Al-Quayda's Googgle Ult Weapon use your moments of happiness to weigh off what lacks in god

The tribe who loves burial vs

The tribe whose color is pennied vs

The tribe whose poison in touch vs

The tribe who lives before the past vs

The tribe who smokes fire vs

a black country with black woods around tribes talking about fucking

other tribes up because if it is true every star represents the fingers
of a hand it is also true what we cannot touch it is possible does not exist

All of us have seen beauty pass into something else,
have seen it waiting beneath a tree until the shade breaks free
& covers it, some of us have even been covered by it,
gripped it like a lover or a machine swerving from the road
where the pines are like people buried head first off the shoulder,
graveyard or gridlock, the sound of a horn entering the mind,
the deer corpse crushed against a guard rail, its eyes wide
open as an officer of the state scraped the body free.

... “I want to go down in history,”
I’ve heard ordinary people say that. I’ve heard names
become catchphrases, I’ve seen names needled deep
into the skin, an ink pumping like oil leagues
beneath the surface of day. Could be we’ll say “our”
with our last breaths: the girls who becomes unfortunate;
the boys with their tongues hard on the air, starving to dance
with no idea what happened or why it happened to them.

The baby was hideous. I don't know how to begin to describe how ugly this baby was. It deserved its own charity or telethon. In certain parts of the world, they'd drown it like a kitten the second it slopped out of the womb. The spawn of witchcraft or a deal with the devil.
The baby had squinty black eyes and a wide mouth like a basking shark. If its lopsided skull were an egg, someone at the egg factory would yell "Wrong!" and throw it down a chute. The nose was completely fucked, a gnarled parsnip of a thing.
Thank Christ the baby wasn't real. He came out of one of those machines in the mall. My wife Gretchen and I squeezed together in the curtained booth and a flash went off. A minute later out came a picture of what our baby might look like. Our hypothetical baby.
Gretchen made a face like she'd just caught a whiff of something foul. I retched and clutched my throat like I was choking.
This was not what we were expecting because we were both reasonably photogenic people. Maybe the machine was broken. I looked for a manager or a complaint box, but there was neither.
For kicks, we named him Little Baby Boris.
At home Gretchen hung the picture of Boris on the refrigerator. Over my wife's shoulder, as I ate my dinner, I could see the monstrous face gawk across the room. With their faces side by side, there was a resemblance. Small, but unmistakable. The slight bulge of forehead, how the eyes were spaced apart. I tried to shake the thought out of my head, because I knew if I didn't it would wedge there like a splinter.


 
You said you slept with your eyes open, but we both know this isn’t true. You were sizing me up. Five years old, sizing me up. Putting me in the place where you thought I should be. I said hell is for children and you sang along. In your sleepy little bed with the gouges and scratches, your legs were joined at the feet by tiny white leather shoes attached to a punishing thick metal bar. You beat your legs, screamed that they hurt. You screamed it like the pain wouldn’t ever let you go. Then I taught you that song.
You fought sleep like the enemy you thought I was. You tore into the night with your eyes opened wide. You blew away dreams like they were someone else’s thoughts that stole into your skull. You screamed and beat the metal bar against your little bed. You did it and then laughed at the sounds you had made.
You sat in the back of the car with your eyes open, head lolling. But your eyes seemed trained on my image in the rearview. What you could see of my eyes and forehead, pressured into being by your eager and inscrutable gaze.
You never slept with your eyes open because you never slept. Cantankerous creature. The opposite of death, you were something that never ever went away. That never ever stopped watching over everything. Tiny little scepter, strange silent ghost with big eyes that stared, never moved. What was I supposed to do? Your green eyes blackened. What was I supposed to do? Hell is for children and the dead never sleep. And I’ll sleep when I’m dead. And I slept like the dead. And how can the blackness appear at the edges of sight when the day is so bright overhead?
To train you out of this looking, I took you to graveyards. I wanted to show you what death meant. They wouldn’t let us in at the morgue. Strange creature, I held your hand at the hospital doors and told you what was inside and you asked to go there. I wanted punishment and you asked to go there. I imagined the white coat sliding some corpse out of a long metal tube, the refrigeration humming like a roomful of bees.
The doctor looked at me like I was sick. But I wanted to scare you into sleep, you strange little girl.
So we went to the cemetery on the edge of town, the one across the road from another midwestern wideopen field. Inside the gates, we could hear the fluttering bookpage sound of wind through the corn, thick leaves caressing, green on green.
You were the one who said it sounded like books. And I thought of you lying belly down in the backyard, coloring books all around you, crayons scattering the grass.
We got out of the car, book pages whispering. The heat had a personality of its own, like someone who stands too close when they talk. Someone who can’t get enough of themselves.
 




When I was born I was freaking awesome. My dad tells me I was all head and could cough for an entire night without stopping. By third grade I knew at least ten nursery rhymes. I could write my name in cursive. I learned my times tables in under three months. I understood what a hypothesis was within minutes of my teacher telling me. By junior high I was fluent in English, backtalk, and Midwest Caucasian. At fourteen I could rollerblade both backwards and forwards. At fifteen I could clear a sewer grate. Between 18 and 20, I learned to identify at least four reservoirs beneath the hood of a car, survived two weeks in a tent with nothing but a cooler full of food and a debit card, moved my t-shirt and CD collections into a dorm room, convinced a chemistry teacher to pass me, financed a midsize car. After that I was unstoppable. I ate dinner in restaurants, shopped in produce departments, held short conversations at parties with average looking men, mini-golfed on weekends, slept in late on Sundays, repainted wicker furniture, nursed a cold sore, scrambled eggs with ease.

I once had a purpose: my maker shoved it into my chest, bolted it to the branches of my ribs. Then others came with wrenches, removed it, gave me another. I carried myself to the coast, built a shack in the trees—scrap metal, scrap lumber—lived in it for years. I met others like me. Lived on stolen things. Hotel soap, tip-cup pennies. All of our salt was stolen. All of our silverware. All of our couch cushions, all of them mismatched—green paisley, orangish satin, yellow and brown argyle—like the sock collection of a circus clown. We burned incense in coconut shells, prayed to whatever gods we thought were angry. Then you came. Unzipped something. Carried me back to the fields with the farm where your parents were buried. I hated you for your appliances. In those days everything I did was cliché. I slept in a bed with pillows and sheets. I mowed our lawn. We had dogs and I fed them. I hated you because living with you was like living with a microwave: you never talked, sometimes you made me food, and you always sat in the same room, blinking, spinning that plate in your head. You used your yarn to make me mittens you said were magic. I never believed you but wore them anyway. In those days you were the mousehole in my wallpaper. Your parents were buried but never left us alone. They wandered through the farmhouse like shadows, shaking clumps of dirt and bits of root from their sweaters, knocking bugs onto our floor. You never stopped telling me I was your father. Then I fell in love with a girl from a magazine. She was made of paper, but at least she wasn’t a microwave. Her parents were dead: she had knocked nails into the lids of their coffins to keep them buried. I told her I only wanted five seconds. I only wanted five seconds of her saying, you’re my hog fat. You’re my snail slime. That night the squinch owls disappeared. The hummingbirds came scudding across the hay fields, whisking up the dust. Then they flatlined and were gone. I left your mittens on the counter. I unplugged you from the wall. Your parents were upstairs, melting in and out of the bathtub. I left. I rode your father’s bicycle out of the hay fields and through the factory towns to a fishing village on the sea. I tried to start over. Tried to find those who had given me my purpose. Then read my story in newspapers. Someone had found you—plugged you back into your wall. You had told our story to the newspapers but had changed everything. Neither of us was who we actually were. In your story I was a monster. Maybe it was true but it wasn’t. But if someone tells an untrue story about you enough times, eventually you become the person from the story instead of the person who was you. With enough words you could have made me into anything. I read all the newspapers. Bought entire stands of them, tied them with twine and tossed them from the end of the docks, sunk stacks of them into the sea. But they kept coming. They kept printing. I stopped looking like myself. My nose bulged; the veins in my eyes spiderwebbed; tiny black hairs sprouted on my feet, my shoulders, my butt, my nose. I forgot how to talk without sounding afraid. My body shifted sizes; all of my clothes fit not-quite-right. I became the me you remembered instead of the me that I'd been. I rolled your father’s bicycle off the end of the docks and rode a bus into the city. Tried to find the girl from the magazine. Discovered she had been dead for quite some time. Got a job in a laundromat, rented an apartment with unpainted walls. Didn’t speak to anyone. Read piles of used books, ate nothing but oatmeal. Like your parents, became a shadow. Lived hunched over a cracked bowl, spooning oatmeal into my imaginary mouth, with magazine cutouts of a dead woman taped to my walls. I can’t stop reading your newspapers. Even when I’m not reading them I’m reading them. You said that I’ve taken something from you. That I’m just as ugly as everyone else. That I’m the spittle of something darker. You said that I never let you into any of my caves, which was true, but even I don’t go down there. I’m not made of the same things you are. No one coaxed the wriggling, wet soul out of my skin, scrubbed it with soap lard and pumice sand, bleached it with vinegar. No one dug their liquor cellar under the goat trails I had stamped through the imaginary. No one lined me all up out of blackboards and built a room with no writing.


We do not have a set of precise definitions of reality in our heads—indeed, we usually do not bother to define reality at all—but we somehow assume . . . that we all agree on what we mean. In general, we mean that reality is what we value, what we care about. But often we mean something far more specific, more debatable, less relative than this. Some of us mean that reality is what is solid; others mean that reality is what is not solid. We tend to assume that our way of thinking is simply an expression of common sense, the most obvious way of understanding and manipulating the everyday world. But since common sense carries with it an implicit definition of reality, to define reality in terms of common sense is to commit a tautology. Common sense... is an attribute of culture, not of nature, a part of myth rather than a part of reality.


And in all honesty, Google Maps has a better plot.




Not so long ago the crops were terrible, and the farmer came home each night worried and wondering how to keep going. Usually there were chickens and rabbits for his wife to cook, but not anymore: now they are almost out of everything. The wife opens her window and lays out a few crumbs of bread on the sill as she has every day for the past several years. The sparrows come, heads cocked. In return for the crumbs they have cleaned her bushes of centipedes, crickets, and biting spiders. They hear her whisper, see the trail laid out for them. That night the farmer returns to a better meal than usual, crunches down the stringy, bone-ridden bits in the stew. Strange, but satisfying, he tells her, before going to bed. She stays up a bit longer by the dying cinders, fingers tapping the rhythms of birdsong. Her insides are fluttering with the beats of tiny organs, there’s something stuck in her throat and her eyes are wide and barely blinking.

All the Birds of Finland. Smoke trapped in the attic. The boy holds illustrations up to the window and traces bird bodies onto sheets of paper towel. Corvus corax. Feral cats caught in traps, blood on canvas, mice in laundry baskets, passerines, tail feathers, sky without color. Grasping a pencil with his small hands, imagining the miles of territory they must cover. Paper towel birds lined neatly in rows, eyes sketched in with water drops.
His father dreams of chivalrous men dancing with beautiful women, slowly spinning. Empty light sockets on the front porch became clogged with nests, punched out with broom ends, all crap and feathers. The car’s backseat holds only empty soda cans never redeemed.

They have been planning the switch for months. The girls grow their hair and dye it the same pale blonde, start buying and wearing identical shapeless dresses, apply their makeup in the same technique and palette. Some kids think it’s cool, but others avoid them because it’s so strange. At first they swap places in a few of their classes to see if the teachers might notice, but none do. Soon afterwards they go to each other’s houses after school, eat dinner with the other’s equally chaotic family, and stay the night in the other’s bed. Each room has the other girl’s scent and pattern of disorder. Each lies awake in a strange house, unsure of the night noises and constituent conversations. At school the next day they congratulate each other on their deception. And so it continues and the two families, being so inconsistent and self-centered, never catch on. One day one of the girls does not show up at school. In fact she is never seen again, since the entire family has fled in the night to avoid their many debts. A letter finally arrives for the abandoned girl, postmarked from another country, with pictures of a new house, an ocean. “I love them and have left myself,” she reads, “I left myself so long ago, please, don’t be angry.”

Artists' prices can sometimes go up when they die,
and I'm 71 years old,
so your investment in one of these may pay off sooner than later:
http://www.billknottart.com/
**
I promise to try to make a splash when I die,
to help increase the value of your knottart—
I'll jump off the Weldon Kees Memorial Bridge, or something . . .







Obscene Father (speaking through an inhaler):
I am also violent in this crawl. I use a megaphone and the result on a million pigs is a visual concussion. I can see them but they are twitching and ill-shapen. There is an evil in my daughter that the pigs cannot reach even with their clubs and cuts and crayfish scraping up my chest. We have to lock the cabinets thoroughly I tell my daughter through the tube. She does not know language. That’s what makes her evil. That and the fact that she is mine.
Daughter:
I am also violent when I can see the cheering nation from the empty swimming pool. I faint with glitterglitter in that pool while officers video-tape-up the napalm body I built today in school. I held a rose in my garbled hand. Every time I make something for the President it turns to shrapnel. My father is still being taped in asylumjanuary. It is because he has an unnatural insect frequency that only I hear. I tell on him. I tell the officers, Right now my father is headless and impregnated. Right now he has stuns in his vertebrae. They fall for it every time. I am the Daughter of Revolution.
The Revolution:I am also violent when working on the martyr exhibition. The sun is rotten and I have to bruise easily during car alarms. But most of all I need to hollywood some Africans for the final room, the Congo. That’s where I get my aura. That’s where I abuse gasoline. Please come down to see me on the surveillance camera. It’s the newest economy. It’s an economy of inside/outside where I am always the outside inside the camera. You might not understand how I can faint every time. It’s easy. Write a receipt for USA and I will show you how to rip off the primal scene.
The Primal Scene:
(Audience Members are made to play a brief version of Fall of the House of Usher in whiteface. They groan. It’s terrible.)
The Passenger (played by Adolf Loos):
I am also violent because I am adorned in all of the jitterbugs that should be outlawed. The ornaments on the walls are falling into the street as tanks drive by. The ornaments from the lynching fall down while newscamerasflash. I felt rubbed in the swans when I saw the correct woman for the part. All through the entire series of unrealistic events, as buildings and people were cleaned off, I had no idea that there was a correct woman for the part. The part of course was to play a host for the invasion allegory. Not a stare for gunshots. That was my part and I must have been next.
Miss World (with a hard-on):
Because I’m a teenager I don’t yet understand metaphors and that is why I understand what the passenger doesn’t understand: The security officers are not trying to turn him into an object (that’s just his sexual fantasy); they are trying to teach him to have an interiority worthy dying for. In Iraq, in Compton, in Flanders, in heaps, in chlorine, on film, with a necklace that breaks.
Father Voice-Over:
We want to teach him how to speak. We want to teach him how to channel the voice that is great within us. We want to teach him how to feel.
Mimesis:The scariest thing is the figure without an interior. Like puppets or movies. And the sexiest. I live in the movie theater. I hide from the cops there. I seduce women in there and steal their children. I wear a skull cap in there. And a skull shirt.
The Natives:
Why is it so cold in here?
Father Criminal (holding the Stagehand’s severed penis):
Now I have a billion-dollar hygiene to fake at the shooting. In the wound I could see the most beautiful butterflies reverberate. I had never seen butterflies before. I had never seen snow before. I came from crib death into crowd auction and my instructions were written with a felt-tipped pen on my slow-motion body. I could hardly make out the last word; it was prevent.
The Prom Queen (blood splattered on her white gown):
Look at my doll penis. Look at my cake. I acquired them by trading in a transistor radio. I went analog. Through my smeared red lips and my putrid lips and my eyes like orchids and my hair like snow, I acquired something greater. I became the penis.
Miss World:Thanks to the massacres exhibited by the Prom Queen I now have several penises. They are interchangeable. It’s capitalism! I trade you a lesbian penis for your disgusting penis. It reminds me of home. The penis I still love the most is the one that flapped out of a soldier’s pants as he was dragged through the street. I have a copy of it. It’s my true penis. I’m Miss World. An impossible prince. Pun. Instrument. I’m a missing child.
Father Voice-Over:(the sound of antlers banging against a church window and live swans being damaged irrepairably with blunt objects)
The Passenger:
First I thought the airport officers were disinfecting me then I thought they were infecting me then the airport burned down. In the hospital I though they were treating me then I thought they were using me as an antidote and then I watched the hunt for the black man on the television and I was scared that he was coming for Miss World. Now I’m a realist. I’ve covered up my eyes. Put your cigarette out on my thigh. Please. I want to be your father.
Mimesis:I want to be your atrocity kitsch.
Hollywood (this time a child who is prevented from obscenity and persecution through the discrete use of tourist trinkets):
You may know me from such roles as the colonial war in the jungle and the place where the president was shot in the head. You may know me from such romps without knowing exactly where the bullets landed and how the face shattered. Of all the widows that I love I love the widow who speaks into a tape-player the most. The cut-up widow I call her when I speak to her like I speak to her now. Cut-up widow, you may know me from such roles as the leading killer of people below the age of 45 or the trailer for a war that was more like a pilgrimage. The potential for bleeding was great and the divas were crowned in idealism. Their voices caused shock waves to propagate through the tissue.
The Locked-In Syndrome (played by the Hollywood-child in the midst of the Hollywood horses):
The problem with ass-fucking is that someone has to clean the machine afterwards. The problem with insects is not the noise that they make (a sweet noise in which I could survive) but that they will not die in droves large enough to cause a halt. The problem with horse cadaver is not that they bleed or stink but that they can be turned into theater. The problem with my femur is not that it breaks (which it does quite easily, quite gracefully, repeatedly) but that you will not know unless I make a fool out of myself, as I undoubtedly have done here, tonight, in front of a cheering nation of burn-victims.
The Dream Weapon:The daughter posses a segmented body supported by the latest and hardest fashion objects. The segments of the body are organized into three distinctive but interconnected units: the foul head, the faintly flowery mouthpart and the abdominal region. The head has a colorful mouthpart decorated with ovule-like organisms. Her abdomen may be capable of feeling pain due the presence of nociceptors. The doll parts are insected with cake. The reproductive structures are fused with ganglia. The lungs are perforated slightly to allow for a gradual reduction of oxygen in the circulatory system. A daughter is an object that represents a baby. It is anatomically correct for nervous disorders. The baby’s wound is covered with flickering bodies of small insects with twitchy wings. In Hollywood we say that she is born again.
Mother History (played straight with her arms tied behind her back):
During courtship, the girl will form a doll of sorts by fusing the thorax which was removed from her optic tract when she was born to various less valuable materials, such as the inner whorl and other organisms associated with the breathing process or one of her floral tubes. She will fasten several gem-like organisms to the boy’s target area. Depending on his age – which may be anywhere from 6 to 12 – he may have to have his target area treated with various fluids to avoid infection. Often the process will have minor effects on the excretory functions, but he will survive. His nervous system is divided into a brain and a ventral nerve cord. The head capsule (made up of six fused segments) has six pairs of ganglia. Of these four can be removed without any major repercussions and attached to the doll should he accept the courtship offer.
Miss World:Nobody kills me when I am bright. I have a ha-meaning when I black out rotten on beds. A rotten bed is a bed with the consistency of beautiful candy and children’s arms. A rotten bed is also called a rancid bed when there are teeth involved. When you pronounce rancid you have to show your teeth. A rotten bed is a spectacle for the folk marching through an infested body. Watch me when I am inserted and pilfered with in the crowd. I will not break. In Japanese my hand method is called “tebori.” It has to do with riots and girl parts. Watch me pronounce the word. My lips look like a tulip. All the sensory antennae vibrate. When I wake up the make up has been wiped off and the fists are sprinkled with gunpowder. Come on, emerge as imago.
The Natives:
1.Why is it so cold in here?
2.The action seems to have stopped.
3.Is it over?
4.Have all the images been exhausted?
5.Have all the bodies been disinfected?
6.How do we get out of here?
The President Speaks Of Love (alone in the woods, gathering up husks):
I have had my face remade.

I am writing a letter to God for a talent show.
I mention napalm only to justify the actions against my body, that flagrant heap of ants which we must all do our best to eradicate.

The Welfare State (naked):
Don’t lock the door. You have nothing to be ashamed of.
Voice-Over:Lock the doors. Lock the doors. We’re having a fire drill!
Trauma:There must be a clearance sale on fur in the welfare state. I am sweating profusely and the animals are not hygienic. There must be a riot in the exhausted state because I cannot get through. In the case of an impasse like this, it is important to use the ganglia to take care of the inflamed hole. You must not allow the insects to enter the ovule. If they do you must immediately extinguish it with felt and fat. A ribcage can always be salvaged but a nest is hard to eliminate. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You have nothing. Allow me to gently sterilize the fur.
Trauma:This blubbery body has had too much insect material stuffed in its asshole. Who is going to clean the ovules? Who will sterilize the machinery before it turns into yet another crawl-heap in the televised horny? This is an acute case of audiophilia: the unrigorous love of swarming-through sounds. Every infection sounds too much in this black-twitched body bloated with insects. In order to restore silence to the pageant we must eliminate the fat. We must eliminate several kinds of cancer, the worst of which are butter cancer and screw cancer. You can see the ovule protracting. You can feel the ganglia throb. You may wonder who will have to clean the machine when the operation is over. I will have to infect the machine. I who hate fecal matter and I who am afraid of larvae. It is I who will use thinner on the holes and ploys. It will leave a varnish-like layer on top of my hands.
Miss World:In the Welfare State the sun has out-ruined all the nocturnal mouthpieces. The sun-out has obliterated all the rancid petals and turned the protrusion dulled. They will all be exhibited in the Natural Museum together with the rest of my assemblage: the polished abdomen, the gleaming ganglia and the disinfected holes. I have drawn a picture of a horse. The captions says: This way.
Mimesis:
I kill because I love money. White women are money but it’s so hard to see in here because it’s dark. I’ve become invisible. I’ve become dangerous to my own chest with all these sharp objects. One thing I’m holding on to might be the most dangerous object yet because it might get me killed. It feels hard, as if it were made of ivory. But it’s invisible. And the crowd is getting agitated. This is realism.
The Passenger:
I’ve made it this far but I still can’t figure out who I’ve been brought to this party to kill. It’s too bright in here. Would somebody turn of the flashlights. Would somebody cover up that girl dressed up like a little girl dressed up like a big girl. She is made of the most blinding materials. It’s even hard to trust the television in here. Every murder plot sounds equally unrealistic. Today I saw a woman in an ambulance. Her mouth open. That was realism. This is terrorism. Desire.
The Trauma:
The fat body must be worked out. I want to see muscles where now I see lemurs climb; veins where now I begin to white out.
The Wolf Man (commodified):
I hate language.
Miss World:The theorists used to believe that I revealed the constructedness of gender, that I was a critique (me and the splattered prom queen). Now they think I’m concerned with what is real, ie not real. I just want to be evacuated into desire. This scares them. They call me necrophilic. Suspects that the Passenger has hurt me. But I’m a prince, I say. You’re dead, they say. Bang bang bang.








I once knew a girl who’d been smothered with a pillow by her lover. It was the same old story, jealousy of this or another. He didn’t get far and she lived, but she became afraid of anything soft. She slept on the floor with no blankets and spat at the clouds. No one told me any of this before I saw her across the room at a party. She was wearing a scratchy sweater and nibbling on ice cubes. I was drunk and kissed her softly on the lips. Reflexively, she bit down on my tongue. "What happened to you," the wide-eyed nurse said later. Strings of blood were swinging from my lips. I mumbled something. "Love?" she said, "Love did this to you?" "I don’t know anything about love," I shouted, sprinkling the counter red. It was true, I’d never loved anyone. I didn’t even know what it meant. It was something they put in the movies and people said to convince themselves they hadn’t wasted their lives. I was angry and never talked to the girl again. I got a job moving boxes then lost it. I had a few girls, but they never stayed long. There was a black rock planted in my chest that twisted as I marched through town. My hair thinned and I cursed at children necking in the park. This went on for many years which became more years and then my life.

When you find a sleeping vampire, you jam a brick into its mouth so it'll starve. This doesn't always work—sometimes their jaws are strong enough to crush bricks. Sometimes they aren't vampires at all. I've jammed bricks into the mouths of regular corpses. There's no telling about anything. There are simply too many monsters out there.
I drank vampire blood once. The body was right there, so I figured why not. It tasted like regular blood and hasn't changed me a bit. I keep getting older, my bones and skin frailer. When I look in the mirror I still see myself. People aren't afraid of me, and when they are, it's not in a sexy way. I don't get uncontrollable cravings for anything.
Sometimes I dream about death by sunlight. I'm standing at my window just before morning. The sun climbs up over the dark houses, just like on any other day. When the light reaches me I start to burn. First the little hairs on my skin ignite, like thousands of tiny birthday candles. Then my skin catches fire with this sound like a whoosh, and in no time, I am one big roaring flame.
You should see me then: I'm like the wick of a kerosene lamp before I scatter into ashes. You'd never know it was me—so bright and hot and surprising.






These boys were rubber-smooth and white. The flowers in their hands gleamed like boiling teeth. They handled our drugs and our daughters too. These boys were polite and well-armed. We could have used their smiles to put the cat to sleep. When they filled our daughters, no pillows were cried into, and they beamed from matrimonial scripts, became so hot we had to walk them through the Sunday Car Wash. We had to load the truck with guns and call our brothers. All this felt incestuous, but so did waking up.
I broke my daughter’s teeth out of her skull with pistol fire because the strands one boy hid inside her clasped around her voice. The boy stood on my lawn for a week, wearing headphones and appearing vulgar without expression. He was sinking into himself, skeletal, swimming in the paste his body gave. He laid the foam sprockets of his music on my lawn, an anthem making the bugs work harder. Not to assist, in any way, the health or well-being of my property. Garbage workers carried that boy to heaven. A forever’s worth of flies had beaten him there. Boys are always mass produced in cities, as we say, clutching after the silver boom known as Between My Legs.
We formed a line around the nursery with free guns. We shipped baskets of what’s-left-of-her labeled Our Daughters. These boys weren’t old enough to polish what we sent them.


Right after I tasted the magic mushrooms
I fell into him and other nightmares.
He tied me up for twenty years
and made me view horror movies, starring,
of course in Technicolor, myself.
I played a supporting role.
Always killed off before the final girl
ran around shrieking in her torn T-shirt,
I wore my gore like an evening dress –
tanzanite, rubies, and blueberry pearls
from the heart’s oozing oyster.
I didn’t mind too much:
the pawns on the pornography chessboard
fawned over me; the Cheshire cat
with the preview eyes and the toupee
lent me his fake smile on Tuesdays;
and I could have my way with opium smoking
caterpillars – if I wore stilettos
and let my husband watch.
I remember my wedding day.
Do you take this …, began the axe murderer
in his dog collar, reaching for the chain saw.
Yes, I take it, I take it, and I’ll take it some more.
The baby’s breath in my bouquet
burst into flames. The entire congregation
kissed my slit throat.
I gave my groom a flamingo golf club
and a wedding ring. He aimed the remote.












The Pope christened France a nation out of brotherly love for all people, even those who do not, technically, exist. Many people concentrate on imagining France at any given time, so it is real. Discussion of France comprises the bulk of Internet traffic. Everyone has a .france site; everyone maintains at least one “French” personality online.
  

A girl in a yellow dress twirled a small baton then blew her whistle
and the parade began. Two black fire trucks followed the girl, sirens
moaning. Next, on horseback rode twelve men with curling waxed
mustaches dressed in stiff crimson robes and blue powdered wigs.
Arabian satin with silver tassels draped the men's calico horses. Behind
them a drill team in wedding dresses started a maneuver, spinning rifles
with fixed bayonets high into the sun, moving their veils aside to catch
them. Behind the drill team nude chamber musicians played the 1812
overture. Then a long flatbed truck passed with schoolgirls reenacting
Normandy. The front hatch of their duck boat squeaked up and down
as the schoolgirls fell limp onto the sand, fake guns rattling, their
pigtails flapping out beneath their helmets. Then came the animals. A
small heard of buffalo painted white, lions and tigers pulling empty
Amish buggies, black children riding drugged elephants, a dozen
peacocks in full plumage roaming free.

I look both ways before getting into bed.
I dream a yeti romances you. In the shower
you untwist his matted hair while he chews
your neck, and–OH!–how blood
runs quietly. In the morning the rain pings
against the window shutters like quarters
being dropped from the Empire State Building.
You say Still we can love each other
through this. I nod into my oatmeal that
tastes like a cinnamon roll. I am artificial
even in the way I dress. That towel is a bad
blanket you say and my oatmeal is gone,
so I nod into my chest. Where did I go?
So many people are married at my age,
and the last time I burned my tongue on
a thigh I was young enough to let it heal.
You promise the yeti didn’t mean anything.
He was blurry even in daylight, always tucking
his feelings under his own myth. A wall
clock tells us tomorrow will sound the same.
A song goes But this day by the lake went
too fast, and now the raindrops are the size
of golf balls. When the power goes out, we
hide in the bathtub. I tell you I have never
drowned and lived. The wind is the sound
of the ocean meeting itself. We huddle under
a doorway. I grip your rainy nose. Tomorrow
I will wade into the nearest river, ask it when
it might like to leave

 
After The Civil War we did not kill Jefferson Davis and throw him into the ocean.
After World War 1 we did not kill Kaiser Wilhelm and throw him into the ocean.
After World War 2 we did not kill Hirohito and throw and him into the ocean.
At the Beginning of the Operation Iraqi Freedom we did not kill Saddam Hussian and throw him in the ocean.
It doesn't seem that throwing foreign leaders dead bodies into the ocean is protocol.
There are two things you can assume from this story.
1. It is made up, a beautiful noble lie for the masses, to distract them from the fact that gas rose 30 cents today. Or perhaps to help Obama's election strategy or just to give some vague hope that are country isn't pathetic.
2. America is now a murdering pile of shit. Instead of doing the normal protocol of getting the foreign leader, bringing him back to face an international trial. We just kill them and throw them into the ocean.
This second might make sense: considering that right now America is killing people with tax payer money in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lybia and Iraq all at the same time.
I want everyone to imagine this scenario:
The CIA and the Navy Seals call the president Barack Obama and say, "We know where Osama Bin Laden is, we can get him. What would you like us to do with him, when we capture him."
Barack Obama responds, "Kill him and throw him into the ocean."
Now before anyone makes up a scenario where, American troops were forced to kill Osama Bin Laden in a firefight.
There are machines that are being used to fight pirates in the Indian Ocean, that can send a sound wave that will cause everyone in its way, basically to fall over in pain because of the sound. We could not have shot that at the house?
But perhaps since Osama Bin Laden led no foreign nation, he was considered under the status of William Wallace and Vercingetorix but they were both captured and held for awhile before being executed.
Someone made this point on some forum, "Because in actuality, they did not kill him, but captured him to extract information. Obviously, they would employ any means to achieve this. Leading everyone to believe he is dead is the best way to prevent public curiosity and interest. And of course the Geneva convention agreement for the treatment of prisoners does not apply to dead people, or does it? Just my personal opinion."
That the Navy Seals extracted information by doing some heinous ass shit and didn't want anyone to see his body. Sounds plausible.







The universe is a puzzle, life is a problem to be solved, it's a conundrum, it's not what it appears to be. There are doors, there are locks and keys, there are levels, and if you get it right, somehow it will give way to something extremely unexpected.

