw.
Can't even clap, I say.
“Can still arm wrestle,” it says.
It sounds like Dad.
Not with yourself, I say.
“Now that'd be confusing,” Dad says.
Dad can't find a good shoe for it.
“I guess nothing will fit for a while,” Dad says.
“Look at what it's doing!” Dad says.
“The confusion arrives from our bodies,” it says.
For you maybe, I say.
“Confusion is the _______,” it says.
It sounds just like you, I say.
“It sounds like my dad,” Dad says.
“I can still arm wrestle,” it says.
We are together in the deciding room.
I hate this room, I say.
“What room?” the room says.
The room, I say
The room right now.
Your skin and the inside of my gardening gloves and the similarities I noted. When you said you wanted to be tied up, and I thought it was the same as saying you had a headache. The workshop we missed that would have taught us the proper way to measure rain. We bought pets the color of fog. The sculpture we made with the bones the neighborhood children kept putting in our mailbox. The insects and days that answered to the same name. Whatever the mailman said when he brought the mail to the door because postal code didn’t allow him to stuff mail into a box of bones. The things Jesus Christ forgot. You loved the way fresh tomatoes looked on clean wool. The cooking class that would have taught us the correct way to skin oranges and lamb. The fishing lures the neighborhood kids hid in the meat. We named your mom after our dog. I will not speak of the unspeakable. I will not mention the word ______. The way I never told you I inherited an Irish pub. And the way I never told you I inherited Irish blood. The way you never told me you were a disk jockey. And the way you never told me you were a disc jockey. The concerts we never went to since you never told me you were a disc jockey. And the way you never told me you were a disc jockey. The canister of razorblades we kept near the sofa. The scarred sofa we kept too near the canister of razorblades. The things Jesus Christ left in the sofa. The way we put the flag up on the mailbox, and the mailman delivered bones to your mom. And the way I would never mention the word ______. I would use plural in place of singular. You would laugh at my plurality. You would tell me we were a disc jockey. We would volunteer our civilian time as disc jockeys. Jesus Christ would remember. I would mention the word ______, and you would laugh. We would laugh at the poor, and they would be healed by the disc jockeys we were. The disc jockey said there was a war. The bones in the mailbox were yours. I made a sculpture out of you and named it ______.
Swatch is now a luxury brand. Why this final loss of innocence? Everything was big in the ‘80s. A watch you could hang on your wall. Visible beads at the end of each eyelash. The “so what” school of criticism.
When the novelty of the new wears off, it feels chintzy. The way I feel about strangers is unconditional. They never seem strange. “Strange” has lost its original meaning; it now means “vague.” Everyone I’ve ever loved has failed me, by letting me.
According to quantum theory, there’s a real possibility you could fall through the floor. In some worlds, you do. Statistically, most worlds are boring. Most worlds could be improved with radical editing. If you like karaoke, you’ll love neo-benshi.
1. This universe has a long sleek wind that I believe in
2. Do not ask a philosopher to explain this because I am
3. I am with my friend, Henry Ford. He flickers when I explain him. I know because I am dead and so is Henry
4. We sit together in the bright light that I invented, but the lamp is not mine. Have you seen a moon outside? There is no outside. The moon is inside and so am I. And Henry is sitting on my bed
5. I will tell you about Henry from death, which he and I are inside. I did not invent it. Yet the moon has an inside that I can describe
6. Any friend has many sides, even in such bright light as Henry and I sit. Yet I can only see one side of him at a time
7. And what is time? Time is a long sleek side. It swells in the darkness of the wide. And so in inventing the bright light I have tried to be everywhere at one time. The moon barely fits within what I have described
8. It is large, death, a large fat side you sit with night after night. And where doesn’t my light shine? On which night aren’t I?
9. I draw a circle and point to the center. That is you, I say to Henry
10. Henry is made of signs connected to a pump many miles away. And it pumps Henry’s answer to me
11. No, that is the spruce tree, a cross-section of it, I hear Henry say
12. Yet Henry and I are often in disagreement. He tells me that he believes in reincarnation. He does not believe in the long sleek wind that is even an infant compared with time
13. I am at the long sleek wind, I tell Henry. I am at the top
14. Henry Ford is an American, and so am I. The lights shine, and we are asked to dine with incomprehensible companions for a very long time
How cool would it have been to live back when the wind and birds and avalanches sounded like Black Sabbath, and killing gave people these huge fucking hard-ons? You’d be so dead.
If death is like a million miles of this then pick up that rock over there and pretend you’re Poland in the Forties and my head is Adolf Hitler.
If I rubbed a magic lamp and some genie smoked out and granted me three wishes, I’d wish for a zillion euros, infinite wishes, and that the lamp was your cock.
So many evil people have designs on my crotch it’s like a thousand pairs of hands are crumpling one piece of paper.
When I grow up I want to chug-a-lug a zillion beers then behead your wife and kids. What do you want to be? I mean besides my sex slave slut.
Me growing up is such an oxymoron it makes the Flintstones seem like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unless 16 counts. Okay, I’d like to turn 16.
I’m the coldest piece of shit in human history but your rotting, stinking corpse is so hot in theory I think it’ll melt me.
I’ve tried to kill myself so many times since I met you that every time you hit me it’s like the ten thousandth car running over a dead dog.
The idea of raping and killing you just triggered off its million billionth hard on, but this one is God’s. That’s my gift to you.
I’m boring. You’re boring. Sex is boring. Being tortured is boring. Being killed is boring.
The problem with pretending your ass was my right hand all these years is fist-fucking you is like playing ‘Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.’
The problem with being a suicidal airhead is getting raped and killed by my best friend seems superficial, but if it keeps you here for five more minutes, then go for it.
When you’re unemployed for so long you begin to take pride in an unidentifiable amorality. I am picking at various scabs, watching dismal horror movies about Nazi zombies. I am debating whether or not one capitalizes Nazi. Often times I don’t capitalize christ. I can hear the mailman outside fumbling with his keys, poking at his radio. I would be a mailman, but I hate walking and wearing shorts. I am going to find pictures of you on the internet and maybe masturbate if I’m not too sleepy. I am going to Google “celebrity endowments.” I am fucked in your garden, thirsty in the atmosphere. I want to be Mario, humping on mushrooms, licking the princess. I go to Target and play the promotional Xbox. When little Mexican kids ask me if they can have a turn I say no, I’ve got to beat my fucking levels. Don’t read porn on the subway. Don’t eat Subway after 2AM. In my free time what’s best is to gnaw on my cheek until there’s a hole. I fill that hole with Evan Williams extra sour mash Kentucky whisky. It burns and all the new energy sits outside on my porch. I never allow her inside.
I had commissioned a squid ink and papyrus copy of your poetry when I discovered that the squid in question was in fact an octopus with a penchant for predicting the outcome of sporting events. I fired him. Immediately. And will deal no more with aquatic calligraphers. Still, I am considering having an edition produced that is written on a tortilla and inked by the venom of a baby cobra. The hallucinogenic effects of such an adolescent toxin have been used to augment the wines of Romania for centuries. I can imagine the effect on your words will be breathtaking. You will eat it ravenously. Death will seem but a small price to pay.
In her book Hygieia: A Woman’s Herbal, Jeannine Parvati notes that many women, Huichol and otherwise, wear a peyote button nestled high in their vaginas like a cervical cap. “Taking these [mind-altering] herbs,” writes Parvati, “can give parents an opportunity to feel their world as their children do…become one within the baby space.” She invokes Hecate, Goddess of Witches, as representative of the “dark connection with healing and female’s trimurti with sexual energy. This Goddess suggests that we women healers regain our lost gnosis, our knowledge of the occult and use the tools of astrology, tarot, or other intuitive channels in our diagnoses and ministerings.”
Miller spoke clean words. His parents loved him the most of all. Privilege. His pants never tearing on trees. His legs superb and strong. Miller was a strength, Eliza a beautiful curiosity. Eliza saw his lips and clouds opened to sun. A latch between breasts covering the door to her heart. Miller’s sleeve creases. Miller’s sharp eyes. Cottonwood trees say love is wind. Snakes in grass say love is warmed rocks. Miller says love is Eliza. A tiny latch and its metal lock. A lock with no hole for a key. Eliza believes love is sun, coming uncovered from clouds.
Four years ago, Daryl was all up in it before it turned into the wrong end of Shark Week; her inner thighs chewed his temples alive. After awaking from a two-day coma, the labia became razor wire at Auschwitz. Once Daryl adapted this concentration camp metaphor, his batting average was that of an amputee until he found Baptist women whose idea of third base was kissing while holding hands in a dark room; his wedding to Monica was in three days.
The hammer falls on an empty chamber, the lethal injection misses the vein. Nothing comes easy after dark. Although the body heals, memory never recovers. Pieces of the gallows sold for a dollar a pound. Until we know why, we won’t know what happened. The man in the window insists that truth is a moving target. The bird on his chest is bleeding, too.
It doesn’t matter how I die,
I want the news reports to say autoerotic asphyxiation
is something you once said to me that I never understood. And now,
you’re gone.
I sit in the co-op, drink carrot juice and think about the day
we insisted the juicers
make us carrot juice the same orange as your shirt,
how they made you remove it
so they could hold it up to the juicing machine
and match the oranges exactly.
We took a photo of you and the juice for the university’s
ping pong bulletin.
It was mostly ginger,
like the way you insisted you’d always wanted the square
because you knew it would fit and I’d always wanted the circle
because of its silver top
even though you’d always wanted the circle
because of its silver top
and I’d always wanted the square because I knew it would fit.
Now I sit in my apartment
and think about that photo
because I can’t look at the photo
because I lost it sometime during the two years
I pretended it was 2005.
I moved eight blocks away and convinced myself I was starting over.
For the next two years I’d drive frantically
around the city crying with animals wearing cones
who were also crying.
See, I was missing something,
which is why
I often panicked.
See, I was lost,
which is why
I often picnicked.
Even though I wanted to know what I was doing I didn’t know
what I was doing but things kept moving forward moving forward
moving forward and you said this
and I said I understand what you’re saying but I’m thinking this
and you said
this isn’t going to work, it’s not going to work,
and at the time, at the time I was devastated
as I stood in the lot of a supermarket where I’d no longer be able to shop.
And then I met Caren,
who took me to the top of her building,
filled a sleeping bag with warm water,
placed me inside and pushed me down three flights of stairs.
Then while shaving, he cut his chin. His irritation mounting, he did what he always did in a time of displeasure: he took his sniper rifle out from the closet, polished it, and rested its stock on his shoulder under his chin just next to the red dollop of tissue paper, sweeping the view through the scope across the next square over. When his finger pulled softly into the trigger and the fruit merchant collapsed in a heap, a shot of approximately 400 meters, balloons and streamers fell from the ceiling along with a banner bearing the numeral 1000. Brushing the confetti from his shoulder, Humberto Figueroa Urquiza allowed himself a brief smile and reflected on a long and prosperous career. The milestone achieved, he could continue about his morning activities without any further niggling dilemma.
I have already told you that I often find myself becoming Tony Leung’s character in Happy Together. I too have a desperate and unhappy love, but in my life Leslie Cheung’s character is played by something else, which you already know and which snickers at description as Leslie Cheung snickers often at Tony Leung throughout the film; a snicker which promises suffering and orgasm or suffering and orgasm; and also love, which sneaks into the snicker without even Leslie Cheung really being aware of it, although I think Tony Leung is aware of it.
Tony Leung’s character is named Lai Yiu-fai and Leslie Cheung’s character is named Ho Po-wing, but I never call them or myself by those names.
My life has taken up where the film left off and I have married Chang Chen’s character, who is also named Chang. Chang and Tony Leung work together in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in Buenos Aires. People often say Wong Kar-wai is a romantic filmmaker and that is true, but I think he is a great filmmaker of labor and in particular illegal labor and the service industry.
You never know for sure if Chang is gay. What you know is that he had eye problems in his youth and so cultivated a practice of listening to people in a supernatural or super-sensitive way. Even after a surgical procedure restored his eyesight, he says, he never lost the habit of listening.
In her village, whenever someone had a problem with bees they called the village hypnotist. He would speak and the bees would leave the hexagons of their honeycomb behind.
a house is an employment of trees, a crowd is a path to a door.
if this is a stage
then ask if this is a stage.
the light of a cigarette outed by snowflakes, no privacy
in the crowd when it’s burning.
if we feed the sun we give away velocity.
i dogear the daisy blooming against the clapboard.
nothing will happen
we tell the sun,
if it does
watch me catch it.
it’s your ice, the dust in your gun when i rush the stage,
if this is only a stage.
can i build it for you?
the carpenter frames us in destroys movement like a photograph.
can i build this house for you?
a ring circumscribes an answer on my hand.
I would've come over to you, to the table near the window where you sat, but I would have no place to put my drink--it would've left a watery broken ring on the table, and I could not put you through that again: those nights where the boys with their parents bank cards bought you drinks they thought you liked because they were drinks you pretended to like -- they were too red, too sweet, they curled your tongue like a thin paperback in a backpocket, though I would not describe your tongue this way: you know the story of Lennon and Chapman and Salinger and that is something I don't want you to think about: about blood, about The Dakota, about autographs.
During lunch we padded our backpacks with newspaper and carried the dishes to the old football stadium. We were alone among the insects flitting about abandoned bleachers. I wore oven mitts and sunglasses, my hair piled high like a Hindu God's. Adam put on a pair of swimming goggles, tugged the sleeves of his sweatshirt over his hands, and grabbed a plate. Cranking his right shoulder like the handle of a music box, Adam bent the opposite leg and flung the dish toward the scoreboard. It shattered and fell to the ground, a firework exploding.
He laughed. I selected one of the champagne flutes, one of the first pieces I’d collected. It took us less than four minutes. When we were finished, we surveyed the shards of purple, white, olive green, and blue. We stared in reverence. Adam took a picture with his phone. A bell rang and we broke from our trance and walked to fourth period.
