Sangfroid I-IV

i.  The Ashen Landscape

“He’s got what?  Days left?  I don’t want to be there when he dies.”

“Sangfroid.”

“I’m cold-blooded?”

“You didn’t wish to come back to the village — to the sea?”

“I see… a Rothko — canted, a lost apocryphal work — an ashen landscape in three gradations.  My father tore out its center and revealed there’s no heart to the universe, only a corrugated armature — frozen, encased — as if the sky were stapled to the sea with liminal ice.”

“You see wasteland?”

“I see ghosts.  I was eleven.  My father placed the gun to his temple — then mine.  He abandoned me here.”

ii.  A Song for the Plague Year

I find my father supine on the bathroom floor, limned by a bloody halo — a pinpoint hole in his left temple.  Gorgeous.

The floor seethes and the ceiling lowers its claim upon me.  I’m extruded out of the bathtub spigot.  Suffering.  Wait.  Wait.  Suffering.  I’m in the heart of darkness.  I’m in the heart of the work now.  Shiver.  Fertile.  Gorgeous.

iii.  Molecular Organic Nano-machines

I’m at the morphine station.

I’m a soft machine inside a hard silicone husk.  I’m a warped machine rattling out flickering images: images of a gun.

I’m a soft machine in a hard exoskeleton — silicone dark inside — silicone smooth and white outside.  My memories play back on the cryoscreen. Here memories are particulate existences transformed into nano-globules (n-g.’s) that are secreted from the ferrules at the end of your iPuffer: smoky, hormonal, and projected inside and beyond your eyes.

“Please cue n-g. 173-A: the day I met my father at CBGB’s; and frame n-g. 173-B: the moment that punk rock saved my life.  Please add the blue 17 gelatin filter.”

A puff from the ferrule and the images resolve, but this memory is faulty.  The memory warps and echoes: a radiator squeals, brass electrodes buzz, my father is blood-crusted, ignored in a dusty corner, covered with mites escaping the evil heat.  Batista’s henchmen torture another… no, stop, this is not my memory but the anecdote he told me that night…

“This is not the n.g. I requested. STOP.  STOP.  Press the eject…”

Blood, on the tip of my tongue.  Where is it coming from?  Then a bestial din: the sound of a million cicadas’ lament before the seventeen year death — a rupture tectonically within me.  The smell of hissing green plantains dropped into overheated oil — the splattering: tinny, spastic —  and then the loss of control.

iv.  missing  STOP

im not who i was once was   STOP   aposiopesis   STOP   STOP   im a perfectionist   im obedient    get away from here    get away from that gun   STOP   STOP   STOP   dr x said im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   dont relive it    dont rehash it   and if it finds you   then embrace it    embrace the thoughts    embrace the feelings    be one with it and then release it     youre not your memories    youre not your feelings   be one with the thoughts   be one with the feelings   and then release them   STOP   

punk rock changed my life    no punk rock saved my life    the songs of the minutemen   no not that memory   STOP  STOP   dont touch him there   dont touch me stop it   put down that gun   38 snubnose    it weighs a ton    STOP   STOP   STOP    embrace this memory   embrace this emotion   im not my memories   not my emotions   STOP   aposiopesis   apoplexies   apophatic   and aphasic   STOP   STOP    dr x said    whatever happens   its ok    whatever happens is ok   im ok    whatever happens    im not my thoughts    im not my feelings   youre doing the best that you can   im doing the best that i can   STOP   STOP   STOP

“To practice any art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow. So do it.”
— Kurt Vonnegut