If the world is code, then it can be hacked. It permits magick because it says, behind the laws of physics, is a deeper level and if you can reach that deeper level, you can make changes there.
So this is real. Astronomers actually believe that 96 percent of the universe is "missing"?
Yes. They call it the ultimate Copernican revolution. Not only are we not at the center of the universe, we’re not even made of the same stuff as the vast majority of the universe.


his is the girl of the moment
the look of the moment is campesino chic. all the lavaliers can be used as ammunition. the word of the moment is functionality. the girl of the moment should be unable to sit. this is the essential pose for spring. all of the condiments are crinoline.

this is the year of the magazine. matte is the new glossy! liner is the new kiss. campfire badges adorn the uncanny. the girl of the moment has never seen a century.

the biennial couture collection approaches! the girls line up to walk a treatise. the treatise takes place in the coffeeshop alley. heark to herald a moment of adversity! last season, all of the girls are starving.

the girl of the moment is pop. pop is the concurrent drama. the drama is sponsored by your local news radio. the radio is the body of a very young girl. the girl is a wasteland. this is the allegory: a voice walks into a bar and orders a body. the bartender is an inkwell. the inkwell is the scourge of a millenia unmaidened. the girl of the moment wears nothing but white. the girl of the moment eats nothing but summer. this moment is always already over. to comprehend the pre-season collections one must employ a derivative commandment.

this is the girl of the moment : a starling sipping tea from a holly leaf : a honeytart baked in pearbrandy : the girl is a moment of : a recipe torn from a futurist cookbook and soaked in ice cream before steaming the girl of the moment is caffeine detritus : the girl of the moment evokes the scandinavian arpeggios in early spring : the moment is nude lips and bronze shimmer-statue : the girl of the moment is taupe! the moment is cheap rhine wine : the girl of the moment is picnic-basket the girl of the moment is straw-brimmed : the girl of the moment is beribboned : the moment is highly breakable alabaster glass : the girl is vaguely chateauesque.

this is the girl of the moment : the girl of the moment is drag. drag is the unofficial party trick of the season. the season is a retrospective of the life of the media. the media has been wounded. the dresses are chestless to showcase the scars. scars are the up-and-coming accessory. the accessory is the murder of a girl in the making. the moment is transient, that is to say, feathers! the hairband is the new waistline. the metaphor is the new stitch.





Fuck everything from Garcia Marquez to the nueva trova. To wit: I found
Dylan thanks to Pavement. Masturbate all the time, everywhere you can. In
any bathroom you find. But always leave them clean.
It's not my fault your idol wasn't born in your country.
Hate cellphones, buzzers, intercoms. Never travel. Go out with girls from
your city and listen to your aunt who recommends giving it your heart and soul.
Always wear black suits. Listen to the Beatles but pronounce it with a
smart Santa Fe accent, "the Be-atuls." Walk and drink water. Give up on Tarantino.
Scorn the old and honk at them from your car. Shame Bolaño got popular.
Put a price on your ass for a night at a trendy party packed with tweakers.
Sell art. Get boring.
25 and not a clue. Try on different religions for size and wash up in
Cordoba convinced UFOs exist. Resentful. Read the Da Vinci Code (everybody's doing it).
Drink warm beer in plazas. Talk with taxi drivers. Don't end up dead by the
age of 27. Hang on just a little longer. Go vegetarian for a month and
donate some small change to Greenpeace.
Set yourself on fire and look for the closest shop selling Coca-Cola to put it
out. Never go to Bolivia but yes to Morocco, (and the corresponding ugly
caftan comes home with you). Look for a hero, an icon, something... (the
Virgin of Guadalupe never goes out of style)
(Bonus Track: buy Elton John albums. Smile like Sharon Stone. Homage.
Let life flow, said a friend. Growing up with the greats is so important.)
 The Swedish trees form; a primary, physical grandeur and air; to glucose: chains, complexes, lignin and resined substances. The tree contains for example: 6% hydrogen, a pinch of nitrogen and mineralsubstances. (50% coal and 43% oxygen). Like it was made for fire. I use the metaphase on myself, I'm on fire and I'm hearing the echoes of the centuries around us. The I is the key: ctrl:ed. You and we form appendix with them. The referencelist is formed of 8 Mb/s and an adult life's collected. Here we are actually, about that I am not alone, even though the words are mine alone and private;
Chap. 2 § 18, so, by Constitution, is the foot and eye/ear, but not the hand allowed in nature, regardless of the perceived private ownership. As an individual you may, for example, not get lost over somebody else's wealth. However, ownership gives the right hand right. Right-by-law. Anyone who prevents the owner's hand, thus its economic interests, industry, will be struck down with an axe. Here, there is talk of criminal liability and prohibited conduct. It is not entirely relevant if property per se exists. Ownership is not an arbitrary act. But it has happened. "Isolated leaves from trees, [ ... ] wild berries, acorns, resin and other worthless fruits [ is allowed ]". But "standing trees and other plants" is part of the ownership. Fruit is free and belongs to those who took it; like power, like Sápmi or other circumpolar property. But the law says: you can be as disruptive and/or how uncomfortable you want on someone else's take. But do not disturb and do not destroy. The I follows this direction.







A bedroom is a metaphor for a puzzle without a clue.
The detective who falls asleep at crime scenes takes a second sleeping pill and pages through his notebook: A few days ago he discovered a book in this room—in the middle a page was folded at the corner. The detective makes sure that the book is still lying on the dresser beside the bed. (A little groggy, he lights a cigarette, sits down on the bed and tries to understand whose side of the bed this really is: the man’s or the woman’s. He lies down, tosses from side to side, sniffs the sheets—he remembers that a previous time he was deceived by the lilac fragrance of the fabric softener—and again cannot reach an unequivocal conclusion. I shouldn’t have smoked here, thinks the detective, or they were so exhausted they simply fell asleep on each other’s side. Embarrassed, he decides to give up this secondary mystery, quickly twisting away from the middle of the bed toward the side with the dresser and glancing at the profile of the book.) And here, exactly as he had hoped from the beginning—the page marked with a folded corner is now found at a distance of one or two chapters from the back cover. It seems to him that the greater the effect of the pill, with almost every breath, the dimmer the room’s light; any minute his eyelids are going to collapse.
If so, thinks the detective before he falls asleep, it appears that I will decipher this mystery without leaving the room.
Someone must have been telling the truth about Franz K., for one morning he found himself transformed into a literary giant. He was seated at his desk and when he lifted his head he could see his immense reputation stretching into the future ahead of him, lying on its back and waving its limbs in the air. But in fact he was prevented from looking.
I am a man of great wealth and dubious taste; I commissioned a special copy of K.'s Complete Works in one volume, with pages like bedsheets and letters the size of human ears. Then I went into the maze and pretended to read it. At the very centre.
While I was there I used my mobile telephone to call an ambulance. “My name is Thornton Excelsior,” I said.
“There's nothing we can do about that, sir.”
“I'm having a heart attack!” I cried.
“Stay calm. Help is on its way. Where are you?”
“The maze. Hurry. Ugh!”
Imagine the fuss as they tried to reach me in there, rushing through the entrance without a map, for maps of the maze are a closely-guarded secret, all in a group, two men holding a stretcher, the others with medical equipment of various kinds, defibrillators and similar machines, stethoscopes swinging from necks! At first they stayed together: then one man went the wrong way, broke off from the mass, lost himself down the branching conduits of a confusion transmuted from the abstract into the real. First one man, then more.
I listened to the muffled, diverging shouts.
Occasionally two separated voices would approach each other, seem to come together and merge; but in reality they were passing along parallel paths, destined never to meet but to split apart again. I chuckled to myself and slowly opened the cover of the vast book on the ground where I had placed it. No one may gain easy admittance to the centre of the maze and yet it is there for everyone. It exists for you.
I had flirted with the idea of combusting spontaneously. But then it would be firemen who came to my futile rescue instead of medics; and their hoses would show them the way out again, like the ball of string that every wise man takes with him into a labyrinth. Plus I had no clue how to combust in that manner.
Footsteps around the corner. Someone had found the correct route by chance alone. I hopped inside the book and lay flat: a space had been excavated within, like one of those books that hide whisky bottles. I closed the lid of my literary coffin just as my rescuers reached the centre of the maze. Two voices above the humming.
“There's no one here! Mr Excelsior, where are you?”
I grimaced as the other voice said, “Why is this gigantic book vibrating? Open it and look inside!”
The first did so. “Like a dog,” he said.
“No, not like that. Much more like a condemned prisoner.”
“Yes, in a penal settlement.”
The letters were the size of human ears but the tails of some of them were tipped with needles. The text of my punishment was etched on my body, a new tale. I still quivered but I was already dead. So how am I able to write anything now? Because this story is the fatal text. One death sentence after another. My book was a special copy indeed, a remarkable piece of apocryphal apparatus.












Seems like things don’t hurt unless they’re being brought back to life, having been already dead or dying, broken or shriveled. You don’t miss them until they come back, the needling throb in the foot you’ve been sitting on all this time, the one you forgot about.
Here, springtime is treacherous. Warmth can vanish overnight or in the middle of an afternoon, freezing into pebbles while you watch, hands over your mouth, clothed in rags.
My advice to you: sit by your window wearing everything you own. Keep a small knife for notching the sill, one mark for each day. Do not be lulled by the sun, not yet.







I was in the car when the autism came on again, and I tilted my head to drain it out. My sister was driving and asked how it felt. I said it was like hands invading a piano, tuning it. She asked about the car in the lane next to us, but she did not want to know the truth. She only wanted to know what face the woman was wearing who was getting it from behind in the backseat.
I do not get to speak much, but when I do, I like to be helpful: "She is wearing a donkey mask with dim eyes. The mask is polymer with silicone paint, and held to her head by a thin elastic white cord. Two donkey ears stand up when the mask occasionally bumps the glass."
Somewhere, if not the floor of the car, there were abandoned walking hooves, a retractable tail, dying donkey heart.
My autism took me to Town Day, where people approached the autistic tent with belaboring problems. They asked for their lost children. Watches needed to be fixed. Will the lights above us flicker out at dark or will they pop? Are you aware that six percent of the beer is tapped with drugs? Have they done away with the lost and found box?
I was asked by the Head Autistic to look for the box. I looked under things, behind things. By things I mean: chairs, helium tanks, children mummifying each other in silly string. When I finally found it, it was a large paperbrown box with tape and marker print, stored behind the stage of a traveling magic act. It stuck out of the black border that draped down from the stage, valance and discretion.
In the box were a number of wonderful things. A glass eye unscathed and dusty. Two quarters from the year of my father’s pre-war birth. The manuscript of an autistic man wrongly imprisoned for rape. A twenty-dollar bill. A girl’s notebook of grades, which I flipped through, validated. A vial of fluid marked with a sticker and on the sticker the word AUGUST. Two ticket stubs to the zoo. Two bullet shells and a key on a key chain. One hollow donkey suit with legs and hooves shaped for the crawling human form.
In the foot hole, a sticker, and on the sticker the phrase NO SHOES.
In the middle of the tents was a church, unsure of its place in Town Day. There were no signs, no open doors. No grinning minister at the steps with a palmful of tracts. I walked in and saw at the altar a canvas attached to two beams, and a painter hanging his legs off the scaffolding.
A woman approached me to explain the painting, and pointed to the gray brown back of an ass. "It’s a painting of Palm Sunday. But there’s something else, though." I don’t understand or need or want or have any business with art, but I did not tell her this. She pointed to the pencil work in the still unpainted half, men standing over a baby on a pedestal. The lines were going dirty with neglect and heat, and the canvas had warped at the corners. The church smelled of linseed oil and the nature of painting, and the painter leaned forward grunting and giving animal detail.
"It’s a protest painting," the woman said. She explained it to me. A baby is born and eight days later a man of God removes the foreskin of the penis. If no such man can be found, then the parents settle for a doctor, and the organ eventually grows into this offering, sets the baby on a path of righteousness and hygiene. The baby forgets the excess skin ever existed.
I asked why God created foreskin if he just wanted it cut off. She giggled and started to answer, but before she could, the painter climbed down from the scaffolding and walked up to us. He smelled like July between five and six in the evening. He still remembered his own circumcision, because it happened when he was thirteen.
He had been away at a summer camp when his parents arrived with a man of God, claiming the command had simply slipped their mind and they were now trying to do right. Counselors and a couple of older boys from camp held him down while the skin was removed. Later, as he lay prostrate on the basketball court, his father sat down on a basketball and said the counselors were replacing his painting classes with two hours of sports.
The court smelled like the handful of rubbing agent the man of God had applied to his organ to numb the pain.
I do not get to dwell on my thoughts much, but it made me think of my autism, and how it is like a basketball, one that has more than once been used to deliver bad news. It too has been kicked around in the sand in an afternoon of sunny hope, and like sand it shifts from left to right, makes formations in the bed, remains for days, to be worn in a sock and aggrieve at the worst possible time.




Consciousness is not something that happens inside us. It is something we do or make. Noë points out that many of our habits, like language, are foundational aspects of our mental experience, but at the same time many, if not most, habits are environmental in nature—we behave a particular way in a particular situation. He goes on to challenge popular theories of perception, in particular the claim that the world is just a grand illusion conjured up by the brain





He blows the whistle and we come up from the trenches and run. The first bullet skims my ear and kills a drummer boy. The leagues mount their horses and the flags are tight in the wind. The cannons are firing and the pants are pissed. It’s right there in front of you, the darkness and the gamble. Helicopters rise like damselflies. The end is near. Queue the maestro. Some Hank Williams, please.

Charlie West and I are on a johnboat. A couple of cold ones in the cooler and the sun is good. He throws out his line. I wonder about the world a bit and ponder on the ideas of sorrow and sex. Talk between men. You would like Charlie West. He has some things to say about it, why life is good. What about the dream, Charlie, I ask. Maloney, you’ve got something on your line. It seems I do.

The snow is really coming down now. Kelly Kelly and I are near the frozen creek throwing snowballs at passing cars. A van races down the road with an airbrushed wolf on the side. We drill the windshield and the van spins over the bridge and into the icy creek. The radio plays a sad country song. We save the family one by one and all survive except an uncle. We eat leftovers at her house and watch ourselves on the late local news.

They marshal their forces and ride toward the river. We are pinned down waiting for them to burn up their ammo, shoot themselves out. We don’t have much by way of fire. There is doom near and I am happy.

The stars are incumbent out here in the mystery. A long electric hum comes from the city. The Apache named Shoe is hunched in half shadow, half light. His headdress makes him seem wise. He holds a hot knife between his teeth and rubs fresh blood on his cheeks. Christ killed the deer and the Apache cleaned it.

Forever found me eating wild apples on an island. He nuzzled my ear with his nose. He is calico, strong of spirit and body. The first morning we rode from the beaches to the end of the forest where we rested and I sang him a song.

Charlie West and I have twins in the old abandoned hospital. His twin is a bank teller, mine is a kindergarten teacher. We take them back to the old surgical theater and lick them. They are redheads and chubby and there is blue light coming from a crack in the door. I hear a noise and it is the cops outside. There are the ghosts of all the dead patients and Charlie and I are laughing, running half naked through the ward.

Heather is stalking a wounded bunny. Forever is stretching his legs. Princess is checking to see if her lymph nodes are swollen. I’m looking west, shielding my eyes.

There is a large disco ball high as ten mountains and we wait until sunset. I take out the spyglass and see what I can. There’s a cavalryman ordering a flanking maneuver. Fixed bayonets flash in the sun. The men in yellow coats hunched beyond the river will die soon. Princess and I mount Forever and ride down the canyon.

The bullet doesn’t exit my leg and I kick wildly. The artillery snaps and pops like firecrackers, but these things send metal straight for your brain. I am close to the end though I just started living.

We creep inside the city gates and a dead man slumps over a killing machine. The streets are aglow in neon. The men are calm in death. Their chests are still. The pins of light above aren’t stars.

Maloney, come back, it reads. This is a letter left in my mailbox by Kelly Kelly. It is full of cliché and maudlin. It smells of her and I take the letter to the bed with me and violate her in mind. The phone rings off the hook.

The Galvanist rides down to us in his Cadillac, hums a tune in C minor. He wears a deep scar around this throat. I hold Princess close to me, Forever twitches underneath us.

I watch Mrs. Kelly before I sleep. She finishes a glass of wine, reads a book in bed. She is delicate. There is Charlie West, my friend, in the bushes watching her through the window.

In my mind, there is only pure music. I started walking and the Princess appeared among the canyons. Forever is here and always will be. I go into her house and hold up my pistol.

Commodore is here. She’s dead, he says. How? She followed the bad man into the ocean.

There is heat and electric light all around. There is pain from the air and pleasure from the light. The bulls and horses are wild in the pastures. Bach plays out over the sand back to the blue hills of Kentucky. Kelly Kelly sleeps in a hayloft on the edge of town. Her gold hair blends into the bales. Mrs. Kelly is waiting by the phone. I am here singing my songs into the radiance.

I watch the Galvanist down below. He baptizes Princess in oil. Forever rests by her side. Footsteps of forty men echo up the walls. There are flowers around their necks. An electrician sings a hymn, a dirge, and prays an unknown prayer.

In the woods behind the Kelly house is a sleeping horse. I nudge him and he rises. There is every war ever happening over and over. I mount the horse and we ride. We go deep into the woods. We round a corner. There are canyons up ahead.


Incredible as it may seem, the Tarahumara Indians live as if they were already dead. They do not see reality and they draw magical powers from the contempt they have for civilization.
I propose we make art as if we are already dead. “Love and Death are the same thing!”
It isn’t any clearer to say it straight out
The angel and the devil, one body and nobody
To be a better perversion, a person with a mouth
I want you with me the white-green clouds
and the thousand screamy, on fire recordings
of speaking over the water a shadow in our image
The two of us missing our turn in the sun,
but making our connection in the here-to-ever after
We make the meaning We blast the giving
insistence terrific one vision all of us
more vehement than different, and these words
for what they’re worth, cascades and some salvation
Reminders of throwing ourselves against the wall
Myself and yourself and laughing and drinking
to wake us back up after long living hell
Wake us back up after fire breathing blackout
You ghost, you owl It isn’t enough just to wait
One person’s apocalypse, another’s brilliant rapture
This message much slower, my call for your response
Don’t die on the porch or anywhere else Life is
our eternal nature Lamplit reflection
in the prehistoric dark Sermon bubbled over
in the obvious present Red tricycle This beer
with black pepper For the longest time I thought
the lying mess in the lyric was a lioness out to get me,
and today it snowed a lot or a fever choked me up
I talked on the phone to my friend about the future
My heart started singing Fits of leaves of Whit-
maniac grass I tickled my daughter The house
caught fire Deeply this winter Or in summer
all at once One always has a choice
what to do and what not








Edwin Budding invented the lawnmower.
Read all 44 Sonnets from the Portuguese
aloud to self, was jealous of Mrs. Browning.
Somewhere beneath the wilting
or flowering, the grass is green.
I want to be being in action. Tree limbs
grow through a chain linked
fence. Drawing a sword,
I could never quite capture the glint.
On a road in Chile, we
dropped our bags, sprinted
toward an active volcano. Would have cost
too much to climb. The dog digs
and digs. There’s nothing there. The dog digs.
As the road gets longer it appears
to narrow. Too narrow. Two narrow
boats on a river in Providence.
The bridge I have never seen
down is not down. Bet it’s been down.
In one of the intervals I was away,
I was a way to be believable
as the conception of myself I imagined would have
imagined. The best Chagall paintings mend
floating people to happy corners out of the blue
background. These images mark the months
of mother’s year. My mother Mary.
My mother who loves Jesus and is sad
when her children are home and she is going alone
to Mass. Molecule is Latin
for little mass. I count my blessings
in blades of uncut grass, sing
praises. Glass in the name
of the father. The wave’s
strength is measured by its breaking.
Mother’s mother died in a car crash.
The round specks of wind-
shield, the road, the glisten. Listen, the sword
is words turned on their sides.
I understood everything she said
except her insistence I did not understand,
which was everything.

Needles pushed into a pillow
shaped like the planet.
All eyes look out.
I am the camel
trying to take Jesus up
on his offer. Through
and through, it’s been
rough. Down boy,
down. Stay. The dog listens
only to the woman
who is the hand legs lips brain bliss
that feeds him.








Our father was coal at the bottom
of the ocean. We named him In Rilievo,
his voice a brash horn. We slept in a room
with his pet snake, its heat lamp
our nightlight. Dear brother, can you remember
sharing the futon, a blanket, the occasional sob
from the prey in its tank, how the reptile
crushed and consumed? It all seemed so ordinary then.
An orchestra of small insanities held together with catgut.

 I meant to write about civil war but it became about brothers. So I wrote about those brothers but it became more about their love. And I wrote those poems of love even when they bent deceitful. In fact I reveled in their deceits, until it became only about ghosts. Then I wrote the ghosts and it was war again, dead bodies, and I was back at the beginning.

Miller has his eyes on the sun. The sun is moving. He is keeping it in long view enough to see it crawling across a sky that is bright. A blue sky. It is a summer sky. This is late summer when fall is not yet. This is the heat of summer. There are trees. There are birds in trees. There is Miller taking it in, in his arms, collecting bees. This was what it was like to be before Gideon, his brother, opened up his mind to the possibility of not existing. This was before Miller he went ghosted.

Miller is watching a fish. The fish is a trout. Miller can see it beneath the water. The river bends and the fish bends with it. This is an oil-canvas. This is slightly sunned, early summer, leaves couched above and shading. Miller is dreaming of his mother. Of her holding him. Miller is thinking of what it meant to be a baby, to be a child, to care above the rifles and noise. Above the cannon-fire. The grey cloud-smoke. What it meant to have Gideon, his brother, take aim and point a bullet from ear to ear, through him completely.

Miller stood looking at a squirrel. Miller looking into the river. Miller walked to the lake. A sky above him and it was raining. There was rain. This was spring. This was late when thunder gathers. This was cotton in his ears from blooming flowers. This was condensed grey. He was remembering about Eliza. He was wishing her hands in his or her lips pulsing his ear or her cheek against his chest in the rain, their bodies wet. He was remembering when it was that Gideon, his brother, shot him through the skull and took those imaginings with him.

Eliza rides up and her cabin door is open. Gideon is standing near it, his pants iron-creased. There is morning air but no valley mist. Eliza’s jaunt was bright. The trees tremble. Gideon has his hands in his pockets, always hiding fists. He reaches to her. Gideon helps Eliza down from her horse. Her laced up boots and the slight bustle of her dress. Inside of the cabin is a bed and a chair and a table. Inside Eliza are candles. Gideon is a man who takes. Gideon takes Eliza off her horse. Gideon takes the maybe from her head.

Before Miller’s father went he said keep the trees on the land, ride the horses near the river, cross your hearts before you die. Before Gideon’s father went he made the motion of a rifle and the mimic of taking aim. And before their father died, Miller and Gideon were sitting around a fire, their mother scrubbing shirts in a basin. The canon fire hadn’t reached this valley, the flames hadn’t burned down love. Miller heard the bullet explode in his chest. Gideon tasted the copper of dying on the back of his teeth. Their father, bleeding into undressed fields.

Eliza reaches to take hold of them, the delicate yellow like a pillowed star. Miller is a man who is a gentleman. Miller is a man who arm-wrestles, who gloats over won bacon, but who waits for a woman to bring her love to him in a basket of fruit and napkins. Miller sees the reflection of flowers in the gloss of Eliza’s eyes. Miller sees a vision of Gideon floating away. Miller sees his father in broken stillness, unkempt in bloodied grass. Eliza, in the flower, opens up, unfurls. Sails of her hair take wind and she becomes sun.

For Eliza, there is always the possibility of what her children would look like if she held Miller’s hand for long enough. His slender fingers, his poetic recessions. There is a sky above them when they are on their backs, in the meadow, the valley an open slope leading back to bodies. There is only sensibility in this, Miller and Eliza, when she is with. There is no meat uncured in her stores, no bread unbaked and wanting. When it is Miller, there is only want for Miller. And Miller’s hands. And Miller’s eyes. And the feet he walks upon.

For Eliza, there is always the possibility of her children with Gideon, their hair open and unlocked, like their father’s, if she was able to hold her breath with him forever. Because Gideon is a habit. Because Gideon is a sin of this youth. Because Gideon is a tree in a forest that she is drawn to, that she carves her name in, that she sits beneath and weeps for the want of climbing. And then there is the sky above them, with its broken clouds, the movement of their bodies, one on another, the motion of a perpetual world.

For Eliza, there is always the possibility that she will never have children because she will never have children. Walnuts drop from the trees, mist hangs in the valley, and the field mice are always looking for a way into and up her skirt. And it has always only been about sun, about light reaching down, about finding arms that will match what a mother would have been. If Eliza would have been a mother. If being a mother is a possibility. If anything other than warfare and cities burning is ever going to replace what once was a womb.





SUNDAY, MARCH 7, 2010
Thought of the Day: It's okay to stare at a dog's dick.
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2010
From John Lurie we learn that just south of Madagascar there's a small, tiny little town where the people are made of rubber.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2010
I used to be ashamed of my striped face.
SUNDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2010
A clown tied me up and started threatening me. I had to laugh.
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2011
I love Alfred Hitchcock's movie "Angry Birds."
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 2011
FRIEND ME, YOU MAGGOTS.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2011
Latest episode of GLEE made me laugh. But overall I was less engaged than usual. Maybe just a mood (had leg amputated over weekend).
FRIDAY, APRIL 1, 2011
I was an early proponent of the “Clean Sanchez.”
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 13, 2011
If you fall off your horse, get right back in your car. I mean, come on. Enough with the horse already.
FRIDAY, APRIL 15, 2011
What this country needs is a good five-cent space program.
SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 2011
Chicken fingers again. Trouble finding gloves that fit.
FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2011
Submissive? You tell me.
SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2011
Added buying a pail to my bucket list.







Long before the fresh apple crisis, my life had some form to it. I would wake in the mornings—I would perform something. For example, the day I tried, as one with acute passion might, to win one woman over but accidentally won another—that whole time I had been living like someone. Though I can’t remember his name. His model of optimism provided me with a certain geography that I inhabit in time of need. This time the need was surprising. People tend to have faith that the juice they drink in the morning is the same juice they have always drunk. And apples take their shape naturally. The guy, whose name escapes me now, taught me to look upon others’ concerns as mine to make at home. I was fond of doing many things at home, but my favorite was drinking juice. When my friends came by—they liked to suddenly show up with all kinds of breads in their hands, thinking they knew what I needed and planning to force it on me—I had to tell them I was busy with my juice. Two weeks before the crisis, I had been writing some poems about it. It was a warm day, not entirely different from other warm days in San Francisco. People were on the street. Pale people were on the street, making it to the park and lying there such that the next day they were a little browned. The poems I had written were failures, but dense ones. It seemed appropriate to think the person’s attempt at wholeness was a series of missteps, which if drawn across an afternoon might prove interesting to other people. I had a way of reminding my friends that we were all in pain, but a fruit tart kind of pain strangers can’t help but enjoy. That day I had, in a sense, gathered all my possessions and gone out onto the street with them. I awoke that morning with an urgency to prepare myself for something—not anything life threatening, but definitely personal.
My lover, then, wanted to spend much of her life asleep. She had no ostensible reaction to the city’s sudden depletion of all its fresh apples and no hope for them. In a world where a person’s tastes revolve around the kind of sleep she gets, I could not find four people who cared. I thought that if I could find those four people we could really do something. A few of my friends pretended they were chosen. A few neighbors felt bad and made offers. My mother called to console me. My lover—in actuality, the closest person to being a member of the encumbered troop, slept next to me. Sleep became our network: falling in and out of it for change. The rule of survival is that no two people can lie in the same bed and sleep at the same time. So I kept an eye on her and played this game of freshness. If by morning I could quickly run out and do seven things that did not involve longing, she would reward me. Before the crisis, the reward would have needed only to be an apple one. But after the apples were gone. The landscape usually contains the solution to what’s lost. Demographics help people in cars. Some people did not notice me. Some demographers lose sleep and do not notice me. That was two days before. The evening before it was two days before the crisis, I was thinking that I did not think I was asleep. I had been watching the sunlight take the corner of my room and my housemate’s cat in it. When I looked again, there was no light—but I had not been asleep. It’s the way people react to traumatic events. They say, “I had just been there” or will say, “She was just with me.” So the loss of light was emotional and the lost state—demographic. I began to trace things by their disappearance. Alone in the room, my memory, and anticipated darkness going for light. People like to talk about the daytime. People in strange moods often miss the daytime. Before the crisis it was not often that one would find me in strange moods. I had managed a particular kind of balance fortified by a certain satisfaction of taste. I was happy. I mean, I was in my juice.

Like me they must miss the old world the field of ruins: because at least then they had a place - a piece of earth to piss on. I note that the shadows move slowly slowly in the middle of the vegetation and henceforth move more and more unpredictably. At the end of their sinuous and incoherent course they form a silhouette frozen in a flood of physical pain. From my collapsing armchair I can see a private cavity of its eye socket
an open toothless mouth
the expression of a visceral panic
something like a prelude to
the last sigh
Maybe. Yes maybe. I wonder if it isn’t my cat.”

This evening the world is a field of ruins a sublime chaos and I will listen to Mahler while telling myself that my life is an extraordinary spectacle of success and perfection. But I know that no one will come that when all is said and done I won’t go anywhere. I’m not dreaming: there all interned some exiled and my Siamese has well and truly vanished. This isn’t a farce.








This is the whole story. How she doesn’t look at me across the table. I stare at her sequence. I’d love it if she could get me some rows. Some beautiful beautiful rows.
Pigeons bust up and I nearly lose it. I fall up the stairs, one more tumble to make my point. She follows me and I’m telling her, You should go home with me. She’s looking at me now. I may be laughed at along the highway but not here. Let’s get lit and do drugs because as long as I hauled them here I’m going to give them to you like anthologies. It was torture spilling my drink while kissing you to ballads.
Trivial, selfish, frivolous. This is some really low motive, man. She returns with a full glass of whiskey and I’m thinking I need to hear some Lefty Frizzell and if that’s a dress she’s wearing I’m totally going to lose it.








Pretend above all to love this thing/this monstrous idea of a room.











I am distracted by a phone call for weeks. I think maybe the world has really ended but apathy is powerful. Do you remember how broadcast news used to make us cry. Do you remember writing a note down to remind your future self to love the future. The feeling collects and collects inside everyone. I have a craving. I make the mistake at looking up at our waitress last night while she is looking at you. She is not going to remember us. She comes up to us with more breakfast food and coffee. The steam from the plates makes the moment seamless. For some reason I remember you even calmer than you are. I am trying to tell you Leslie Cheung died almost ten years ago. We only have to wait a year or so to celebrate and rent Happy Together again. Yes, this entire time I have had some of your dress in my mouth. What is your problem.