With her machine gun soaking in breast milk, she’s smoking
Marlboros before the Ouroboros. I put my prayers in zero. A
laughingstock on TV, he took an arrow to each elbow, hasn’t
been the same since. Johnnie Cochran holds up the cock ring,
shows the jury, calls it “Exhibit X.” Tattletale scavenger hunt.
“That’s diabolical,” he says. “Well, sayonara, Aram Saroyan!”
Nowadays, converting your aversions into druthers is nothing
like converting your perversions into the good old missionary.
You bellowed all the solitude
like a historically intriguing paint.
I was so backwards.
America, are you window or current?
Your significance little spikes a piquant suffering.
You’re an untenable, modern decadence
& I am drastically horny.
I aftermath like such a masked lady.
You’re depicting on virtue.
—Except for the wasps, it was a fine outing. Uncle Nicholas grilled the tuna steaks to near perfection.
—Did Father summer with us?
—No. He traveled, on a business trip to the Vatican.
—What business carried him there?
—He was swindling them. He cheated them out of certain priceless statues, e.g., Cellini’s Nymph of Fountainbleau, if memory serves.
—Thus the priceless Cellinis in the foyer—
—Yes.
—I dressed them, when I was younger, in cloths and beads.
—No, that was Veronica. You feared them.
—Veronica?
—Yes. You wouldn’t go anywhere near the foyer; you’d shriek and cover your eyes and try to run.
—I had no idea.
—Veronica adored those statues. She stood there for hours, singing, dressing them. She named each one of them.
—Tell me again how she died.
—You shot her through the forehead with Father’s crossbow.
—I don’t remember.
—And through the chest. It was rather a bloody spectacle. You’d been playing at Beatniks and Swine.
—And she was the Beatnik?
—No, she was the Swine. You were the Beatnik, in the midst of a Beatnik rebellion. You’d found the weapons shed unlocked.
—And I shot her through the chest and the forehead?
—It was accidental, of course. You were only thirteen, didn’t know that the crossbow was loaded.
—I had no idea.
—The weapons shed should never have been left unlocked. We fired the Beatnik who was responsible.
—I had no idea.
—She died at an inopportune time, Veronica did.
—Did Father cry?
—He wasn’t there. He had left for the War.
—Which War was that?
—The second one. I begged him not to go to the War—I pleaded and begged, but to no effect. He remained unmoved. “The opportunities,” he told me. “War offers such wonderful opportunities. Museums, private collections...”
—I remember him, a little. Wielding his crossbow. Wearing his cap and goggles, his silk scarf billowing.
—He cut a dashing figure, I must admit.
—You adored him.
—I adored him.
—How, then, did he die?
—He isn’t dead.
—I had no idea.
—He lives quite comfortably in Munich.
—He never came home?
—The War had changed him. He wrote me a letter. He wrote, “The War has changed me. I’m going to live in Munich, quite comfortably.”
—What does he do there?
—What did he do here?
—Have you heard no more from him since that time?
—Only once, in a postcard he sent ten years later. Its front was a picture of the Harlequin. On the back he wrote, “I am living here still.”
—Did he make any inquiries as to me?
—No. He never cared for you. I never could convince him that you were his child.
—Am I?
—No.
—Momma? Where do babies come from?
—They don’t come from anywhere, darling. They simply are.
The time machine flickers.
Tiny explosions devour the control panel.
A blue-skinned sentient biped
lies in a slowly growing puddle of green blood.
Brainwaves operate the omnidimensional rifle.
A brave stands inside the treeline.
He keeps killing white devils on the beach
until the big wooden ship sails away.
The Queen of the Vampires mounts her skeleton horse.
She has assembled an army of zombie shamans.
They storm Jerusalem and rescue Jesus.
No cross is erected on top of Golgotha.
I trade my rare coin collection for a bottle of absinthe.
O Dark Beauty, I meet you at the cotillion
where a graveyard dances with a shopping mall.
I love you in life and I’ll love you in death.
Me and Theodore climbed to the top of the water tower because we were scared of the tremors beneath the dirt.
There is nothing wrong with lanterns under your skin. The way they bump and quiver when you run. There is nothing wrong with they way their lights follow each other, dark to light, making a flashing wave of lit up lantern shapes all up and down your arms and legs. There is nothing wrong with the way they itch when they rotate and push at your skin from the inside. Let them move. Let them agitate. They are the light that will guide you into the night. Into the battle that rages on the other side of this hour. When that trollop called night sees you coming, an army of you, bringing this lantern light into her house, she will squeal, she will burn, she will howl at the way a muted and shallow little light has invaded her home.
There is a certain faith in the body's ability to heal. In the way a broken bone, set correctly, will find its way back together. The way a scab forms over a cut. The way strained muscles ease into a painless routine. There is a certain faith that the body will return and return again. The body will defend against the demons that cut us down, that bury us. But where do we turn when the pain persists? When the mole gets bigger? When the breath gets tender? When the demons are your own body, attacking, treason from the inside? Are we supposed to just give up and go, voluntarily, into that perfume of rot called twilight only to be swallowed by the selfish maw of night?
Light those lanterns, light them all, each and every one. There is no shame in the pattern that reaches across your backs. Take pride in your own defenses. Take pride in the light we've made here together on this day.
On this day, we stand together, shoulder to shoulder, watching the blue of our youth pulling her own skin back, to make room for the sad, bleak, anonymity of night and all the violence and crud that she brings. Crawling through her hair and over her skin, eyes, in through her holes and out through her mouth. A putrid witch of a thing. When I say charge, charge into that sky. Into that gloating black night. Raise your weapons and make war.
I said take up your weapons and make your way into the belly of night. Slash apart her mud veil. Cut her through front to back. Make of her chest a hole. Make of her arms kindling to burn on my pyre. Tell her eyes to stop their weeping. Prepare your destiny. Prepare your mind, body, and soul. Charge into the night with rage and pity. And know that while some of you may fall and some of you may fly, if you are lucky, no one will be there to see you reeling, incomprehensibly, into darkness.
Mom said she raised a good boy, a fine son. I am that which she speaks on. I am glad to have been born. It was luck I was born of her and not of a mom that was in a house that was in a part of town far from the mom I did get and love still. I could have been raised up in some place quite bad. I would be dead now. But I have the mom I have. I have her still. She raised me. We used to drive by some of the homes I did not like in our car, mom and me, when the homes still stood, and I would look out at each of them and think on who could be in such a place. We would not stop and go in them. We would go back where we live. I know I am a good boy as mom told me and still says. I know I am in the best place I could be. I do love mom so. I did not care so much for dad. He stayed in his room most days and at night. He would not let me in if I had come to knock for him to say hi. He would not look at me if he could help it. He oft did not care to hear it when I said I loved him, as I had to say to him to be a good boy. I guess he was sad that I got sick. He got lone and blue and full of pain. It was like this since my head broke. I don’t know why that is. I can’t tell why dad did what he did. I’m not sure why he frowned and would not talk to me when I got my skull took off. I wished he would have changed back to how he used to be. I prayed for it at church when mom drove me there. I don’t get why dad had to act like he had got more hurt in him than I had when it is me who fell down. I tried to be real good when it came to all my pain so as not to make mom fret for me. I shoved all the pain hid in my gut where mom can’t see it. I kept it thus most of the time. I did not let it out when she was in the same room. I still keep it safe that way these days. Dad did not learn that trick. I wished he learned since I did not want mom to fret for him or me or at all. I told mom I love her and she said it back, of course. I did not quite love dad, and sure did not like him, not the way he was in the end, but I thought it was my job to be nice and the right
A boorish silence fills the forest
like a carpet around the rich.
Trees fall just to be chivalrous,
maiming highwaymen.
The forest is full of syphilis,
I don't care who caused it.
Tax incentives for dying
make me worry about the government,
but it is a human thing
to worry over my penis,
what a human thing it is
to hold your children
as bandits dismember the night
and feed it to their hounds.
It is a soundless terror
inscribed against the ice,
where swineherds mistake laundry
for drowned ghosts.
It is a tiny map I swallow.
"Between one castle and another,
the world is a moat,"
says my coachman.
His words float like leaves,
a trail behind me.
"In times of peace,
it seems quite foolish
to harness your chest
against a giant, heavy flag,"
says my soldier.
When we stop at a crossroads
we all weep like philosophers,
automatically regretting
the anatomical future
our decisions sketch ahead of us,
the premonition of etiquette
and its attendant colonies
stretching rumors
of damp, paranoid vacations
amongst our number.
"On an island, you can't trust anyone,"
says my artist,
who is also an inventor.
One solution is to ride furiously,
blurring what should be scenic
into a genealogy of wind,
branches ripping gently
as if the trees were rehearsing
a modern war.
Another is to part ways forever
under the same name,
confronting scholars
with alternate endings
which are exactly the same
but for the question of a beard.
It's been done before.
As I ride Eastward,
I can hear my biographer
furiously dictating
his own adventures,
enthusiastically citing swans
like a boring lake.
Alone, the forest becomes a room,
the moss turned down
and the brambles tamed.
I stop at a clearing
and the snake inside me
whispers that I should get naked,
slithering over dead leaves
until who I have been
is a crisp windsock,
a trumpet made of tissue,
a translucent cathedral
where all the little villains go to play.
The Government Pays Your Uncle Not to Farm
In Iowa your Uncle is outside with his dog, fighting a daylight raccoon. He shoots it inside out. You're in the kitchen gutting pheasant. You think: fingers cover the frost. He tells the dog to sit and says he doesn't grow any corn because the government pays him not to farm. The prairie grass failing like a weak deer. You think: bountiful moon. The crops no longer circle and dive like birds. I think we're in a wheat field. I can see two feet ahead and want nothing more than the smoke of your breath in my frozen ear. The raccoon lays there. Blood on the dog's lip. Your uncle walks to the stream. I stay with the mess, my ears ringing like a television left on through the night.
I Do Not Want To Die Because of Corn
I pretend we are alone. Watch the lights of California melt the stars away. We are a parking lot of byproducts. Cement walls everywhere. The corn ruining our breath. We drive hours away on 10% corn ethanol gasoline. At Vista Point we see there is nothing in heaven we want and watch Los Angeles suffer like a stray. I hold you hard while you dream of my heart coming apart like a frayed wire. There is nothing worth eating. We are a parking lot of ruined insides. I bleed open like a split fence and sleep with dirty hands.
There is No Real Corn in California
I can't stand checking nutritional facts. It's always a trick. The organic farms. There is no real corn in California. There is no diet that can keep you clean forever. Each night the head of a fish. Each night like a storeroom of rice and wheat. Your past is avocado-painted roads and my past is the Union Workers parting the Heartland with an interstate.
The Paint on Your Toyota Camry is Made of American Corn
The paint on your Toyota Camry is made of American corn and the car itself is recycled bottles and computer chips. The dangerous floor mat works like a noose. I can warn you about pedals but you are not a child. When I feel pressed against you I think: change brake pads. When I feel soft I think: carwash. One morning you will wake with rust beneath your eyes. You will resurface yourself, think about purchasing a sexier car. One morning I will come home with a brand new heartache machine. You will think: anti-lock braking system; Mercedes-Benz.
We Can’t Consume All the Corn We Produce
I buy you dinner because I imagine lingerie beneath your clothes. While we eat I think about the way sometimes your hair curves like leaves around your lips, about your bare legs moving against the cold sheets. I imagine a surplus. I imagine feeding the starved. I want to wear you like a coat I carry into another field of corn. You say that we use corn in everything because we can't eat all the corn we have. You say that we are sinking, that we are a beat-down shed. I try not to spill ice water on your thighs and imagine that hunger does not exist while I pick the shell of a prawn from my teeth.
Government Subsidized Corn is Crushing the Global Economy
As I watch you undress Government subsidized corn is crushing the global economy. There is a song about this on the stereo. It goes on like a bag of empty cans. I've crushed each one and I too love being crushed. Like spice, like a mound of sand. I tell you this and then practice burying myself. In the evening I barely crawl into the deepest shadow of our yard. I dream of trucks backing into a garage. I dream beneath the porch in the dirt and watch these giant fists crushing grass like boots. The trucks are full of corn and gasoline and the gasoline is made of corn and oil. Do you feel my ruined soil? Do you see me battered, frail as meal?
You Used to Scatter Corn Silk in the Grass for the Birds to Use to Build Their Homes
This is the way we get to heaven. Walking carefully at night around the hot tub with toes curled like the rain. The television in your parents room flashing across the yard. The colors cutting through the silk we left in the lawn. This might be how they build their homes. Each toe like a kernel of corn. This is how we take off our clothes. The nests of silk so quiet. It hurts like sleep to build a home and most nights you are not this soft. When I whisper all you hear is wrinkled breaths, a photograph of numbers coming out of me like string.
1. A smudge of a person in a smear of a room. There’s light and sound and then there isn’t.
2. George Jetson is in a living room listening to music. Then he turns off the music and turns out the light and goes to bed.
3. George Jetson is listening to the Beatles’s White Album and playing Spore on a laptop in his living room. A platypus walks in the front door. It sits down next to him. This music sucks, the platypus says. Don’t you have any Devo? George Jetson thinks the music off. When he closes his eyes, the lights go out.
4. George Jetson and a platypus are taking turns playing Spore on a laptop and listening to Smashing Pumpkins and Korn. After a while, George Jetson gets sleepy and jetpacks off to bed. The platypus plays until the planet stage, at which point it loses interest. It wonders what it would be like to be the first man to wear pants. It walks out into the night, never to return.
5. There was a dog named Astro once that talked through the day, and a family, but that was a million years ago, or from now. George Jetson had a tail once, too, or an ancestor did. Some nights in the living room he hears phantom barking so he turns on his iPod and listens to music until he falls asleep with the lights on.
