laurel to fig (senseless)

look mister,

play the heathen woodwind
in keeping with the fatherland
with observatories & non-permanence
with your alluringly detached gender
the cathode for the big american weapon

splinter your sphincter exerting a supernatural
inhibition over your farthings and flip-flops
a patisserie a pastiche ≠ an oblique

play the tortured poet profound
expound on the settings of the doomsday clock

your swan {lake} a security felon—
a coordinate geometry emigre

you’re the evil fingernail wreck
an atrocity exhibitionist to the stars
you’re the black bogey cylinder geographer—
charnel house outpourings served sartorial in your smatterings of deceit

i’ll redact you as a nonlinear black-and-white mercy pigtail
you tragic degenerate quail quaffer

i anoint you: scruffy the steeplejack diva!
seductively ambiguous and always ornamental

What I’m Reading:

In a time when the amount of language is rising exponentially, combined with greater access to the tools with which to manage, manipulate, and massage those words, appropriation is bound to become just another tool in the writers’ toolbox, an acceptable—and accepted—way of constructing a work of literature, even for more traditionally oriented writers.

— Kenneth Goldsmith / Uncreative Writing