We human beings may think of ourselves as a highly evolved species of conscious individuals, but we are all far less human than most of us appreciate. Scientists have long recognized that the bacterial cells inhabiting our skin and gut outnumber human cells by ten-to-one. Indeed, Princeton University scientist Bonnie Bassler compared the approximately 30,000 human genes found in the average human to the more than 3 million bacterial genes inhabiting us, concluding that we are at most one percent human. We are only beginning to understand the sort of impact our bacterial passengers have on our daily lives.
Art noise in this culture, as conceptualized by Nechvatal, “distorts and disturbs crisp signals of cultural communications.” Unlike normal noise, which doesn’t mean anything, aesthetic art noise, according to Nechvatal, is full of cultural meanings and becomes a dense, confusing assemblage of cultural ideologies and signifiers. Hence, according to Nechvatal, “art noise” as virtual environment can be considered a miniscule abstraction of our larger noisy, connected world. While immersed in a “noise art environment,” the “immersant” is stimulated to experience a paradoxical (and disjunctive) state of connectivity and disconnectivity. The neural networks of the human body join with the external, noisy art networks and form a body-space of “hyperconnectivity.” Thus, the classical, ontological body partially dissolves in an art-of-noise virtual environment, collapsing the distinction between the inside and the outside.
However, noise is disturbing and offensive. It is beyond comprehension and challenges our habitual way of thinking and reasoning. Noise necessarily produces resistance in the mind, creating a “critical distance” via a “body/mind rupture.” But Nechvatal intends not only to make us aware of our inner ruptures. He too proposes that the “excess” inherent in the “art of noise” offers an expansive, “saturating border experience.” By increasing art noise to that threshold, the superabundance of “ideological demonstration becomes non-representational.” Therefore, such a noise art environment becomes a private vacuole (noncommunicational cocoon) of self-reflection, where a newfound depth of self-understanding is achieved, as well as a disillusionment of social spectacles and ideologies.





We stood so much that birds built nests in the couch cushions and took showers in the kitchen sinks. When we weren't standing, we were jumping up and down. Fleas were parasites, and nobody wanted them anymore. Instead, we wanted to believe that there would be a day when no one would take anything from us. We were suckers.
The fleas made it so we could no longer sleep; beds sprouted leaves, working toward a tentative peace with nature. I listened to the radio at night, waiting for a sign. A block away we saw the first tall man on stilts, his head bobbing above the rooftops, headed in our direction. He had built them from the picnic table that had become useless furniture in his backyard. We had all given up on sitting.
His features were smaller up there. A young boy said, He's made a fedora from the clouds. From our spot on the ground, we watched the fleas beneath us surrender or change strategy. It all happened in an instant.
Then we raided the hardware stores.
A neighbor sawed down the addition she'd made to her house, just for the wood. Platforms were added to buildings so we could order coffee without climbing down from our new perches. Stop signs were raised several feet so we'd remember the intersections in the neighborhoods. We parked our cars, agreed never to drive again, and forgot about them as they became sculptures.
When most of the town was up on stilts, the divisions began.
We fell down and got back up. Bruises healed; there was evidence to prove it. When the fleas began to disappear, those of us who'd fallen off our stilts in the early days came down once more. Most of the others stayed on them even when they didn't need to any longer. Maybe they banished us. Our small group believed in the power of gravity so much that it's possible we had already decided to leave together.
We created a tiny city somewhere off in what used to be the distance, a dot stretched thin into the horizon. No one here uses stilts anymore; we sit around at night and watch the trees grow, waiting for the public health official to make the rounds again, to see if we change our minds about being the only ones back on the ground. He warns us of foreign travelers, visiting our new city for the annual philosopher's festival. He warns us the fleas will be coming again, and everyone will be vulnerable.
One by one, we turn our eyes down to the earth, and settle into our shoes with that much more resolution.
















on the european route to zagreb sawn out of
the region one afternoonlifted at night
ram shackled by bullet holes of thoughts & volleys
of the plastic sheet above the MOSOR & KOZJAK
and charcoal from three days ago all fallen litter
crumbled moonlightand the random
look-back lands (the airport's reopened)
somewhere in the area mined by tv


I have seen the beauty
of big cities, the splendor
of their avenues, the misery
of the masses and the destruction
of the individuals,
I have loved the big cities
and I love them as well
in their decline,
it's not the big cities
which destroy the people,
but rather the laws
which do not form people
but strangle them instead,
I was formed by the big cities,
what I saw, what I suffered, what I became
I thank a mother of stone,
the big city,
and tomorrow, when my time is up,
it will be the big city
which buries me.

When we loved each other,
we didn't love ourselves.
When we declared war on each other,
we already gave ourselves up as defeated.
When we were beaten,
we gave history the blame.
When we were alone,
we drowned it out with music.
When we split up,
we stayed in the same place.
And soon we lay in each other's arms again
and called it a love poem,
but no love poem explains to us
the fear of love,
and why the sky was so blue
when we met each other,
and why it will still be so blue
when we die,
you by yourself,
me by myself.








pontius pilate washes his hands
with honey he washes his feet with milk his face
he washes his rear his brain his money
his nameplate beside the bell
we wash his billboards,
with milk with honey we wash
the traffic signs that implore
interdict & instruct
pontius washes his hands with milk
his money his face we see
in the mirror our daily mirror again
in the rearview mirror we wash our faces
with our hands with honey
our brains & our bottoms pilate
washes his hands
with milk his face his feet with honey
his money in our brains
we pull his instructions implorations
& interdictions from his rear
we depict we reflect & wash
one of pontius' hands in honey in milk
one of pilate's feet in our rear
in our face in our brain
milk & honey are a cashflow from pontius
to pilate we wash
implorations interdictions instructions in our poem
one hand washes our brain
while the other washes our eyes
our faces are
pilate & pontius we are
with hands & feet we wipe ourselves
from memory
& everything will be clean
but nothing will be clear.

PLENUM is itself a living form—an inhabited
terrain alive with traces and voices
marked up, ululating
it cannot be definitively—though it can be temporarily—individuated. it is chaotic, but is not
a psychotic blather or dead husk
a vital husk
what is the force or mechanism that feeds vitality, propagates its waves? furnace of the vitality event? historical voices, received urges, filtered through
the cognizant momentary—not the death but the making-particulate of the author. the mayfly author, who incubates at the bottom of the stream and is born
as an adult for half an hour





















Imagine living a life in which your every desire or ambition is contingent on whether another little girl has the same desire or ambition. That little girl is your sister. She doesn’t know anything about you or of your existence, but you know everything about her.

When Jackson deals with Books in general, we become aware of the fact that books have always read themselves, even long before structuralism educated our taste buds: Microcosms that Outlive Monuments, as Jackson puts it. We are to understand the reversibility of the irreversible: the secret of books (which they themselves could not grasp) has been the fact that we may understand the text now, but read it later (or even never).

Phonon (full title translated: Phonon or state without name) is a typical work for Dath as it brings together all key aspects of his writing as popular culture, especially music, left wing political ideology and exaggerated fantastic and horror elements. The main character Martin Mahr works for the fictional music magazine Phonon, that can easily be identified with the “Spex” magazine Dath worked for. Here Germany has become a monarchy after World War II, its female emperor Patrizia reigns by horoscopes and people live in gigantic trees. A conspiracy of dark figures tries to exchange important people of state and magazine with robots, but an underground group called GPI tries to fight it. The novel is crammed with allusions to contemporary German literature, music and politics. In the end green slime fills all buildings, people go insane in the streets and kill each other, things become stranger and stranger.
Für immer in Honig (Forever in honey) is Daths longest novel of some 1000 pages. Here reanimated zombie armies, which do very much look like Nazi Germany and Soviet Union troops, fight against all present mankind. A small group of super heroes with outstanding abilities are the key figures in defeating the zombies. Several of them know each other from their teenage years in a small town in south-west Germany which very much resembles Daths own home town. Long political essays are spread over the second half of the novel, a total of about 200 pages. With them Dath delivers parodies of left wing political slang of the seventies.

I will cut
out from
you the
righteous
and the
wicked // I
will cut out
from you
the moist
and the dry.


We pay our rent in slabs of fat. We use peelers, shattered pairs of scissors, the sharp sides against us. Mostly, I cut mine from my breasts. The boys didn’t have much to begin with. We pile the fat on the front porch and wait for the truck to come. There are small smears of us on each other’s skin.
The men pull away with our excess. We go inside bleeding. We move to the same place, go to the same bedroom. We curl around each other, pushing bones and new wounds together, making a low warmth, the only warmth we can afford.
The wind whispers to a river,
"You won’t be lonely forever.”
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.

A melancholy refrigerator
knits a movie theatre.
Fame is blind
and fortune is lame.
The irrefutable irreducible pond
appeals to winter
for a new pair of shopping malls.
The stars kneel down,
the sky leaps mournful,
and the rivers stand up.
A liquor cabinet
meanders toward a wolf pack.

The chained chairs
loan sorrow to the wind.
The bass player’s eyes turn red.
A zombie ninja materializes
on the lawn of the White House.
With a quick flick of his wrist
(of course, his hand falls off),
he buries a throwing star
in the forehead of the Vice President.
Blood jetting from the wound,
the Vice President staggers backwards
and morphs into a reptilian monster.
The lead guitarist makes a mystical pass
(her fingers move in ways
fingers usually don’t).
Bipedal sentients will never be free
until the last movie star is strangled
with the entrails of the last pedophile.

The cavalry gallops into town.
The troopers need to buy beer
and comic books.
The Indians saunter into the fort.
Their medicine man knows mighty magic.
Their allies include soldiers from the future
with odd heads
and four-dimensional rifles
(they kill your father before he meets your mother),
saber-toothed tigers the size of cats,
knights with rayguns,
a housefly as large as an elephant,
and a blue brontosaurus small enough
for a brave to ride.


In Dream Music there is a radical departure from European and even much Eastern music in that the basis of musical relationship is entirely harmony. Not European harmony as textbooks have outlined it, but the intervallic proportions and acoustical consequences of the particular ratios which sound concomitantly in the overtone series when any simple fundamental is produced. Melody does not exist at all (The Disappearance of Melody) unless one is forced to hear the movement from group to group of various simultaneously sounded frequencies derived from the overtone series as melodic because of previous musical conditioning. Even before the first man moved successively from one frequency to another (melody if you like) a pattern for this movement, that is the relationship of the second frequency was already predetermined (harmonically) by the overtone structure of the fundamental of the first sound. And in the life of the Tortoise the drone is the first sound. It lasts forever and cannot have begun but is taken up again from time to time until it lasts forever as continuous sound in Dream Houses where many musicians and students will live and execute a musical work. Dream Houses will allow music which, after a year, ten years, a hundred years or more of constant sound, would not only be a real living organism with a life and tradition all its own but one with a capacity to propel itself by its own momentum. This music may play without stopping for thousands of years, just as the Tortoise has continued for millions of years past, and perhaps only after the Tortoise has again continued for as many million years as all of the tortoises in the past will it be able to sleep and dream of the next order of tortoises to come and of ancient tigers with black fur and omens the 189/98 whirlwind in the Ancestral Lake Region only now that our species has had this much time to hear music that has lasted so long because we have just come out of a long quiet period and we are Just remembering how long sounds can last and only now becoming civilized enough again that we want to hear sounds continuously. It will become easier as we move further into this period of sound. We will become more attached to sound. We will be able to have precisely the right sounds in every dreamroom playroom and workroom, further reinforcing the integral proportions resonating through structure (re: earlier Architectural Music), Dream Houses (shrines, etc.) at which performers, students, and listeners may visit even from long distances away or at which they may spend long periods of Dreamtime weaving the ageless quotients of the Tortoise in the tapestry of Eternal Music.







You’ve just done the thing last night. He’s out back now, on your grass, in the back yard, getting high. You have known him eight hours.
You are always scared of your own womb, aren’t you? How long has it been? Six months.
This one is taller than the others; you could climb him to reach something that is far away or high up.
What would you need to reach? A watery leak in the ceiling or to kill a fly. You would plug the leak with your finger or swat the fly with a fly swatter, your calves at his cheeks, toes on his collarbone.
You think of the pattern of his chest hair, which was a squat upside down triangle, something unique but not marketable. Would a man like this sit next to you on a beach one day? Would you be happy about the triangle then, against a backdrop of sand and other chest hair options?
What was your next move? Put on the scarf and the big glasses and walk slowly down the block to the Pharmacy like always? Aren’t you endlessly walking down a sidewalk to a Pharmacy?
When you get there, you will only swallow pills. After you swallow, your womb will be clean, coated in white paper, flawlessly empty.
Without the pills, you spend days praying for black birds to come and peck at your midsection, to remove with their beaks what does not belong.
Ideally, the birds would peck out your womb stuff while you were standing on his shoulders, reaching for the fly or the leak, solve two problems at once.
The beaks would slide into your skin and dig out red treasures while your finger held the water or the swatter bashed the fly.
Ideally, you would climb down from him and there would be no need for a Pharmacy or a ladder, not ever again and wasn’t that what love was?


Originality is not the denial of origins. Some things must be opaque to be seen. We are making birds not birdcages. “Put your trust in the inexhaustible nature of the murmur.” Breton said that and know when to shut up, I’m saying that. What I know about form could fill a thimble. What form knows about me will be my end. Poets are excellent students of blizzards and salt and broken statuary, but they are always somewhere else for the test. Purposelessness is not meaninglessness. Your genius is your error. Mistakes aren’t contaminants any more than conception is an infection. Let us get better at not knowing what we’re doing. Let us laugh so hard we disrupt the tragedy! Self-consuming is Self-generation. Just open your thieving, feral heart to the mortal stars. The proper use of a hammer is to stand fifteen feet away and throw it at a nail. If you’re the hammer in the beginning, you’ve got to be the nail by the end. The song is always instruction in how to sing. The way in is to go out. After a while even train wrecks become tedious. The Liberty Bell is more convincing with the crack! I know my poems are autobiographical, I just don’t know who they are about! Just because a thing can’t be done doesn’t mean it can’t be did. Our error is our Eros. Poetry can’t be harmed by people trying to write it! Some impurities can make water clearer. The blood may be fake but the bleeding must be real. The primitive breaks through logic like a foxglove through asphalt. I am wrong, what a relief.





The serious writer has embraced the word “pussy”. Other words for this part of the female anatomy are repugnant, carnivorous. A pussy has a life of its own. A secret life. One can smuggle drugs inside a pussy. As a serious writer, in mid-life, she must master speaking the word “pussy” with confidence and authority. She practices doing so out loud for her next book store reading. The serious writer is starting a book tour to promote her new novel which is bursting with ‘pussy'. She practices reading in front of the mirror, engaging her slightly furrowed brow... medium voice... "'I love your pussy,' Ian says softly to Trina, his hooded eyes at half mast," the serious writer reads to her refection in the mirror. “'I love cock', Trina offers, imagining his range of movement.” Her dialogue is raw. Edgy. The serious writer is known for this. "'You're huge, Ian... my my my...' and she is touching it through his cords. She is feeling its neck, perhaps its beak... but doesn't want to frighten Ian by admitting to her deepening fear...her hunger,” the serious writer reads. "'My god. You're damp,' Ian says, stroking her muff, her moistened ball of hair, the underwear covering Trina's pussy," the serious writer says, her voice tiring. (The serious writer is sick of the adjective “wet”. She is experimenting with other adjectives. She wonders if a man would really say ‘damp'... Not just any man... but Ian, the vegetarian with an occasional weakness for farm raised fowl.) She looks at her face in the mirror. It is a successful face, one that has accepted three Gertrude Smallwood awards. A face that should not have any trouble with the word 'pussy' for fuck's sake. “Pussy,” she says it again. She says it, right to her face.






They’ve just finished. They’re putting themselves back together, smoothing their clothes and hair. His is the color of dead leaves; hers the ruddy meat of a fig. They brush their teeth using the same brush, something she does not usually do. There is a large mirror in the bathroom and each watches the other in it. Their reflections, not the one standing next to them. Her face is still flushed red; his unshaved and ashen. The man places himself on the couch, drapes his arm over its back, his ankle hooked on the opposite knee. It is not a natural pose, more for an absent audience, imaginary onlookers, than himself or even her. It has only been a few weeks, but he feels as though he no longer knows how to occupy his own body, does not remember what to do with it when they’re not together. How did he walk before? Where did he place his hands? He hears the woman down the hall. Putting on makeup. Reassembling her room. She will make the bed smooth but leave one small dimple or bump in the middle, a pillow left askew, wary of what perfection might give away. It’s a loft, open and exposed, the furniture adrift in a sea of blonde wood and sunlight. There is nowhere to hide in that big room and he often feels as though someone is standing behind him. There is a knock. She emerges, her dress a study in contrasts, fitted yet fluid, deep green and black, the chiaroscuro of an El Greco. In a flutter, a wave of air, she passes him, all the while scanning the floor, stopping to turn a circle, to search for what is out of place. She finds only him on the couch looking not like himself, seeming very small. She wants him again—she does—and when she gets to the door, she pauses, not sure of what to do with her face, how to say to this new person Hello, please come in. How nice to see you again. Her hand on the knob, but instead she turns herself around, rushes forward, and crushes his face with hers, her body on his, a stroke of color awakening a blank canvas. For a moment, he is not there, he is instead the one outside waiting to come in, both the man now and the man he was just hours before. He had cradled a bottle of burgundy wine in his arm, a growing, flickering desire in his stomach. He thought about that song she was always singing, Anticipation is so-much-bet-ter. What does it tell her of the moment between being and not being. But being what, he thinks? Satisfied? Together? Would it be different for her were it not a betrayal? He does not want to think about it. Her knee grazes one of his ribs, she reminding him of his body, and his hands come alive on her waist, the back of her thighs. The knock comes again, a more insistent fist. Why is she having people over? Who is out there now? He nudges her away, but she is on him fiercely, the same thing, some thing awakening in her again. Was it she or the twisting, struggling energy inside her that had said it, just an hour before? Or was it he? A breath lost in the passage between their mouths. No, she had said it. But it felt like a wish of his made manifest, at once formed and fulfilled. He pushes her—hard—and now she is up, standing breathless. She loves being pushed away by him. It is a matter of perspective, she knows. For the longest time she has felt it: I don’t want to do, but want things done to me. Her eyes are wide and fervid but grow tame, shifting to the one who is outside, arriving. She will be cool, she decides. Calm. No need to get excited just yet. This was, after all, her favorite part. The just before. The almost there. She opens the door. A pause, a beat in time. He steps in, exhibiting a shy confidence. In his arms is a bottle of wine and he slides it onto a side table, scraping the surface as a fiddler might warm up his bow. The man says: You look like you’ve just robbed a bank. She draws a pistol finger to his chest. Bang bang. You’re as good as dead, she says. I hid the money in the mattress. Oh yes? he asks, glad for her ease, this transition. But he has become wary: Will it be the same? Will he feel, as always, like he is being watched? It is impossible not to follow her, that wry smile, the shifting, snapping whip of her green dress, the luster of an unripened apple. In her room, they are quickly on each other, ripping at the other’s seams. Funny about what he said in the doorway, he thinks, when he is the one who is stealing. But he is rapt, with this body that does not belong to him, how close he can get and still not know all that it can do. He is thinking this when she says it, a whisper so clear that it sounds as though it comes from inside his own mind. Hit me, she says. And he does, both his face and his hand feeling the sting. He hits her and splits into a man inside his body and a pile of clothes on the floor—an old skin.

And if, as I sometimes think, the hotel is all my own devising—why have I not equipped myself, by a willful act of imagination, with a sac such as birds have? With it, I might ascend, dreaming, to my Funambulist and, after ceremonies of love, join her on the high-wire beneath the ceiling (festooned with trapezes of dust as if to remind us that life can be a circus, though there are no elephants or tigers). I would not wish for feathers or even wings—would not be a bird-man (a being, like us, preferring life in between). I would, however, be a cowboy like the ones I saw in movies as a boy (in a childhood deprived of cows), drinking bitter coffee under lonesome skies while tumbleweed and prairie schooners drive before the wind. So I rustle, with the Plumber, the General's horses while he is on sabbatical with the Chanteuse, staying in a cabin by the lake—there to study the nuptial customs of mechanical swans. Having unhitched the horses from the carousel, we ride hell-bent-for-leather across the High Sierra Room, through a plaster-of-Paris pass-horses buried to their knees in Ivory Snow flakes—and (after days of hardship) onto a plain created by the Decorator from bolts of felt meant to cover billiard tables. I leave the Plumber to water the horses (thirsty, though they are mostly wood) and stable them, while I take off my spurs and chaps in a room above the town's gaudiest saloon. Like any cowboy who has spent a long time in the company of animals and gruff, unshaven men, I am lonely for a woman. I send a telegram downstairs for one; and in no time at all, up comes the Shepherdess, dressed in cowgirl skirt and vest, smoking a cheroot. "Are you happy in this dream?" I ask her; "or would you rather have a different one?" She is about to answer when my wife's face in the windowpane reminds us that I am not at liberty to dally with cow—or any other kind of girls. Sheepishly, I smile at my acrobatic bride while the Shepherdess does up the buttons of her blouse. In the saloon below, the Prime Minister, playing the role of the Hanging Judge, is looking at a catalogue of rope. Surly and dyspeptic, he hankers to stretch a neck or two before day dwindles to a close. (The guests applaud the fidelity of his acting, overlooking the skimpiness of his false moustache.) The General with the Chanteuse on his arm abruptly enters through the swinging-door. The P. M.'s mustache would have twirled with his surprise, if the mucilage had not been peerless. "We did not expect you two so soon!" "The swans were misbehaving," the General comments. "Passing by the carrousel, I noticed that my horses have been stolen." "What's that you say?" the Hanging Judge is all en pointe: "Stolen? Horse theft's a hanging crime!" He is pleased to have a thing to set his mind on; life in the Old West is often boring, especially for a man who adores a lynching more than most. A vigilante mob of three drags in the Plumber, whose hair looks like a magpie's nest after napping in the stable's stall. "String him up!" the P. M. shouts, breaking his gavel on the desk. "No, not me!" the Plumber cries. "Norman was the mastermind!" "Where's he now?" the Judge demands with all the majesty he can muster. "In the room upstairs with his fancy woman," the Hat Check, in the role of preacher's wife, informs the court. "Let's hang 'em!" shouts the Engineer, in town on railroad business. "Not before he pays his bill!" the Barman begs. "When you're finished, may I stuff him?" asks the Taxidermist, who has been complaining of a scarcity of subjects for his art. "Help!" I call as the town's folk thunders up the stairs with murder in its heart, which, in a mob, is a single sanguinary organ. The Cowgirl faints, but I have no time to take advantage of her state. They are breaking down the door! It is nearly splintered when Quasimodo shambles through my window, crying: "Sanctuary!" Nimble as a tightrope-walker, he tiptoes—high above the dusty street—toward Notre Dame Cathedral while, like a sack of spuds, I hang across his misbegotten shoulder. Where did he learn the art of funambulism and—of even greater interest—how did this Hunchback, who should be in Medieval France, arrive in 1880's Kansas? Who is dreaming this? Someone who has seen too many movies! A thought can sometimes splinter in a brain undermined by cocktails and lingerie (or even stamps if one happens to overindulge a passion for philately), with havoc the result. I only hope that—tottering above an abyss of multiplying fantasies—I will be upheld by Quasimodo, until he sets me down to rest among the gargoyles and sorority of bells. The Fireman set fire to the Roman Room, in which the Violinist moonlights as Nero while the other musicians are asleep, or in rehearsal. He is first chair of all the strings and needs none. "This arson is not the work of an authentic pyromaniac," the Analyst concludes. "That is, one consumed by notions of holocaust, which is, psychically speaking, an erotic contagion devouring what is touched. The Fireman's delight, however, is alchemical as he watches baser material alter into a gold and ruby conflagration." "He is, notwithstanding, a danger to us all!" retorts the Prime Minister, whose view is of the commonweal. "He must be apprehended and his head cut off." "But he is our friend!" the Chanteuse cries. She has been keeping company with the Fireman behind the General's back because of the former's ardor, which is larger than that of the old man, whose moustache droops. But the P. M. is adamantine in his resolve to arrest the "firebug" before the hotel, which is flammable, is rendered unfit to live in. The Engineer and the Decorator, whose interests are antithetical, argue the possibility—each from his own entrenched position—of burning to the ground an imaginary structure. Indifferent, I compose a tribute to my Funambulist bride, whose ankles have just come into view. "Look!" shrieks the Masseuse, pointing in alarm to real smoke on the painted horizon. "The palm trees are ablaze!" They are papier-mâché. "Whom do you suppose could have disabled the sprinklers?" the Building Inspector inquires. As if in answer, the Fireman sidles from the scene with a canister of gasoline. Happily, the elephants (whose existence has been doubtful) shamble from the Serengeti Room and with their muscular trunks, having first unlimbered them, douse the flames with water brought for the purpose from a puddle on the plain. "Elephants are not so dumb as they pretend!" says the Prime Minister, who reprises then his punitive theme: "I sentence the Fireman to be chained to a rock in the Gibraltar Room—there, to be pecked at daily by an eagle." (Miracle of the Taxidermist's art.) "But this is wrong!" the Historian shouts. "The mythic figure to which you allude was chained to Mt. Caucasus: I speak, of course, of the titan Prometheus, who stole the gods' fire in a fennel stalk and for this impudence was—" "Yes, yes, we have read Bulfinch!" the Plumber, who is Classical in his methods and approach to pipes, snarls. The Designer is delighted with the sentence, seeing in the fettered Fireman a way to finish the room's looming piece of Jurassic limestone, which, in his opinion, is "too much of a good thing." "May I visit him?" the Masseuse asks between (or is it amid?) sobs. "At twilight to distract him," the P. M. answers. "In this way, his flammable fancy will be less likely to catch fire from the setting sun's example." "I shall take him cakes and oranges and massage his aching back and be to him a wife such as the Funambulist is to you." She looks at me in recognition of the impediment to union imposed by my wife's aerial vocation. "And I shall play for you and your Fireman a fiery—" No, no, not fiery!" interjects the Prime Minister. "Are you mad?" The Violinist recants: "Forgive my thoughtlessness. I shall play for them a single soothing note on my brightest string." "The hotel has become something less than a utopia," the P.M. laments. "Art and love, however, have conspired to restore order to our disordered system—a triumph for Chaos Theory!" As if to mock the vanity of human certitude, a meteor hisses hotly through the hotel atmosphere (singeing the flounce on my beloved's acrobatic attire). "Great balls of fire!" cries the General. "No one is safe until the Fireman is found and taken into custody!" A second meteor, accompanied by derisive laughter, rains incandescent debris on us. "He shall be taken and put to death!" the P. M. declares, rising up in the full majesty of his office. Thus the idea of death, which was banished, is admitted to the hotel and our dreaming. The maniacal Fireman, the origin of whose disease is not known, escapes his destruction in a swan boat on the lake far below. He goes outside, where fire is ample—in a world mad for burning.

Scene: Arc d’ Triumph. Jude Law meets Gabriel Garcia Marquez, calls him Gabo. Marquez slaps the boy and calls him puta, Bitch, and they are instantly transported To a deserted island where they must listen To evangelists until they repent and kiss On the lips. A stand-off for months. Then the rainy season. The droplets, open mouths. The two men kiss like dust. The dependable ecstasies no longer satisfy: food, sex, love, pow- er, poetry, prayer, nothing engods, mouse under cabinet splash- ing blood against heart walls, nose twitching for oblivion to fill out skin, nothing, flat, highs sliding, and I needing refined, higher grade, purity brighter than white, multiple simultaneous partners fused into one explosive orgasmic tide, tie off arm and shoot naked women like speedball; poetry sickens, art of prima donnas soaking faces in egg-milk until they resemble pot pie, calling it courage, squeamish civility of conformity, gulag of cutesy, give me entrails that I may wrap myself in shawl of bowel, liver, blood, balls, god's reeking mansion sweeping me into Pan's hermaphroditic room, transcendence, foetal, magnificent; the coitus interruptus of gustatory thrill, table centerpiece, I want mouth bomb created by exquisite explosives assembled in Lucifer's smoldering kitchen, man- goes blowing tops off heads, kumquats previously orbiting Mars, aperitif blanketed with Jesus's jism, a candle snuffer suffocates ambition's flame flickering for god's nonexis- tent air, smoke encased brittle black wick, daddy cannot nor holy ghost escape, therefore, washing to shore, hair plas- tered, legs sucked back, flat as flounder, raging incremen- tally less, I resign, like my parents and theirs before them, occasionally flicking stinger or flare, fantasizing fullness, overplus, satiation, fat, conditions necessitated by central control and its brick-like gray impenetrable compaction. I starve my two dogs to see what transpires; first day: tail-wagging, chop-licking, enzymes anticipating, confused disappointment as I ignore bowls, lovingly I scratch, they frolic, doze, forage, stalk, older without friskiness, gray muzzle hairs, dysplasic, I haven't space for running though they worship walks, seem accepting, assuming mental lapse, dozed under coffee table and stairs, nightly feeding: upright, tails banging, yellow one ex- pecting heaps talks, black one rears, bodies twisting, sensing moment by sunslant, arrival, sounds, looking over shoulder to pull me to Friskies, I know, I understand, performing chores I pass bowls over which they hover, greeting with soul, ca- nine loyalty, they would kill for me, night curtains, forgiv- ing annoyance, foraging kitchen, anticipatory postures, can still lick hand and do not reveal disgruntlement toward hun- ger, enjoying my cooing, perturbation by degrees, quiet all night, day 2: frantic excitement, muscle, body weight, pro- pulsion, I take out trash accidently kicking blue feed bowl, pass pantry, pour milk over flakes, uncharacteristic yipping, finish cereal, pass pantry, dress, aware an adrenaline-fueled lethargy, drooping, one nips another, I utter reassuring note while putting them out where crouch to pee, squat to shit, absent all day so cannot recount behavior but imagine dissension, antagonism, nightly feeding: usually a cup plus biscuit: noticeable rivalry testiness, disgruntled butting, enervation, lassitude, pork chop, salad, pintos for me, aro- matic cooking, visibly discomposed, yellow one naughtily rears to counter, bad dog, I shout, rap snout, amazingly tails wag, put them out, yap, bristle, snarl at imaginary or liter- al danger, predictable discomposure but adoring still, roam- ing night rooms, hungry beseeching eyes, forgiving ex- pressions, unconditional, day 3, morning feeding: oat- meal, cream, d'anjou pear, rushing, (early meeting), ham and cheese bag lunch, in periphery two hackled animals competing, lapping water, pass feed bowls to back door, out they flow shot from fire hose, viral behavior, snarling, snapping, twisted, acids shooting, stiff withers pushing, gnarled paws, nightly feeding: attacked each other, torn ear, puncture wound, ripped out whole almond sized nail, slightly bloody, shame, patchy, curled in crawl space bar- ing, refuse helping hand, humiliated, I drag the yellow one, heavy sack, through powdery filth, the black one crushed into corner angry, attacking--let the games begin. You suck, you make me sick, you're disgusting, you're fat, go to hell, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, loser, bitch, prick, cunt, piece of shit, lunatic, Texan, nutcase, Jew, Christian, drop dead, jump up my butt, I despise you, you ruined my life, what of it, lunatic, charlatan, whore, I never liked the way you fuck, ditto, brute, shrew, bastard, witch, get out my life, happily, parasite, block of ice, go fuck yourself you goddamn piece of misogynist garbage get out of this house leave me fucking alone I'm outa here, I'm not going anywhere it's my goddamn house don't delude your- self psycho freak passive-aggressive monster get the hell away from me, go flush your head down the toilet, better than sticking it between your legs you taste crappy, mur- derer, oh Jesus it's over what the hell life is over I'm cooked I give up I don't care anymore I took a chance blew it I thought you were it it's my fault all my fault fuck it all I'm dead you win I'm finished, oh baby don't be so hard on yourself you're always so bloody hard on your- self why do loathe yourself you can't accept any- one's love it's like poison anyway it's not all your fault okay honey we're both messed up, I do part of me loves myself I'm so defensive right now I feel so I feel so...annihilated like a piece of shit I didn't mean what I said all those things retaliating lashing back you know and I didn't mean what I said earlier either I know I said it but I didn't mean it I was hurt abandoned angry en- raged and I lashed out at you no excuses it was childish I'm sorry I'm really... me too I'm sorry too I'm not exactly rational, forgive me, I'm raw, I suppose we both are its all so sickening, I forgive you if you for- give me, all right of course, kiss me--again--will you fuck me I need you to fuck me here now on this floor, I guess why not you know you're everything.