6. There’s a platypus in a living room not listening to music. There’s nobody there to feed it. After a while, it wanders down a cul-de-sac and dies.
7. George Jetson and a platypus are playing Dance Dance Revolution in the living room. They are supergood friends. Their insides are like deep stone wells of devotion. They dance to Devo. When they’re exhausted and happy they eat ice cream and read comics. In time, rubyred energy beams come zapping out of George Jetson’s eyes. The platypus shrugs and wings unfold from its shoulders. They put on costumes and save the world over and over again, then go to bed.
8. The living room was built by Adam Jetson in a house he built by hand with his wife Rachel the day before she delivered their first child, her belly swollen and her hammerstroke true. Before that there was meadow and before that there was forest and before that there was ocean. Someday there will be wreckage and timber and then there will be rot and then there will be field and then forest and then ocean. Right now there is living room, and human being and platypus flicking through like moths, like meteors.
9. George Jetson is in a living room with a platypus. They’re listening to music on a very old cabinet stereo. The platypus stays up all night. Sometime after midnight, George Jetson heads to bed. He leaves his boots on. They drift up to the ceiling and he awakens upside down above the bed. The platypus is curled up on his pillow. George Jetson has never slept so well in his life.
9.2. He’s never slept so poorly in his life, ever since he started sleeping with the platypus.
9.3. They sleep well together, spooningly so, curled in on each other, fur and skin, bill and butt.
10. God invented the living room about twelve days ago. He aged the timber eighty years and scarred the floorboards and cracked the windows and endusted and begrimed the corners and windowsills.
11. George Jetson in his supercool jetboots hovers crosslegged in the middle of the livingroom. How long has he wrestled with this knot of feelings for the platypus dancing to Devo in his living room? It’s a wrongness, a tangle, a wingflutter of the heart. Put on your secret agent hat and come to bed, George says. The platypus levels its blank stare at him. Unreadable and mysterious, it stops dancing and cocks its head. After a while, George scoops up the platypus and hoverboots it off to bed. The heart is a thousand birds lifting suddenly from a field in winter.
Amsterdam Island, France-
Everyone who stays on Amsterdam for longer than a year is examined by a medical officer from the south of France to check that he is coping with the long period of restriction of movement and the confined, purely masculine environment. No woman has visited longer than two days. At night, the men gather in the small video room in Great Skua to watch one of the porn films from their personal collection. Each man sits in a row on his own. The loudspeakers emit grunts and groans, and the air is heavy with the musky scent of the bull seals.)
I want a guy who humps in the nude. I want a guy who brushes his teeth with his eyes open. I want a guy who’s a man. I want a guy who works heavy machinery. I want a guy who leans into it and pumps at that meatcutter with his groin. I want a guy who’s so passionate about his work that he makes love to it. I want a guy who drools a creek across the pillow.
And let’s be honest here. I’m no lady and I got thighs like the hock part of the ham and my skirts is too tight but I can damn sure touch my toes and yep you bet the cleavage at my back is in tight competition with the cleavage in my front and oh could I ever give you a wet willie.
I’m in the grocery store. I’m gliding down the aisle towards the gleam in your hair. That hair’s like a shiny balloon top or something. I want that gin blossom to trace the healthy proportionate bitch curve of my belly. I want a guy who drinks Merlot with a golden shower chaser and if you ain’t him you will be soon. Oh goddamn it I want to bake you a pie so you can smash it in my face concurrent with the climax. A cherry one and oh I’ll show you some cherry.
Let’s make a ground beef plaster mold of your privates and make your beefdick enter a couple Butterballs. Hand me over some raw fish or alligator tail or turkey necks and I’ll hang them from these tits like the tassels your mama had nightmares about. I want to help you out. I want to scare you shitless. I want to show you the way around a t-bone and a ladydick and that erogenous part between the toes.
I can hold a lemon in seven different places on my body. I’m serious as the heart attack I want to give you. I’m gonna put you in the babyseat and crash the cart at the dirty feminine aids aisle. I’ll figure-eight your ass from the donuts to them slivered salad almonds and if you’re any good you can use the time to pat these boob pillows, make you somewhere nice to lay your head.
I’m going to deliver your birthday cake out my womb. It’s a marble with buttercream frosting and its name is Anything Goes. Smack my ass to make sure it’s breathing and I’ll smoke you a cigar from my lady parts in celebration. Blow you some smoke rings, lasso you in.
I want a guy who parts his hair on the left. I want a guy who’ll lick my throat area. I want a guy who’ll finger my back cleavage. I want a guy who owns tools. I want a guy who collects ratshit. I want a guy don’t like to read. I want a guy who’ll slash my tires. I want a guy who hates a pinky in his ass.
I got ripples of fat for you to skip your gonads on. I got a forehead for teabagging. I want you to sandpaper me a rough spot on the insides of my thighs with your dumbass unshaven cheeks. I want to trim your nose hair with my incisors. Make me a pendant from your earwax. Hold you in front of the fridgedoor till your willer shrivels to a peanut.
I’m in your line. There’s no undies under these skirts and there never will be. You dribble some sausageblood, I’ll bend to wipe it. You want a closer look you’ll have to ask and I’ll have to squat. Take my order. I want a pound of fuckmeat and some fattypart skewers. I’ll shish kabob your loins and there ain’t gonna be any leftovers.
I’m pretty cause I say so. You got shit for brains but that’s the way I like it. Long as you been around the ass block and you drink your coffee black. I’ll be in the parking lot marking my territory up against your truck tires, pulling my shirt up and playing fried eggs against your windows. Bring me out a cow’s tongue and a duck’s liver and say yes or don’t say anything, because you and your plasticlooking hair and your tiny lady nipples are mine and you ain’t got no choice in the matter and anyway I’m driving.
I dream you are a live wire, you are alive: Stumble upon me and bloom
and let the almost bloom.
The live wire is me, the almost, the live wire stumbles upon the almost.
I am an are, a strange and stumbling are, I paper the walls with almost
and wake almost stunned.
Common dream otherworld: under sand through a space wide enough to swim through, a place without water is home. There’s no sky, it’s maybe necessarily cave or womb like there, a good place there. Maybe jewels, maybe governments or ways of greeting that surprise.
But I sing. I say therefore. I say at the center of thee is either a child-flame or child-angels. I say it is thy soul. Shapeless, subtle. I say paper bag and I take it. I take the crumpled pages that I love from the book of love and I must love them again and again. For it is snowing and I bid the snow to sing, but it will not. And I worship the voice of the snow for its silence. Still, I have not learned how not to love, though I have undertaken thy numerous lessons. And I wrap my bottle in a paper bag like a lamp. What I love greater than light. The thought of light. Glowing phrases of a nightingale reincarnate the sum of a river. I lurk in the drink. And I think of the torn silk. The subtleness of my undergarments as I sit on a bench. And I think how I am saved. Saved from the snow in which you are passing. Which passes over you who are deep within the pages of the ice-story. Aye, you cannot hear me. For you plug thy self-made fingers into thy self-made ears. Outside the newly fresh. We are right, we who ask for the singing. We who can’t ask. We who can’t sing. We are glorious in our belief. We believe in the story of asking. Snow under thy wing. Snow upon thy unseen sparrow. We believe flowers bottle themselves into tiny startled blossoms. We unfold paper from thy bread.
Our talking is a kudzu of carotids in which we lose our marbles. Hours later they tumble out as we are snoring, awakening us one at a time, hard little tumors we flick underneath one another. By morning we lie like border states whose boundaries are rivers, anomalously straight, canals funded by nature.
When I get nervous near you it's like a utility forms and hits a whole town with its too much. Everyone goes shed 'n' attic and unearths devices: those they need, those they never use, those borrowed and never returned, those they wish they'd borrowed and could thus return, those they don't recognize, those whose uses they can't fathom, those double-barreled ones which lend skulls cold spots, those too flimsy to withstand unearthing, those which served as stunt doubles for other devices once, in their heyday, those they don't really need. But want. Among them: electric utensils, rodent rotators, epilepsy-inducers, oars, spooling agents, laminators, pompadour replicators, run-on detectors, vaginal dredgers, mechanical fins, metronomic innards, palate-ticklers, religious spatulae, hissiphones. Those that look burnt but not flammable. Those that come off synthetic yet overripe. Those for pulling, for turning, for penetrating, for twisting and more. Thanks, we say, blushing, thanks. What they do with them is done, and then they are put gently back into their slots, slid onto the hooks and rafters, and eventually I can meet your gaze once more.
Next year starts my stint as anthropologist on that island where relationships and existential quandaries are thrashed out in small talk, and any mention of the weather or the pop diva‟s latest gown makes the strongest crack with weeping.
Even the tolls adjust on our approach. You catch them trembling and think it a trick of light. Whatever we hand over, coughed and culled from cushiony crevasses, is always “exact” and “change,” and still you clamp down, silent as mile markers, on one bald coin.
Whatever else we are, we are surely a beard that has convinced its owner to stop shaving. How long? No longer do we even notice the Unabomber comparisons, the razors orphaned in the snarl.
The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans. It was said of the First World War that people in it fell like seeds and the Russian Communists later calculated how much fertilizer a square kilometer of corpses would yield and how much they would save on expensive foreign fertilizers if they used the corpses of traitors and criminals instead of manure. And the English invented the tank and the Germans invented gas, which was known as yperite because the Germans first used it near the town of Ypres, although apparently that was not true, and it was also called mustard because it stung the nose like Dijon mustard, and that was apparently true, and some soldiers who returned home after the war did not want to eat Dijon mustard again. The First World War was known as an imperialist war because the Germans felt that other countries were prejudiced against them and did not want to let them become a world power and fulfill some historical mission. And most people in Europe, Germany, Austria, France, Serbia, Bulgaria, etc., believed it to be a necessary and just war which would bring peace to the world. And many people believed that the war would revive those virtues that the modern industrial world has forced into the background, such as love of one’s country, courage, and self-sacrifice. And poor people looked forward to riding in the train and country folk looked forward to seeing big cities and phoning the district post office to dictate a telegram to their wives, I’M FINE, HOPE YOU ARE TOO. The generals looked forward to being in the newspapers, and people from national minorities were pleased that they would be sharing the war with people who spoke without an accent and that they would be singing marching songs and jolly popular ditties with them. And everyone thought they’d be home in time for the grape harvest or at least by Christmas.
Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was the first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and town and civilians, and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and the general theory of relativity, according to which nothing was metaphysical but relative. And when the Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Senegalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And the soldiers wore green and camouflage uniforms because they did not want the enemy to see them, which was modern at the time because in previous wars soldiers had worn brightly-colored uniforms in order to be visible from afar. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their name and number and regiment to indicate who was who, and where to send a telegram of condolences, but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost, the military command would announce that they were unknown soldiers, and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten, because fire preserves the memory of something long past. And the fallen French measured 2,681 kilometers, the fallen English, 1,547 kilometers, and the fallen Germans, 3,010 kilometers, taking the average length of a corpse as 172 centimeters. And a total of 15,508 kilometers of soldiers fell worldwide. And in 1918 an influenza known as Spanish Flu spread throughout the world killing over twenty million people. Pacifists and anti-militarists subsequently said that these had also been victims of the war because the soldiers and civilian populations lived in poor conditions of hygiene, but the epidemiologists said that the disease killed more people in countries where there was no war, such as in Oceania, India, or the United States, and the Anarchists said that it was a good thing because the world was corrupt and heading for destruction.
There has arguably never been a film quite as mind-bending, strange and ambitious as Enter The Void, Gaspar Noe's tale of a hallucinogen-loving teen who gets blown away – in the first five minutes of the movie – while tripping his face off on DMT. For the next two-and-a-half hours his soul floats around a pinball machine-like vision of Tokyo watching his sister (Paz del la Huerta) strip, recalling his parent's horrific car accident and plummeting through wormholes in time and space that come in the form of everything from lightbulbs and headlights to vaginas and eyeballs. Imagine the last sequence of Kubrck's 2001 and you are getting close to the aesthetic, but this is actually way more surreal.
Try it a bit, instead of sexing
One night. Close your eyes,
And think, Grandmother,
I’m coming to you, live!
Jesus shows inside his flesh.
He is airy marbles and we are
All looking at his un-pain
While we fucked, I’d hold his baby. To keep the baby off the dirt. Clean babies are happy. I’d hold the baby out in front, and he’d fuck me from behind. The baby never cried. The baby wandered. I mean its eyes. The baby appeared unfazed. I mean by the fucking.
We fucked in the park, in the tall grass. When my arms that held the baby bounced, the baby laughed and laughed. And while I got fucked, while I was holding the baby, I’d wonder about the baby’s other daddy. This was what I assumed, that the baby had another daddy, because unlike his first daddy, the daddy who fucked me, this baby was brown. I figured the baby was adopted. Something about the daddy, I could just tell, he seemed like the kind of man with a man at home. Even though he never talked about himself, he didn’t seem like he kept any secrets.
I wanted to ask him, Bring the other daddy to the park! One daddy to kneel on the ground and take me in his mouth. The other daddy to fuck me. And me to hold the baby. To keep the baby clean. But I never had the guts to ask.
That was a few years ago. That daddy disappeared. Now that park has fewer babies. Now those babies toddle. Oh man, those babies are getting big.
You wanted me to tell you everything I did after we left each other.
Well, I was very sad; it had been so lovely. When I saw your back disappear into the train compartment, I went up on the bridge to watch your train pass under me. That was all I saw; you were inside it! I looked after it as long as I could, and I listened to it. In the other direction, toward Rouen, the sky was red and striped with broad bands of purple. The sky would be long dark by the time I reached Rouen and you reached Paris. I lit another cigar. For a while I paced back and forth. Then, because I felt so numb and tired, I went into a café across the street and drank a glass of kirsch.
...When at last we reached home, it was one in the morning. I wanted to organize my work table before I went to bed. Out my study window, the moon was still shining—on the water, on the tow path, and, close to the house, on the tulip tree by my window. When I was done, Louis went off to his room and I went off to mine.
