b-movie cycle: v. The Incantation

The incantation was one of pathos, of moving b-movietude: Lana Turner was in it—The Big Cube. Something waiting for me on “saved recordings” — something in nanoseconds that included bum trips, flashbacks, and psychedelic ass—something of moving backwards—lighthouses roiling for the death of a beachboy (no, not any of those Beach Boys despite its 1969 vintage). Not only were we moving in grapples, but we would now have to shed our small bags of flowers for our hair, smaller than any rota of our previous San Francisco trips. 

We’d never seen anything quite like it, my soursop shake (though I liked the name batido de guanabana better) reminded her of a green horny plane rom Havana. 

She said: In the intervening yodels I learned much from thee umbrella of apostrophes. 

I said she should watch Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie for a trip more sour than this and a hegemony writ large. 

Railroad flats, she said, shotgun shacks. 

At no point during our forty footsteps did we level a medicament any further than 10 or 12 footsteps—despite our “big cubedness.” 

I was stumped.

She seemed a bullfinch reader now, something reminiscent of a reminder of limitless lies from the late psychedelic period—and we hadn’t even opened our Proust yet!

I, alternately, was baffled in a Baffin Island state of mind, wasted like an emaciated polar bear malfunctioning on wastrel seal soup. 

We stared into space, mouths agape, drool slowfalling from the corners of our mouths.

I dare you to look into The Big Cube third eye. I dare you to try.

What I’m Reading:

A toenail clipping floating in a toilet bowl
like a crescent moon reflected in water,

beauty is quiet and self-conscious.

A character in a novel
sits on the toilet.

Sometimes for forever.

Speaking of which,
where does the shit of a billion people go?

Back into the countryside.

— Hua Xi / “Toilet”