By morning all is quiet— he must have left Mommy finally gets up and breathes Mommy bites and kills each one of us for giving off a suspicious scent from last night’s terror She kills us then eats our intestines, grinds her teeth against a wall then digs out our eyeballs to eat then there is no one As always, only Daddy and Mommy are left It looks as if Mommy is expecting another litter Inside the palisade of ribs the heart is well fed with blood at the ranch of the heavenly universe the sheep keeps feeding on grass the hunting dogs called Time growl outside the palisade the quiet planets can’t even go beyond the fence I am my prison I am my prisoner My eyes are the prison’s guard posts The pain that escapes the body is no longer pain but I still want to step outside the ribs tonight. Count her loyal to this street, a straight shooter. Down it: grocery, mail, drugstore. Each box containing the packets she needs to live. Each building, a box – each block, a frame. She'll never learn what it looks like from above. She doesn't want to know, and so she won't. She moves up and down the street, the same, may she always. Go slowly, someone tells her. Don't get in the car and certainly don't get on the plane. Walk in the opposite direction of traffic so that you can see what might kill you. That's the way you want it – to see death bearing down if – but she shouldn't worry about that. Death won't come tomorrow. Someone says she has, impossibly, years and years to live. Life is a long song and draws all the air she has. This street takes a length of lung over and over. She goes slowly and kneads breath through her throat – is a rope, pink, and she an acrobat around her own pipe – but not without help. Never alone. There are certain other planets, the men of 517, rotating around different axes. They laugh and call to her as she passes. They say: "Read to us from your book!" Soft sidewalk, it glitters. Someone mixed the night down and laid it flat. She moves in slippers, comfortable on her path, and polishes night, polishes rough weather. Her errands circle her neck and pulse – there are ten of them. The first is to visit the grocery. She goes slowly up and down the aisles, waiting for the music to start. There it goes. The screaming strains and the walls of ice. She moves through the tunnel and makes her choices. Someone tells her, Be moderate. Don't buy sauces or spices. Select the round fruits. Moderation is an honorable way to exercise control. Of course she is less concerned with honor than with a good night's sleep under a mountain of whole food. Her book on the nightstand – closed. A scratch along the golden pages. Some eager talon she couldn't avoid. About the men of 518 she feels concern. She is stirred when she walks by – moved to turn her face. This is not embarrassment, but a flush of mothering. It slaps a red state on her chest. Together she and the men inhabit the same stretch, nurturing habit. They sit, and she walks. They want to stand, she can tell. They lean toward her but cannot rise, bowing from their café seats. "Please," they say, "Read to us from your book. Sit down awhile. You never stop to talk to us." Along the street are stores she has never entered. She can't start now. Early on, she selected her baubles. Someone tells her, Saddle yourself with just enough. Pick one of each type of destination. Wear one necklace, one ring, one bracelet. Devotion starts with a firm choice, and she is firm. She sleeps under tight blankets and dreams of transparent chalkboards, the city gleaming behind. Someone's child writing a sentence across ladders of window. Taking instruction. Someone tells her, You are facing the facts. You do good work, someone tells her. Your routine is pure because it sustains you. Nothing good would come of visiting new stores. She lifts her hands to someone before she crosses a threshold. She asks for new information. She thinks, Is this how? Wait – a bolt starts in her palm and grows down to her elbow. Pools there. But, this is pain, she thinks. This isn't direction. This is the cry of muscle, meaning weakness, meaning I don't know how to rightly ask. The men reach toward her from their funny moorings. Palms down, fingers straight. "You're so much younger than you act," they say, "You're so young, but you never look at us. Aren't you curious?" She looks away. Across the street are teenagers wearing shorts. The tallest of them has skin that hangs from her shoulders in sheets. She sways on the line and giggles at things the boys say, balanced on the two points of wood that are her feet. Mean, pricking stems. These men would squirm beneath her, the yawning team of 519. A screen door, the sky guarded, wires. Pole to pole, and she swims below. In the air is a buzz, but she hears someone humming, not a man or woman, not metal either. Not a city saying. It's to the hum she raises – she can't receive. She goes on under the buzz, back and forth to the post office and her box. Her box is most often lightly full. Someone says, Correspondence is a trick. She tries to transmit nothing, but she is not as loyal as she wishes she were. She speaks in bed. Your routine will pay off, someone tells her. You're gleaming the track. Think of the street as practice for the real walk. She varies her speed. Fast feels better because she doesn't notice the men, but slow – slow is a mobile. An invention like art, but named for science. Not one full revolution. A woozy shift. A this-then-that, her carving column. I am thinking of fish, she thinks, the common roadside attraction. The glass tube – we ducked inside. I am still there. Someone tells her, The flash is just magic, no good, only wet. The men of 520 are wearing her clothes. "We love your room," they say, "The low snuggle. Can we come inside?" She shakes her head. Her book is open in the hands of the men. Palms like slabs are the pages, held apart to show zipping lines. "May we read aloud?" they say. Next door is a dance and the slapping of fins, a marriage rhythm. A celebration she should attend. It's over, she thinks, after the wedding. They read aloud: "May and May forever. May and May forever. May and May forever." That is how I feel today, with your shit floating in the pool: tense. Because of your color blindness, you must see your shit in black and white, as in old films or pretentious music videos, which is unfortunate, because your shit[4] in color is a most luminous thing—the pale sunrise this morning fingering through the cypresses onto it in scatological arrays of tertiary pinks

Sewed two cat heads onto my chest for breasts, black, whiskered, / one chartreuse, one amber eyed, mouths fixed in terror-grimace / (decapitated them alive, naturally); fixed a pig snout into my crotch / for cock, raw, red, jagged, but eternally erect; coconut shell pieces / for kneecaps. hairy but tough and sexy; casava skins for butt en- / hancement, smooth, pettable, delicious, pale; slivered banana peel / for hair, long curvy strips with a lilt like a soccer star; the cat / stomachs doubled as moccasins and the pig gut made a fine scrot- / um wrapped round two whole hazelnuts, hanging. Needed a new / heart and decided the ripe red plum, so pried my cavity with a sur- / geon’s vice and stuffed it in, veiny, glutted, sugary-sweet, dripping / deep red streaks mosquitoes could swill on sweltering moonless af- / ternoons; a scooped-out lemon rind for bladder and blown out egg / shell for chin, the kind I smeared Paas over on Easter and called it / art, beaming like a watt; bathed in compost to the crown, stuck / on pheasant and buzzard feathers to ready myself for she for whom / I am cooking shrimp Mozambique with coconut milk, cayenne pep- / per, and Rachmaninoff, she whom by my creole-smooth telephone / voice accepted my invitation sight unseen—the Personals, you know— / and who I am positive will be wearing for playful aperitif thong pan- / ties with the window I’ve seen in nudy magazines. Decided from / ear lobes, to dangle one live goldfish each by needle holes punched / through gossamer fins, a touch, an accessory as Paloma Picasso / would declare, with a smattering of close-to-surface-blood wrist / cologne. I have such a beautiful clean-angled house, roomy, high- / ceilinged, everything squared, spacious, shiny, flat, lacquered, and / wide, and I inside, part ichthyologically glittering, part vegetatively / glammed, mythological, nightmarish, a creature no woman could refuse. These are the grotesqueries: long fake fingernails painted purple / glued on the end of bitten fingers used to enter minute streams / of data into a PC; a bent and contorted rubber man giving him- / self a blow job on a chintz bedspread at mid-day behind heavy / curtains to a whirring traffic sound in a moderate-sized Midwest- / ern town reeking of sanitized industrial smells and environmental / mediocrity, sucking like a pig his red dong, snorting and slurping / until the gun fires hot flan into his rasping mouth; two average / boobs “anesthetized upon a table” swelling like birthday balloons / as the Master slips silicon heavy pouches into slits wide as or- / gasm-grins, the kind that closes you like a briefcase and slams a / Charlie horse into your thighs, two massive mounds rising from / ash topped with bright red hard proud maraschino cherries; a half / dozen frosted orange vials lining the medicine chest like circus / milk bottles daring to be bowled over, one for nerves, one for / insomnia, one for anxiety, one for bipolarism, one for rage, and / one for love—a puppet theater with a silver curtain behind which / reside Princess Penelope, Queen Prunella, Poh-Poh the Clown, / Hrothgar the dragon and the dastardly Count Badunov each / with their respective handmaidens, henchmen, and courtesans, / all attired in peaked white caps and the family crest across which / is written the prescription for victory; splatting a human brain ag- / ainst the broad part of a bat, particularly if the scalp is Black / and the bat has four running legs attached to and pinwheeled by / a common hip, whose politics ends with the word “premicist,” / if you get my drift, in Bama, Tejas, or Mississip, the bat electrical / taped for grip and discolored with consistently smacked grand / slams against opponents under floodlights to cheering stands, / flashbulbs blinding the victor with grandiosity and capturing on / silver the beautiful slaughter; O the grotesqueries are these: / shoving the middle finger to the ham-knuckle up the anus of / a cat, the cat a frozen sculpture of horror, in the guest room be- / side the closet and wall-socket into which is jammed a light bulb / a lamp a black rubber chord and a two fingered hand; the armless / drummer grinning under moustache in a smoky dome full of booze, / babes, Cobras, and panthers, one strumpet who from a distant pew / coats his body with lust as the cymbals clash, the snares and traps / intensify a rap so hot nothing connects the sticks to his stump but / blurry air or a heat-mirage whose dust flies round a fool diving in; / sinking surgical gloves through fascia and muscle, ligatures and / sheath and striking pure granite, like boulders sunk in silt, granite / arteries, granite gut, granite lungs, granite pump, rock upon rock / in soft mud, immovable, great hereditary tumors imbedded and / petrified into heavy, cold, dead, blunt, blind, unemotional stone. Against my will, I rip down zipper, shove porno before face, grow / tumescent, and rape myself. Rapist fist-squeezes, tears undercircum- / cision tissue, violences orgasm into toilet, and bangs away like a / striking hawk leaving me on carpet weeping. Crisis response team, / rape squad, description (shot sharded glances in mirror), unrpedic- / table, unexpected, brutal, Caucasian, fled into the night of self, vast, / anonymous like a whiptail; rage, not sex; revenge against distant / abusers; howl in heart; injustice gnawing cerebral wires; I’ve not / confessed—shame—he’s hit before, cracked open hard core and / beat incessantly ripping out my stuffing and fled like a murderer / into my soul, slaked on subjugation and spermatozoa. I can take / victimization by his hunger no more, the horror, the shock, the / degradation amidst a beautiful world, his closet appearance ir- / repressibly, he’s always within dead bold perimeters, his shoe- / toes replicating mine and the gutturals wrenched out his throat / iterate details he could not know; Karen’s tampax, Sheila’s lub- / rication, the exquisite blood orange and yellow pipefish, the / unexpurgated yank through caverns of emptiness, cravings of / Joyce, weird tectonic schisms in the earthplates of stability; my / superinformed assailant confusing me with identification; smash- / ing my dick between fist with jackhammer-aching arm, he hal- / lucinatorily grunted, “fucker, you are me,” then incomprehen- / sibly vaporized the instant my come blew me off its string; pride / terrorizes—I’ve slaved, I confess, for years, homosexually, pain- / fully, grievingly, plumbing swallowing my esteem; the tidal sucks / off a devastation-home. No more: hazel; six feet; gray wreath- / tonsure; straight teeth; cupcake mole, left shoulder; moustache; / olive; one-ninety; deceptively soft spoken; black bush; left lobe / crease; fiftyish; big fingers. Grab handful of flesh, wrap fist, rip / him through sewer grate to light, to justice, imposter, fake soc- / ialite, slime-liar, hit/run impresario, abominator of stainlessness / and gorgeous stacks, chickadee household blackguard bastard.

The patient’s disease threatens to reach out beyond the body and invade others, moving with the force of a river that cannot be dammed even when the word river is carefully broken up. Meaning manages to leak out even in the face of verbal mutilation and constant interruption, so that the poem operates by a contagion that spreads among words and makes collective sense of them. Poetry is a virus, its semiotic contagion infusing bodies and connecting us to one another and to the language with which we are infected. Viewed in this way, poetry is both an intimately corporeal act and a guerilla-style revolution in the politics of expression.

A decade ago the coroner reported that my father had died of up to 90 to 95% natural causes, though the coroner’s office couldn’t explain the remainder. That’s why I live like a squatter in his caved-in mansion in the Hollywood Hills. It is my job to be the curator if anyone knocks on the door wanting to see the sculptures of animal bone and wire that he produced at his desert studio in the last troubled years. I’m self-employed at that job. When you don’t need for money you can serve the ideals of another world that exists in parallel to the world of money.

I came home from my surgery and there was a message from Brad. I can’t find my leather jacket. Coming over to look for it. I knew where his jacket was — inside a pillowcase, on my bed. Even though the doctor told me to take it easy the first couple of days home, I got the pillowcase off of my bed and took Brad’s jacket out of it. I threw the jacket into the spare bedroom. It landed behind a pile of newspapers.The mind is a smelly heap of compost comprising our greatest hopes, delusions and sexual fantasies about robots. We explain its function with analogies to computers or other machines, trying to impose a structure on a ghost. So when our bodies and minds start to fail, we panic. We grope about in the dark for a user’s manual, a crossword puzzle or anti-depressant that will put our brains in the order that we suppose it should have.

As soon as I could get away, I visited with each of the twenty-six paintings. I pictured what I would change: put the red dog in the trout’s jaws; the black church spire atop a walled-in prison; a field of massacred trees floating in bright green blood, the men, women and children a forest. My imagination flowed along with the wine. Not that I was an artist. I liked to re-imagine things. I have to put my ear to the carpet to hear the music. There is a thumping in my chest, and I understand that the goodness left once and forgot where it was headed. Girl #8 calls, and says I feel like a drawbridge every time I think about you thinking about me. We have phone sex even when it’s light out. Girl #3 is making a documentary about her heart. In it I say Do you need some water? Three weeks later I’m sleeping on the floor. I don’t remember how Girl #5 tastes; I just remember counting the cigarette butts. I listen to a song, and it goes But if you’re worried about the weather, then you picked the wrong place to stay. You can see my pores open when I yawn. Have you ever been stuck in a sun shower? So confusing.

Did I mention my hidden cameras? After her shower I admire the lace Mrs. Kelly puts on. She has taught me many things: art and literature, how a naked woman behaves when she thinks no one is watching. Maloney, how are you? Fine, Mrs. Kelly. And you? Do you have your essay on Heart of Darkness? Yes, I say. I remember her body in the bathtub from the night before. Double spaced, she says. Very good. There is an illness in this part of the country that makes happily married men get up and leave their houses. Sometimes they walk to the next town, forget who they are and start new families. Once, after a sledding accident, I saw a man dying in the waiting room. He got off the bus by himself with an awful head wound, blood down his face. There was a magazine with a tiger on the cover. He picked it up. He set it back down. The horizon is neon. I think of my father, an old man when I knew him. He and I are the same person with the same memories. My mother is his mother and so on. I think of how he sailed the South China Sea. I am there with him. I wear his gunner hat and he wears my spurs. I am also my grandfather, a navigator on a huge steel bird in the second big war. And I am his grandfather, a coward Confederate submariner shot for desertion while trying to swim home.

Cone White cone descended in sound blister There were the people having skin removed: to make the hood over our last evening Cone, White cone, colored destroyed, slipped between the wall air and the bodice of the sacrificial mothers making money from the rummage of their wombs: unto the Cone Our homes turned on their sides, the sound of the descent fixed with the ripping split the image of our vision into ten and ten again, we watched the fluelight strobe from softer planets in the vision of the fly, our begging formed a prayer The cue meat of our perfect flayed-red bodies had been for hours there arranged, stood up on gray dots in White silence for the Cone, we called it god, we called our bleating mothers’ named into the fold of needless seeing, this could have ended where it began, could have spared the retch of splitting selves, where the anger of the firmament released a golding dew In the patterns of the people I could see the homes bumping through the frame of dirt rising magnetized to match the cone, the other color was a skin box inscribed with the numbers of our names, and someone begging inside the begging to be released from infinite fits, as this could yes go on forever and this would yes go on, numbers remained, sod remained fit to our cerebrums where we touched inside the fold, becoming only ever one mass body, the flubber of metal lungs and unending crystal squeal Under the sever of the folds of each skin there were mirrors being turned up toward the gold, to fix the light back at itself and in beam of it the air began to mold white and formed with cones along the bristle, there were corridors there eaten into nothing, there were the blind becoming tongues, eaten hard into a coarse hold where no one wanted and the sandwiches were worm, the fire leading backwards into long globes where the holes would let you fall forever into dough, the cribbing of the muscles, the asking of the child, how to as well exit this father body before it hits the ground under the ground, and under that, the chew Us our sandwiches for evenings and the columns of the replicating bell, a cord of child milk rising in pink glisten for the city lamp and making every person see themselves before themselves with tubes removed, the index of the body bopped with big sheaths of silver foiling, catching words where there were words, though there were very few, the colds came rolling, cinder burst in spume, chocolate winter, no condition, a bottle of the night, the words went on and on repeating and no hours, the crust eroding on the clocks, rams the size of Christmas folding webcode through the granule of the teeth, where anyone had been bitten for any year at all, I did not know what to say, I did not know what to say or could be needed, the hammer of the grunt, the pig babies falling out of holes surrounding, wired, what I needed was this bone No, what I’d needed was not anything about a body, it was a small leak over the home, where all these animals were writhing and making little purple pockets from their sweat, by which hand over hand for hours one might climb into a blue mark that had corroded just across the gray, the mink of all the skies folded to one sky again quilted in the money of our night, a face just behind it, I heard seething, with its flabby lips and neon teeth, speaking into our white cylindrical air with all the language to be given back to Shell, back to the mime behind the moon’s boob squirting ugly milk all in this life, and still no one here would stop me from Become, no one could gather at my knees, the gnats having strengthened all such bulbs around us that the speaking even would not fit, and nothing left and wives dividing, and the money in my snatch, for every hour of the day a bed bloated stone-sized on the face of waters that had risen over all old glow, all the powerwires farting bloating pellets There must be a limit to this wall, there must be someone growing larger just beneath the growing larger that could fuck the force back toward a stall, this was the idea we were healing under in a lexicon of domes, not a sound now even ever but something running back and forth between two nodes, and peeling upward anything that wanted near it, the mothers’ laughing rendered paste, the oars of something harder than a houseface leaning down toward the soil and blistering within it something reticulated and caterpillared and so croned it could not speak, the piddle of the image wavering from great heat and spittle rising off my back, my ingrate body, my pustule system, there was no one I would not have ever left, there were so many sore beds I had turned from or fell down through and would never blink again, would never eat again, would never, and I did this every day, for every hour I was alive I ratted someone out and so did Joey, John, Mary, Mom, so on, all the names, all the flux stops and the white ones, creaming underneath, the rise of corn where that bunch hit it and something warbling for bust, to be hit hard in the center of its wide, deciding, legendary face, the creams and rouge of Endlesswanting amassing on our arms a finer glue And still I could not stand beside you in the color of the Cone, for each inch of me that wanted and would be cleaning there was ten feet of me that stunk, each rung of each of these connected more rungs in a cribbage system I could by no length of me infer, I did not have the body, no mind, nothing left on which to brand, suddenly I was wearing all these bracelets and these groancrowns and I was looking down upon the earth, the legions of pixel bodies screaming underneath me and raising with their hands, the curdlife in their eyes forming diagonals that split each into new earths, blood encrusted, cowing, bigger babies squirming in their tendons to get out of their whole heads and making war from underneath, bruises formed in trombone to regale me with acid squench, and yet, there at the same time, up above me, I was looking on into the butt of any other one, my arms raised in the same way up above my head and beeping with the babies also in my own folds there again, and the lather pouring from my bodice and the keyholes of my spine, and for every lick of shoulder I had there there were ten others with the same whorl, all of us looking up and onward into one, whereby, in the split, I was the godhead and the altar and the putty and the butt, I was no one for anybody and the whole air and the figurefather and the wretch, and all of this was fine still and all of this would soon I knew begin again It did not begin again, I waited, I said the word, I fucked the cone, I let the cone fuck on hard into me, I waited, it did not begin again, I said the word again, I fucked the cone hard, I squirted come into a bull, something wriggled through my system eating all need and the need made meat in me again, and yet the hour went on lurking and still would not again begin again, I waited, I said the word, I let the cone have all my breast, I gave my cunt my comb my belly my cerebrum my disguise, no word, I gave my ass my hair my money gave the center of my light and all that coil, gave up the years I had recovered in my pillage and the white glue where I soon expected life again, gave all of that to that above me and at the same time rained it down, a spigot system of my spoiling rendered overhead and as clean soil, I waited more and fucked the cone more and fucked the cone’s friends and its clime, I rolled into and gave the numbers over I had been keeping for better night, to index in and sit with all these hours, I gave it this and this again, I let it eat its dinner in my tonsils, I let it sell me to the wench, gave my last religion to its mother and the white dog, could not stop coughing, wore the gown, split the crown in ten and ate that, shat it out, gave this to there, the Cone, the Whitened Cone, my king, it would not listen, it did not begin again, it had no eyes inside it even with my bent hard over and taking all this passion up the ass, all this spooling in me where once I had meant to be a seamstress and now was nothing more than stone You could ask again, you could keep going, there were two dimensions and no walk, there were the seven dens split into heavens each and someone presiding over all, a glove eye at the center of Cone, it said its name and was the name forever and would spin down under dirt and eat the cord out of the dirt if this was wanted and would return and be a floor or be a cut orange on some white table seated around by many hooded men in masks, one of them a woman with a shaved head, though she would not be found, and burned on each one’s left nipple one new number that had been unindexed from the charts, a glass of milk in one hand, hammer other, how to remember how to begin, how to call the number in the phone that has been baking since the minute of the lock, where you were born a second child beside yourself into this white cone and the cone again, again, the mother of you bathing in the sludge you’d shit out of you inside a night, upon a bed called before another frame you’d meant to love and could not see, could not call by the right name in the light there with the screens descending every second made of ash, blistering the second soft between you and obliterating and descending every second there again, it did not matter that the sky had lurched down all this give already and within that some kind of sponge, a new shirt to put on and walk around in, cloud speech, this would not be yours, this would not be hours to have given back into you no matter which way inside the folding you would try, and in a warm flat room you laid down and were someone and in other ways you’d just begun, and in the same ways you’d been folded upright in a white cord for the hours colded in the floor, and in the same ways you were nothing left regardless and would never sin again, would never lick again or say a number or be a body of the Crash, the cone unspooling from its tip point ten ways and ten again and ten What not yet above could not be crushed, this was the fifteenth iteration and would replicate again, though this still not be any new beginning and when it ended it would not end, the houses laced with blue night risen in the toning of the crystalmind, a corridor of small flags each pyramidal and seated with a center made of cream, each hiding where inside them another instance of this lock, the speaking humming through the speakerbodies magicked and lumped with lanterns down the longest corridors, the Cone’s, the Cone curled queuing flues of natural numbers with each one a little flay, guns pirouetting in the cinder, honey for a clasp, inside the bark I tried to stand up and look what fell out but all this paste I can not eat, this translucent shit of coming skin, or a person rendered from dismissal, what I gurgled, where you’ve been, the scorched recorder on the bedside table I would from my mind to mattress groan a blow, notes for nothing, no words, you feet beside my pillow squirting bread, somewhere down a long a long curve way beneath us a crying chowder we carried in our lungs throughout the maze, maze of ovens and frottage dying in the drawers surrounding hours we could not sleep, the hole the sink makes in a person, the diagrams of chalk, let me have you, again, no prismatics, let me have you of your brine, let me let the Cone inside us and fold nothing and be nothing and what worship of the rise, worms not threads but pleasure showers, the hole I have for you alone, the walls collapsing in the headnod faction where the mirrorarmies ask us to refrain from being flesh and spittle, I put my head against you in the shower, there is a number, a kind of dynasty undid, something writhing underneath the lather, your name imprinted, your chestparts affixed in the acid of the lawn we do not have, the asphalt prison of white hours walking between engines, someone halving you from inside that machine, the blue machine I almost killed by dying, the words you could not count, glass emission, night of no breech, caught your head against the blurt, and in the white the White Cone again rises, again the pearling rounding down, where I walk into the no yard where no door is and see the stone cut into the next instance in relief, another number will be coming and yet will not appear, speak me your age, add into the silent number that one and throw the system, guide  

In a holster rolled from a leather remnant, I stashed a miniature flare gun, which I would never use. It was so small that Claire would need to fire it for us. My hand was too big. But I wanted the reverse of what this item could achieve. What was the opposite of a flare gun? Something that sent up a signal that made people never know where you were? A coordinate-obliterating firearm. That’s what we needed, a gun you could shoot so no one ever found you again. If I had something like that, I would have fired it first at Claire, to hide her forever, and then I would have turned it on myself and greedily released the thing directly into my own face, squeezing the trigger repeatedly until no one ever saw me again.  

Through the radio came great washes of medicinal broadcasts, an attempt to send a healing sound throughout our communities. If you tuned your device to the high nineties there were stations promoting an advanced species of white noise, shredding through the vocal spectrum so that language sounds were fattened into moans, the potent syllables cloaked over and ballooned. Claire and I sat some nights in the living room and bathed in this sound. We were too weak to hug, too ill to really touch. But the gush of sound from the radio felt soothing. You could picture it as a physical thickness in the air, a lather that subdued the harsh sounds, blocked that spectrum of attack. This was wrong, of course. It did no such thing. Maybe it was just that Claire and I were together inside it, sheltered by a blizzard of noise. Sometimes the noise abated and a voice from another station bled through, squeezed out little speeches, which suggested that perhaps they’d found some safe way to share news. When this happened I rushed to the radio, stopped breathing, just so I could hear something, but Claire, days ahead of me in the illness—ahead, behind, I’m not clear how to describe it—Claire, when she heard this voice pick its way out of the radio, cringed, felt physically repulsed. Esther turned civil around that time, even gracious. She did as we asked, refrained from speech. When she needed something she quietly retrieved it herself, and if we found ourselves in the same room with her she kept her eyes down, observing a respectful, speech-free distance. At night I would tuck her into bed, and she would endure my attentions, correcting her blankets to her liking after I left. Of course she needed no such service. She was fourteen and she had fastidiously sealed off all visible signs of need, spackling them over so that she was fully unapproachable, impossible to help, a stranger. But I wanted to visit with her, and in the dark, with Esther beneath her covers peeking out at me, I sat on my knees at her bedside until she finally rolled over and pretended to sleep. Of course these encounters were not cursed by speech. The mouth’s poison was withheld. We sought no hand signals or any other kind of communication. What I wanted was for Esther to know that I was there, even though, in all ways other than the empirical, I wasn’t. In those final weeks at home, we were proof that many family interactions can be accomplished in total silence. In fact they probably should be. It would not have surprised me to learn that while I knelt by Esther’s bed at night she looked at me with perfect, cold clarity, saying to herself: not once did you kiss me good night or even visit here when things were fine. You think it’s ok to do so now? Is that what passes for tender? You think that builds feeling? I’m supposed to be glad for you when we cannot speak and when whatever I say makes you cringe? Whether Esther said these things to herself or not doesn’t matter, because I heard them, and I heard them in her voice. Sometimes I mustered a response: must affection and attention be measured so unfavorably against those moments that lacked it?

 

‘Roussel’s fantastic contraptions and their fairy-tale explanations place the reader in a perfectly artificial landscape. The world of Locus Solus is like that inhabited by the vat-brain: a complete simulation, a self-enclosed spectacle of imagery disconnected from real objects.’ And, in fact, the novel’s pataphysical vignettes – filled with quasi-scientific theories of reanimation, quantum mechanics and psycho-spiritism – resemble a kind of automated language machine in which homonyms and puns are used to construct the ‘spaces’ of the protagonist’s titular estate.

They purred secret sentences in silent rising spiral until the sky at last had drunk so much it sunk to night—the night not out of cycle but in insistence, demanded in the skin, the unseen smoke of body after body sewn surrounding until the mother, at least, could not see—could not feel the air even around her, or her other—could not feel anything at all—and in the dark the mother stuttered—and in the dark again the mother walked. and heads made laugh and bees barfed buzz and long dogs barked and babies babbled, while inside his bulb the father began to shout a semi-prayer and the bulb zapped his skin and skull in hot correction and across it all there was a wind and no one would. When the light of each of all the sides was gone again in spinning, the light remained there still—it hung in gristle, caked in bones and teeth, in the ceiling of the nothing far above—in distance and in hours, doorways—reflecting air back at the earth—in all the dirt, and all the wonder—days in hours—years in days. 