Sometimes We Have To Push Each Other Away So We Don’t Drag Each Other Down I’m sorry I hid from you
amongst a group of black women
while waiting for the bus.
Still terrified you’d see my white hair,
I stooped down and huddled
between them.
One of them patted my head.
A woman on the bus
gives another man a $2.99
Entenmann's pound cake.
He says it is his passion.
They call it his 'baby.'
He even cradles it a bit in his arms.
I am not the man cradling the
$2.99 Entenmann's pound cake.
I am the one who’s even too
afraid to lift my arms.
I’m awakened at 3 a.m. to the sound of an owl.
It takes me a minute to find my glasses.
I press my face to the window.
A silver flash crosses the yard.
It settles into an owl shape on a nearby post.
My nose and eyes are stinging.
A stinging behind my face.
Like some kind of problem behind a billboard.
Why would a man look at an owl and start to cry?
My body is trying to reject something.
I have no idea what that is.
The owl is sitting in the moonlight.
The yard is completely still.
I don’t know how to behave but
I know what I believe. I believe
that if I stick my head in the oven
I won’t take it out. I believe in
corduroy couch cushions. I believe
in digging a tunnel with a small
silver spoon. I believe in tunneling
with this spoon under the city
and never giving up.
I believe in after-breakfast naps
and Russian roulette—
Russian roulette while eating ice cream
as I watch the evening news.
I believe in the evening news.
And I believe in celebrity.
I believe in those photos
on the web of Putin playing doubles
Ping-Pong, outdoors, in his Speedo.
(Find those.) I believe in haircuts
and bubble gum, and putting my face
down into a pillow or cushion,
and that when I do this I will see
the future, plus other cultures, most
of them, and I’ll get work done
that couldn’t be done another way.
I believe in tacos and mortification.
I believe that all people fall
into one of two categories: Doonesbury or Far Side.
Well, or Andy Capp. Andy Capp type people.
They’re everywhere.
It’s high noon in Brooklyn but its always midnight on southern, dead end suburban streets. Here, there is total silence except for the house at the very end, where inside a tin roof garage, teenagers are kissing for the first time. The humidity is too great, the boys peel off white t’s and the girls cheeks are flushed, beet red under the garage’s two fluorescent stripes. In a pond behind the house an alligator waits for a snow birds’ Pomeranian to take its night stroll. A child is sleep walking for the first time. Some one is running away for the last time. The music is too loud on the 12 D battery boom box radio, the cops are on their way. It’s at this moment you hear the music of Twin Shadow on a radio station transmitting suburban ghost dreams that sound like a slow motion shot of a cannon, singing about spirits, visions, and aural hallucinations cutting through the first American night.
You're my favorite day dream. I'm your famous nightmare. Everything I see looks like gold. Everything I touch goes cold.
What do you say when they say “What do you do?” I say I play the
blues on my red kazoo. That I teach yoga to yahoos. That I have a ranch
in Australia where I breed blue suede kangaroos. I steal women’s shoes
and sell them to perverts over an 800 line. I do gardening with lasers.
I clean houses with plastic explosives. I’m on welfare. I’m on heroin.
I’m on parole. I teach the art of Ninja to ninnies. I’m a professional
identity designer. Nothing, I’m rich. Nothing, I’m emotionally crippled.
I’m a media mogul who moonlights as a Chippendale dancer. I manufacture
ladies lingerie for Frederick’s of Krakow. I play golf with beatniks.
I design then live in the cities of the future... which sometimes takes all
afternoon. I sell gizmos to gooks. I wholesale freeze-dried mail order
brides. I design Boy Kaddafi’s stage outfits and sometimes read him his
fan mail. What do I do? Well, I’m waiting for this think tank thing to
come through so I can get tanked and think of new ways to screw citizens
out of the dollar or two they’d like to use to buy brew but instead goes
to you know who. I loot shopping malls in radiation zones. I cruise
the art zoos looking for what’s new in mutations. I sell crack at the
United Nations. I don’t have just one occupation. I’m an amalgamation,
a confederation, a conspiracy and a conglomerate. I do what I have to do
because I’m a man... that’s spelled M – A – N. I don’t do anything,
I’m just a writer.
I’m a common man, a lunkhead, a stumbling predator, a devotee
of bitter indulgences. Just an ordinary guy with some extremely frisky
demons, an intimate with certain angels, and on speaking terms with my
personal version of God. I’m a flaunter of basic virtue, a victim of
luminescent tragedy, an occasional calamity of exuberance, an unskilled
dreamer, a squirming statistic. I’m a magenta hombre, a toxic tactician,
a refuge from convenient reason, a slobbering suitor, a recent visitor,
the midnight ranter at rest in the warm afternoon sun. I’m a churning
hunk of frenetic funk, a misprogrammed meat torpedo, rock and roll in a
rented tuxedo, a brain with a food hole, a high performance heart with
no brakes. I’m King Shit Deluxe, Kid Avalanche, Jumpcity Geronimo.
I’m the fool who just wishes he was tired. The boy next door...who you
never see because I’m kept locked in a closet. A quiet man with an
elaborate arsenal. I’m the karma chameleon who’s grown up to be a
dragon lizard, the former lizard poet who now could use a steady job.
I’m Mr. Wonderful miscast as a miasma of memory and menace. I’m just
a happily married man, a Prudential agent suddenly possessed by the
spirit of Howling Wolf. “You gotta do/ what you gotta do/ to protect/
your family/ you fam-i-lyyyyyy...yeah..” I’m a common man, a consensus
sweetheart, a condescending adult, a fugitive from the do-not-file file,
an exile from every Main Street from Naples to Nantucket, Goos Bay to
Ozone Park. I drinks whiskey when I’m thirsty but only eats zucchini
if I’m drunk. I labor to control my destiny, struggle to meet my
simple needs, try to manage more dangerous impulses. I’m quick-
tempered, wrong-hearted, short-sighted, but I want to be right, I ache
to be good, and I’m trying, so help me, I’m trying.
Well, we dance loud while standing still, and think best while
swinging sledge hammers. We insult the slackmasters, rock with the
wizards of angst, and celebrate finding lollypops in the snow. We
are the sentimental guys left in charge of the evacuation plans, the
stoned soldiers left to preside over the lost cities. We’re the sweetheart
word-crunchers laboring to explain the true nature of the Relentless
Romp. We sing: “Minute by minute/ we’re deeper within it/ Minute
by minute/ we’re closer to it.” Somehow we have propelled ourselves
from accident to interlude, from breakthrough to secret passion to manic
absolution to final argument. We try to maintain our good nature, our
love of well being, our simple kindness. We try to proceed rather than
wallow, to laugh rather than screech. We’re the ones who fall down the
Stairway to Heaven backwards while carrying a drink and never spill a
drop. We realize we have a few problems. We also realize we are full
of love, and that others love us, though not usually in the way we’d
prefer. We know that since we can’t get out of it, we might as well
keep doing it. To go as if we knew where we were going. To do as if
we knew what we were doing. Onward and upward, through the fog and
across the night, the relentless romp, the relentless romp, the relentless
romp.
The men a woman twists around in words are post-males. As a rule, all that is left of them is flayed skin laid out to dry. But sometimes they leave behind visions, phantasms, sensations and emotions.
He was a tall red-haired man, almost always dressed in black. He was an interesting man, but I avoided him like the plague. I would not have liked to be touched by him at any time or under any circumstances. I felt revulsion, as towards a hysterical and incomplete man. His small hands were those of a girl, his eyes autistic. He was lively and full of charm and a great storyteller, picturesquely loquacious when he was not in the grip of paranoia. His body was never to be seen, because it was always swaddled, camouflaged in roomy and concealing layers of clothes. He refused to make his body felt in any way or another, and that was why he was reminiscent of a gravedigger. He had white skin, unaccustomed to being touched. He did not know what it meant to be tempted or to desire, because he did not permit himself to feel anything. He was frightened of the world and of the bodies that circulated through it. Had he been able to choose the way in which he could be born, he would have opted to be a soul without a body. That is why he was, in fact, a kind of ghost. He was a man enclosed within his own body as though in a crypt. He had the sharp voice of a quarrelsome or nosy woman: it seemed that he had concentrated his hope of life in that hysterical, squeaky voice of his, in the manhood that it ought to have contained. What was to be done with such a man? To leave him to his own devices, to let him find his own way. He had a horror of the male sex, because he had a horror of his own body. Sometimes he and his solitude made me nauseous. Other times, he was very dear to me, because he had red hair and dressed in black.
He was a mature man, very mature, corpulent and soft. He was neither ugly nor handsome, but he had a voice that could stir all the outbursts and inbursts of a woman. He had the voice of a lively and gentle man, of a somnolent man, with flushed skin. I found his voice pleasing, like a quilt, like a sheet. I floated after his voice; I stretched toward it to pluck it like a succulent fruit. I could have rubbed up against that voice as if up against a body. It was even a slippery, wet body, hence the way in which it invaded my ears as though they were defoliated sexes. In this way I would hear with my own sex split in two, and his voice fell like a mute, fluffy avalanche. It was nice. It had a kind of silky, orchid yearning. His corpulence did not entice to bodily love, but nor to disgust. It was a corpulence like any other: bearable. But his voice was a mature sex, not at all hurried, a sign, a passage, a crossroads. He had chubby and childish hands. Their sensuality was minimal, but functional.
His long black hair, smelling of laundry soap, aroused me: long black hair. Sometimes, his eyes got in his hair and lingered there for a long while, hanging like bats. He was just skin and bones, thin, a man hard to caress, because there was not a crumb of flesh left on him. I don’t know how women touched him, because I never touched him. His long black hair was enough for me. It was my baldaquin. His every joint creaked. He was crumpled up into his thoracic cavity. He was a man crammed into himself, sickly and dear. I liked his voice only when it grated, jerkily. Otherwise it would be hoarse and prickly; it would prickle my flesh and I didn’t like it. I could not at all imagine how that man made love, because I saw him as just one tall bone, from head to foot. I didn’t like his beard, but had he shaved it off, I would never have recognized him again. Polished hair and bone, that’s what he was.
He was a faun, a swarthy man, with a stiff beard. He had a curved, arched body, as though he were continuously embracing a woman. He often had an appetite for women, but he did not permit himself to expose it. He looked at them and was content with that much. He had a somehow gobbling mouth, with powerful teeth, which would have been capable of rending you asunder. He could have been an industrious shepherd of female sexes, his happy and obedient little sheep. But he was concerned with appearances. With his hands he might have stroked greedily, with his beard he might have pricked wildly. But not he. He would speak of the body, but not of possessing it, although this obsessed him. He would smile satisfied at his own masculine state, he did not omit a single woman with his gaze, he would touch her in passing, as though he had given her a slap on the buttock, weighing up her rump, and nothing more. I often used to talk to him about women and men; I liked to talk to him. I had never seen his body, but I suspected that it was dreadfully hairy. You could tell by his backwoodsman’s beard. His body hair was probably what prevented him from letting himself go: not because he was embarrassed, but because he was tangled up in webs of lianas that hindered his progress. In his jungle of mature albeit callow man, of faun-like albeit domesticated man. And, alas, of conformist and predictable man.
He was a manling, which is to say a fresh little man. He had well-drawn and strong lips. He was a guerrilla fighter, although he looked like a little monk. I don’t know how much he knew about women, nor even if he had ever had one. His body was collapsed or ruptured, although he was young. Like a seahorse. However, he also seemed to be a budding inquisitor, reining in his body and his fluids. He might just as easily have been capable of becoming a full and seductive man, a gourmand of women. He had to be prudent, because he was so slight that he would not have been able to survive the passion of too many females. I gazed on him with pleasure, as though he were my own, albeit imperfect, work. His eyes were sunken: they had a Spanish sensuality, but were restrained rather than lustful. His eyelashes were arousing, as though they were a hundred untiring thighs all tumbled one on top of another. I had the sensation that he was swathing me in yards of hair, as though in a cocoon. I would have liked to be younger for him, but time had left me behind.
I was crazy about tall men, and he was just the right height for my appetite. But he was an inveterate masturbator. He had nacreous, almost Japanese skin; he had little brushes for eyelashes, fleshy lips and telescopic eyes. Women liked him, and he was addicted to them: he had possessed many and nonetheless he would never be sated, even after the sexual act had been consummated he would still not miss out on a bout of masturbation. For that reason he disgusted me, even if it was a pitiful disgust. His own body was like a brother in arms to him, he could have done anything to it, except mutilate it. That was why he set it to work in every shape and form, as a submissive and malleable servant. And nevertheless, his body was svelte and lively; it was a young body, in the most authentic flowing of blood through veins and arteries. But it was, at the same time, the body of an autist. Sick of itself and, for that reason, stammering. I felt sorry for that man, so alien in our world. However many women he possessed, it was still with himself and with his own sex that he ate, dreamed and prayed to God. What more can I say, except Amen?
Alberto Manguel is an asshole. Whatever he told you about Alejandro, I’ll bet my right arm it’s wrong, Terradillos. Manguel is one of those types who see an orange and then swear it’s an egg. “What, and orange-coloured?” you say. Yes. “And round?” Yes. “Does it smell of blossom?” Yes. “So like an orange?” Yes, but it’s definitely an egg.
Like people's blood with not-real diamonds inside
And beds made with fake diamonds within pillows
Would you dream a glittering icy sun
Under such a thing
Dad is outside of the soilrelaxing a new kind of animal.
“One leg might be enough,” Dad says.
“One leg might be confusing,” I say.
“For you, maybe,” Dad says, “but this one seems okay.”
Dad pats the new animal's one and only paw.
Can't even clap, I say.
“Can still arm wrestle,” it says.
It sounds like Dad.
Not with yourself, I say.
“Now that'd be confusing,” Dad says.
Dad can't find a good shoe for it.
“I guess nothing will fit for a while,” Dad says.
“Look at what it's doing!” Dad says.
“The confusion arrives from our bodies,” it says.
For you maybe, I say.
“Confusion is the _______,” it says.
It sounds just like you, I say.
“It sounds like my dad,” Dad says.
“I can still arm wrestle,” it says.
We are together in the deciding room.
I hate this room, I say.
“What room?” the room says.
The room, I say
The room right now.
Your skin and the inside of my gardening gloves and the similarities I noted. When you said you wanted to be tied up, and I thought it was the same as saying you had a headache. The workshop we missed that would have taught us the proper way to measure rain. We bought pets the color of fog. The sculpture we made with the bones the neighborhood children kept putting in our mailbox. The insects and days that answered to the same name. Whatever the mailman said when he brought the mail to the door because postal code didn’t allow him to stuff mail into a box of bones. The things Jesus Christ forgot. You loved the way fresh tomatoes looked on clean wool. The cooking class that would have taught us the correct way to skin oranges and lamb. The fishing lures the neighborhood kids hid in the meat. We named your mom after our dog. I will not speak of the unspeakable. I will not mention the word ______. The way I never told you I inherited an Irish pub. And the way I never told you I inherited Irish blood. The way you never told me you were a disk jockey. And the way you never told me you were a disc jockey. The concerts we never went to since you never told me you were a disc jockey. And the way you never told me you were a disc jockey. The canister of razorblades we kept near the sofa. The scarred sofa we kept too near the canister of razorblades. The things Jesus Christ left in the sofa. The way we put the flag up on the mailbox, and the mailman delivered bones to your mom. And the way I would never mention the word ______. I would use plural in place of singular. You would laugh at my plurality. You would tell me we were a disc jockey. We would volunteer our civilian time as disc jockeys. Jesus Christ would remember. I would mention the word ______, and you would laugh. We would laugh at the poor, and they would be healed by the disc jockeys we were. The disc jockey said there was a war. The bones in the mailbox were yours. I made a sculpture out of you and named it ______.
Swatch is now a luxury brand. Why this final loss of innocence? Everything was big in the ‘80s. A watch you could hang on your wall. Visible beads at the end of each eyelash. The “so what” school of criticism.When the novelty of the new wears off, it feels chintzy. The way I feel about strangers is unconditional. They never seem strange. “Strange” has lost its original meaning; it now means “vague.” Everyone I’ve ever loved has failed me, by letting me.
According to quantum theory, there’s a real possibility you could fall through the floor. In some worlds, you do. Statistically, most worlds are boring. Most worlds could be improved with radical editing. If you like karaoke, you’ll love neo-benshi.
1. This universe has a long sleek wind that I believe in2. Do not ask a philosopher to explain this because I am
3. I am with my friend, Henry Ford. He flickers when I explain him. I know because I am dead and so is Henry
4. We sit together in the bright light that I invented, but the lamp is not mine. Have you seen a moon outside? There is no outside. The moon is inside and so am I. And Henry is sitting on my bed
5. I will tell you about Henry from death, which he and I are inside. I did not invent it. Yet the moon has an inside that I can describe
6. Any friend has many sides, even in such bright light as Henry and I sit. Yet I can only see one side of him at a time
7. And what is time? Time is a long sleek side. It swells in the darkness of the wide. And so in inventing the bright light I have tried to be everywhere at one time. The moon barely fits within what I have described
8. It is large, death, a large fat side you sit with night after night. And where doesn’t my light shine? On which night aren’t I?
9. I draw a circle and point to the center. That is you, I say to Henry
10. Henry is made of signs connected to a pump many miles away. And it pumps Henry’s answer to me
11. No, that is the spruce tree, a cross-section of it, I hear Henry say
12. Yet Henry and I are often in disagreement. He tells me that he believes in reincarnation. He does not believe in the long sleek wind that is even an infant compared with time
13. I am at the long sleek wind, I tell Henry. I am at the top
14. Henry Ford is an American, and so am I. The lights shine, and we are asked to dine with incomprehensible companions for a very long time
How cool would it have been to live back when the wind and birds and avalanches sounded like Black Sabbath, and killing gave people these huge fucking hard-ons? You’d be so dead.
If death is like a million miles of this then pick up that rock over there and pretend you’re Poland in the Forties and my head is Adolf Hitler.
If I rubbed a magic lamp and some genie smoked out and granted me three wishes, I’d wish for a zillion euros, infinite wishes, and that the lamp was your cock.
So many evil people have designs on my crotch it’s like a thousand pairs of hands are crumpling one piece of paper.
When I grow up I want to chug-a-lug a zillion beers then behead your wife and kids. What do you want to be? I mean besides my sex slave slut.
Me growing up is such an oxymoron it makes the Flintstones seem like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Unless 16 counts. Okay, I’d like to turn 16.
I’m the coldest piece of shit in human history but your rotting, stinking corpse is so hot in theory I think it’ll melt me.
I’ve tried to kill myself so many times since I met you that every time you hit me it’s like the ten thousandth car running over a dead dog.
The idea of raping and killing you just triggered off its million billionth hard on, but this one is God’s. That’s my gift to you.
I’m boring. You’re boring. Sex is boring. Being tortured is boring. Being killed is boring.
The problem with pretending your ass was my right hand all these years is fist-fucking you is like playing ‘Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.’
The problem with being a suicidal airhead is getting raped and killed by my best friend seems superficial, but if it keeps you here for five more minutes, then go for it.
When you’re unemployed for so long you begin to take pride in an unidentifiable amorality. I am picking at various scabs, watching dismal horror movies about Nazi zombies. I am debating whether or not one capitalizes Nazi. Often times I don’t capitalize christ. I can hear the mailman outside fumbling with his keys, poking at his radio. I would be a mailman, but I hate walking and wearing shorts. I am going to find pictures of you on the internet and maybe masturbate if I’m not too sleepy. I am going to Google “celebrity endowments.” I am fucked in your garden, thirsty in the atmosphere. I want to be Mario, humping on mushrooms, licking the princess. I go to Target and play the promotional Xbox. When little Mexican kids ask me if they can have a turn I say no, I’ve got to beat my fucking levels. Don’t read porn on the subway. Don’t eat Subway after 2AM. In my free time what’s best is to gnaw on my cheek until there’s a hole. I fill that hole with Evan Williams extra sour mash Kentucky whisky. It burns and all the new energy sits outside on my porch. I never allow her inside.
I had commissioned a squid ink and papyrus copy of your poetry when I discovered that the squid in question was in fact an octopus with a penchant for predicting the outcome of sporting events. I fired him. Immediately. And will deal no more with aquatic calligraphers. Still, I am considering having an edition produced that is written on a tortilla and inked by the venom of a baby cobra. The hallucinogenic effects of such an adolescent toxin have been used to augment the wines of Romania for centuries. I can imagine the effect on your words will be breathtaking. You will eat it ravenously. Death will seem but a small price to pay.
In her book Hygieia: A Woman’s Herbal, Jeannine Parvati notes that many women, Huichol and otherwise, wear a peyote button nestled high in their vaginas like a cervical cap. “Taking these [mind-altering] herbs,” writes Parvati, “can give parents an opportunity to feel their world as their children do…become one within the baby space.” She invokes Hecate, Goddess of Witches, as representative of the “dark connection with healing and female’s trimurti with sexual energy. This Goddess suggests that we women healers regain our lost gnosis, our knowledge of the occult and use the tools of astrology, tarot, or other intuitive channels in our diagnoses and ministerings.”
Miller spoke clean words. His parents loved him the most of all. Privilege. His pants never tearing on trees. His legs superb and strong. Miller was a strength, Eliza a beautiful curiosity. Eliza saw his lips and clouds opened to sun. A latch between breasts covering the door to her heart. Miller’s sleeve creases. Miller’s sharp eyes. Cottonwood trees say love is wind. Snakes in grass say love is warmed rocks. Miller says love is Eliza. A tiny latch and its metal lock. A lock with no hole for a key. Eliza believes love is sun, coming uncovered from clouds.
Four years ago, Daryl was all up in it before it turned into the wrong end of Shark Week; her inner thighs chewed his temples alive. After awaking from a two-day coma, the labia became razor wire at Auschwitz. Once Daryl adapted this concentration camp metaphor, his batting average was that of an amputee until he found Baptist women whose idea of third base was kissing while holding hands in a dark room; his wedding to Monica was in three days.
The hammer falls on an empty chamber, the lethal injection misses the vein. Nothing comes easy after dark. Although the body heals, memory never recovers. Pieces of the gallows sold for a dollar a pound. Until we know why, we won’t know what happened. The man in the window insists that truth is a moving target. The bird on his chest is bleeding, too.
It doesn’t matter how I die,I want the news reports to say autoerotic asphyxiation
is something you once said to me that I never understood. And now,
you’re gone.
I sit in the co-op, drink carrot juice and think about the day
we insisted the juicers
make us carrot juice the same orange as your shirt,
how they made you remove it
so they could hold it up to the juicing machine
and match the oranges exactly.
We took a photo of you and the juice for the university’s
ping pong bulletin.
It was mostly ginger,
like the way you insisted you’d always wanted the square
because you knew it would fit and I’d always wanted the circle
because of its silver top
even though you’d always wanted the circle
because of its silver top
and I’d always wanted the square because I knew it would fit.
Now I sit in my apartment
and think about that photo
because I can’t look at the photo
because I lost it sometime during the two years
I pretended it was 2005.
I moved eight blocks away and convinced myself I was starting over.
For the next two years I’d drive frantically
around the city crying with animals wearing cones
who were also crying.
See, I was missing something,
which is why
I often panicked.
See, I was lost,
which is why
I often picnicked.
Even though I wanted to know what I was doing I didn’t know
what I was doing but things kept moving forward moving forward
moving forward and you said this
and I said I understand what you’re saying but I’m thinking this
and you said
this isn’t going to work, it’s not going to work,
and at the time, at the time I was devastated
as I stood in the lot of a supermarket where I’d no longer be able to shop.
And then I met Caren,
who took me to the top of her building,
filled a sleeping bag with warm water,
placed me inside and pushed me down three flights of stairs.
Then while shaving, he cut his chin. His irritation mounting, he did what he always did in a time of displeasure: he took his sniper rifle out from the closet, polished it, and rested its stock on his shoulder under his chin just next to the red dollop of tissue paper, sweeping the view through the scope across the next square over. When his finger pulled softly into the trigger and the fruit merchant collapsed in a heap, a shot of approximately 400 meters, balloons and streamers fell from the ceiling along with a banner bearing the numeral 1000. Brushing the confetti from his shoulder, Humberto Figueroa Urquiza allowed himself a brief smile and reflected on a long and prosperous career. The milestone achieved, he could continue about his morning activities without any further niggling dilemma.
I have already told you that I often find myself becoming Tony Leung’s character in Happy Together. I too have a desperate and unhappy love, but in my life Leslie Cheung’s character is played by something else, which you already know and which snickers at description as Leslie Cheung snickers often at Tony Leung throughout the film; a snicker which promises suffering and orgasm or suffering and orgasm; and also love, which sneaks into the snicker without even Leslie Cheung really being aware of it, although I think Tony Leung is aware of it.Tony Leung’s character is named Lai Yiu-fai and Leslie Cheung’s character is named Ho Po-wing, but I never call them or myself by those names.
My life has taken up where the film left off and I have married Chang Chen’s character, who is also named Chang. Chang and Tony Leung work together in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in Buenos Aires. People often say Wong Kar-wai is a romantic filmmaker and that is true, but I think he is a great filmmaker of labor and in particular illegal labor and the service industry.
You never know for sure if Chang is gay. What you know is that he had eye problems in his youth and so cultivated a practice of listening to people in a supernatural or super-sensitive way. Even after a surgical procedure restored his eyesight, he says, he never lost the habit of listening.
In her village, whenever someone had a problem with bees they called the village hypnotist. He would speak and the bees would leave the hexagons of their honeycomb behind.
a house is an employment of trees, a crowd is a path to a door.if this is a stage
then ask if this is a stage.
the light of a cigarette outed by snowflakes, no privacy
in the crowd when it’s burning.
if we feed the sun we give away velocity.
i dogear the daisy blooming against the clapboard.
nothing will happen
we tell the sun,
if it does
watch me catch it.
it’s your ice, the dust in your gun when i rush the stage,
if this is only a stage.
can i build it for you?
the carpenter frames us in destroys movement like a photograph.
can i build this house for you?
a ring circumscribes an answer on my hand.
I would've come over to you, to the table near the window where you sat, but I would have no place to put my drink--it would've left a watery broken ring on the table, and I could not put you through that again: those nights where the boys with their parents bank cards bought you drinks they thought you liked because they were drinks you pretended to like -- they were too red, too sweet, they curled your tongue like a thin paperback in a backpocket, though I would not describe your tongue this way: you know the story of Lennon and Chapman and Salinger and that is something I don't want you to think about: about blood, about The Dakota, about autographs.
During lunch we padded our backpacks with newspaper and carried the dishes to the old football stadium. We were alone among the insects flitting about abandoned bleachers. I wore oven mitts and sunglasses, my hair piled high like a Hindu God's. Adam put on a pair of swimming goggles, tugged the sleeves of his sweatshirt over his hands, and grabbed a plate. Cranking his right shoulder like the handle of a music box, Adam bent the opposite leg and flung the dish toward the scoreboard. It shattered and fell to the ground, a firework exploding.He laughed. I selected one of the champagne flutes, one of the first pieces I’d collected. It took us less than four minutes. When we were finished, we surveyed the shards of purple, white, olive green, and blue. We stared in reverence. Adam took a picture with his phone. A bell rang and we broke from our trance and walked to fourth period.