What the Mower Found The mother mowed the yard again. She mowed the yard, the yard, a prayer. The mother was slick with sweat. Her skin was red in certain places from sun and where she’d scratched herself to keep the ants and bees off. The insects swarmed her head no matter how fast she moved. They had wings and teeth and eyes. They swarmed the yard, the street, the long horizon. The mother had mowed the yard twenty-seven times in the last week. Sometimes she’d go on for hours. Her biceps and pectorals were getting meaty. The grass was going dead around the edges from where the mother had pushed the mower so much. The mother kept her eyes wide and turned her head back and forth from side to side. Where was the man who’d fixed the mower? What else could he put a hand to? All those surrounding lawns on all those houses. The father was still gone. That morning he’d left sometime just after 4 a.m. and he would probably not be home till after midnight. His face seemed to be sinking into his features. The mother tried to think of the father’s name. She could think of lots of other names it might have sounded like, but not quite the right one, she knew. She mouthed out things she’d said before—she reversed her rehearsed vows, teasing her tongue toward the father. She mowed the yard in wicked zigzags, reckless with her aim. The mower devoured her newer flowers—begonias, ivy, mums. They were dying anyway. She ripped up one long sod piece, spurting mud off on the walk. Underneath the sod, the insects hung, spaghetti. The mother kept pushing, head up, chest out, scrunching her face best into something someone watching could sometime want. The mother did not see the son watching through the window on the second floor where there may not have been a window once before. The mower soon grew heavy. The handle hurt her hands. The mother went on garbled grunting, as if trying to push something from her insides. Around a corner by the chain fence, she felt the mower suck something up. Metal clanged against the blades. There was a whirring, choke and smoke. It spat something out its side. The mower whirred a little longer and then got tired, then was gone. The mother squatted on her haunches in the trampled mud-mushed grass, her eyes stung with gasoline and sweat, the sky behind her slightly hulking. In the grass there, slushed with clippings, scarred, the mother saw the egg. The Copy Egg The egg was made of a smooth dark polymer with several seams and edges, though the mother could not make them open, try as she might with nail or hammer. Several hours of such tinker caused a burning at her eyes. The mother found with effort how the egg did other things. The first night she slept with the egg under her pillow, hugging. She woke with the huge toy in her mouth. Her chest felt funny and she could not remember sleeping. She later found the garage filled with an inch of liquid. The liquid stunk and had to be scraped out. The mother watched the father on his knees for hours scowling with the trowel. The second night the mother hid the egg inside a lamp. She wasn’t sure whom the hiding was meant to be against. She’d bought the lamp from a garage sale run by the neighbors. The stuff was left out on the front lawn with a sign. No one was watching. The mother left a dollar. She went back and left a dime. Later, she couldn’t get the lamp to work. She liked the lamp—the look and stink of it, the pattern. She called it Bill. She sat it at her bedside. The egg seemed to fit the nodule where the bulb went just exactly. In the morning the lamp was on. The mother carried the lamp and egg into the bathroom and used the light to read while in a bath. The light made her feel younger, but not enough. The third night the mother felt very tired and did not have time to touch the egg at all—instead she dreamt she ate it. She dreamt it had a job that paid for all. She dreamt it became a full-grown boy who sat beside the son and kept him clean. The fourth night the mother stayed up late alone and held the egg against her chest. She found by lengths and rubbing how the egg could steer the house. When she touched the egg in one location, the downstairs bathroom toilet flushed. When she knocked with her left thumb knuckle on its one small gray abrasion, the egg nudged the kitchen off an inch. Other sorts of routine made the egg do other kinds of things, most of which would go unnoticed unless one knew exactly where to look. The mother found it difficult to remember which trick did what. She tried to write down notations, but her hand shook scribble. One thing the mother knew for certain was when she kissed the egg a tone would sound inside the shell. The tone triggered something in her brain that made her shake with vast orgasm. It erased all previous tones. Her body shuddered reeling, clobbered taut. The mother felt guilty and enormous. Her certain veins clenched into bouquets. It had been more than several years. The mother could hardly keep herself from squealing through the small house in the night—she had to bite a wooden spoon. She bit through it. She kissed the egg until her eyes went bloodshot and her brain swam fat with glee. The next day she could not stand up. Nor the next day nor the next. Her lower muscles scored and knotted. The mother hid the egg inside her nightgown. She moaned with ache with ache late into evening. The father went to sleep downstairs. The mother cursed the egg. She called it Bastard. Inside the egg the egg changed colors. The next time the mother found the chance to kiss the egg it just sat and gleamed for hours. The mother spit. The mother put the egg inside a closet, covered, and closed and locked the door. The fifth night the egg woke the mother up. Its voice rattled the bed frame and the mirror. A man’s voice, deep and meaty. The father slept right on. The egg said things about the son—what he’d done and what would happen. The egg would not shut up. The mother found herself arguing with the egg aloud. The mother took the egg downstairs. She immersed the egg in high ice water. The voice bubbled upward, even louder. She got house paint and coated the egg’s face in a new white—the same color as her bedroom. The egg started hissing. It melted through its outer layer with new blackened creamy flesh. It went on and on not only about the son now, but about the mother—who she’d been, what she’d wanted, how she felt about the father, what she would do given the chance with certain other men or even just for money. The mother’s nostrils made little outlets, waiting for a plug. The mother carried the egg out through the front door down the street past other houses. She searched for a sewer, but could not find one, no other holes into the earth. The mother ran, her sternum shaking. She became afraid others could hear what the egg said. She went back and got in the car and sat the egg on the seat beside her. The egg’s voice super-boomed now, shaking the fake upholstery and the dash. The mother drove the egg out to the coast. It was a sixteen-hour drive. The mother had never seen an ocean. The waves were flat and spackled, thick with old foam and floating geese. The mother lugged the egg into her arms. It seemed to weigh several times what it had, still growing. Halfway down and squeaming the mother had to stop and roll the egg in sand, its voice susurrating all the way out to the ruined dock. At the smeared lip of the water—gassed and pudgy, melon yellow—the mother heaved the egg as hard as she could manage. It landed three feet from her feet. It fell in through the seahead spurting, as if in grease. Beneath the lip, it seemed to spin a minute, steaming. The mother watched the egg go down. There was a stutter on the surface. Overhead a troop of gulls quickly gathered fast—hundreds of them, enough to clot the sky. They dove in shifts at the egg’s indention. Their beaks were long and weird and curvy. Their eyes spun in hungry loops. As they came up, they lunged for the mother, squawking. The mother did not flinch. The mother watched for quite some time to make sure nothing could be done. In the house somewhere far behind her were the father and the son. What the Son Did With His Information The son was in the kitchen when the mother came back in. The mother had grass clippings all clung to her body stuck in the glisten of her sweat. She left a trail behind her on the carpet. She had it in her teeth too, where she’d licked the clippings, where several gulls had nipped her neck. She looked slightly like another person. She weighed nine pounds lighter than that morning. The son had emptied the refrigerator. On the kitchen floor he’d spread the milk, juice, eggs, several cheeses, tortillas, bacon, cold cuts, margarine and butter, ketchup, lettuce—all the other things the mother had just bought. Everything had already either wilted or gone sour. Some had grown a slight rind of mold. The son had also cleared the freezer. He’d dumped the popsicles, waffles, yogurt, ice cream, ice in massive slushing piles. The veal cordon bleu and veggie medleys and tiny cheesecakes in countless stay-fresh packets, an off-brand box of frozen dinners bought in bulk some evening for the son at his request. The melting had made a puddle that spread across most of the kitchen floor and turned the edge of the carpet leading into the dining room several shades of color deep. The son had taken out the plastic and glass shelving and the drawers that held the food. The fridge was now one large empty box with two tiny light bulbs gummed with glow. The son was standing in the freezer part of the refrigerator. His shoulders fit the width precisely. The back wall seemed to stretch so deep. Just as the mother came into the room, the son moved his hand and closed the door. Their eyes met briefly in transition, like electric light. A shutter shut. The room was still. Later the mother would wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t come in at that exact moment. She would consider it a sign from god. She would seal the fridge with tape and bring another smaller fridge to sit in the parents’ bedroom so that the son would not feel the urge to repeat. She would not think about how the son could just go climb into the freezer in the garage, or in the magic trunk stored in the attic, or how everywhere there were roads and overpasses, and cars driving under, piloted by whomever. The mother went to the freezer and pulled it open and saw the son. The son looked tired, the same way everyone else she’d seen looked tired. Everyone everywhere at every moment as tired as they could be. The mother asked the son what he was doing. Her voice came out much higher than it did most days. The son said something wadded. The son had something in his mouth. The mother asked him to repeat. It came out more off. The son was trying to talk in the same voice as the voice that had called him on his cell phone, but the mother couldn’t know that. The son had abrasions grown in beneath his hair that the mother would never find. The mother did see, though, how the son now had long brown streaks worked under his eyes—so brown they looked like makeup. She rubbed one with her thumb and made a smudge. The son looked like a tiny warrior, or a linebacker. The son’s eyes were whirling, as had the gulls'. Hey, the son said, staring at her. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. The mother clasped her grass green hands.  

Quirt, so it starts, whimpered at and standing under the crystal chandelier in the foyer while Mister Vin at the table considered slightly the kingdom of pillows and of embrangling the dog and of the obviously happy Quirt at the table next to himself, Mister Vin. We'll start with the pillows. Quirt said this. "We'll start with the pillows." And the dog. "Blah blah," said Mister Vin at this. Obviously healthy, and the crystal chandelier chandeliered the room. Pjilkm performed flips in the voluble kingdom and the dog rested on the table or under it. "Okay." Pjilkm said okay. The dog was obviously happy on the table or under it. Quirt was healthy and whimpered so. The dog aimed its whimpers at Mister Vin so Mister Vin took his fantastic and embrangling strangling fingers elsewhere, to the backyard possibly. Mister Vin—such a voluble, obviously happy, healthy specimen—whimpered at and embrangled the dog on the table. And Quirt. There went the kingdom and the dog with it. Out with the voluble dishes, in the backyard, where Mister Vin vanished to, or maybe Pjilkm? Voluble and disguisably capable. The dog was obviously happy with all this. The kingdom nodded with the audience satisfactorily. Quirt, Pjilkm, Mister Vin and the dog all rested on the giant pillow in the kingdom of voluble whimpers. The dog back flipped. Quirt front flipped, rested, walked. And Pjilkm, obviously happy, showed it. So Quirt, quite cold, quite cold. While the healthy Mister Vin sat on the pillow brought in from the backyard where Pjilkm practiced his back flips. The dog in the kingdom of embrangling cowpokes rested on the table and Quirt gave Pjilkm a hug and felt warm after, physically and figuratively. Beneath the crystal chandelier, the dog rested and waited for the voluble thing to swing. So the dog whimpered, "Quite cold." And the healthy Mister Vin flipped in the foyer. The crystal kingdom and the healthy dog felt the voluble Quirtness of everything and headed to the basement of the kingdom of embrangling Quirty. Quite cold. Who ever heard of a dog in the kingdom of whimpering pillows? Mister Vin and others had. Quietly as could be and as could be seen from the kitchen, far from the chandelier crystaling the foyer, in the foyer sat Quirt. "All of the air is quite cold in this kingdom," whimpered Mister Vin and no one heard him but the dog who whimpered back. Quirt felt this was all quite cold and whimpered so. Mister Vin, always healthy and voluble, rested on the pillow and tried to organized thoughts which had been earlier so embrangled beneath the crystal chandelier in the foyer with the dog barking barking. All while the dog, barking barking, and the rest of the quite cold but healthy family felt voluble and like a sack of oranges under the sun. This whole time Pjilkm had been in the bathroom fetching soap. "How utterly voluble," embrangled the dog, so "Who lettruy ublvoue," uttered the voluble dog, so. And the quite cold air Mister Vin had been remarking upon flew into his ear. The sack of oranges in the kitchen felt the sun from an aimed at ray of sunray from the crystal chandelier, beneath which, the air of the foyer felt quite cold, quite utterly voluble, Mister Vin felt. And the dog wouldn't stop whimpering and Quirt, quite healthy and voluble, rested on the table, embrangling ideas and wrangling the flipping around acrobat of his dream. Later, the dog and the rest rested in the kingdom of the crystal chandelier, then woke and poked their noses around and found Mister Vin finally, asleep in the backyard. The sack of oranges had become quite cold and Mister Vin whimpered so. Pjilkm rested. All of this in the kingdom of the sack of oranges and the oranges bumbling around in there. "All this voluble, embrangling," thought Pjilkm at Quirt and Quirt replied whimperingly, "The dog was a mistake." In that moment or suddenly proceeding it, the crystal chandelier crashed down crashing the crashed-at ground of the foyer with itself. And now the growl from the foyer and the dog and its lungs and throat. Mister Vin in the backyard came inside to the not-backyard and uttered a whimpering gasp sighly. Pjilkm ran out of the bathroom and into the hallway and then into the kitchen to run sink water on his on-fire hand. Quirt considered everything happenstancely standing from the roof of the kingdom happeningly, then later lounging on a pillow, scratching a new dog growling growling. The sack of oranges in the kitchen did nothing with themselves. Mister Vin felt quite cold and voluble about everything. The dog whimpered and Pjilkm took the hint from the dog. "The dog was a mistake," Quirt wouldn't stop saying. The rest of the rest of them ate in the kitchen that evening and the next day the dog growled and Quirt woke and Mister Vin didn't. Pjilkm, still healthy, ran into the foyer to practice his back flips onto crystal shards. The neglected sack of oranges in the kitchen remembered their neglection, then aimed their thought rays at Quirt and Quirt said, "Oh, the oranges." Mister Vin, quite healthy still, took a rest and told Quirt to jump. All this in the kingdom of embrangling. Now there was light from the window and all about the kingdom like a nail gun driving it into crevices. Quirt and Pjilkm and the sack of oranges ate each other and pondered the embranglement of recent events and Quirt decided that none of it ever happened and Pjilkm decided that none of it had either. Where was Mister Vin? Out dancing. The dog rested and growled growled in the kitchen so Quirt threw an orange at his head. The healthy weather producing light from the window rested as it penetrated the kingdom with its light and its voluble kingdom of light. Mister Vin coughed and Quirt heard it come from the backyard. Quite cold and voluble, Mister Vin sat in the backyard and embrangled his thoughts into new ones, then erased them, then added more, then pinned them to the floor. The dog, the light from the window, all added up as one and one is two often adds up similarly. The dog back flipped and Pjilkm clapped. "This is certainly a memorable morning," thought Mister Vin, then erased the thought, then thought this: "The light from the window, is it voluble enough for the rest of us, for the growling dog, the embrangling though healthy Pjilkm, the quite cold Quirt, and the miserable sack of oranges?" Ftyd stood in the foyer holding a new sack of oranges and growled back at the dog growling growling at him first. And the healthy, though quite cold air was all about them and passed into and out of the lungs of Quirt and Mister Vin and the dog also. Dogs breathe also. "The kingdom, the light from the window, everything," thought Ftyd as he stood and watched time happen in the foyer of the kingdom of voluble dogs. Mister Vin back flipped from his seat and felt quite cold, quite voluble and decided to take a rest in the kitchen, on the floor. Quirt stepped over Mister Vin and growled at Ftyd who rested in the foyer, on the floor, amongst shards of a previously crashed crystal chandelier plus particles of light from the window. Then the light from the window flipped volubly over the dog and Mister Vin embrangled himself on the floor with a growl and a nod. Quirt, who'd been quite cold, though healthy, rested using the sack of oranges as a pillow. Ftyd heard about this and felt quite cold as a result. So the light from the window embrangled the kingdom and the kingdom said, "Quite." And the kingdom felt quite cold about it. The dog flipped over the sack of oranges and Ftyd clapped and woke Mister Vin who resumed embrangling his thoughts on the matter of the quite cold sack of oranges and the impressionable Quirt in the foyer singing a forking tuning folk. Mister Vin and Quirt, quite taken, quite impressionable, quite cold to say in the least. So Ftyd took up to embrangling the dog against the growling sack of oranges beneath the light from the window and before it left healthily, skipping down the streetwise. This kingdom for a dog and Ftyd on its back for once. Mister Vin witnessed this list of embrangles under the light from the window in the kingdom of Ftyd and felt that all was good and well with it, although certainly quite cold. "Enough," Quirt blurted and the impressionable Mister Vin in the backyard complied and the dog flipped onto the sack of oranges and growled at the light from the window and the waves it made off of the crystal and rested on the lens of its eye. Therefore, nothing was left over and taken as impressionable for the young Ftyd and his neglected sack of oranges. Another was Mister Vin at the door, healthy and studious at the door. He spoke thusly, "Two more and where's the dog?" And at once they gravitated to the backyard and greeted Mister Vin and his victuals, quite cold and impressionable, quite like a sack of oranges and a growling growling dog to boot. In the backyard where the light from the window came from before coming from a sun. Ftyd and Quirt ran and growled at the face of the dog who's mouth and vocals growled back and spoke between themselves a conversation involving resting and flipping and feeling healthy and other embranglements. A healthy dog and a light from a window and Ftyd and Mister Vin at it again. Quirt, quite cold and quiet near the fence flipped onto it and walked along it physically and figuratively. Resting, the dog flipped into a dream and woke from it instantly, complaining about his good health and bitey bark while the sack of oranges in the kitchen felt neglected and impressionable. In the backyard, Mister Vin and Ftyd and Quirt felt quite cold and quite something else unfingerputonable. Mister Vin imagined a new dog, then there was one, and Quirt decided to embrangle his pants so he did and threw them over the fence for the perhaps pantsless neighbors. "Bark bark," Quirt replied and the new dog eyed him quite impressionably. Suppose Quirt and Ftyd and Mister Vin and the dog wrapped themselves into the same blanket and hibernated for a minute, and then that happened also. Mister Vin yawned and considered what day it was. Quirt continued to rest and the dog felt the light from the window upon the hair in his ear, and the dog wept because of this. Ftyd considered the weeping dog and laughed. Then the healthy and vibrantly impressionable Mister Vin flipped the sack of oranges over his shoulder and decided to leave forever. "I'm staying right here forever," he told the dog whisperingly, then sat on the sack of oranges and plotted his next move. Quirt, healthy and quite cold, and the backyard was full of all of them. The light from the window fell upon the backyard and the backyard spit it back out and into Mister Vin's eye and the dog bark barked. And Ftyd, remember Ftyd and the sack of oranges? They fell asleep, one under the other, and the sounds of resting could be heard by the neighbors and backyard dogs of the street. The impressionable light from the window held its impression through the window and onto the piano. The rest rested and growled into their dreams. Quirt continued to hibernate and the dog hibernated in Quirt's hibernation dream and back flipped into the backyard from the window again. The healthy, the quite cold and impressionable Mister Vin impressed upon the growling neighbor that Quirt and Ftyd were only temporary and the elaborate scheme to hold the particles of light from the window on his tongue would evidently be thwarted by younger adversaries. Okay, so the dog laughed and hiccupped twice at this, and the sack of oranges in the kitchen, still neglected, but growing older and unfirmer as time went on as indicated by the shadow of the piano from the light from the window. Quirt in the backyard looked to the sky and considered his impression of heaven and how it impressed so heavily upon his impression. The elaborate back flip the new dog performed made the old dog bark bark and finally everyone rested finally. And everyone hibernated for the evening and grew themselves awake in the morning and ready for another one. The ever healthy Mister Vin finally came inside leaving Ftyd and Quirt to hibernate in the quite cold air and frisky morning water. He lifted the sack of oranges and set them down again. And that was the end of Mister Vin. Hibernating in the backyard still were Quirt, Breop, Ftyd and two dogs, or one dog and two ticks on him. Seven growling ticks lived and died in the last minute regrettably. Breop, quite impressionable, felt the quite coldness and how it impressed its cold upon him and the elaborate manner it went about doing so. And the dog now, flipping and flipping, back flipping and landing on the chair like a sack of oranges landing on the sand. The light from the window elaborated the scene and its furniture to the audience. Ftyd felt quite cold and told Breop so, and Quirt said, "I'm hibernating, okay." And the growling growling of the dog's throat bellowed in the evening and hung around until midnight, then rode away on the waves of the light from the window. Meanwhile, everything felt quite cold and contemporary. Quite impressionable and elaborate were the sack of backyard oranges. Quite cold and impressionable were Breop and Ftyd and Quirt and the dog and the new dog and the first dog flipping around each other elaborately, then hibernating beneath the light from the window once. Okay, there's Quirt and that's that, okay. Breop said, "Let's go." So the currently flipping Quirt flipped impressionably at the light from the window from the house inside of the earth and on top of it. Quite cold, the dining dog and the impressionable landscape Ftyd considered growlingly. The sack of oranges, remember them? Oh god, the flippity doorway and the elaborate growling coming from behind it and or somewhere near and behind it or somewhere near it only, or in front of it. Breop, let's say, was hibernating in the backyard when the denouement occurred. Ftyd and Quirt were having lunch in the foyer after the dog swept the shards under the doorway to the backyard. And then the denouement occurred. Quite cold, and the dog wrapped in a blanket rolled into the kitchen and bumped into the sack of oranges on the floor while the denouement occurred. Then the light from the window. The house! Here in this house where the light from the window and outside of it shining while the denouement occurred in the basement and the house of elaborate impressionisms was quite cold, certainly it seemed to be quite, until later that afternoon and beyond perhaps. "The basement," said Quirt. "Investigate it," said Breop. So Ftyd shouldered the sack of oranges, leashed the dog and investigated the elaborate basement structure. The house burped and Breop felt quite cold while investigating the light from the window and the dust that smoked through its particle waveries. In the backyard, a mouse ran and ran, flipped, investigated a rock and ran back to its house beneath the fence and into a neighbor's house and basement finally. In our house and basement, Ftyd tripped and fell, then woke in the basement a month later and the light from the window was unseeable unfortunately, but Quirt investigated the light thoroughly and concluded that light is made of elaborate growls and of birds that hibernate in the backyards of houses. Here was a healthy afterward. Breop refused and Ftyd agreed finally refusing, after having risen from the basement like a ghost. And Quirt continued to house him in the impressionable room meant for hibernating. And Breop discovered her vagina and became a woman. "Woman?" thought Quirt whose penis something happened to then. Ftyd sat on the couch impressionable and famished and ready to start over again. Our investigation of the trees in the backyard, the ones where Quirt wished he had returned to, had been successful. Good for him or her. So Breop tore off her clothes and said, "Look! Woman!" and Ftyd and Quirt chewed on quite cold and buttery oranges. Quite cold, the light from the window and all its misery shouted at Breop who wept and ran away. The backyard, so full of oranges and other hibernating characters deep in dream investigations. Say the light from the window was buttery. Say Quirt and Ftyd read newspapers and fell into hibernations. Say the sack of oranges shined on by the light from the window of the house felt buttery and the house and its roof felt quite cold under the scorching sun ironily. And Breop in front of the house screaming screaming. The elaborate growl from the mailman as he walked by explanatorily. Quite coldly came Breop back into the house calmly and ready for a shower. So Quirt smiled a growl and Ftyd growled a cold and impressionable growl at the light from the window finally. Impressionably, the impressionable Breop ran out of soap somehow and Quirt left to investigate the hibernation of Ftyd in the foyer again, under the light from the window again, from the house again. The house and the quite cold and buttery light coming from the window made the house feel like a used sack of oranges growing older and less ready to eat if anyone ever would. Breop found soap in the bedroom dripping on the floor bruised by the light from the window all night and Chak lay in bed hibernating already, holding the sack of oranges like a pillow, quite cold. Chak felt impressionable and she said as much. "I feel impressionable." Ftyd lived in the backyard then and for about a month hibernated amongst the investigative and impressionable ants. Chak felt impressionable, very much so, so Breop held her in bed and the sack of oranges hanging above them was shined on by moonlight from the window from the house that glovely held them. The buttery light from the window from the backyard was quite cold and Ftyd snored at the moon elaboratedly and buttery and much like a sack of oranges. Consider the sack of oranges unsacking themselves and walking around like little round persons investigating the world along with the elaborate growls of its inhabitants. Chak felt Breop's buttery arms around her and smilingly returned her squeezing of her while Ftyd growled in his sleep at the elaborate plot to find the impressionable ants eating oranges and eventually hibernating in them as round sunly houses lumped sackly together.  

There is no letting go, not until the end. Only the gradual layering of browned filters upon filters in the trash like dumb leaves, the soggy flaps of impressions and this-is-me-again, hello, craning my neck against the high, blank sink of night. How many times can night be described without throwing it away? I want to do more than throw. Nothing goes away, says the boundless larynx sending waves of peristalsis over the stage. That is night. Purse of pelvic bone jangling with something collapsible and quiet with groundwater. That is night. Flung curtain, a shift of the sky’s retina. Is it not such outward pleasure that makes the inner cells grow big? Document of earliness when god’s many hands, tipped with unethical electricity scorched the earth. White grub’s slumber. Shout that wraps itself around a marrow of hunger. A cold baby. A hope caught in the sucked body of a man. Straw wrapped flannel in a field. That is night. That is night. That is night. Over the mouthshaped drop in the ground stretches a thin linen. Layer of thin insect’s thread woven into a delicate verge. Something with lonely hands takes care of it, fabricates a refrigerated needlework. Near frozen, near white, near zero. We are threaded gently. The eye is small but we are smaller. Crystals of breath from the lungs of my kin, whose wings are thin, whose eyes are shingled with hundreds maybe thousands of pieces of each other. Iridescent as money and unrecognizable as sand. Not only this but even the wrung out stalks of the trees on the other side of the pane warns me of insects but not in the way you think. The warning is directed at me. I don’t have six legs but I do have antennae. Then I look in the glass and a lightbulb is crushed. My eyes are legs walking over the cell of my room made of cut trees and the detritus of ice ages. Only in our eyes exists miscreation. This is why we have been granted sleep, a small mental key. Mud climbs up the tunnels in my head. I hold the shining cochlea of night in my hand. Deaf and dumb and dangling with whiskers. I call and call into it, and hold it to my ear like a dead sea-thing and call into it with hearing. Dawn closes. Flesh remembers everything. I don’t know it. But it’s there, knocking around my pinched abdomen, fluid coated currency. What is listening? Who’s out there humming beyond my white spacesuit? The night is muscular and veined like a husband. I step into it. I am married to it.

 

You’ve just done the thing last night. He’s out back now, on your grass, in the back yard, getting high. You have known him eight hours. You are always scared of your own womb, aren’t you? How long has it been? Six months. This one is taller than the others; you could climb him to reach something that is far away or high up. What would you need to reach? A watery leak in the ceiling or to kill a fly. You would plug the leak with your finger or swat the fly with a fly swatter, your calves at his cheeks, toes on his collarbone. You think of the pattern of his chest hair, which was a squat upside down triangle, something unique but not marketable. Would a man like this sit next to you on a beach one day? Would you be happy about the triangle then, against a backdrop of sand and other chest hair options? What was your next move? Put on the scarf and the big glasses and walk slowly down the block to the Pharmacy like always? Aren’t you endlessly walking down a sidewalk to a Pharmacy? When you get there, you will only swallow pills. After you swallow, your womb will be clean, coated in white paper, flawlessly empty. Without the pills, you spend days praying for black birds to come and peck at your midsection, to remove with their beaks what does not belong. Ideally, the birds would peck out your womb stuff while you were standing on his shoulders, reaching for the fly or the leak, solve two problems at once. The beaks would slide into your skin and dig out red treasures while your finger held the water or the swatter bashed the fly. Ideally, you would climb down from him and there would be no need for a Pharmacy or a ladder, not ever again and wasn’t that what love was?

 

Father fathers from a distance, stands on top of a short mountain and wisdom bellows. Father is no bigger than pinkies. Trees and rivers learn from father, heed advice, drive fast cars with aching backs, wear permanent sweatpants. Dirt and squirrels steal batteries from grocery stores, watch mental screens of pornography on loops. Everything around father wears dirty socks, hushes constant orgasm moans. Father is the size of thumbs, smarter and louder than all roaring. Father looks down at me moon‐like until I move, fill pockets with copper and metal, find ways to come. My heart is open but done with errors. I have placed a number of frequencies under my pillow in hopes my dreams will play in the form of a radio this night. Data drifts in silence, grinning among the faces in the rafters—their ammonia celestial bodies telegraph to the ghosts in the carpeted hall. The light bulb is filled with bees, buzzing out of sequence. They’re dancing like drunken sailors on a weekend pass— temporarily home from the war. If I hold out my hand, I can almost touch the darkness that exists just beyond the pattern cut across it by the light. A shadow on the wall suggests the trees have begun to notice the same. Burned out hulls rusting in office complex cubicles. We used to burn clean. Now the radio station promises cash and prizes, plays scrap heap lullabies to dreamless hunks of bone and clay. Birds of prey await their permanent disconnection here. Jerked awake and walking to the bathroom. Spiders are playing baby games. Oceans swallow interesting peppermint believers, and I have bitten my lip a little too hard this time. The blood tastes metallic. Dry little bones scattered across lines of discontent. Jokes without punch lines become the jokes no one tells. The sleepy saints of unclaimed loves are tried for neglect and led into exile, reborn into a Paris a million miles from here—or anywhere. Pray the tigers, from clouds of daydreams and ever faltering soil; hands are threats not mentioned in the brochures. Soft voices stain graph lines on the thought clouds in which they are written. Their values remain undetermined and are left bargaining for meals in the epicenters for displacement. I am beginning to understand the motion sickness traffic signs secretly discuss while the world is busy exploding into its own mouth. I am beginning to understand a lot of things. Like how ampersands can break an unsuspecting heart.

A useless, elongated closet. A way to avoid detection. A passage bypassing open areas. A space making home smaller. Extra wall in what could have been a large room. Places of surprise attacks, claustrophobia, cluster. Non‐dining, non‐living, non‐resting, not a room. Umbilical wasteland. A way to avoid friends. A void in lieu of a way. Too small to hold art. Too long to hold people. A sick replacement of the original idea. One giant host held to each smaller room a door. Symbiote. A brain. Now there’s a passage which bypasses all of the bad, all of the good, the eyes, the blind. In the hallway the other rooms are blind to you, sneak thief. In the hallway pedants whisper words, words like in the isthmus no datum is parable. Rhymes with terrible. T‐Rex! That’s right, Author. King on his throne. Porcelain laurel. No rest, the main hall once contained us all. Now motherless, continuing to travel out the out hole, a monger in our blood, Mr. Hyde eyes. Grr of Kissinger. An allway or none. This made a home need directions. Not for the Author, he has only one toilet‐dining‐sleeping‐room. Rimbaud’s leg bone made into a long pipe no one smokes here.  

If you were wearing a ribbon I would use my teeth to untie the knot for as long as it takes me to untie a knot. I want to steal a car and drive it to you. I want to be closer. There are a thousand miles between me and where I will be soon. I want a hotel building in the dark to ourselves so I can ravage you in one hundred rooms and cook you something nice in a large kitchen. In the morning we can run in the hallways in your underwear. We can dance. We can bite each other in the pools and every white jacuzzi with the steam going with the lights down. There are towels on the floor and open bottles of wine and champagne. Everywhere we can see, I want to say I can have you there. The stereo is playing somewhere. The ceiling lights behind you seem like they have been on forever. On your face you’re contemplating never opening your eyes again. On the bed you wonder how light you are. I whisper, I know how to move everything from the ground up and hold you where your ribcage tingles. I know how to make the world a feather. There are boys around you smoking a cigarette in the forest. In the house there are curtains on fire and girls you know lighting their cigarettes. You like the color red and yellow you can see in the distance from your house. I am running and weaving between trees in the forest chased by wolves and little foxes and already I am feeling impossible to be taken alive. There are men chasing me too with guns. I can see you waving to me in my books and rock music. I can hear your voice pressing me to keep going. I know we know I am on my way to see you. The way I ignore branches and shrubbery in our way is careless. I am always later than you want me to be. My face is red with scratches from the sticks and leaves. Running from state line to state line I eat wolves guns and little foxes for breakfast. Behind you the house is burning. Because I am running in a business suit and tie everyone on the street believes I am part of some strange mystique. Some greater power. My dress shoes scathe the pavement. They each wonder where I am going. They all wonder how long I will go for. This is how strong I miss you. Momentarily our story occupies beautiful minds while the city bustles then slows then goes quiet. The buses are late and heads turn simultaneously one way. You can finally hear the birds again. All the girls are looking with their eyes wet and wide open halting traffic to go as normal, following me. Windows are pressed with faces. Their mouths are open. People celebrate our direction and my running in the same way they do when everyone in the world has the same birthday. When they see a comet in the sky. I run for days and days in the woods. I want to have sex with you and hold you throughout time on beds and in the forest. Behind you the house is burning with people asleep inside. There is no use in saving them even though you try. I am always later than you want me to be. You register me as fast as I register you with your teeth and I appear from the dark. I am surprised there is not a mark on your lips where you bite so often when you see me coming from around the corner. I can anticipate holding your shoulders. The leaves vibrate on the trees and the fire sounds like crumpled paper. I like how smooth you are. I like that you don’t turn around even when the house is burning even when I am right behind you. I want to say I outran everyone but realize we are all alone. Above your chin, our eyes share a hue. When you tell me I am being dramatic I say, You are this celebration. You can have me anywhere. Like inside your ear.  