With her machine gun soaking in breast milk, she’s smokingMarlboros before the Ouroboros. I put my prayers in zero. A
laughingstock on TV, he took an arrow to each elbow, hasn’t
been the same since. Johnnie Cochran holds up the cock ring,
shows the jury, calls it “Exhibit X.” Tattletale scavenger hunt.
“That’s diabolical,” he says. “Well, sayonara, Aram Saroyan!”
Nowadays, converting your aversions into druthers is nothing
like converting your perversions into the good old missionary.
You bellowed all the solitudelike a historically intriguing paint.
I was so backwards.
America, are you window or current?
Your significance little spikes a piquant suffering.
You’re an untenable, modern decadence
& I am drastically horny.
I aftermath like such a masked lady.
You’re depicting on virtue.
—Except for the wasps, it was a fine outing. Uncle Nicholas grilled the tuna steaks to near perfection.—Did Father summer with us?
—No. He traveled, on a business trip to the Vatican.
—What business carried him there?
—He was swindling them. He cheated them out of certain priceless statues, e.g., Cellini’s Nymph of Fountainbleau, if memory serves.
—Thus the priceless Cellinis in the foyer—
—Yes.
—I dressed them, when I was younger, in cloths and beads.
—No, that was Veronica. You feared them.
—Veronica?
—Yes. You wouldn’t go anywhere near the foyer; you’d shriek and cover your eyes and try to run.
—I had no idea.
—Veronica adored those statues. She stood there for hours, singing, dressing them. She named each one of them.
—Tell me again how she died.
—You shot her through the forehead with Father’s crossbow.
—I don’t remember.
—And through the chest. It was rather a bloody spectacle. You’d been playing at Beatniks and Swine.
—And she was the Beatnik?
—No, she was the Swine. You were the Beatnik, in the midst of a Beatnik rebellion. You’d found the weapons shed unlocked.
—And I shot her through the chest and the forehead?
—It was accidental, of course. You were only thirteen, didn’t know that the crossbow was loaded.
—I had no idea.
—The weapons shed should never have been left unlocked. We fired the Beatnik who was responsible.
—I had no idea.
—She died at an inopportune time, Veronica did.
—Did Father cry?
—He wasn’t there. He had left for the War.
—Which War was that?
—The second one. I begged him not to go to the War—I pleaded and begged, but to no effect. He remained unmoved. “The opportunities,” he told me. “War offers such wonderful opportunities. Museums, private collections...”
—I remember him, a little. Wielding his crossbow. Wearing his cap and goggles, his silk scarf billowing.
—He cut a dashing figure, I must admit.
—You adored him.
—I adored him.
—How, then, did he die?
—He isn’t dead.
—I had no idea.
—He lives quite comfortably in Munich.
—He never came home?
—The War had changed him. He wrote me a letter. He wrote, “The War has changed me. I’m going to live in Munich, quite comfortably.”
—What does he do there?
—What did he do here?
—Have you heard no more from him since that time?
—Only once, in a postcard he sent ten years later. Its front was a picture of the Harlequin. On the back he wrote, “I am living here still.”
—Did he make any inquiries as to me?
—No. He never cared for you. I never could convince him that you were his child.
—Am I?
—No.
—Momma? Where do babies come from?
—They don’t come from anywhere, darling. They simply are.
The time machine flickers.Tiny explosions devour the control panel.
A blue-skinned sentient biped
lies in a slowly growing puddle of green blood.
Brainwaves operate the omnidimensional rifle.
A brave stands inside the treeline.
He keeps killing white devils on the beach
until the big wooden ship sails away.
The Queen of the Vampires mounts her skeleton horse.
She has assembled an army of zombie shamans.
They storm Jerusalem and rescue Jesus.
No cross is erected on top of Golgotha.
I trade my rare coin collection for a bottle of absinthe.
O Dark Beauty, I meet you at the cotillion
where a graveyard dances with a shopping mall.
I love you in life and I’ll love you in death.
Me and Theodore climbed to the top of the water tower because we were scared of the tremors beneath the dirt.There is nothing wrong with lanterns under your skin. The way they bump and quiver when you run. There is nothing wrong with they way their lights follow each other, dark to light, making a flashing wave of lit up lantern shapes all up and down your arms and legs. There is nothing wrong with the way they itch when they rotate and push at your skin from the inside. Let them move. Let them agitate. They are the light that will guide you into the night. Into the battle that rages on the other side of this hour. When that trollop called night sees you coming, an army of you, bringing this lantern light into her house, she will squeal, she will burn, she will howl at the way a muted and shallow little light has invaded her home.
There is a certain faith in the body's ability to heal. In the way a broken bone, set correctly, will find its way back together. The way a scab forms over a cut. The way strained muscles ease into a painless routine. There is a certain faith that the body will return and return again. The body will defend against the demons that cut us down, that bury us. But where do we turn when the pain persists? When the mole gets bigger? When the breath gets tender? When the demons are your own body, attacking, treason from the inside? Are we supposed to just give up and go, voluntarily, into that perfume of rot called twilight only to be swallowed by the selfish maw of night?
Light those lanterns, light them all, each and every one. There is no shame in the pattern that reaches across your backs. Take pride in your own defenses. Take pride in the light we've made here together on this day.
On this day, we stand together, shoulder to shoulder, watching the blue of our youth pulling her own skin back, to make room for the sad, bleak, anonymity of night and all the violence and crud that she brings. Crawling through her hair and over her skin, eyes, in through her holes and out through her mouth. A putrid witch of a thing. When I say charge, charge into that sky. Into that gloating black night. Raise your weapons and make war.
I said take up your weapons and make your way into the belly of night. Slash apart her mud veil. Cut her through front to back. Make of her chest a hole. Make of her arms kindling to burn on my pyre. Tell her eyes to stop their weeping. Prepare your destiny. Prepare your mind, body, and soul. Charge into the night with rage and pity. And know that while some of you may fall and some of you may fly, if you are lucky, no one will be there to see you reeling, incomprehensibly, into darkness.
Mom said she raised a good boy, a fine son. I am that which she speaks on. I am glad to have been born. It was luck I was born of her and not of a mom that was in a house that was in a part of town far from the mom I did get and love still. I could have been raised up in some place quite bad. I would be dead now. But I have the mom I have. I have her still. She raised me. We used to drive by some of the homes I did not like in our car, mom and me, when the homes still stood, and I would look out at each of them and think on who could be in such a place. We would not stop and go in them. We would go back where we live. I know I am a good boy as mom told me and still says. I know I am in the best place I could be. I do love mom so. I did not care so much for dad. He stayed in his room most days and at night. He would not let me in if I had come to knock for him to say hi. He would not look at me if he could help it. He oft did not care to hear it when I said I loved him, as I had to say to him to be a good boy. I guess he was sad that I got sick. He got lone and blue and full of pain. It was like this since my head broke. I don’t know why that is. I can’t tell why dad did what he did. I’m not sure why he frowned and would not talk to me when I got my skull took off. I wished he would have changed back to how he used to be. I prayed for it at church when mom drove me there. I don’t get why dad had to act like he had got more hurt in him than I had when it is me who fell down. I tried to be real good when it came to all my pain so as not to make mom fret for me. I shoved all the pain hid in my gut where mom can’t see it. I kept it thus most of the time. I did not let it out when she was in the same room. I still keep it safe that way these days. Dad did not learn that trick. I wished he learned since I did not want mom to fret for him or me or at all. I told mom I love her and she said it back, of course. I did not quite love dad, and sure did not like him, not the way he was in the end, but I thought it was my job to be nice and the right
A boorish silence fills the forestlike a carpet around the rich.
Trees fall just to be chivalrous,
maiming highwaymen.
The forest is full of syphilis,
I don't care who caused it.
Tax incentives for dying
make me worry about the government,
but it is a human thing
to worry over my penis,
what a human thing it is
to hold your children
as bandits dismember the night
and feed it to their hounds.
It is a soundless terror
inscribed against the ice,
where swineherds mistake laundry
for drowned ghosts.
It is a tiny map I swallow.
"Between one castle and another,
the world is a moat,"
says my coachman.
His words float like leaves,
a trail behind me.
"In times of peace,
it seems quite foolish
to harness your chest
against a giant, heavy flag,"
says my soldier.
When we stop at a crossroads
we all weep like philosophers,
automatically regretting
the anatomical future
our decisions sketch ahead of us,
the premonition of etiquette
and its attendant colonies
stretching rumors
of damp, paranoid vacations
amongst our number.
"On an island, you can't trust anyone,"
says my artist,
who is also an inventor.
One solution is to ride furiously,
blurring what should be scenic
into a genealogy of wind,
branches ripping gently
as if the trees were rehearsing
a modern war.
Another is to part ways forever
under the same name,
confronting scholars
with alternate endings
which are exactly the same
but for the question of a beard.
It's been done before.
As I ride Eastward,
I can hear my biographer
furiously dictating
his own adventures,
enthusiastically citing swans
like a boring lake.
Alone, the forest becomes a room,
the moss turned down
and the brambles tamed.
I stop at a clearing
and the snake inside me
whispers that I should get naked,
slithering over dead leaves
until who I have been
is a crisp windsock,
a trumpet made of tissue,
a translucent cathedral
where all the little villains go to play.
The Government Pays Your Uncle Not to FarmIn Iowa your Uncle is outside with his dog, fighting a daylight raccoon. He shoots it inside out. You're in the kitchen gutting pheasant. You think: fingers cover the frost. He tells the dog to sit and says he doesn't grow any corn because the government pays him not to farm. The prairie grass failing like a weak deer. You think: bountiful moon. The crops no longer circle and dive like birds. I think we're in a wheat field. I can see two feet ahead and want nothing more than the smoke of your breath in my frozen ear. The raccoon lays there. Blood on the dog's lip. Your uncle walks to the stream. I stay with the mess, my ears ringing like a television left on through the night.
I Do Not Want To Die Because of Corn
I pretend we are alone. Watch the lights of California melt the stars away. We are a parking lot of byproducts. Cement walls everywhere. The corn ruining our breath. We drive hours away on 10% corn ethanol gasoline. At Vista Point we see there is nothing in heaven we want and watch Los Angeles suffer like a stray. I hold you hard while you dream of my heart coming apart like a frayed wire. There is nothing worth eating. We are a parking lot of ruined insides. I bleed open like a split fence and sleep with dirty hands.
There is No Real Corn in California
I can't stand checking nutritional facts. It's always a trick. The organic farms. There is no real corn in California. There is no diet that can keep you clean forever. Each night the head of a fish. Each night like a storeroom of rice and wheat. Your past is avocado-painted roads and my past is the Union Workers parting the Heartland with an interstate.
The Paint on Your Toyota Camry is Made of American Corn
The paint on your Toyota Camry is made of American corn and the car itself is recycled bottles and computer chips. The dangerous floor mat works like a noose. I can warn you about pedals but you are not a child. When I feel pressed against you I think: change brake pads. When I feel soft I think: carwash. One morning you will wake with rust beneath your eyes. You will resurface yourself, think about purchasing a sexier car. One morning I will come home with a brand new heartache machine. You will think: anti-lock braking system; Mercedes-Benz.
We Can’t Consume All the Corn We Produce
I buy you dinner because I imagine lingerie beneath your clothes. While we eat I think about the way sometimes your hair curves like leaves around your lips, about your bare legs moving against the cold sheets. I imagine a surplus. I imagine feeding the starved. I want to wear you like a coat I carry into another field of corn. You say that we use corn in everything because we can't eat all the corn we have. You say that we are sinking, that we are a beat-down shed. I try not to spill ice water on your thighs and imagine that hunger does not exist while I pick the shell of a prawn from my teeth.
Government Subsidized Corn is Crushing the Global Economy
As I watch you undress Government subsidized corn is crushing the global economy. There is a song about this on the stereo. It goes on like a bag of empty cans. I've crushed each one and I too love being crushed. Like spice, like a mound of sand. I tell you this and then practice burying myself. In the evening I barely crawl into the deepest shadow of our yard. I dream of trucks backing into a garage. I dream beneath the porch in the dirt and watch these giant fists crushing grass like boots. The trucks are full of corn and gasoline and the gasoline is made of corn and oil. Do you feel my ruined soil? Do you see me battered, frail as meal?
You Used to Scatter Corn Silk in the Grass for the Birds to Use to Build Their Homes
This is the way we get to heaven. Walking carefully at night around the hot tub with toes curled like the rain. The television in your parents room flashing across the yard. The colors cutting through the silk we left in the lawn. This might be how they build their homes. Each toe like a kernel of corn. This is how we take off our clothes. The nests of silk so quiet. It hurts like sleep to build a home and most nights you are not this soft. When I whisper all you hear is wrinkled breaths, a photograph of numbers coming out of me like string.
1. A smudge of a person in a smear of a room. There’s light and sound and then there isn’t.2. George Jetson is in a living room listening to music. Then he turns off the music and turns out the light and goes to bed.
3. George Jetson is listening to the Beatles’s White Album and playing Spore on a laptop in his living room. A platypus walks in the front door. It sits down next to him. This music sucks, the platypus says. Don’t you have any Devo? George Jetson thinks the music off. When he closes his eyes, the lights go out.
4. George Jetson and a platypus are taking turns playing Spore on a laptop and listening to Smashing Pumpkins and Korn. After a while, George Jetson gets sleepy and jetpacks off to bed. The platypus plays until the planet stage, at which point it loses interest. It wonders what it would be like to be the first man to wear pants. It walks out into the night, never to return.
5. There was a dog named Astro once that talked through the day, and a family, but that was a million years ago, or from now. George Jetson had a tail once, too, or an ancestor did. Some nights in the living room he hears phantom barking so he turns on his iPod and listens to music until he falls asleep with the lights on.
6. There’s a platypus in a living room not listening to music. There’s nobody there to feed it. After a while, it wanders down a cul-de-sac and dies.
7. George Jetson and a platypus are playing Dance Dance Revolution in the living room. They are supergood friends. Their insides are like deep stone wells of devotion. They dance to Devo. When they’re exhausted and happy they eat ice cream and read comics. In time, rubyred energy beams come zapping out of George Jetson’s eyes. The platypus shrugs and wings unfold from its shoulders. They put on costumes and save the world over and over again, then go to bed.
8. The living room was built by Adam Jetson in a house he built by hand with his wife Rachel the day before she delivered their first child, her belly swollen and her hammerstroke true. Before that there was meadow and before that there was forest and before that there was ocean. Someday there will be wreckage and timber and then there will be rot and then there will be field and then forest and then ocean. Right now there is living room, and human being and platypus flicking through like moths, like meteors.
9. George Jetson is in a living room with a platypus. They’re listening to music on a very old cabinet stereo. The platypus stays up all night. Sometime after midnight, George Jetson heads to bed. He leaves his boots on. They drift up to the ceiling and he awakens upside down above the bed. The platypus is curled up on his pillow. George Jetson has never slept so well in his life.
9.2. He’s never slept so poorly in his life, ever since he started sleeping with the platypus.
9.3. They sleep well together, spooningly so, curled in on each other, fur and skin, bill and butt.
10. God invented the living room about twelve days ago. He aged the timber eighty years and scarred the floorboards and cracked the windows and endusted and begrimed the corners and windowsills.
11. George Jetson in his supercool jetboots hovers crosslegged in the middle of the livingroom. How long has he wrestled with this knot of feelings for the platypus dancing to Devo in his living room? It’s a wrongness, a tangle, a wingflutter of the heart. Put on your secret agent hat and come to bed, George says. The platypus levels its blank stare at him. Unreadable and mysterious, it stops dancing and cocks its head. After a while, George scoops up the platypus and hoverboots it off to bed. The heart is a thousand birds lifting suddenly from a field in winter.
Amsterdam Island, France-Everyone who stays on Amsterdam for longer than a year is examined by a medical officer from the south of France to check that he is coping with the long period of restriction of movement and the confined, purely masculine environment. No woman has visited longer than two days. At night, the men gather in the small video room in Great Skua to watch one of the porn films from their personal collection. Each man sits in a row on his own. The loudspeakers emit grunts and groans, and the air is heavy with the musky scent of the bull seals.)
I want a guy who humps in the nude. I want a guy who brushes his teeth with his eyes open. I want a guy who’s a man. I want a guy who works heavy machinery. I want a guy who leans into it and pumps at that meatcutter with his groin. I want a guy who’s so passionate about his work that he makes love to it. I want a guy who drools a creek across the pillow.And let’s be honest here. I’m no lady and I got thighs like the hock part of the ham and my skirts is too tight but I can damn sure touch my toes and yep you bet the cleavage at my back is in tight competition with the cleavage in my front and oh could I ever give you a wet willie.
I’m in the grocery store. I’m gliding down the aisle towards the gleam in your hair. That hair’s like a shiny balloon top or something. I want that gin blossom to trace the healthy proportionate bitch curve of my belly. I want a guy who drinks Merlot with a golden shower chaser and if you ain’t him you will be soon. Oh goddamn it I want to bake you a pie so you can smash it in my face concurrent with the climax. A cherry one and oh I’ll show you some cherry.
Let’s make a ground beef plaster mold of your privates and make your beefdick enter a couple Butterballs. Hand me over some raw fish or alligator tail or turkey necks and I’ll hang them from these tits like the tassels your mama had nightmares about. I want to help you out. I want to scare you shitless. I want to show you the way around a t-bone and a ladydick and that erogenous part between the toes.
I can hold a lemon in seven different places on my body. I’m serious as the heart attack I want to give you. I’m gonna put you in the babyseat and crash the cart at the dirty feminine aids aisle. I’ll figure-eight your ass from the donuts to them slivered salad almonds and if you’re any good you can use the time to pat these boob pillows, make you somewhere nice to lay your head.
I’m going to deliver your birthday cake out my womb. It’s a marble with buttercream frosting and its name is Anything Goes. Smack my ass to make sure it’s breathing and I’ll smoke you a cigar from my lady parts in celebration. Blow you some smoke rings, lasso you in.
I want a guy who parts his hair on the left. I want a guy who’ll lick my throat area. I want a guy who’ll finger my back cleavage. I want a guy who owns tools. I want a guy who collects ratshit. I want a guy don’t like to read. I want a guy who’ll slash my tires. I want a guy who hates a pinky in his ass.
I got ripples of fat for you to skip your gonads on. I got a forehead for teabagging. I want you to sandpaper me a rough spot on the insides of my thighs with your dumbass unshaven cheeks. I want to trim your nose hair with my incisors. Make me a pendant from your earwax. Hold you in front of the fridgedoor till your willer shrivels to a peanut.
I’m in your line. There’s no undies under these skirts and there never will be. You dribble some sausageblood, I’ll bend to wipe it. You want a closer look you’ll have to ask and I’ll have to squat. Take my order. I want a pound of fuckmeat and some fattypart skewers. I’ll shish kabob your loins and there ain’t gonna be any leftovers.
I’m pretty cause I say so. You got shit for brains but that’s the way I like it. Long as you been around the ass block and you drink your coffee black. I’ll be in the parking lot marking my territory up against your truck tires, pulling my shirt up and playing fried eggs against your windows. Bring me out a cow’s tongue and a duck’s liver and say yes or don’t say anything, because you and your plasticlooking hair and your tiny lady nipples are mine and you ain’t got no choice in the matter and anyway I’m driving.
I dream you are a live wire, you are alive: Stumble upon me and bloomand let the almost bloom.
The live wire is me, the almost, the live wire stumbles upon the almost.
I am an are, a strange and stumbling are, I paper the walls with almost
and wake almost stunned.
Common dream otherworld: under sand through a space wide enough to swim through, a place without water is home. There’s no sky, it’s maybe necessarily cave or womb like there, a good place there. Maybe jewels, maybe governments or ways of greeting that surprise.
But I sing. I say therefore. I say at the center of thee is either a child-flame or child-angels. I say it is thy soul. Shapeless, subtle. I say paper bag and I take it. I take the crumpled pages that I love from the book of love and I must love them again and again. For it is snowing and I bid the snow to sing, but it will not. And I worship the voice of the snow for its silence. Still, I have not learned how not to love, though I have undertaken thy numerous lessons. And I wrap my bottle in a paper bag like a lamp. What I love greater than light. The thought of light. Glowing phrases of a nightingale reincarnate the sum of a river. I lurk in the drink. And I think of the torn silk. The subtleness of my undergarments as I sit on a bench. And I think how I am saved. Saved from the snow in which you are passing. Which passes over you who are deep within the pages of the ice-story. Aye, you cannot hear me. For you plug thy self-made fingers into thy self-made ears. Outside the newly fresh. We are right, we who ask for the singing. We who can’t ask. We who can’t sing. We are glorious in our belief. We believe in the story of asking. Snow under thy wing. Snow upon thy unseen sparrow. We believe flowers bottle themselves into tiny startled blossoms. We unfold paper from thy bread.
Our talking is a kudzu of carotids in which we lose our marbles. Hours later they tumble out as we are snoring, awakening us one at a time, hard little tumors we flick underneath one another. By morning we lie like border states whose boundaries are rivers, anomalously straight, canals funded by nature.When I get nervous near you it's like a utility forms and hits a whole town with its too much. Everyone goes shed 'n' attic and unearths devices: those they need, those they never use, those borrowed and never returned, those they wish they'd borrowed and could thus return, those they don't recognize, those whose uses they can't fathom, those double-barreled ones which lend skulls cold spots, those too flimsy to withstand unearthing, those which served as stunt doubles for other devices once, in their heyday, those they don't really need. But want. Among them: electric utensils, rodent rotators, epilepsy-inducers, oars, spooling agents, laminators, pompadour replicators, run-on detectors, vaginal dredgers, mechanical fins, metronomic innards, palate-ticklers, religious spatulae, hissiphones. Those that look burnt but not flammable. Those that come off synthetic yet overripe. Those for pulling, for turning, for penetrating, for twisting and more. Thanks, we say, blushing, thanks. What they do with them is done, and then they are put gently back into their slots, slid onto the hooks and rafters, and eventually I can meet your gaze once more.
Next year starts my stint as anthropologist on that island where relationships and existential quandaries are thrashed out in small talk, and any mention of the weather or the pop diva‟s latest gown makes the strongest crack with weeping.
Even the tolls adjust on our approach. You catch them trembling and think it a trick of light. Whatever we hand over, coughed and culled from cushiony crevasses, is always “exact” and “change,” and still you clamp down, silent as mile markers, on one bald coin.
Whatever else we are, we are surely a beard that has convinced its owner to stop shaving. How long? No longer do we even notice the Unabomber comparisons, the razors orphaned in the snarl.
The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans. It was said of the First World War that people in it fell like seeds and the Russian Communists later calculated how much fertilizer a square kilometer of corpses would yield and how much they would save on expensive foreign fertilizers if they used the corpses of traitors and criminals instead of manure. And the English invented the tank and the Germans invented gas, which was known as yperite because the Germans first used it near the town of Ypres, although apparently that was not true, and it was also called mustard because it stung the nose like Dijon mustard, and that was apparently true, and some soldiers who returned home after the war did not want to eat Dijon mustard again. The First World War was known as an imperialist war because the Germans felt that other countries were prejudiced against them and did not want to let them become a world power and fulfill some historical mission. And most people in Europe, Germany, Austria, France, Serbia, Bulgaria, etc., believed it to be a necessary and just war which would bring peace to the world. And many people believed that the war would revive those virtues that the modern industrial world has forced into the background, such as love of one’s country, courage, and self-sacrifice. And poor people looked forward to riding in the train and country folk looked forward to seeing big cities and phoning the district post office to dictate a telegram to their wives, I’M FINE, HOPE YOU ARE TOO. The generals looked forward to being in the newspapers, and people from national minorities were pleased that they would be sharing the war with people who spoke without an accent and that they would be singing marching songs and jolly popular ditties with them. And everyone thought they’d be home in time for the grape harvest or at least by Christmas.Some historians subsequently said that the twentieth century actually started in 1914, when war broke out, because it was the first war in history in which so many countries took part, in which so many people died and in which airships and airplanes flew and bombarded the rear and town and civilians, and submarines sunk ships and artillery could lob shells ten or twelve kilometers. And the Germans invented gas and the English invented tanks and scientists discovered isotopes and the general theory of relativity, according to which nothing was metaphysical but relative. And when the Senegalese fusiliers first saw an airplane they thought it was a tame bird and one of the Senegalese soldiers cut a lump of flesh from a dead horse and threw it as far as he could in order to lure it away. And the soldiers wore green and camouflage uniforms because they did not want the enemy to see them, which was modern at the time because in previous wars soldiers had worn brightly-colored uniforms in order to be visible from afar. And airships and airplanes flew through the sky and the horses were terribly frightened. And writers and poets endeavored to find ways of expressing it best and in 1916 they invented Dadaism because everything seemed crazy to them. And in Russia they invented a revolution. And the soldiers wore around their neck or wrist a tag with their name and number and regiment to indicate who was who, and where to send a telegram of condolences, but if the explosion tore off their head or arm and the tag was lost, the military command would announce that they were unknown soldiers, and in most capital cities they instituted an eternal flame lest they be forgotten, because fire preserves the memory of something long past. And the fallen French measured 2,681 kilometers, the fallen English, 1,547 kilometers, and the fallen Germans, 3,010 kilometers, taking the average length of a corpse as 172 centimeters. And a total of 15,508 kilometers of soldiers fell worldwide. And in 1918 an influenza known as Spanish Flu spread throughout the world killing over twenty million people. Pacifists and anti-militarists subsequently said that these had also been victims of the war because the soldiers and civilian populations lived in poor conditions of hygiene, but the epidemiologists said that the disease killed more people in countries where there was no war, such as in Oceania, India, or the United States, and the Anarchists said that it was a good thing because the world was corrupt and heading for destruction.
There has arguably never been a film quite as mind-bending, strange and ambitious as Enter The Void, Gaspar Noe's tale of a hallucinogen-loving teen who gets blown away – in the first five minutes of the movie – while tripping his face off on DMT. For the next two-and-a-half hours his soul floats around a pinball machine-like vision of Tokyo watching his sister (Paz del la Huerta) strip, recalling his parent's horrific car accident and plummeting through wormholes in time and space that come in the form of everything from lightbulbs and headlights to vaginas and eyeballs. Imagine the last sequence of Kubrck's 2001 and you are getting close to the aesthetic, but this is actually way more surreal.
Try it a bit, instead of sexingOne night. Close your eyes,
And think, Grandmother,
I’m coming to you, live!
Jesus shows inside his flesh.
He is airy marbles and we are
All looking at his un-pain
While we fucked, I’d hold his baby. To keep the baby off the dirt. Clean babies are happy. I’d hold the baby out in front, and he’d fuck me from behind. The baby never cried. The baby wandered. I mean its eyes. The baby appeared unfazed. I mean by the fucking.We fucked in the park, in the tall grass. When my arms that held the baby bounced, the baby laughed and laughed. And while I got fucked, while I was holding the baby, I’d wonder about the baby’s other daddy. This was what I assumed, that the baby had another daddy, because unlike his first daddy, the daddy who fucked me, this baby was brown. I figured the baby was adopted. Something about the daddy, I could just tell, he seemed like the kind of man with a man at home. Even though he never talked about himself, he didn’t seem like he kept any secrets.
I wanted to ask him, Bring the other daddy to the park! One daddy to kneel on the ground and take me in his mouth. The other daddy to fuck me. And me to hold the baby. To keep the baby clean. But I never had the guts to ask.
That was a few years ago. That daddy disappeared. Now that park has fewer babies. Now those babies toddle. Oh man, those babies are getting big.