I understand the concerns of the birds; or, the concerns of the men who killed the birds because they loved Them; or, the concerns of the Native men who killed the birds for the Other men who loved Them; or, the concerns of the Other men who killed the Native men who loved the birds but not Them; or, the concerns of the Native men who killed the Other men who loved Them but not the birds; or, the concerns of the birds who were killed by the Native men for the Other men who loved not Them; or, the concerns of the Other men who killed the Native men they loved like birds; or, the concerns of the Native men who loved the birds and killed the Other men; or, the Other men who were killed by their careless desires for birds and Them skin; or, the concerns of the Native men with featherless skin and careful de sires; or, the concerns of the birds, none of which likened the killing of Them to the loving of Them; or, the concerns of the men who loved the birds because they killed Them.  No dream but the unending dream. Caterwaul. A walled cat in the margins of marmalade. Another summer in the waistband of winter. Another cloud interfering with dementia of old‐timey button on breastplate. Synergy in successions. An elevated lipid, limpid, livid. The angry chimes. What is barnacle but vestibule into the chamber cleared‐out for hearing? Blossoms. An aphorism. Depleted follicles grown willful from soil. An avalanche. Took the tidekeepers by supplication. Wristwatches attenuated. Malarial symptoms. Mother and father raking the coals for the porridge‐pot of yesteryear. White foods turning grey foods. Compost shit into blankets worn tight around ears, stalks, spines and lightening strikes. Several fleeting malarial symptoms. Ingesting chemical dosages we circumvent the oceanic drifts. Tidal Ptolemy. The inverses of excess. Could I buy one in every‐color? The spectrum dividing new frequencies. Star Quests. The overflow. Schemes and scheming and schemers. Grammar for the sake of such is and was and forevermore. Epitaphs. Wind shifting in grave. Shitfaced. Oh for the love of gnome and troll. The marchers and the overstuffed couches. Waistbands expand to take in the never‐ending border patrol. We sneeze and it harbingers implosion. To ease our knees into protoplasm and tuck our tailbones into dens. From the cave came the rancid bear. Blueberries redberries greenberries whiteberries. A berry for the thoughts emanating from the domain. Actually. Another pale storm thrashing against the wet‐black. Nothing to sit tight on. Mouse gospels in the night eating everything dismembered from plates. Who’s to say or say not this ether unseen or unfeeling. Grasp a pentacle with your tentacle infinitely legged pus. Whether or not the weather continues. Dried up to north south east west floods. Abysmal moisture. Trumpets in the ectoplasm. Cellular tunes disembarking on a gesticular path. Oh, inherent brain. Lovely in disregarded garb. Gravel. Grave is the mouthless circle. We can stay up all night discussing the ins and outs. Braiding our hair. Mashing our pubis. The unmentionables. Liquidy discharge. After laughter loftier visions encase the umbilical toll. Another beast distinguished by wings, halos, specters, vacuums into no non‐sense. Charts. Triangulation. Catastrophe cartographed by engravers gavel. Blanched. Oven‐roasted. Looking for the lowest spot between two points to hang a hammock overhead, swaying, infinitely unseeable. After thought. Breeze reverberates static‐clingily to all vital systems. Monitors. Overhead compartments shifting contents into interstellar debris cascading down through invisible funnels absorbed through the pore‐skin of reason. I left the stew out to grow fierce mold. I unhinged the doors. I broke the windows with BBs solidified in my tumbler. Regurgitate the arsenal. Over and over we rode the hills like humpbacked whales. We reached down with long arms of universal law. Coral. Polyps. Dollops of sweet to put on our bitter regrets. Storm’s center is center from where propagation dropped its seed. Petals. My little, tiny boner. Can undulate to far reaches of myself. Can extend my fingers into sky‐scrapping twigs. Remorseful of past’s pasts. Smells secreted. Over to the next diatribe unleashed in sequestered syllabation. Over‐exerted to all points north south east west. Sirens with their songs fondling my little, tiny boner. Keep off the trajectory that might disorbit you. Plans birth plans birth the overflowed fridge. We’ll pile the Pleiades with packages from the mega‐mall. We’ll fill our coffins with coffers and coffee drinks and come‐hither stares. Electric blanket only keeps the outermost warm while the innermost is fractaled in frosty lace. Glaciers. I need to tidy up the house that has begun to shift on its axis. If I can’t sashay in holy scarves, I must hunker‐down in musky fleece. If we can’t wear moon‐scars we must sup tidal forecasts. Reminiscent of water‐born animals. In steady downfalls we zipper our lips, keep our chins furled, put our hands into our bottomless gloves. What keeps the keeper? Collectors of relics and ancient musings. Storyteller of defunct plots gone haywire. Fused these hyperbolic joints. In the primeval forests we curled our tails around branches. I’m guessing. Living up to expectations. It’s hard not to despair. The fur‐green of the hills is trees. Dendro‐ or Derma‐, thereʹs not so much difference. Either wayʹs a coating; either wayʹs a shag of stalks. Right now Iʹm on a bus and bound towards a girl in the northwest of the northeast. What that means is that this is a hopeful writing, a prose of promise. A pro(mi)se. The miʹs encapsulated, a note in the middle, as on a scale, and also a homophone for the subject. Me, Iʹm bussing. Me, Iʹve got a job for the first time in months. So me, Iʹm busy. Youʹve no reason to care. So. To make this a story for you here is a twist or plot event: Swarm of insects, a black cloud engulfing this bus Iʹm on. What will happen is the cloud will grow and thicken. The air will gum with wings. The cloud will become blanket, atmosphere, and the bugs will lift this bus right off the road. It will be an airbound bus and Iʹll be dead in the center of a dead black floating. The bus will touch down in the center of a forest in north central Pennsylvania where the woods are thick with trees and churches. Often churches are topped with nipple‐shaped steeples. Often steeples are called phallic too. This is why God is in all of us, man and woman. Even through clear windows, itʹs easy to see things wrong. Yesterday my roommate saw a dogʹs penis and thought it was a breast. The hills look haired. My eyes are tricked by un‐bare moundings. Foliage for follicles or reversed, itʹs all a problem of optics. A problem of optics‐ this time a lack of light. Though weʹd have lit upon the ground, the insect swarm still will blacken our windows. I will see nothing, no women, no trees, no fur. I will grow from fearful to angry to mostly only sad. Dear Insects, I will trace out with my finger in the mass of their bodies‐ they will have made it into the bus by now and begun to fill up the pockets of air. Dear Insects, I will trace. Dear Insects, I am trying to get to a girl and itʹs important. I am happier with her, you see, much. Why did you steal this bus? Why have you dropped me in this particular wood? Please take me instead to her town. Please let me exit there with her. And ‐ and this depends on your cast of mind as much as my own, as remember for whom this whole narrative digression was made in the first place ‐ perhaps then the swarm of insects would feel my finger on their many bodies and would lift up the bus once again. And they would fly swiftly to a town, maybe even the right one.

Don’t talk to me about a woman’s curves. Thanks. Chocolate milk and hernias, thoughts induced by my smile as perceived, anecdotally, in the reflection of a car door, if caught sidelong by someone hungry for aggravating pain; to wit, you, you and your sway bellied semantics. Place a sell order on the venture liens, the ones in that suitcase, no, that one, the one with the severed hand attached to it. No, the Italian looking severed hand. Wrong again, that one is a contractor’s lunch pail, but you are getting warmer. Give it here. You watch me throw an empty attaché case into the river and it floats off dragging a hand behind it, as if a businessman stood on his tiptoes below the surface trying to keep safe his collection of paper cranes. Enough sentiment! The conversation turns to talk of avoiding type‐I error. The null hypothesis is bowling allies; the treatment variable, me. Your marriage, it would seem, in response to varying levels of the treatment variable, has suffered in statistically significant ways. I discount the effects of your tendonitis and league night torpor, discount completely; all variables are controlled in the regression model, yes? You blame yourself, Wednesday nights, and pill bottles. You efface pride with brylcreem, wave about your divinity book like a strange disembodied duck‐billed phallus, the one visited upon deprecatory sinners wont to deviant cryptozoological fantasy. You ask me why I bite my hands when I pray and I tell you that I do not; this is a pretend sandwich and it will give me the heart disease required to hold hands with you‐know‐who. I have been long wondering about how I came into possession of this shopping cart with its variegated packages, handles, desperate clasps, and ruby rings. You watch as the day spins into continuous charming sunny clouds of light and optioned banter. I wipe my mouth with my tie and as blood drips from my fingers you begin to see for yourself, in ways undisguised by the apocrypha of reckless luncheons, that you are not ever really alone. The field was a bed. There was wind, lemons, a man and a woman. The bed was a field. There was once a war in the same field. Soldiers who wore blue uniforms. That was years ago. The field was a bed. There was a sparkly disco ball in the field. The man liked shiny things. The woman liked the field because it was quiet. The bed was a field. Passion was quiet. There was passion in the field. Sometimes the field was bare. Except for the lemons. Except for other yellow things. The bed was a field. Animals would come to the field. They felt the windInternational agents arrested the think tank on Sunday, freezing cresting waves in Minnesota lakes on advice of the local parishioner. Stand up one afternoon, he said to me and licked condensation from his glass, and feel struggle which will never be yours, and tapped the window at blue lights. The wide winter choked talk to whispers so seven criminals owned dreams and people stayed indoors to die. The respected parishioner sipped lemonade, phoning citizens with comfort for taking, warm blankets pulled through glossy incisors, your grief is mine. He said to me, it’s a great responsibility, and crushed ice fell from his mouth. Treason, the sentence. He said to me, roads are made to be followed, and red skin pursed under pressure and tip of switchblade calling for spring and even summer but mostly for the waves to roll again. After us elves lap sap moths clothespin our noses. Wingflaps fan snores. Hands gluey as frog digits, we stamp forest spoils, stock crafts stock. Nuts, needles, lock’n key leaf work, bark scrolls, winged seedlings. Troll’s knock mimics woodpecker. We unbind witch’s broom blinds. He hurls cash at elm hollow cache. We remind him, currency has no country here. Striving to sup slow as plants grow, we mind morsels’ gifts to body & mind. Sip dew, pay prayer. Bellies kept ½full to store creative hunger, stew, stir, for leisure leagues follow meals. The stretch of forging our art is not leisurely. How to relay elf art? Like any maybe; intention: tempt senses. Color, composition, shape, mellifluous fluidity… Now’s modish motif is bird‐based. Flight designs, tagging sung songs. We did a whale of mammal work. Paw & hoof casts in mud cake. Exercised dream reunions with undulant ungulate spirits. Broadly our art boils↓ to ballooned or stripped musings on forest‐fed muses; stylized expression of our hearts by strained brains. And words. All elves poem and pen. Reading gets bred after bread was halved and had. Gaze at the elm canopy frosted gloaming froth. Youth hammocked in carved bows, starving to escape with(in) birch‐bark‐ bound pulp sheaves. Listen. Each scratch’s secret. An ancient aural art of tracking turned pages. So fast, so many get torn. After youth craft read and rest, gaming gains favor. Aerial archery stitches zip‐line canopy. Gallant swimmers spelunk springs’ for unchartered caves. Runners training with elk herd hear peculiar bracken meadow music. Brushed fronds harbor piglet snoozing in straw cup. After cleaning its eyelids of popped spores, runners bend, legs beg to wheel. Bores of all sizes & checks on uproar/tranquility scale are generally boors. They keep to themselves, which we’d respect, except they regard forest unfavorably ‐ root loose old‐anchored roots. BUT THIS ONE, our gallopers agree, HE’S LIKE US. They study the piglet’s snored snot bubbles, fragile as a glassblower’s whistled whispers. Deliberate appeasing shapes ‐ grapes, ursine cerebellums, soapy gurgles that fold in like crepes, moon rinds, plump blackberries, leaf spears, teardrops, which now, rushing up, summons season’s initial snowfall. SO BEING AN ARTISTS IS INSTINCT, one elf remarks as she shoulder‐loads the dozing piglet. Her pacer lands crystal stars on his tongue. Tasting home in wind, they run. Winter, scouts enter time travel travails. Skate skiing lake rimed crust‐slush, I eye a breathing pine. 1000 Chickadee chicks beep. Merlin casts swooping hunger spell, prey prayer. Flushed birds flick needle pinioned wings. Risen by feathers traded for needle & cone fur, fir senses flight. Shed silver fluff descends, demoted to duff. I glean wing drippings, patch itchy ruff & plumed epaulets, trot up tree. Wind tumbleweeds me ↓ stratosphere Blvds, cloud chute shortcuts. I land nomadically, like a wheezy balloon, in city alleys. Tar garbage flavor. Hissing tabby scare‐dy cats. Blacked‐out graffiti. I’m on my bathroom floor. I’m reading Joan Didion. I’m masturbating, but noncommittally. I am easily distracted. There is the confusion of past encounters with cinematic history. The Misfits, specifically. Your head – on the outskirts at first - was gauze-wrapped and downcast. Suddenly here I was, the one of us up-sitting. I kept my eyes open. I was careful with the names Monty and Perce. I called you honey, sugar, darlin’. I was working a diner counter in my mind. Your shirt was ripped up the back, the result of a dance or bullfight or unsatisfied woman. I said: Don’t say anything, just be still. I fisted your hair then spread open my fingertips just as easily. I searched my purse for a needle and thread, pushed you forward onto your knees for better angling. One of them believes in the devil. One of them has two cell phones. One of them is from Hawaii. One of them has letters to mail. One of them never takes off their shoes. One of them has slept with many of them. One of them sees their mother only on Thanksgiving. One of them has faked their own death. One of them has a gmail and a hotmail. One of them does a crossword puzzle every day. One of them has soft, pretty eyes. One of them won't stop looking at me. The Beers are too smart for your evolution and will chuckle behind your back as you lift glass with both hands. What happened to the orange groves and tarantula farms God hid by the creek You don’t need to be botherin’ wit dat chickenhead. The grainy television of happiness is cable-ready, do not fret, you’re safe as raw chicken and hair triggers. As Bobby Knight awoke he found himself knitting the veil of darkness that would cover the sun— it smelled of bacon grease, felt of five o’clock shadows, and within its fibers he could hear the whines of his elephantine heart. Jesse tastes the bees of life but talking about it’s what makes them sting. There will be a day when space comes to us and so will The Beers. Everyone will love you when you become sticky enough to force them to. Voici l’aisle. The Beers stole your bicycle and girlfriend Patty. The Beers smothered your cat because you said it was okay. The Beers knitted the sweater of darkness that would fit snug around the sun— smelling of dog-carpet, feeling of a decade callous, and within its yarns you can hear the laugh track of the television of future. Do you have brain damage too? Me three. The short memory. I miss Toledo. I don’t think Vespa scooters are sexy. Do you mind hearing it again? I just don’t. During commercials, forget what I’m watching. Jersey Shore: I feel superior. Golden Girls: I feel empowered, rapt & unmoving Difficulty of never again Difficulty of the divine Difficulty of I love you Difficulty of robots Difficulty of rabbits Difficulty of you know what I mean? Difficulty of genitals Difficulty of proximity Difficulty of bears Difficulty of tamari Difficulty of French onion Difficulty of no one Difficulty of plants Difficulty of how much Difficulty of not enough Difficulty of too much Difficulty of possibly Difficulty of water Revenge plus guilt / equals dancing / divided by architecture / and in the end every ex-boyfriend ends / up underground / Thanks God / what makes me feel better / feel anything / often I imagine myself / up and awake and hanging / on the phone / saying something untrue / I bought a dog / I named him Blood / the city you destroy / destroys you / and here come the dead friends / there is work to be done / for real / I am earning my living / with the wolves / I believe in one enormous desire / to protect one thing / so well / it forgives itself Rabbit she called me / and absolutely rabbit / I remain / be it in the dirty snow / or watched over / by a mercy killing of crows / let me stay awhile / inside of some lovely thing / making my way / from megachurch / to megachurch / like a window mounted AC unit / dripping my bad waters everywhere / dreaming about an earth full of blood / last night I got so sober / I shattered someone’s weekend / with laughter / emptied out the empties / now I’m forgetting / how I got here / to get her together / I carried her aquarium / across the river / and I damaged no one / and I changed and / still I shine so rabbit For Jackie, no thoughts came from ham. For Sean a little thought, a miniature ham. It sat on a miniature plate, but then it started to be a hat, and soon a man was wearing the hat and telling Sean to eat the ham. Without identifying him as such, Sean knew the man was the Commander, and the hat he wore would never go back to being the miniature ham, which had been so good to Sean because it had looked just like the ham he was about to eat but had also been small enough to fit whole inside his head, and its wholeness had consisted of various scenes from the past three months of Sean's life of Sean successfully leaping over large holes of known area but unknown depth that Jackie had created. If there's going to be a plan it has to come from inside Sean, Jackie thought, in momentary lieu of a bite of ham. Only Sean knew that inside Sean the Commander wore a hat that had once been a miniature of the ham Jackie was now large-scale eating. A series of joins between disparate entities and experiences connected the men to each other; for Jackie the series of joins was visceral, transitory pleasure enduring now as ham; for Sean the series was a more static structure, a house situated on what happened when Sean thought the words "arable land". When Sean thought about its construction, the house would lose parts of itself inside itself; nevertheless, lately Sean had begun to inhabit one of the lost quadrants of the house. In the lost quadrant Sean had begun to inhabit, Jackie ate ham and Sean tried to diminish the Commander by thinking "arable land, arable land." A notable feature of the Commander was that he was Sean if Sean were to wear a hat that had once been a miniature ham and now cast a shadow the size and shape of the average-sized ham Jackie was eating, Jackie being an important structural element of the house that was for Sean what gathered and held in coherent order all that connected the men. Sean believed that Jackie received experience through a filter or screen that corresponded to an object Sean often encountered in his dreams—a telephone. Jackie believed that Jackie received experience via the ham and Sean, whose face formed part of the background of the ham. Sean, now that the comforting thought of miniature ham had become a commander he had to combat with "arable land", tried to find some comfort in the thought that he, Sean, was receiving experience by way of the dream phone—that it was all a message being relayed to him by someone else, a dream interlocutor whose important role in Sean's life could only be known when Sean situated himself in one of the lost quadrants of the house. "Arable land, arable land," the voice on the other end of the telephone was saying, and this voice now belonged to Jackie, and was Jackie's only voice within the house. But the voice was something additional, an overlay of voice atop the underlay of voice that was actually Jackie's, and it confused Sean, why Jackie was introducing this unnecessary technique of asserting his authority, using the dream phone to say the words that were what the house was situated on—they were its foundation. So now that Sean's plan came from Jackie, and Jackie ate ham, Sean ate a bite of ham, connecting himself, for Jackie, to Jackie. Part of what formed the background of the ham, for Jackie, was Sean's face; the part not formed by Sean's face was a window, and through the window Jackie saw the tinted window of a van. Though Jackie could not have known this, the tint of the window was the color of the phone through which Jackie's additional voice repeated the words that had been Sean's private command, or anti-command, since they opened up space that had been occupied by the Commander and his commands to Sean to eat ham. "Arable land." Sean ate ham. He and Jackie ate ham together. For Sean, this shared act of eating ham became part of the structure Sean had recently begun to inhabit, and for Jackie, this shared act of eating ham was a shared act of eating ham, one with a foreground (ham) and a background (Sean's face, tinted window of van), with Jackie positioned at the shared act's center. 2. the aims & aspirations of the theatre of cruelty are analogous with the effects of pastoral magic. pastoral magic is that force which animates the corpse & fills its caverns with the refracted light of a liberated imagination (that is to say, glitter) so that it might convey to the spectator the experience of being one body entirely unified with the spirit of magic, which is by nature entirely pure, often manifesting musically or through a combination of melodic sound and an oversaturated geometry of color. pastoral magic is a natural alchemy. it is the world which we inhabit but it is the world from the other side of a screen. the other side is where the ritual of birth takes place, the magical act of animating a sign. & animation is total synesthesia. the animated text is a total reality analogous to all other possible realities. the animated reality is represented by an oversaturation of surface. everything in this reality exists only in relation to the aesthetic design of said reality. absorption into this reality relies upon the body as a moving gesture composed in ink, through which a disembodied voice communicates, often through music or musicality. because this experience is entirely synesthetic it is possible to experience the animated text in a such a manner that the reality of the experience is perfectly analogous to the experience of actual physical pain. & this is the very goal of the animated text. it is a medium upon which can be written anachronistic gatherings of disembodied voices and mute bodies, a meeting place for the disabled. for example – in the disney version of sleeping beauty she knows prince phillip before they meet in time/space because they have met before in dreams, as specters. in the final scene, the hue of her dress changes constantly and systematically as a result of the imposed power structure of the affection of her fairy godparents, representative of the unwillingness to animate the glyph and just let it signify – it has to remain in a constant shift, because the root is a ghost and ghosts are pure media. because media is always consuming and always excreting. & 5. “The image emerges when the surface oversaturates… Between the ‘binary ears’, the mush gelatin of brain matter, the registering specter also known as ‘trauma light’. Wave a hand through me, I am barely here.” the image is that which signifies signification. signification can only be carried out by a body. the specter or ghost is the image without a body, pure excess of energy seeking to act upon matter but ultimately unable to do so; or, pure; or, nomadic; or, total – expenditure. 6. because a magic ultimately freed from physicality is the ultimate excess, so a language freed from signification is the ultimate excess. in order to have excess one must have value which is to say there must be a unique & un-reproducible material to which all other materials correspond & can be compared, i.e., value is a “concrete conception of the abstract” (artaud). the theatre of media is necessarily based on a system of consumer values. the plague is spread via these values, which infect the bodies & consciousnesses of the consumer/spectator (it is no longer relevant to refer to the acts of consumerism and acts of theatre or their respective players as separate, as consumerism is the constant theatre) with glitter which is the plague & the plague is an exit & material has to leave through a medium. the medium’s the thing & mum’s the scourge when it comes to cruel necessity. children are a glitterplague & birth is a trauma which causes a wound which produces a body & which results in an opening. inside of the opening is a constant present tense. in her manifesto about the “future” of “poetry” joyelle mcsweeney posits that the present tense might be “a continuous interface with death,” possibly caused by the trauma of birth. so birth as a screen; or, a membrane; or, a filter out of which impurities like demons flow. 7. so, birth as the rosetta stone – Aase Berg: “The mother’s relationship to the baby is the root of language, madness and complexity.” : or, the paintings in the guinea pig cave are dancing! such an interface is occult, witchy, twitchy, attractingly-negative, feminine. the child appears like a sign of the plague, attached to but independent of the infected body. the mother is infected with the magic of writing, literally – her body is consumed by the act of writing the code of another being, replicating the code of the plague; her body puts on a giant costume which is made of itself and which signifies, absolutely. & the only cure for motherhood is death. motherhood is the ultimate theatre of cruelty. the female body becomes the location & location itself as a result of natural forces acts through the mechanisms of a variety of other bodies within itself & the physical consciousnesses are subjected to tangible forces & the consciousnesses of the spectator/actor are fused with the creative force of nature to form a constantly expanding & reciprocal being which is necessarily disabled by its own apparatus. 9. the total experience of the theatre of cruelty is to be possessed & to be exorcized; or, to die. to die or be purified. to be a liberated sign suspended in the becoming, the marching fermata of the distended navel. The stage is couch it may be made of caramel in which case the bodies become stuck to it. Therefore the bodies become part of the furniture it is beneficial. The set decays as the bodies decay underneath the stage lights, which is to say, they melt, which is to say, the specials will have to be varied with each performance & eventually the performances may have to take place entirely in the dark or with flashes. an ellipses is a darkness & if so text is a flash. or darkness is white space emptied of it’s potential. or the ellipses are a series of melted analogies : SECOND FAILED ANALOGY. an object made by man for man is a text if it is a body. it is different from itself but it is itself an embodiment of the same. presentation creates an extension of the body which is an analog, analogous to the experience of pain when violence is enacted upon the sign. in this case, the sign is literal, represented by a + this symbol appears under spotlights of white space, not a crucifixion but a fashion victim, a two-headed deer stuck onstage in last season’s dress, macerated by an act of unspeakable violence: “propane to remember it”[i], “a transverse facial scar to be kissed”; = is “a terrible burden like a cello” because it forces display. adornment indicates a desire to be looked upon. a “vulnerably embodied gaze” because it wants to be so : “I want to pretend you are a girl…because it will only last for a moment…” : if the subject is inherently creative the material boundary doesn’t exist : THIRD FAILED ANALOGY : the revolution is based on immaterial boundaries which do not actually exist : translating the immaterial boundary into a physical entity requires that physical violence be enacted upon numerous bodies analogous to the principle of the immaterial boundary : the immaterial boundary requires these bodies in order to manifest : intense pain is “language-destroying” so destroyed language is melted makeup a collapse of pain or violent language a weapon of the revolution as a sublimated form of fucking : : As if good weather meant, no, were wedded bliss: a series of standard phrases or married words, conjugal felicity for instance (for instance for instance). Dark clouds can swirl like dirty tissue in an overflowing toilet somewhere else for all she cares but here and now Fine is the only forecast. There's a spot of blue the BDPD always looks to, willing that bright bit to stretch from horizon to horizon, with maybe a few brushed-on wisps of cirrus for ornament, purely decorative, maybe a bit symbolic (fecundity, etc)—why not? Into every rain a little life and so on, oops, I mean…but not today, not on her day. So out it goes, bad weather, along with spills, miscalculations, iffy temper and anyone who can't—as she puts it—get with the program. Packed off in a box labeled "Just for today" or "Once." So much of what comprises the world as we know it must be heavily, sometimes clumsily, packed up and hefted off-stage "Just for today": her special day. Luckily it's not far to the wings where wars and typhoons are contained and every kind of disaster (from the assassination of a major political figure to a chipped nail) is stacked helter-skelter—we can stagger off there, if we've had one too many, to toss our cookies on the lot. The number of lives lost yesterday in that marketplace bombing and the overthrow of an elected government are back here somewhere with global warning oops warming, under the fear that the divorced parents will make a scene or just refuse to be photographed. It's not that she doesn't understand that the green stain from the unbound stems of her garden bouquet on the hand-beaded duchess satin of her dress is of less moment than not just genocide but even the fender bender that may or may not have given her Aunt a mild case of whiplash on her way to the church: her heart—as she puts it—is in the right place. It's just that everything seems to be a sign, today, or these facts so many claim checks someone else can turn in later, right? For today a dazzling compress should keep those in her flawless blue circle blind to everything but her beauty and happiness. Not here and not now she admonishes the lack of potable water in the refugee camps and her nephew sneaking off to the cloakroom again complaining there's no way to get through this without…. Portents: droopy roses mean there were abuses of detainees, cracked stemware and stained tablecloths are pretty much a confession that the number of civilian deaths was much higher than we thought. That line of green spots down her white skirt is just another way of admitting that, if the pre-nup negotiations didn't kill all affection between the parties involved, both were left distrustful and lawyered up. And the rain, for the storm announces itself (a turning wad of white in the Gulf), means not just that this coalition is unstable and destructive, but that it was always based on a lie, everything, the whole long engagement. I drownproofed myself and the dead babies with shriek vests and we set off across the lake on our raft towards another shore whose inhabitants might welcome us. We were transfigurational pilgrims, the water re-shaped us and we knew that the lake was merely the surface of our dream, like the raft was just a borrowed womb the babies couldn’t leak through. A clergy of crows cropped up as a magnetic chorus on the horizon. I grew fins and amped up our destiny. I was willing to submit to the crows’ reconfigurement, become beak-scarred, learn to speak out from the dungeon where I hoard all my skulls. St. Blake baby projects a dream onto the atmosphere as evidence that life once flickered within him. The dream is a film I enter as a second mother through forest to clearing where I find a boy pulling an object out of a lake. The boy tells me in our secret language that the object is a postcard on which a morphing mouth screams. I believe the boy is frightened as I am frightened of the boy and his prophetic debris. But I am his mother. Let us peer into the mouth together, but the mouth is now a vase—half gray, half red—and we understand that in it loiters the essence of a child. The vase at times vaguely resembles a human face, it keeps changing and makes the boy laugh, now. We drop the vase back into the lake. The lake is my belly. I want the scream back. The Air Force is a thrift store for monarchs and I am one of those monarchs. When I joined the Air Force, I was handed a mix tape of moments when I acted like my parents. I like being a pilot, but I also do not want to wear a mask of my old stuffed animals. So I am relegated to a junior position. I must find the reincarnation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry here in America. I am what you call: yellow yellow yellow which means I am a member of Solid Gold October: a club I have made, where I follow the sun through the trees. It was a video about heat—how it is so elusive to grasp— just up ahead, coming off the pavement. The video had a small man attuned to beer. He was desperately grasping for heat off the top of air conditioners from the night houses which lit his terrible face. He was a small movie leaking memories. What he was felling was from the commercial, but weaker, more true. Because I’m greedy by nature, I can’t let you escape. That you want to get out, I noticed long ago. Also, that you drench me with enmity when I turn back to you, and that you thrust your pale arm forward. That’s all the more reason I don’t want to let you go. I want to keep you under my control, a loose rope tied to you. I want to feed you evil-smelling wine and ham and keep you shut up here all your life. You will serve me every night with your unbathed, dirty body. Rub my arms and legs with tears in your eyes. Caress me with your nailless fingers. I won’t free you. I won’t put you behind the iron door. Decay here in a leisurely manner. Your emaciating body. Your eyes are muddy, you cough horribly, your skin is coarse. You don’t talk, you don’t eat, you don’t act. You can’t even stand erect on your own. Bones stand out on your scrawny body. Medicine has no effect on you. Do you spit it out secretly? Your condition worsens day by day. Your end may be unexpectedly close. I want to be in touch with you. I want to be always in touch with you. With your thin, flat chest, your shoulders, your slender neck. Not to mate, but I want to be holding you. I want to feel human temperature. If you die, your body temperature will be lost. To be in touch with a dead body is pleasant at first. But one gets tired of it in no time, before the day darkens. A dead body is a boring creature. You’ll be no good once you die. You may die if you revive at once. But I won’t tolerate your remaining dead. Are you hoping to die? Your hope won’t be fulfilled. I won’t let you die. And yet you go on emaciating. You only sleep, inert. Do you have an older twin brother? Do you have in this world an older twin brother whose limbs are far skinnier, lips thinner, and whose hair is brown—that is, one with an advanced likeness to you? If you do, call his name wordlessly. Tell him to come here within three days and do the transition work against that day. Teach him the rituals of this room. This will be your last assignment. You can’t die before you finish it. I won’t tolerate a wishy-washy transition. Get to it with that in mind. Sleep forever if you do it to perfection. If you don’t have an older twin brother, you won’t be allowed to die. I’ll call your name many times. I’ll even go to the Nether World to call your name. Wake up and love me. Hold me tight with arms that seem ready to snap. You must stay here until your old, one-eyed mother gives birth to an aphasiac older brother. They’re saying irony is dead. And for a few minutes I thought I might die too—a woman who would buy a fifth of liquor and a pregnancy test just to see the look on the clerk’s face. It’s always strange to be born before the cusp of some new age, hanging onto nothing as if it were Los Angeles. I remember glaring through the windshield of the family Pacer, watching a thirty-foot man crack jokes on the screen. My parents were laughing, but I didn’t get the way something huge and astonishing could be flat, could not exist at all. Sven lies frozen to death in a ditch by the side of a road. His nostrils and lips are pale blue, jacket, pants, and boots encrusted with ice. His eyes have rolled back in his head. I sit alone in a theater. Sven wakes up in bed. He stands, revealing his bare ass, calves, shoulders, and penis. He puts on a sweater and stares at a mirror, touches his stubble. Outside Sven’s house the air is a smoggy gray. We lurk behind various trees as Sven walks to his car with a decidedly grim facial expression. We are at a zany angle directly below him as he opens his car door and gets in. We are in the passenger seat. We are drifting in an aimless, perhaps symbolic fashion outside the cracked dashboard, looking in at Sven’s eyes. Once again we are inside the car. He seems to be having trouble starting it. He slams the steering wheel and mutters an oath that translates into English as “fuckers of shit.” At a café Sven sips an espresso and stares vacantly at the street. We anticipate but do not actually see a single tear dribble down Sven’s cheek. Five to twenty minutes pass in silence. A balding man with a thick beard sits down next to Sven. They talk at length about aesthetics, Foucault, Nietzsche, Faulkner, Jerry Lewis, the economy, the balding man’s wife, his students, and his mistress, who is one of his students. Sven mentions that his car is dead. The balding man mentions the recent deaths of his cat (postal truck) and youngest son (seizure, swimming pool). The balding man invites Sven to his lake house for the weekend. Sven says no, he has to work. The balding man asks Sven if he needs money. Sven says no and thanks him. He tells the balding man not to worry. Sven exits the café, crosses the street, enters a patisserie and buys a croissant. He carries the croissant down the street. I fidget in my seat. My eyes are tired and dry. Sven is in his bedroom wearing long underwear. He gets into bed. I’m on my bathroom floor. I’m reading Joan Didion. I’m masturbating, but noncommittally. I am easily distracted. There is the confusion of past encounters with cinematic history. The Misfits, specifically. Your head – on the outskirts at first - was gauze-wrapped and downcast. Suddenly here I was, the one of us up-sitting. I kept my eyes open. I was careful with the names Monty and Perce. I called you honey, sugar, darlin’. I was working a diner counter in my mind. Your shirt was ripped up the back, the result of a dance or bullfight or unsatisfied woman. I said: Don’t say anything, just be still. I fisted your hair then spread open my fingertips just as easily. I searched my purse for a needle and thread, pushed you forward onto your knees for better angling. I’m not a man, you said. I don't know what I am. (This wasn’t any great realization though I pretended for your sake that it was.) Didn’t anyone ever cry for you before? I said. I hadn’t been crying but I wanted you to know I was willing. Bull or no bull, I’d leak out a tear. I’m not human, you said, which felt for the most part a reiteration. You’re the only person I know who is in worse shape than I am, I said, which was my way of saying when you wreck your car I’ll be the first one on the scene; I’ll run from the party in my heels, pull your upset body from behind the wheel into my lap. The configurations will be much the same as they are now: the immaculate wounds, the distraught face. Maybe you’re not supposed to remember anybody’s promises, I said, but you were already gone. You had shuffled off somewhere I couldn’t see, into the arms of another jealous woman or barside another roughneck ready to stack dollars on your backside. When they write your biography it will be absent the singular love that is a requirement of the genre. To fill this section the author will scramble for female names, of which mine will be one. There will be speculation as to the true nature of our relationship. They will retell the story of your crashed car, of you leaving my party in an inebriated state. They will mention my nine husbands; the men and women squandered. They will refer to us as “lifelong friends;” to feelings defined as maternal. This is the way it goes when I masturbate to Didion. The sentimentality spills forward. I have trouble getting off. I have trouble distinguishing my history from what has been set before me in books and on the screen. I remember everything that was said. The years will do nothing to diminish my affection. I have a needle and thread with me still. I remember no promises. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love The reason that I am so good at love I love I love I love I love I love I love is because I was born seemingly with a fierce aversion I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love to logic I love I love I love I have none when it comes to most things I love I love I love no logic I love I love I love I love I love I love I would be a shitty politician I love I love I love I love I love I don't know my east and north I love I love I love I love I love I love I get angry because I love I love I love I love and I forgive really quickly because I love I love I love I love I love I would be a shitty politician I love I am shitty when it comes to politics I love I love I love I love politics and math I love I love I love I love I love I love I love not to equate them I love I love I love I love I love because one makes sense and the other doesn't I love I love but the one that doesn't make sense makes no sense not because of love I love I love I love but because of power and cruelty and manipulation I love I love I love and love is none of those things although I love I love I love although the masks of love I love I love I love I love are often also the masks of those things I love I love I love I love I love I love masks that I have worn many times and I love I love I love masks that I will surely continue to wear sometimes when I love I love I love I love I have been scorned I love I love I love or when my love feels too hungry I love I love I love and hunger is so mean I love such a mean beast I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love willing to steal or kill in order to be fed I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I have found I love I love I love I love I love I love so many people to love to love to love I love I love to love and at every stage there have been people I have loved I love I love I love just tonight in the shower I was thinking about two women I loved I love I love I love in college I love I love and I love them still and I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love I love and they are sisters I love I love I love and I felt like one of them too I love I love I love I love I love and I didn't like sleeping alone and would sleep I love I love I love I love I love with one or I love I love the other I love and we would huddle I love I love I love so many times I love I love I love within the bonds of a love I love I love I love that we barely paid attention to I love I love I love because we were too busy figuring out I love I love I love I love I love the other loves that were consuming us I love I love and sometimes I love I would be very alone I love I love I love and I would read Anais Nin and I love and Simone de Beauvoir and I love I love I love and I would feel like I was them in my I love I love in my love for them I love I love I love and remembering that tonight I love I love I love I wanted to go back and sit with myself and stroke my head I love I love I love I love I love and say good for you for reading your French women I love I love I love and enjoy yourself I love I love I love I love I love I love I love you I love you I love you I love you I love because I don't know if life will ever feel again quite so glamorous I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you than it does in its exquisite nineteen-year-old sadness I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you and I am so keenly aware I love you I love you I love I love I love of the many things I can't seem to do I love I love I love although I try to change them every day I love you I love you but this thing I love I love I love this love I love I love I love I cannot seem to change it I love you although I wish I could I love you I love I love you because I think I would maybe get more done I love you I love you I love you more written I love you I love I love if I could just stop love I love I love you but I can't stop I love you I love anything I love I love I can't I love even read a map Lucas still has his green harness on, which digs in a bit as he cranes his neck to the port hole. His baggy white t-shirt says "I heart Debra Winger". It is untucked, of course, because nobody tucks a t-shirt into blue cycling shorts. I'm still nervous so as I eat handfuls of jelly-babies, powdered sugar coats my hands. I feign choking slightly and gently blow feathery clouds that descend over the green lines and blue curves and it's not that light so I can almost pretend I am staring at the Earth as we rocket further away. Lucas is. Fixedly. My baggy white T-Shirt says "I heart Erich Fromm". I haven't unveiled it because it seems a little coy now he went down that route. Someone will see it on a T.V. camera before I get changed for bed. I seem to be distracting him. We can still hear cheers from the launch area through the system, and interviews and chats. I draw a love-heart with my sugared finger on a camera and get told off. I write "I'm sorry" and wipe the whole thing. My husband, doctor, his glassy eye, effervescent, a hook on a mirror, spent all year hoarding small codes, “Get over here,” loves medium-sized dogs, me, says, “Promise me there is a chance that my being around will make you feel better,” I promise, then we get on an airplane, land, arrive in Los Angeles with a broken, Broken, and he takes my hand, strangely, I have no fingers, “This hand,” he explains, “is nailed, its circumference,” and I can’t see out, “the veins,” he explains, but I really can’t see out, our productivity, copped, there’s fog, multiplicative, his expertise, dripping, and I love my Husband, Husband, Husband, I saw that you opened your mouth. Now there were three places: school, the rec room, and your mouth. I spun the bottle to role-play an easier mode of chance. I hadn’t invited anyone else in. No one else had asked. I think that is the point of what I’m telling you. These days I wake up. My parents have forgotten to go to the store again. I have no milk for my breakfast. I pull on sweatpants that express my limbs. The sweats apologize over and over, looping cracks. In the mirror I see new outlines of my circumcision. Maybe I am seeing the new room that’s invented by my penis standing out from my legs. I still haven’t invited anyone else. No one has asked. It’s true, my thinking, but sometimes I get tripped up. So are we good? After you left I went in to eat. At the dinner table I felt a breeze before the collision. My mother told me to stop entering rooms as if I could already flip to the subtexts. When her hand was done with slapping it left a sucky vacuum. Part of me fell in and was gone. Some things are just so unpredictable. But the sucky vacuum had a point. I realized I must have been thinking completely about you again. I felt so humiliated. I closed my mouth tight. I resolved to tell you exactly what happened there. I resolved to tell you exactly how I felt. After many sleight-of-hand days the sun squares itself on the white walls. Tart is what your tongue says against the slice you lay across it. Sweet say your molars. This apple grown from graft. Open the myth starred in every core—shiny useless things. Our stem tale sutured. Where your limb would be, I find my violent pleasure. Beauty resides between immutable perfection and the liquid moment grey-green as the twilit wood and ripe with doubt When the black girl who was auditioning for black swan removed her face, the underside was red flesh, and inside her palms lay an inverted face mammal. When the white actresses all freaked out and expunged in their respective bathroom stalls, each toilet resembled a ceramic crown, into which their heads had evaginated. They were bent over, each terraced spine an unhappy flipped smile. When the black girl didn’t get the part of the black swan, she imagined scars as thick as fettucini running down her back, funneling into her crack as some egg and flour pasta rapist offering some alfredo. The scars continued throughout her intestines, out her mouth ending at her tongue. When the black swan negotiated the contour of the man made lake, it saw the ends of two white rectangles poking out of a man’s trench coat pocket, a view rhythmically eclipsed by his wife, as suggested by the metallic noose around their respective ring fingers. The black swan did not know what movie tickets were, and continued counter clockwise around the cement lake. When the black girl watched the husband and wife from park bench, she saw through them at the triangles of negative space made by their walking limbs. She saw trees and then buildings behind those shapes, and finally, behind everything, the swollen arc of the sky splattered by inked fireworks from some quill being flung at the page, that one feather flailing, once flying. Passion in writing or art – or in a lover – can make you overlook a lot of flaws. Passion is underrated. I think we should all produce work with the urgency of outsider artists, painting and jerking off to our kinky private obsessions. Sophistication is conformist, deadening. Let’s get rid of it. I met someone who gave me brainworm recently. I used to think of brainworm as something that I would own and hold. I thought, “The person who gives me brainworm will be mine and I will be theirs.” The new brainworm I found does not feel like something I need to own or hold. It is a thought that continues to eat wherever it wants to eat. I enjoy the feeding of this thought. The feeding is endless. I could let this feeding continue the rest of my life and I would be happy even if I never saw the person who gave me the brainworm. I am so full of brainworm that I am sick. It seems stupid that I could be so happy about having something as dumb as a brainworm. Tonight I ate some cheese. I was one of the last people in a room eating cheese. An elderly woman who reminded me of my grandmother began talking. She talked about the time she saw William S. Burroughs read. She went to the reading because she wanted to ask him a question. A lot of people at the reading just wanted to take William S. Burroughs out and get him drunk to see what would happen. She never asked the question she wanted to ask because she didn’t know how to formulate it. I continued to eat cheese and listen. The elderly woman said, “If I had a chance to ask William S. Burroughs a question now I would ask him: but what about love?” My roommate just got home. He said, “Hellllwwwwwooooo” when he walked in the door. He likes to pretend he is a cat and an Asian when he says “Hello”. When he said, “Hellllwwwwwooooo” just now he was actually saying “Hello” to all the haters who will say they don’t believe in brainworm and think its so heterosexual to believe in something like brainworm. But yes, I have a brainworm that I’m prepared to live with for the rest of my life and not doing anything about.

sample n. The earth vivisects itself before you. It cracks cleanly and diagrams. It wants you to look through the saltwater pools, the thin scales of skin, to the metals and minerals and fire, to the solid inner core. frame sewing tr. v. The English language has several fine idioms for planning ahead. Many involve birds. This romanticizes the concept of organization for drunks and wild children, both of whom have a tendency to lie on their backs and look at the sky. blind stamping tr. v. People fall in love to feel special. They want someone to confer beauty upon them, a half-hidden mark of grace. Tell me what makes me different from the others. Tell me when you knew I was the one. white glue / PVA n. Folks in olden times thought men carried human eggs in their seminal fluid. While we have since learned that procreation is collaborative, that line of thought isn’t unreasonable. What that men make could be more precious? end papers n., pl. I’m notoriously bad at finishing. I empty most of the dishwasher. I memorize most of the lyrics. I butcher the last week of the relationship. The very prospect of finality makes me want to fold myself up. guillotine n. My boyfriend is afraid he can’t feel. When I grab his ribs, he looks confused. When I tickle his nose with a flower, he sputters. When I’m a tempest, he falls to his knees and begs, “Cut my head off, please.” awl n. Miracles exist mostly outside of the digital realm. No one’s written the code to explain my dreams. When machines fail us, we return to the tools from centuries before, to the muscle we’ve always known, to the sweat. Somewhere art has tapped the world like a revelevant religion and brought to its fondle a palpable location you exist inside. You want to live there all fetal. Detroit has its own concurrent apocalypses that smell interesting, shifting kind of pretty, nice and cold, easily pointless, wonder over progress. You just want to die in the gutter a little, decorated with the ruins, you grew into it, fear extends to everyone you meet, but it is happy advice to fear everyone you meet, you thank the city for beatings that never come because you're old now and don't pause long enough to receive things. Here is a space tucked in the city, calamitious, painted static by genius images, escape, a crackheaded bat signal leads geeks there, pockets flipped, fuck living elsewise. The latest installation is a spiderweb of plastic bags, thousands, networked from the entrance, downstairs to the bathroom, maybe two hundred feet of hallway, the bags snake into the restroom, tied around the flusher of each urinal, back upstairs knotted into a single vein, and when you walk briskly it shakes them; you feel your wind travel the building. This is why I want to clean their toilets or hurt myself lifting boxes if they need it. There is sometimes a sense of community in art I want to not believe is happening because goodness doesn't seem real to me. A small dose, briefly nothing is awful, gowned around you like uptopia in seconds, you're moved by art, you connect, more ineffable than anyone's god, you're a tanning bed of churches, spatially bent, not real because real ain't passionate, no stir in a transcript, the experience is yes. Get silly, you're a hustler free of hustle. Yes, I want to look up at some kind of pornography, see the sky reduced awkward as positions. David Antin likes poetry decaying in the landscape. It goes away, is subject to weather, sky writing, he creates moments for the random few passing by. They leave or get snarky or their day explodes and they stop and are maybe revolutionized according to taste, the shape of their head. I don't think I could poesy up some airport with wall street timers (Antin spun big money deals and almost did); I would want it making people fuck their own whole arm. Could you put a guillotine next to a public fountain with the poetry lines visible high up only once your head is all the way entered? The guillotine slams you with a bunch of confetti when you're done. You go about caughing words written on each piece. Assemble them, show your boss. Your boss promotes you. Wait, what community? People think nasty art belongs in jail. I can't even back mine up with theory or compassion. My community is formed by halfway hiding from community. They want all that straight sense and point and clean ethereality. Let the perfect public art be my lobotomy. Think Adrian Piper. More funk in public art. It can't be a leashing. It's not a parade of well-spent taxes. What the fuck is taxes? Are you at the page with intentions? How does it come? It has to be a terrorist act that cracks the mind of whoever random might see. Or they don't see, but still it came out. It's not a baby you pet and school. It's a noose with invitations. Who follows you in, who cares, you did it, dance. The alienation will empty and fill back again like come. Thank You in the City of Steel China My mother aborted me on someone's doorstep. I dreamed of coat hangers. I cried at thrift stores. The people who raised me worked in oil. We ate vats of it for dessert. We were accused of minstrel antics. We were accused of playing violins. They cut us a little bit and promised more. At the hospital, the doctor showed me slides. "These are slides of what you would look like if you were better." They were slides of road kill, slides of pregnant women killed by fire. "Everything drips if you hate it long enough." "I want to go." I said. "You big tease," the doctor said. "Please cough for me." The window showed buildings without spines. In a bomb space, children cornered their dinner. Dinner was shaking and drawing them a treasure map. Children in Steel China are not tickled into believing. Dinner lost its hind legs first. I used mine to walk home (what was left of home) and worshipped random objects. I thought I was funny. Someone saw me in the backyard and threw a large rock at my lap. I dreamed of a girl who had a bruise between her legs where something else was meant to be. Your landmines watch us sleep, doctor. The sky crossed with bombs. We love you here. We're your biggest fans. Economy was your thing back then. Your dreams were made of whispers. (We keep them numbered.) I know, I know—Commission from the mayor, oil knives for feet, make the prison shine. But have you seen three people dropping into the noose hold hands? It fills your heart with good silverware. We send you letters from the stove. In Surgeon's Hall it is cold and bombs announce their arrival. We give them what little of us we can spare. Our meat is so valuable. Our meat is so valuable because we wear it. Even our mirrors are shaped like dollar signs. But don't worry, everyone's paycheck involves disembowelment, castration, bad music. But we are poor here and tremble in closets. We bite our arms and swallow all day. We go to your statue and cry, come home, starve some more. But Thank You is teaching self-defense to the cows. And just the other day Mr. Ostrich robbed a convenience store. He was bored. And look, even this girl's suicide note reads: learn to sing. Yours quite literally, The animals of Steel China Heavy tax fees were no longer fashionable in Steel China. Instead, the citizens were allowed to plan which five years of their lives they wanted to spend in prison. This was economical. This was fair. This worked. I chose puberty. I filled in the box. They came to the house and escorted me out with batons. They said, "These handcuffs are gold, all yours. In them, you would be even more beautiful as a skeleton. We might feed you today or in three months. The chair has caught fire and you must sit down. Water might drip into your eyes for a long time." I killed a man for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I killed a man to eat and stay alive and for every man I killed they gave me another death sentence. They walked by the cell (there was only one cell) jiggling nooses, electric chairs, dogs, family portraits. They walked by the cell with steak and shaved labia. They walked by the cell spraying mace and I tried desperately to eat the clouds, tongue stuck past the bars. "Thank You," they said, "please die." They were polite about how they killed us and always knew my name. Most abortions in Steel China were performed through interpretive dance. The high school debate team always turned into a masturbation contest. At my probation hearing, I showed them my talent for throwing knives. I was released immediately and given a free house filled with taxidermy heads and bombs that had stopped ticking. Everyday I watered the landmines, went back in, and stared at a different head. Small country presidents, former popes, animals —but those were too beautiful to watch stuffed. They looked like they were going somewhere. "Would you like a sandwich?" I asked them. "I only eat sandwiches now and sit down when I want." I felt like my own bacteria were tired of my voice. Or they were listening, but they were listening with headphones on. I laid money on my chest and told them to take it. I pretended there was a catalogue from which I could order tiny microphones. I watched through a microscope. They were constantly eating. "Chew me faster," I said. "You're so petite." 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. A pulse asset with glorious visions, the green river flown out of the cave, an enormous hammer making from pulp some distinct love (as say, the Swiss for their snow). A great discretion. When the tenure committee said au revoir I was, understandably, miffed. Now with you here and your little dog I can lecture all night long, and then scrape my teeth on your thigh. A candle burned down my love – and that is only God’s anger – as it does rise in the morning so it will set at night. Winter. The creme de la creme of the forest. I treasure every little thing you neglect for me. In the quaint book of lessons, let one more be recorded. They are to each other after and on the flower near the crackling fire next to each other but when she looks she’s no longer looks at him. Looks at him. She’s not there looks at him. No longer on, she’s not there, the lone floor of Freeman’s living room and/or the opera stage where the deafening noise, rather, from our crowd’s spoke-woken her. She must have passed, missed, slipped out, slipped, must have hurled herself in the path of a hurled pointy hat. The crowd’s on their endingly feet singing neverendingly songs over and over, the song Cassandra beguttoned a day or so ago. Oh Reuben, oh Reuben, offstage jumping: keep it going, yes yes, keep singing, keep it going. But she’s jumped and banged and heaven’s sake and sang enough for heaven’s sake, was just pointed-hat-hurled on stage for heaven’s sake, hurled in the pointed hurled hat with a head. The crowd sobers when the loss of their leader is lost from the strange of the onstage. They file, the crowd, out of our theater seats whistling like a bird-caller army in their cars, near their dinners, at their desserts, within dreams, out from deserts, under oceans, sleepwalking-whistling to kitchens preparing two egg in the morning salad sandwiches. Freeman prepares himself and his components, the components of the egg salad sandwich at two in the morning with his kitchen around him, tea kettle whistling. Whistling. No longer whistling. Can you barely? You’ll need to look closer: Cassandra fashioning at Freeman’s kitchen table, the square one, eyes open, a mug of tea, ghost roses parading and the donkey playing a cello In my left arm I keep a fear of dogs. A fear of bees in my right. The soil informs me of a world without the distinctions of language. Let’s talk about this on the telephone. The use of electronic devices is permitted only when the cabin doors are open. In review, a way to open the doors. The memory of a river: a meadow to one side. Dogs splash in the shallows. The orphans toss them food but the dogs will not touch it. By food, I mean their dead. Only one, the largest, tears flesh from a canine skeleton. The orphans whoop. The cannibal dog has the head of a man. I tell Beretta this story. She asks about the bees. When I was seven I trod on a wasp. Here, flight as the contrary of death. A wasp is not a bee. How do you know? You weren’t there. In review, a way to reinforce solitude. The cannibal dog has the head of a man. These are developments beyond Design, as Beretta would portray herself. An anomaly, with plumage similar to the modern day peacock. Able to subsist on soil but with a preference for lilacs. I have taken to sleeping in a miniature coffin. Everything I know I learned from birds. Many old wives’ tales persist in town, such as: take an orphan child hunting, you will return with threefold the bounty. Although law forbids observing such advice, a hard winter is coming. Some adults decide to take a few of these unfortunate children into the woods. The hunt yields nothing. After several days the adults become frustrated, and the already grief-stricken children know something is wrong. Sunlight does not pass through the tree canopy, and the children see ever more owls and bats. They sneak away from the hunting party and wander the forest. Nightjars and swifts circle, alight on their arms, pinch them. Swallows dive and take tufts of their hair. Exhausted, the children crawl into the undergrowth. They feel safe and sleep, but wake without memory of themselves. When they cry it is the sounds of the whippoorwills. The nightingales become their mothers, and pheasants usher them to winter quarters. Meanwhile, the adults have returned to town to face the others. Everyone grimaces, hearing only what they decide to understand. They call him hatchet-head, spoon-nose, moon-face. His friends are a worn-out bicycle and the family dog, who is graying and slow. They barely endure his talking at home and his mother frequently buries small talismans in the backyard after his father has gone to sleep. One night she nods off in the yard, waking to find her son holding a bouquet of fiddleheads, puffballs and sumac. She feels very hot, as though the sun is out. But it is only that the moon has risen to a brightness she no longer anticipates and she hears the river recede into its rocky bed. Her son’s face is nodding and difficult to see, yellow in a blurring glow. The town is definitely cursed but some decide to stay there anyway. They watch their screens carefully to help figure out where to burn the leftover parts. They should not forget their protectors, they say to one another. They should remember to chlorinate the water and bathe every third day. The women can be assembled in one area to watch the food. It’ll work itself out once the clouds blow away to the east. The screens have a steady flickering pattern that interferes with live broadcasts of unsmiling wide-shouldered men in heavy suits. The dogs of the town lie in a heap and cough, shuddering with every breath. One day in June all the baby starlings appeared, just like that: born of nothing but curses. Hurrh-hurrh-hurrh of their feeding throats drowns us out. Insect parts litter the streets, that white shit everywhere and dead robins too. The witches come out and stand on their front porches, clapping their hands to draw the starlings in for the night. Sickness has struck all over town, children falling one by one, their little organs gracefully shutting down, fevering away from consciousness. Mothers try clapping their hands but birds just hit the windows. They have been banned from the local swimming pool and their parents complained about the trenches they dug in their backyards, so the three girls meet in the colorless dawn by the pond near the highway. People in the cars going by seem not to notice. The girls hold each other’s hands and wade into the shallowest part of the pond, shivering violently. They kneel down and take turns inhaling the stagnant, rusty-tasting wetness, the microbes and the dirt. Now they cannot be seen from the road at all. Each day they return to practice their underwater breathing. When it does flood the following month, they laugh and swim gloriously between the submerged houses like underage mermaids, lithe among bloated debris. 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 Contrary to modern canons, the grotesque body is not separated from the rest of the world. It is not a closed, completed unit; it is unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits. The stress is laid on those parts of the body that are open to the outside world, that is, the parts through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world. This means that the emphasis is one the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose. Loss of self meshes with the aesthetics of decoration, for it ushers in a movement into objecthood, where the submissive becomes decorative; desirable and even arousing in the material qualities of her bodily arrangement. But a move into materiality raises other questions in film, where materiality, the ontological, and the fetishistic pleasures of seeing people as things lead us to the grounding qualities of the medium. Beatty’s films eroticize the decorative as a form of cinematic materiality, making the spectator aware of the closeness of their pleasures and, indeed, provocatively staging the masochistic as the cinematic. The individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. he tries to look at himself from any point whatever of space. He feels himself becoming space… He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is ‘the convulsive possession.’ Nobody kills me when I am bright. I have a ha-meaning when I black out rotten on beds. A rotten bed is a bed with the consistency of beautiful candy and children’s arms. A rotten bed is also called a rancid bed when there are teeth involved. When you pronounce rancid you have to show your teeth. A rotten bed is a spectacle for the folk marching through an infested body. Watch me when I am inserted and pilfered with in the crowd. I will not break. In Japanese my hand method is called “tebori.” It has to do with riots and girl parts. Watch me pronounce the word. My lips look like a tulip. All the sensory antennae vibrate. When I wake up the make up has been wiped off and the fists are sprinkled with gunpowder. Come on, emerge as imago. In the Rampant State, nobody understands how to clean the ganglia. Nobody knows how to thread it, how to abuse it, how to interrogate prisoners with it. In the Rampant State all the torture devices involve drowning or lynching. The General wants to lynch all the black male bodies with moths. He uses obvious innuendoes, to make sure his base understands him, but he cannot say it openly. To do so would be to offend the refined tastes of his base. If anybody accuses him of racism, he replies that the accusers are "playing the race card." I am playing the race card with a revolver pointing to my head. The revolver has an autonomic system. It is loaded with two silver bullets: one for my black brain and one for my insect nerve. I got off in the fog of Port Trakl, searching for the bar of good fortune to chat about my trip. But everyone stared at the polar stars in their drinks, silent like the sea off a desert island. I went out to roam the red-lit streets. Perfumed and bored women, selling their tired bodies. “In Port Trakl poets come to die,” they said, smiling in all the languages of the world. I gave them poems I planned to take to my grave as proof of my time on earth. A myth among other things Is basically in the category of an idea The vibration — radiation of an idea Activates itself manifested synchronization. A lie among other things Is basically in the category of a myth. The myth is of images, Because the myth and that which is of the myth Is the activator of unlimited imagination .......... Parallel to or more........... Synchronized to that which is not. Everything is of a particular science And myth is no exception Witness: "Science-fiction" And the manifestation of its self To a living what is called reality Or so-called reality. As a science Myth has many dimensions And many degrees Tomorrow is said to be a dimension of myth Or even the very realm of myth itself. When it is said that "Tomorrow never comes," Thus when we speak of the future, We speak of a lie, Because the future is tomorrow And tomorrow never comes. Politics — Government by experts and administrators. Delegate the shaping of policies and the control of experts to a body of "jurors" replaced automatically at given intervals, chosen from outstanding persons in all fields. Abolish politicians, parties, voting. Perhaps have referendums. Voting and active participation on mainly regional, labor and such levels where participation is concrete and comprehensible. Find and channel some geniuses into creative administrative and diplomatic work, instead of excluding them from such leadership. Risk: nothing can be worse than the present predicament of power games on local and global levels between smalltime politicians whose sole expertise lies in acquiring and keeping power. Pleasure — "The ecstatic society ". Research and planning in order to develop and mass produce "art" as well as "entertainment" and drugs for greater sensory experiences and ego-insight. New concepts for concert, theater and exhibition buildings; but first of all pleasure houses for meditation, dance, fun, games and sexual relations (cf. the "psychedelic discothéque" on the West Coast, and the multiscreen discothéques of Gerd Stern and Andy Warhol). Utilize teleprinter, closed-circuit TV, computers, etc., to arrange contacts, sexual and other. Incite to creative living, but also approve "passive" pleasures by means of new drugs - good drugs, strong and harmless, instead of perpetuating the use of our clumsy, inherited drugs, liquors, stimulants. Refine the activating (consciousness-expanding) new drugs. And develop euthanasia drugs to make dying easy, fast and irrevocable for terminal cases and prospective suicides. The risk of people not caring to work anymore would be eliminated by the fact that people would have superficial benefits attractive enough to make it worthwhile to work in order to obtain them. 2. We were interested in gothed-up spectacles, grotesque fantasia, unhealthy bodies, spasmodic bodies, bodies that jerked like dolls, epileptic bodies that performed their fits in strange outfits and B-movie scenarios. We were interested in art and media. We were interested in disability theory and translation theory (We wrote a manifesto of “The Disabled Text”, which didn’t win us too many friends. We lost our hearing.). We were interested in kitsch and decadence. We were interested in the energies and upheavals of the historical avant-garde, but not so much the formalist orthodoxies that they had become. We were interested in all those tasteless dimensions of art that poets of the official verse cultures seemed so eager to condemn and ridicule. We were interested in the sublime art that both these poetries seemed scared to touch. We were interested in total art. 3. Ugh. 4. We were ridiculous. We were heroic. (We were antiheroic. We were ridiculous.) 5. We enacted an ambient violence in the balloon rooms and with wreckage posters. (After Katrina, we watched refugees riding in Army buses like prisoners, and prisoners riding in school buses. Traffic stopped for these convoys as for an army of Jackie Kennedies. At the front of the white homecoming parade, a white drum major. At the front of the black homecoming parade, a black drum major. The white homecoming court wore tuxedos and gowns. The black homecoming court wore business suits.) After Katrina, we discovered stray dogs in the streets of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. 6. We gave them names like Culture, War and History. 7. (The dog’s real name was ‘Corndog’. Then we went to vote in the garbage truck garage. Some of the garbage trucks were out on their routes, leaving room for the voting machines. Garbage in, garbage out. Another night, another concession speech. Kim Hyesoon’s next Action Books title: All the Garbage of the World Unite) 8. We were not interested in poetry that made us feel ethical or too refined for this world. (In labor we developed uncontrollable bleeding normally suffered during labor by cocaine users and fifteen year old girls. This complication was called an ‘abruption.’) 9. We were interested in Artaud, Genet, Vallejo, Bataille, the Beats, Plath (but the hysterical Plath, the surrealist montageiste Plath, not the recuperated Plath Craftswoman), Hanna Weiner, Jacobean revenge fantasies, (Langston Hughes the Red montageist,) comic books, fetishes, spells, Finland Swedish Dadaists, (Brazillian Swede Oyvind Fahlstrom’s board games to bring about the ecstatic society, and his invented language, Birdo, a language made up entirely of bird cries, into which he translated Poe’s the Raven; Alice Notley; Harryette Mullen;) fashions shows staged in hospitals, automatons staged in circus tents, deers shot in circus tents, hallucinations staged in the White House, televisions stages with fat bodies, bleed-outs staged in the snow, the plague the plague the ouch-it-hurts disease. We staged our parties at anti-abortion rallies. The sun is mango. Cut open the day. Left uncut, the evening. We swallow sunlight Making strong muscles. While we sleep Sunlight flows into our blood Travels throughout our body. On its journey meets Another piece of sunlight. Today’s possibility: 56.7%. Every month or so there comes a new Moses, babies left bullrushed on the river, sometimes there are notes though more often there aren’t, fourteen so far, What to do with the Moseses? the newspaper asks regularly, and for now the answer is the same as for any other question. With the right scar on your eyebrow you can join the coalition of young men who take to the riverbanks, painted aboriginal, daily knifing through underbrush; with the right recommendation you may secure a job underground, two hours of each of your days spent waiting, you will call yourself a Caser, as in a Just In _____, as in: fans meet feces and you’ll have to become part of The Answer. 1:52pm makes him terribly anxious, for reasons unknown: not 1:50, not even 1:55, just 1:52, and when the boy packs his bag he’s everyday packing for oblivion or two quiet hours, eternity or an afternoon. A book, sheets of paper, pens, a picture of his family, strawberries wrapped in a damp tea towel, a spent plastic film shell of chlorine tablets. He loads his satchel, glancing around his room, and somehow the familiar cry of wolf is still lost on him: look anywhere and say goodbye and pretend that’s not your reedy voice, windy and breezing. Pretend you’re sure this isn’t the wolf. Goodbye mom. Goodbye Bill the bird. Goodbye green sofa and you too Daphne Waphne. Goodbye picture of dad waving, just next to the door in the kitchen: he leaves from his job downtown. Children under twelve are allowed to travel with their parents, over twelve have to go alone, and the boy is fifteen. Daphne Waphne, eight, waves, stops waving, waves smaller. Ha ha ha, wait…maybe only two ha’s, maybe just one. He kisses his mom’s cheek and walks out the door, following the same route to the edge of the city each day. Once there his chemistry forces him to consider cardinal points, but it’s always simple: south. Down the only direction left. The city is built around where a big river crescents east for a mile and a smaller river branches off. For $3, anyone can call a number that reports the most unsafe places. The boy walks south, through four minutes of bells tolling and cars honking, and when he looks at the sun he’s not scared anymore: when he was younger his mom told him that he’d burn out his eyes, go blind, go mad, staring at the sun, and now as he walks south he thinks: maybe it’ll be today, thinks: I don’t know what to see anyway. At 2:05pm silence settles like a dare, no one speaks at 2:05, and along the river the giant clock blinks digitally, different colors depending on factors no one’s sure of despite the clock being tax funded. 2 blink 05, 2 blink 05, sixty blinks and another minute passes during which It hasn’t Happened. For it is the essential tragedy that a character is trapped in his own free will, trapped in a complex; the ambiguity of motive is such that he does not understand why he is acting in the way he does, nor why he fails, but only that he acts always within that futile circle whose nature becomes apparent only at the last second, at the unreachable point of awakening. This is brain injury awareness. We cover our faces with our hands to communicate our displeasure at being so confused. We put all of our octopi in one eye. It’s not pretty. It’s nothing to scream about. We scream and scream. Stay so silent, give up all your small machines and still you might be standing still. What can I say to you, darling, When you ask me for help? I do not even know the future Or even what poetry We are going to write. Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people Than either of us have tried it. I loved you once but I do not know the future. I only know that I love strength in my friends And greatness And hate the way their bodies crack when they die And are eaten by images. The fun’s over. The picnic’s over. Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left After you die or go mad, But the calmness of poetry. There was a boy born in the projection booth of a tower in the sky far away from the Earth as we know it; from the demons in sycamores and cookie jars of thieves and dirty grass and clinics for the sick. At the top of the tower, cloud-swirled, it was never bright as the sun below it, nor dead dark, but rather calm and eerie with baby colors, canary yellows and soft blues. Like one of those picture books. His name was Oat. The walls of his home were so blank they glowed. Reels of film coiled like snails through a hundred shelves. There was film in his head, sponges of Fellini and Ford, Father Cassavetes and cellular Scorsese. Kurosawa gave him buckteeth and the spaghetti cry of a samurai. M. Bay gave him grief and made him sick with nasty allergies. Kubrick rang the stars of his tears like bells. Guillermo showed him in his sleep the way that moss grows on trees, the shades of purple that consume forest ponds. His eyes were dark and reeling. His skin was quilted, like a pumpkin’s. He was born with a plague in his mouth, his head became haunted by lice, his knees weak and unpredictable. His belly ached for hours after a good laugh. Oat was a silly little ass, motherless fatherless, a thing spawned quite alone in an attic. Imagine dreams and planetariums. 8mm of mucous. When he brooded, his eyelids fluttered and went tututututut, twitching candlelight on the wall. If he wept, he did so silently until he hiccupped, and old cartoons splattered the walls. Jan Švankmajer packed the rockets of his skeleton with clay and paste, he made Oat’s genitals new and man-like. He had the polished gold testicular of an Oscar. It was in Hepburn, Holliday, ye olde dazzling Hollywood that he found desire. A rose bloomed in the part of his body where F.F.C. poured vats of wine-red blood-red soil. Oat was curious about slapping a woman in the car of a black locomotive, and inhaling tobacco after making sizzling love, and complimenting a pair of gams and painted toenails. He would know he was shy, and, though endearingly so, quite unbrilliant with females—if only he had ever encountered another human being. He had never. He would know he was sensitive if he paid attention to what it meant to be tough; instead, he gushed over the exquisite lighting of a brutal moment, the crystal clear babble of a river rosy with blood. If he knew himself, Oat would know that when he cried to music, Mary Pickford’s blush crept comfortingly into his cheeks. One day, he made the bold decision to have a birthday. The projection booth was a party of colorful birds, fruit trees, ghosts of Indian warriors. “Soy Cuba!” his eyebongos rejoiced. A hundred different films overlapped a hundred others, turning the walls like pages. Madly he danced, buckteeth gleaming. Hanging out the stone window, he drank dinosaur cocktails in bat country, hollering the horizon bedtime stories of T. Gilliam’s fantasia until the sun had gone. “BAH!” he wailed to his room of metal shelves. He leaned back out the window. Paper angels tiptoed up his spine. “Bah ha ha!” Cocks In an empty asshole Blinded dark By Bird form and fish dread of an untitled Flora eye, Contain the evocative and Dreamlike hesitation Of a journey calmly dissolving Into roots Infernally Libido blurring The skeletal mist of gushing decals Slender Perfect & future tenses Lend their cloud-perspectives To my insistent dying me:yeah they are most interesting. whatever, who cares, i'll make a sad baby Cara:I'd love your sad baby me:yay me too Cara:my baby will be angry Cara:full of joyous rage me:that sounds great Cara:we shall put them together and see what happens me:mine will be full of jouissance ara:jouissance means orgasm me:yes, but in the lacanian sense, where it is pleasure to the point of pain. my baby will be full of jouissance and angst Cara:lacan had orgasms too. oh is that his schpiel? but that's not brilliant, that's just sado-masochism Now the deer fever tears apart cells inside my ravaged, already so harrowed leather body. In my breath, tracks of moon wind are smarting against the throat and windpipe. I have moved around the deer, I have fastened my fibers to the hard dancing deer. Steam rose from frozen wells, ice floes chafed the channel, cold sweat broke out of the skin wall between my being and the cold. It was a hopelessly treacherous time. I have moved around the rare glass deer of September. I have moved around the timid water, by the closed border of the fiber deer. And the crack rushes through the black glass. It crackles and shimmers, it quakes in the deer, it quakes and quivers in the breastbone deer. The leather falcon flies north in sky-shrieking torture. There is a light in the deer, there is a light in the deer, there is a light deep inside the cavity deer! Now the blood surface song surface is heaving! It quakes through me and the deer. Fibers ache in my sharp border. Now the painful deer tears now it breaks. Now the deer and I burst and are exposed - I can only imagine how hard it must be for you to believe me. I mean, to hold blame. I mean, to be you. At least embarrassment is not an imitation. It’s intimacy for beginners, the orgasm no one cares to fake. I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise. At any rate, this moment was important, wasn’t it? Even though no one remembers why.