You wanted me to tell you everything I did after we left each other.Well, I was very sad; it had been so lovely. When I saw your back disappear into the train compartment, I went up on the bridge to watch your train pass under me. That was all I saw; you were inside it! I looked after it as long as I could, and I listened to it. In the other direction, toward Rouen, the sky was red and striped with broad bands of purple. The sky would be long dark by the time I reached Rouen and you reached Paris. I lit another cigar. For a while I paced back and forth. Then, because I felt so numb and tired, I went into a café across the street and drank a glass of kirsch.
...When at last we reached home, it was one in the morning. I wanted to organize my work table before I went to bed. Out my study window, the moon was still shining—on the water, on the tow path, and, close to the house, on the tulip tree by my window. When I was done, Louis went off to his room and I went off to mine.
Sometimes We Have To Push Each Other Away So We Don’t Drag Each Other Down I’m sorry I hid from youamongst a group of black women
while waiting for the bus.
Still terrified you’d see my white hair,
I stooped down and huddled
between them.
One of them patted my head.
A woman on the bus
gives another man a $2.99
Entenmann's pound cake.
He says it is his passion.
They call it his 'baby.'
He even cradles it a bit in his arms.
I am not the man cradling the
$2.99 Entenmann's pound cake.
I am the one who’s even too
afraid to lift my arms.
I’m awakened at 3 a.m. to the sound of an owl.It takes me a minute to find my glasses.
I press my face to the window.
A silver flash crosses the yard.
It settles into an owl shape on a nearby post.
My nose and eyes are stinging.
A stinging behind my face.
Like some kind of problem behind a billboard.
Why would a man look at an owl and start to cry?
My body is trying to reject something.
I have no idea what that is.
The owl is sitting in the moonlight.
The yard is completely still.
I don’t know how to behave but
I know what I believe. I believe
that if I stick my head in the oven
I won’t take it out. I believe in
corduroy couch cushions. I believe
in digging a tunnel with a small
silver spoon. I believe in tunneling
with this spoon under the city
and never giving up.
I believe in after-breakfast naps
and Russian roulette—
Russian roulette while eating ice cream
as I watch the evening news.
I believe in the evening news.
And I believe in celebrity.
I believe in those photos
on the web of Putin playing doubles
Ping-Pong, outdoors, in his Speedo.
(Find those.) I believe in haircuts
and bubble gum, and putting my face
down into a pillow or cushion,
and that when I do this I will see
the future, plus other cultures, most
of them, and I’ll get work done
that couldn’t be done another way.
I believe in tacos and mortification.
I believe that all people fall
into one of two categories: Doonesbury or Far Side.
Well, or Andy Capp. Andy Capp type people.
They’re everywhere.
It’s high noon in Brooklyn but its always midnight on southern, dead end suburban streets. Here, there is total silence except for the house at the very end, where inside a tin roof garage, teenagers are kissing for the first time. The humidity is too great, the boys peel off white t’s and the girls cheeks are flushed, beet red under the garage’s two fluorescent stripes. In a pond behind the house an alligator waits for a snow birds’ Pomeranian to take its night stroll. A child is sleep walking for the first time. Some one is running away for the last time. The music is too loud on the 12 D battery boom box radio, the cops are on their way. It’s at this moment you hear the music of Twin Shadow on a radio station transmitting suburban ghost dreams that sound like a slow motion shot of a cannon, singing about spirits, visions, and aural hallucinations cutting through the first American night.You're my favorite day dream. I'm your famous nightmare. Everything I see looks like gold. Everything I touch goes cold.
What do you say when they say “What do you do?” I say I play theblues on my red kazoo. That I teach yoga to yahoos. That I have a ranch
in Australia where I breed blue suede kangaroos. I steal women’s shoes
and sell them to perverts over an 800 line. I do gardening with lasers.
I clean houses with plastic explosives. I’m on welfare. I’m on heroin.
I’m on parole. I teach the art of Ninja to ninnies. I’m a professional
identity designer. Nothing, I’m rich. Nothing, I’m emotionally crippled.
I’m a media mogul who moonlights as a Chippendale dancer. I manufacture
ladies lingerie for Frederick’s of Krakow. I play golf with beatniks.
I design then live in the cities of the future... which sometimes takes all
afternoon. I sell gizmos to gooks. I wholesale freeze-dried mail order
brides. I design Boy Kaddafi’s stage outfits and sometimes read him his
fan mail. What do I do? Well, I’m waiting for this think tank thing to
come through so I can get tanked and think of new ways to screw citizens
out of the dollar or two they’d like to use to buy brew but instead goes
to you know who. I loot shopping malls in radiation zones. I cruise
the art zoos looking for what’s new in mutations. I sell crack at the
United Nations. I don’t have just one occupation. I’m an amalgamation,
a confederation, a conspiracy and a conglomerate. I do what I have to do
because I’m a man... that’s spelled M – A – N. I don’t do anything,
I’m just a writer.
I’m a common man, a lunkhead, a stumbling predator, a devotee
of bitter indulgences. Just an ordinary guy with some extremely frisky
demons, an intimate with certain angels, and on speaking terms with my
personal version of God. I’m a flaunter of basic virtue, a victim of
luminescent tragedy, an occasional calamity of exuberance, an unskilled
dreamer, a squirming statistic. I’m a magenta hombre, a toxic tactician,
a refuge from convenient reason, a slobbering suitor, a recent visitor,
the midnight ranter at rest in the warm afternoon sun. I’m a churning
hunk of frenetic funk, a misprogrammed meat torpedo, rock and roll in a
rented tuxedo, a brain with a food hole, a high performance heart with
no brakes. I’m King Shit Deluxe, Kid Avalanche, Jumpcity Geronimo.
I’m the fool who just wishes he was tired. The boy next door...who you
never see because I’m kept locked in a closet. A quiet man with an
elaborate arsenal. I’m the karma chameleon who’s grown up to be a
dragon lizard, the former lizard poet who now could use a steady job.
I’m Mr. Wonderful miscast as a miasma of memory and menace. I’m just
a happily married man, a Prudential agent suddenly possessed by the
spirit of Howling Wolf. “You gotta do/ what you gotta do/ to protect/
your family/ you fam-i-lyyyyyy...yeah..” I’m a common man, a consensus
sweetheart, a condescending adult, a fugitive from the do-not-file file,
an exile from every Main Street from Naples to Nantucket, Goos Bay to
Ozone Park. I drinks whiskey when I’m thirsty but only eats zucchini
if I’m drunk. I labor to control my destiny, struggle to meet my
simple needs, try to manage more dangerous impulses. I’m quick-
tempered, wrong-hearted, short-sighted, but I want to be right, I ache
to be good, and I’m trying, so help me, I’m trying.
Well, we dance loud while standing still, and think best while
swinging sledge hammers. We insult the slackmasters, rock with the
wizards of angst, and celebrate finding lollypops in the snow. We
are the sentimental guys left in charge of the evacuation plans, the
stoned soldiers left to preside over the lost cities. We’re the sweetheart
word-crunchers laboring to explain the true nature of the Relentless
Romp. We sing: “Minute by minute/ we’re deeper within it/ Minute
by minute/ we’re closer to it.” Somehow we have propelled ourselves
from accident to interlude, from breakthrough to secret passion to manic
absolution to final argument. We try to maintain our good nature, our
love of well being, our simple kindness. We try to proceed rather than
wallow, to laugh rather than screech. We’re the ones who fall down the
Stairway to Heaven backwards while carrying a drink and never spill a
drop. We realize we have a few problems. We also realize we are full
of love, and that others love us, though not usually in the way we’d
prefer. We know that since we can’t get out of it, we might as well
keep doing it. To go as if we knew where we were going. To do as if
we knew what we were doing. Onward and upward, through the fog and
across the night, the relentless romp, the relentless romp, the relentless
romp.
The men a woman twists around in words are post-males. As a rule, all that is left of them is flayed skin laid out to dry. But sometimes they leave behind visions, phantasms, sensations and emotions.He was a tall red-haired man, almost always dressed in black. He was an interesting man, but I avoided him like the plague. I would not have liked to be touched by him at any time or under any circumstances. I felt revulsion, as towards a hysterical and incomplete man. His small hands were those of a girl, his eyes autistic. He was lively and full of charm and a great storyteller, picturesquely loquacious when he was not in the grip of paranoia. His body was never to be seen, because it was always swaddled, camouflaged in roomy and concealing layers of clothes. He refused to make his body felt in any way or another, and that was why he was reminiscent of a gravedigger. He had white skin, unaccustomed to being touched. He did not know what it meant to be tempted or to desire, because he did not permit himself to feel anything. He was frightened of the world and of the bodies that circulated through it. Had he been able to choose the way in which he could be born, he would have opted to be a soul without a body. That is why he was, in fact, a kind of ghost. He was a man enclosed within his own body as though in a crypt. He had the sharp voice of a quarrelsome or nosy woman: it seemed that he had concentrated his hope of life in that hysterical, squeaky voice of his, in the manhood that it ought to have contained. What was to be done with such a man? To leave him to his own devices, to let him find his own way. He had a horror of the male sex, because he had a horror of his own body. Sometimes he and his solitude made me nauseous. Other times, he was very dear to me, because he had red hair and dressed in black.
He was a mature man, very mature, corpulent and soft. He was neither ugly nor handsome, but he had a voice that could stir all the outbursts and inbursts of a woman. He had the voice of a lively and gentle man, of a somnolent man, with flushed skin. I found his voice pleasing, like a quilt, like a sheet. I floated after his voice; I stretched toward it to pluck it like a succulent fruit. I could have rubbed up against that voice as if up against a body. It was even a slippery, wet body, hence the way in which it invaded my ears as though they were defoliated sexes. In this way I would hear with my own sex split in two, and his voice fell like a mute, fluffy avalanche. It was nice. It had a kind of silky, orchid yearning. His corpulence did not entice to bodily love, but nor to disgust. It was a corpulence like any other: bearable. But his voice was a mature sex, not at all hurried, a sign, a passage, a crossroads. He had chubby and childish hands. Their sensuality was minimal, but functional.
His long black hair, smelling of laundry soap, aroused me: long black hair. Sometimes, his eyes got in his hair and lingered there for a long while, hanging like bats. He was just skin and bones, thin, a man hard to caress, because there was not a crumb of flesh left on him. I don’t know how women touched him, because I never touched him. His long black hair was enough for me. It was my baldaquin. His every joint creaked. He was crumpled up into his thoracic cavity. He was a man crammed into himself, sickly and dear. I liked his voice only when it grated, jerkily. Otherwise it would be hoarse and prickly; it would prickle my flesh and I didn’t like it. I could not at all imagine how that man made love, because I saw him as just one tall bone, from head to foot. I didn’t like his beard, but had he shaved it off, I would never have recognized him again. Polished hair and bone, that’s what he was.
He was a faun, a swarthy man, with a stiff beard. He had a curved, arched body, as though he were continuously embracing a woman. He often had an appetite for women, but he did not permit himself to expose it. He looked at them and was content with that much. He had a somehow gobbling mouth, with powerful teeth, which would have been capable of rending you asunder. He could have been an industrious shepherd of female sexes, his happy and obedient little sheep. But he was concerned with appearances. With his hands he might have stroked greedily, with his beard he might have pricked wildly. But not he. He would speak of the body, but not of possessing it, although this obsessed him. He would smile satisfied at his own masculine state, he did not omit a single woman with his gaze, he would touch her in passing, as though he had given her a slap on the buttock, weighing up her rump, and nothing more. I often used to talk to him about women and men; I liked to talk to him. I had never seen his body, but I suspected that it was dreadfully hairy. You could tell by his backwoodsman’s beard. His body hair was probably what prevented him from letting himself go: not because he was embarrassed, but because he was tangled up in webs of lianas that hindered his progress. In his jungle of mature albeit callow man, of faun-like albeit domesticated man. And, alas, of conformist and predictable man.
He was a manling, which is to say a fresh little man. He had well-drawn and strong lips. He was a guerrilla fighter, although he looked like a little monk. I don’t know how much he knew about women, nor even if he had ever had one. His body was collapsed or ruptured, although he was young. Like a seahorse. However, he also seemed to be a budding inquisitor, reining in his body and his fluids. He might just as easily have been capable of becoming a full and seductive man, a gourmand of women. He had to be prudent, because he was so slight that he would not have been able to survive the passion of too many females. I gazed on him with pleasure, as though he were my own, albeit imperfect, work. His eyes were sunken: they had a Spanish sensuality, but were restrained rather than lustful. His eyelashes were arousing, as though they were a hundred untiring thighs all tumbled one on top of another. I had the sensation that he was swathing me in yards of hair, as though in a cocoon. I would have liked to be younger for him, but time had left me behind.
I was crazy about tall men, and he was just the right height for my appetite. But he was an inveterate masturbator. He had nacreous, almost Japanese skin; he had little brushes for eyelashes, fleshy lips and telescopic eyes. Women liked him, and he was addicted to them: he had possessed many and nonetheless he would never be sated, even after the sexual act had been consummated he would still not miss out on a bout of masturbation. For that reason he disgusted me, even if it was a pitiful disgust. His own body was like a brother in arms to him, he could have done anything to it, except mutilate it. That was why he set it to work in every shape and form, as a submissive and malleable servant. And nevertheless, his body was svelte and lively; it was a young body, in the most authentic flowing of blood through veins and arteries. But it was, at the same time, the body of an autist. Sick of itself and, for that reason, stammering. I felt sorry for that man, so alien in our world. However many women he possessed, it was still with himself and with his own sex that he ate, dreamed and prayed to God. What more can I say, except Amen?
Alberto Manguel is an asshole. Whatever he told you about Alejandro, I’ll bet my right arm it’s wrong, Terradillos. Manguel is one of those types who see an orange and then swear it’s an egg. “What, and orange-coloured?” you say. Yes. “And round?” Yes. “Does it smell of blossom?” Yes. “So like an orange?” Yes, but it’s definitely an egg.