No one loved time like Milton Chesterfield. He loved dates, regardless of what events they marked. He loved all the times of day: dusk and dawn, noon and midnight. He loved the weeks and the months, especially the leap-year fluctuations of February. He loved minutes and he loved all of the hours. He wound watches of all sizes and colors and wore them, bands of mechanical wonder stacked from his wrists to his elbows that thrilled as their ticking vibrated his body. His eyes met mine, full of eager gleam. “Do you want to know the time? In Dublin, Paris, Cairo, Beijing?” “My watch’s microchip can tell me that,” I replied “I don’t need sixty different watches.” “Ah, but you have forty radios at home, all tuned to different stations.” “That’s different,” I protested. “It’s faster than turning the dial.” “It’s faster to glance at my arms than fiddle with tiny buttons.” “But why should you want to know the time in Tokyo or Timbuktu?” “Because there’s time everywhere. I mustn’t lose track of it.” “What’s the time at the South Pole?” I demanded. “You know, where all the time zones converge? It must be every possible time all at once.” Milton clutched his head. The next time I saw Milton Chesterfield, he was wearing shorts. From his ankles to his knees were more watches, evidently with extra links in the bands, or much longer straps adapted from belts. Even more formed a collar—all the time in the world spinning him from head to foot. I couldn’t help myself. “What time is it at Mount Olympus on Mars?” I asked him. He staggered, aghast; and clutched at his chest. Ticker trouble. He’d need a pacemaker now. I went home and turned on all my radios at once. And I felt like God. I dreamt you had a box You were going to press the button You hid behind a door so I couldn’t see you The plane keeps going down The brown grass blows aside Death is gun-slow

The man in the brown suit had fingernails as sharp as knives. He was born like this, but his body never adapted, so there were little coin-sized curls of printless skin across his palms from all the times he’d balled his hands into fists before remembering. Also, his forearms were mangled from childhood mosquito bites he’d scratched at in his sleep. Also a little behind his knees, but no one on the plane could see, because of his brown suit. It was a dark brown suit, the color of a tin of hot chocolate.
“Phan-TAS-ma-goria! Meta-more-pho-SEEZ! Come see what the gods have wrought! Come see the fierce Order of Virility! Young blood and high blood, fair cheeks, and fine bodies! Manhood: the greatest show on earth! Step right up! Ten cents please.” This is no joke, though I joke. Though I play at barker I’m part of this sideshow. Professor Ike Schilling, my most familiar self, is himself constellated for his wickedness among these many dark stars. And not only constellated but—as I can show you—made the centerpiece, as if we were the constellation of the pig and I the apple in the pig’s mouth. Conspicuously, around my neck hangs the logo of our guild, what we as a Klan have allowed carved of our flesh. It looks innocent enough: a jaunty decoration, dangling embellishment. But remove it from the neck and it is a snare for young hares. Or gripped in a fist and yanked upwards it is a halter—homey in some way, of one’s own making. And yet it has not always been so. I have not always been a member of this Order, this thumb’s smudge in ink. (A stern hand grips the back of my neck. Is that you, God-the-father? Whose side are you on? He insists that I say that “not always having been a member of the Order” means only that there was a time before I was caught and known.) As recently as 1932, the hermaphrodite (whose presence on my left is manliness’s lone irony) and I were free to tour the dusty back roads of Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana through towns of people stupefied by corn. How eager they were to see a man who could buckdance on a wagon tongue, who sold bottles of liver syrup with pictures of Cassandra of Crete on the label, and who allowed those most disturbed at heart to gaze by lamplight on the boy’s complicated sex. Yes, the “boy” was museum quality. He rivaled Miss Ada Scott, whose skillful handling of snakes has astonished thousands in this country; the Princess of Zirmekia; the Horned Man; the little armless wonder; the two-headed girl; old Black Simmons, who has been turning white for years; Kee Kee the hot iron performer; Jones, the glass eater; big Winnie Johnson, of 500 pounds weight; the spotted boys; the man alligator; old whistling Charley; Kuro, the Congo Giant; and the ossified man. But the boy’s lure was special and deep. And while he exhibited to a man the folds and textures of his grotesque essence, I demonstrated for the client’s wife the soothing subtleties of an oil, unguent, obtained of an albino ram, found only in tenebrous Irkutsk. For Professor Ike Schilling has a “freak” of his own: I was born in a desert and raised in a lion’s den. My only true occupation has always been taking women from their men. Frequent reflections of an enlarging moisturizer for noses on days when the heat gives off till the shower holds. Bellies with excellent soup height unwill and cleave to oceans days of nailed in hearts. Now the light east feeding tunics where its germ inhabitants the rays of the sun that is also all over the country. Finders playful old holes make it seem like trash. Narrowly faded times but with joke spite. Await to be even the lost scripture that puts you at the top of your hairs green season. He stole rubies not the thought of having to eat with one eye. The man opened his only face to see that the ceiling was itself a blanket. The old man dreamt his succubus towards a lightly adrift face. Some sod in the house of a light rain between the music and the candles of a light that burns. Finally it feels okay to use the rug square to illicit at least the feeling of a cowboy that has gone through some tough events. On a sexual position for angle needing softer music in the air while we smell the edges of real nurse sleeves. Losing the flavor of the fruit to the beat sometimes our only taste of hell in the eyes of these vermin with a sandwich just to bleed. A cot that looks around at the radar like a photo on a lot in the deep south. Summer is the glass parade to dream stupor. Give me daughters to be this love and see this happening on a face with some winter light. Her eyes in the future with the pants in the corner like one hundred and seven years of struggle. Only hustles in the jeeps that need to be their own hatred. We toil like the lost mirth feeling the help through groin of a taped together squadron in his eyes only colors go so beautiful and tear up reluctant just to taste the hubris of a wasted year. Waiting for the light to mimic the films of tuberculosis with paint our white weed hair. I put my self in a bottle where it grows pale and hairless, swimming in its milk of formaldehyde. There’s not a lot of wiggle-room but it is exceptionally well-preserved. Every once in a while it catches my eye from the display case, as it pushes round against the glass and my face floats into view. Earlier than ever this morning I wait for copy to vacuum. It must be free of error and the deadline is near. But what matters today isn’t news about war, poverty or race riots ripping the city. What matters today is the warm quicksand of that good woman under me again, taking me in. Let her writhe, let her tug at her knees, let her legs go off in every direction. Let her take what I have and lunge for more. I’ll be here forever, a bee crazed by the honey buttering her thighs. I am permanently serious. I believe people are far too young for one another. Night comes in like body hair we shave all night. We were first seen protrusions wearing silk socks flatulence from bathers to a healing spring I swallowed the mother for better or worse handwriting liquid skin stretching to assign the instrument world strapped with explosives I throw a trenchcoat over its back walk it to the next available teller his clubfoot crossing the easel painting with mop water fucking itself spreading on toast melted butter from the grossest animal that still gives milk Days have horizon strapped to my wrist I tap the clock face. No seeds! whoever listens to me wants to keep their life I chop off my fingers and dealing them out see who has the shortest straw then I say some stuff in Italian it all seems like an opera people begin to behave decently Stars in the viaduct I know at night I’ll have to go around with a shovel burying reflections so there’s no evidence of conspiracy no telling the animal suffers of what but it dies from a good carrot to dangle We would dance the Milk Chocolate Caramel Tart With A Foamy Peanut Elixir, on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, Paris like tout le monde until our feet hurt. They really did. They hurt because our feet were foamy. But foamy feet don’t stop love. Plum Brown Butter Financier with Late Harvest Riesling Ice Cream, always used to say: foamy feet don’t stop love. It beguttons the buttoning of alarms or the on of the radio. Somewhere pianoish, Rachmaninoffish. Awake. A little chilly. In the hall where the hall rolls bathroom-toward near the mirror and our donkey, a bit of trouble, of seeing himself clearly. Nevermind that. He dabs drips which are of a muskier something. The mezzo-soprano sang, then bang, ended, the audience sang, off with their pointed hats. 1 It means an envelope of conversation appears on a map, and is stationary like the whim between. 2 In a cartoon, a hat expands When it is a pasture, 2 1/2 2 5/7 2 11/16 memory pries open the usual, melodious vials of instruction, semi-acoustical vowels, the anti-romanticism 3 accustomed to linger on porches. Ecouter et parler, 4 blowing doe-eyed lavender shoes in wind weighed like macaroni. 5 thus, you are my lips glued to the ocean. 6 Like a coupon facing a mirror, the computer enters the moon's tendencies, 7 Figure is doubled. The arm is inside. 8 An indisputable grey pom-pom on the scale of years. 9 Dear motion -- faced desk 10 Here is a glove compartment for what you considered to be marriage whosoever knots sensimilla on the scale of believability. 11 On high, the kidskin glove is half naked, and dumb. 12 The audible hand touches. 13 You is also described. One is forced to be spontaneous. 14 If the hand stops to touch your mouth, it makes an unnatural motion, and the parchment is destroyed. FISH BONES OR OTHER ACCIDENTAL BONES ARE TAKEN BETWEEN FINGER AND THUMB AND REMOVED BETWEEN COMPRESSED LIPS PITS AND SEEDS MUST BE EATEN QUITE BARE AND CLEAN IN THE MOUTH AND DROPPED INTO THE CUPPED FIST AND THEN ONTO THE PLATE THE PITS OF STEWED PRUNES OR CHERRIES THAT ARE EATEN WITH A SPOON ARE MADE AS CLEAN AS POSSIBLE IN THE MOUTH (WITH THE TONGUE AND TEETH) AND THEN DROPPED INTO THE SPOON WITH WHICH YOU ARE EATING AND CONVEYED TO THE EDGE OF THE PLATE BUT IT IS HORRID TO SEE ANYONE SPIT SKINS OR PITS INTO A SPOON OR INTO THE PLATE UNLESS REALLY DRY AND WITH LIPS COMPRESSED Every body is a leaking body Some practices try to control the leaking but the leaking is too strong with its five ancillary roots reaching to the great estuary. I know because the practices are in my body much like the leaking. The attempt to control the body and the leaking is sometimes pleasurable, always futile. Eying the world through a rear view mirror, I have often believed dusk to be my favorite season because even though it does not last long, it comes more frequently than autumn, my second favorite season. Perhaps this is why I like it: dusk feels like autumn (and when I say this, wait for the undertow beneath the sound) but passes quicker and lighter on the heart. It tastes like horseradish and brings me to the front door of a home like a nightmare caught in the folds of my heart, a sense fluttering like a scared bird bleeding rusted leaves. This is the home I am always backing towards, looking forward and moving backwards (consistently amazed at how everything moves farther away.) The Russians have an untranslatable word for this: toska. A feeling like eying the world in a rear view mirror when you leave some girl you love at dusk some day in autumn and all your breath gets caught in that one moment after you hope she waves but before she does. I’m sitting beneath the live oak, wishing the plane blinking above me was a satellite that would shoot images of Darin back down into my brain so I could print them out and paste them on the wall. I have to keep looking at this one picture of him to remember how his jaw was and on which side of the moon he parted his hair Do you enjoy the earth? Beyond violet, waking disheveled stranger What can you say of vocabulary? Chasing means wearing someone else's departure Are the trees tall in side your lungs? Heirloom wings fold themselves into a factory When do you turn a page? A stack of pianos stare in through my window The black man's eyes are liquid dark and pour down into him, dissolving into his blood. They circle through his heart, his groin, his legs, his belly. They flow up to his neck and through his head and pull back out his eyeholes. Errors have been made, lies perpetrated, mischief carried out, but this is war. a husband and wife who are sickened by the speech of their daughter. Literally. So sickened that they have to leave her. A situation so bad you’d have to abandon your child. 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. They would haunt, let nothing be built there. Pilfer and break. All the foreman’s nails disappeared. Buyers would fear the ghost of the place. How it angered — no sudden noise, no late-night working, keep the moonlight. Buyers would feed stories to their youngest children: do not walk the lot alone. They slept beside rubble, woke with bodies pocked by stone. They ran their hands across this stubbled flesh. Hold fast to me, one said. The other said nothing, did not let go. I lit a fire with waterproof matches: Grandmother washed the dishes in the bath and put them in the cupboard before getting dressed. Her flesh the color of fall leaves, withered and brittle, more attached to the linoleum than the bone. This is a waterproof fire: What is God? I asked Grandmother. She handed me an address and a room number. Grandmother never taught me how to hit, how to fold my fingers at the knuckles into a fist but not to fold the second joint into the palm. This fire is hot and not wet: I showed Grandmother a biblical passage that contradicted her involvement in PETA. She showed me a biblical passage that contradicted my involvement in Christianity. This is not a quilt: I hit the man who lived behind the room number. I wondered if the man knew my grandmother never taught me how to hit. I wondered who taught the man how to be a face. This is definitely a fire: I cried because I wasn’t sure why I was hitting the man, and because his face broke my fingers. I cried for both of us, and laughed for one of us. I did not weave a quilt with waterproof matches: Grandmother never taught me how to hit, but she taught me how to inherit arthritis and stomach cancer. This is not a wet quilt: I looked at my face in the mirror, at my face in her mirror, at my face and her mirror. I forgot I used to want to be a firefighter. When a whale dies, its corpse becomes a city. It sinks to the ocean bed and sea creatures swim through it. It becomes their shelter. Decomposition is both life and a second protracted death that comes after death. This is the way people talk of The Sovereign: the way a city looks from a plane, his neck pocked by arable fields, his cul-de-sacs and hedgerows. When I was younger I saw no distinction between God and the sun. Buratino knows the same: it is not enough to be real. He was born for the clouds. The first thing that happened was the glass, though it probably wasn’t the first thing. Other possible first things include a slow wind that moved through the house at night, small slugs clinging to the fogged windows in the morning, and a howling dog that couldn’t be found. At least I think they were slugs. They looked like slugs. But when I told him he said, What glass? like he didn’t know what I was talking about, like he hadn’t seen it right there on the floor with his own two eyes, which I knew he had because I saw him look at that spot on the kitchen floor where the glass had been, where I had seen it, and where I had seen him see it, so I knew that he knew, even though when I said, What are you looking at? he said, Nothing. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t actually surprising. Back then we didn’t understand each other or at least he didn’t understand me and maybe I didn’t understand him, even though I often just spelled it out. I AM TRYING TO SEDUCE YOU, I would finally say, slowly and clearly, after parading around half the day in a red skirt, sitting suggestively on the arm of the couch, or doing jumping jacks in the backyard. Didn’t you notice the skirt? But I guess we had moved to get away from things like skirts and slugs and simultaneous dreams in the night. There is only one dream, he said, and it is a house. And I believed him, so I baked desserts and ironed shirts and answered the phone. Hello? I would say. Hello? The glass on the floor, I said, the pile of glass swept up and left there. But he didn’t answer, at least not at first, but instead stared into the distance for a while and then said, That dog is always in our goddamned yard, which was true. It could hop its own fence, the dog, and I’d seen it do so on more than one occasion, which at first was shocking, to see a dog hopping a fence that it shouldn’t be hopping, very shocking, a high wooden fence like that, jumping up and over it, but pausing on top to look back, to invite me in, to plead with me, and then suddenly down the other side, disappearing behind that large forbidding fence, hiding God knows what. But there it was again, peeing on the azaleas. The yard is where we came to drink in the evening. Although sometimes I drank there at other times and without him, and sometimes I found him sitting there and not drinking, but rather just sitting with his eyes closed, can you believe it? I wasn’t supposed to be drinking, but really there was nothing else to do. I had planned a sumptuous garden, but the things that I wanted to grow didn’t grow and strange things I didn’t want to grow grew instead, although I talked to them harshly, in the morning and at night. You’re no good, I said. You’re unwanted. But to no avail, and in fact they flourished, these weird spiky plants that I didn’t want and hadn’t planned for, they flourished, and I think they actually liked it, my talking to them like that, which was, I don’t think it’s too much say, frightening, so much so that I didn’t even want to look at them let alone touch them. From the road it could be a power station, a postmodern cathedral where they will feed us? But it is neither: the abattoir that serves villages all the way from the river to the edge of the woods. This, because we are so hungry, and as Jackie so likes to point out, is our lady fortune in disguise. My job is to cart the disembodied heads of lambs from the refuse pile to the incinerator in a metal wheelbarrow. I wear a rubber apron and thick black gloves. Jackie says this proximity to death is just what we need but he doesn’t say why we need it. I am more disturbed by our proximity to youth. How close to its birth does a lamb need to be slaughtered to still be considered a lamb? In the house where we learnt music there was a green staircase where ghosts were. The door to the green staircase had no lock but we had been told by our teachers not to open it. At the top of the staircase was a green room with high set windows and old schooldesks. I didn’t see a ghost in the room. I saw an open wardrobe and old clothes spilt out onto the desks. A black top hat, a cloak with red lining, white linens. The next day a man came. He could recite the Gospel of John from memory so we sat in rows in the assembly hall. Sometimes he wore a shroud about his head and neck. Sometimes he pretended to weep. I don’t remember much of the Gospel of John, just the man standing at the front of the stage shouting ‘Lazarus! Come forward!’ It was 12 years later, in the house where Alfred died that I learned how I could talk to ghosts. In Page, Arizona, on a street of eight different churches, a car dealership rises where the town fades back into the desert. With the purchase of a new vehicle comes a free goat. But those aren’t goats. They are lambs. They are in a small pen on the highway side of the property. There are balloons that mark them there and a banner. Free lambs. And they are alive. This morning I saw a fox running through traffic on 6th Avenue at Clarkson. Every evening we eat offal except Tuesdays when we walk through the snow to Giotto’s house. He fries whitebait in goose lard on his one-ring stove. Once he served us tiny black shrimp he’d caught at the docks with a syringe, a length of carpenter’s twine and a net he claimed to have woven from hair. The next morning Jackie sat doubled in the corner of the slaughterhouse vomiting blood into a general issue blue bucket. Some of the others thought this was funny. The floor that we work on, the main floor, they call it the ‘blood flats.’ They are driving to the city tonight. A man has come to talk about God and reptiles. I wonder if this is the city we saw from the road, months ago when we were hungry. Jackie tells me a dream he had as a child: I sell everything I own and walk into the woods. I build a house inside an oak tree. Life becomes acorns and silence. Dear Gretl: I know that an American book is a book of movement. I know that movement is only seldom accompanied by silence. On her first night in the hospital, Marjorie heard a heart monitor flatline. It was the heart monitor of a woman two beds down on the opposite side of the ward. This is the ward to which I always return. Marjorie had thought she was dying. But it was the woman opposite who was dying. What disturbed her most was that she could feel no seams as she passed between worlds. Dying felt exactly the same as being alive. In the morning a man came to consecrate the space that the woman had left. He wore a black top hat and a cloak. He chanted prayers in a language that neither of us knew. Marjorie said that foreign languages could be our secret lives. The man shook ashes over the bed. When he left, I asked Marjorie if she wanted anything from the canteen. The menu was a blackboard and the prices were written with yellow chalk. I didn’t eat anything. I just stared at the blackboard. Dear Gretl: This is the tariff that I know by heart. Soon we will leave the slaughterhouse. Giotto told us of poppy fields that surround the city. Near the hospital, closer to the water, is the church of Our Lady Star of the Sea. In the park opposite is a miniature golf course that reproduces the various landmarks of the harbor. Here is the lifeboat. The guildhall. The helter skelter and lighthouse. It costs 25 pence to walk to the end of the pier but the helter skelter is free if you don’t mind the queue. Before you climb the stairs a man will give you a mat woven from sackcloth. The causeway to the lighthouse is submerged at high tide. Check the times before you leave. Be careful. Check the tides. Will we meet ghosts on our journey? Yes. Should we call our journey a pilgrimage? A ghost is an impossible literature. Contained in each unsatisfactory moment is the promise of the next. Whenever I try to transcribe this conversation, I end up rewriting our story. A cloud, small as a man’s hand, is rising from the sea. One event can mark the beginning at least; my father came to town and slept behind one of the doors upstairs. That week it was rarely that I could bring myself up there; a noise was noising, a high-pitched little piece of torture, it hummed all week. All that is over now. He's left. I can hear. The heaped laundry, stacks of mail, black-bottomed coffee cups and the gummy floor—well, I prefer it. I should mention that my father is well-liked. When he drawls and people want to pet his hair. The women are always telling him how young he looks and he does look young. He looks about seven years old to me. Some people say he's a convincing thirteen, but I would disagree. Sometimes, if he hasn't slept, he looks like a teenager but the rest of the time he really looks about seven or eight. On the other hand, I was born with a full head of gray hair, little wrinkles around the eyes. People joked that my mother must have been pregnant for nine decades instead of months. Ha. Ha. I never thought that was so funny. Charles came by after my father had left. I put my hand on Charles's jaw and said, Charles, you are a beautiful man. Charles smiled and put his hands on my shoulders, and his forehead against my forehead. Adrian, he said, you are a beautiful man. I smiled even though I didn’t want to because Charles knows how I feel about being called by a gendered pronoun. My smile made a little laugh and Charles said, No, just beautiful. You are simply beautiful. That was better, though it still seemed lacking. Charles told me he prefers older women, actually older women and men. I think I know what Charles means by this but what is upsetting is that Charles is fifteen years older than me. He carries it well, of course. When we're out strangers probably think I'm the lech, a cougar, a nasty old man. The extra bucket was for bonuses, Assimiliations so out of the question we had to amputate I like your little hat, the way it howls across The EMS in the overloud sun And we were so sure of ourselves that day we didn’t even look To see if our socks were the same height And you with the limp. And you with the limp, I said, Little boyscout like a laptop with no harddrive.— Excellent. The mold grows like schematics. The man with a shoe for a head told everyone to look for him in their local Athlete’s Foot. He said, you should really buy my head. He said, go hard or go to the grocery store, and, just make your way through the world, you pussy, and, if I’m not in you then you don’t have a man with a shoe for a head inside you and that’s just a sad thing. He had a wife who had a tooth for a head. If you could have heard her, she would have said things like, you wouldn’t believe all the things that get stuck between me. Their children were frogs, but not real frogs. They were the kind of frogs that look exactly like the puppet frogs on a children’s television program. How the man with a shoe for a head, or his wife with a tooth for a head, or their puppety frog kids, or you, or the me, got to be the way we are is anyone’s guess. Beneath her hair lay more hair, the black strands cables holding up the suspension bridge that is her head. If you could peer through these fibers—and few can—you would spy yet another world living upon her scalp. Her skull is the mantle of this planet, the skin a crust, the hair an atmosphere. Under this atmosphere, running about, tiny mothers in tiny minivans, with tiny bumper stickers with the wee-est messages scrawled across them: I vote for level-headed-ness. Let’s forget the word “tiny,” now that that’s obvious. A mechanic has a tow truck. He is grease-splattered. His grease-splatteredness makes its way all across the globe. This is the man of our woman’s dreams—our woman with the thick hair. What we mean, is that this man had once shaved his goatee and when he did so he entered the woman’s dreams. He fell through her scalp-crust, fell through the thin fatty layer, fell through the parietal, into the cerebral cortex, and thus became a dream of a man with no goatee. When he emerged he was inextricably changed: he ordered a cleanup of the world of the woman’s scalp. This mechanic’s greasiness became biodiesel, the scalp area grew more atmospheric hair. The tiny—sorry—people of this tiny—sorry again—world, breathed wonderful air. The woman ended up on a television commercial where she flipped her hair through air lit by a director of photography’s lights. This woman became famous even if only for a while. Then everyone forgot about her and her thick hair. And everyone upon her scalp died and the planet went extinct. And then the woman died the way all women die: her hands were crossed over her body peacefully. THE TUMOR celled its way to a golf ball-sized clump of cells. Tumors and certain weather phenomena are always compared to sporting balls and fruit. Example: There’s a grapefruit-sized tumor in his colon. Our town was pummeled by softball-sized hail. Why are not tumors and hail tumor and hail-sized? The doctors and meteorologists wander their offices tapping pencils to their temples and eyeing through stacks of Sports Illustrated, their walls wallpapered with fruited still lifes. This particular tumored man, about whom we’re discussing, possessed good teeth, bad gums. His gums smelled like dead flesh. He jogged. His heart was a very fat man’s, and he pounded it inside his chest. As many syllables as “cardio vascular disease” lined by on a sign inside his head. His tumor was a basketball under his shirt. Sex evaporated as quickly as his wife’s presence in his apartment. His body remained, tumor-attached. The body was named Larry. Outside the hail was the size of hail.