i jump off the bed— cold granito floor judders my core— legs & spine ablaze lower brain doused in fire.
i dread the conflagration in my head as i peck away at my dreams like one conditioned inside an arcade game box.
slot a quarter in the box & the turntable i stand upon spins— a hatch opens where i peck at feed.
to eat & not to eat.
so long since anyone’s come by & i had a grain or two. don’t pass me by / i say with shopworn eyes. don’t walk by / i will u to slot a coin.
i haven’t fed in three days— slot some money / honey provender’s behind the door. be a hun / i may be your child’s nugget some day. walk by that pinball game straight into my heart.
“I don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”
You can’t see your backhand tumescence. You ridge an indemnity to a mild occlusion. You shiv gambler smocks and spectator gallantry. You sing and tinge without specie or varicose effluvia. You spree on tremor-free fibulae. What are you playing at—speaking in tools?
You speak in a larch I can understand—a riot of the auspicious. You cast about probability roadsides in magical viridian. You are the vitrine of souvenir permaculture—a solution to ponder. You wave at ticker and sunroof parades simulcast in wispy simulacra. You walk in topaz somnambulist shades.
“It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”
cronobacter poetaster— salmonella malefactor— flay your cruelly blacked-out heart
one element erasmus punk mender-eyeing milk / are u sycophant or plagiarist 80 pages in?
criminal or felon? anti-matter skate? hag the play / r u predator of snorts? strike the pedestal / defame the stage
mandala manacler / u know no restraint a phiz phosphoric / bilge neurotic spewer of guiltless interludes / ignorant & skewed
as u scribble speaking parts for criminals & prostitutes? catullus & horace roll about in their small-petaled tutus
“she hid pencils beneath her gown, slipped out the pink erasers, bit down the metal sleeves to pretty serrations, carved an index of incongruences into her skin. nurses kept her cuffed in gauze.”
The sun cuts a slice of light into his head. The stellate light streams through the window and blinds him. His last word is ¡Guao! The bullet fragments in his Broca’s area and splits the infinitive making its way through his synapses. His face a frozen distortion. His last word unnoticed by another.
What is left of him—his locked body—falls through the air on its ineluctable path to the terrazzo floor. What remains of his consciousness seeps out with the type O negative from his ragged head. The shrapnel sizzles in that now useless brain—the organ loses its way in this world.
The cafetera hisses on the stove top as the revolver spins on the floor syncopating with the tinny transistor radio version of Guntanamera.
Fragments of his head are embedded in the valence and jalousie panes. The air is burnt cafecito and spatter.
The photographs of him and El Comandante on the wall are commingled with parts of his frontal and parietal lobes—the very lobes that once devised entertainments for dignitaries, wooed countless women, and gave voice to the orders to shoot 183 gusanos in the revolutionary reprisal squads.
“Next you will want to make a list of the materials needed to build your fence. Some people find that their fence needs to be made of wood or metal; other people prefer to make fences out of their soul-parts, or their skin. Refer back to your fence’s main purpose to deduce what materials you will need.”
—Carolyn Zaikowski / In a Dream, I Dance by Myslef, and I Collapse
Plactivist—a disembodied word. Decontextualized. One word in bas-relief, that I heard her say, in a slurry of words not directed at me.
Plactivist—decoupled and set adrift from its word cloud. It blazed like a meteorite across the my cerebral cortex and burned up somewhere in my temporal lobe.
Plactivist—I pictured a curved sickle scaler. A shadow with giant scalers for hands floating at my dim peripheries. Only the glint of the oversized probes resolved at the edges of sight.
My head in a vise as “Ode to Joy” — Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor (opus something or other) the fourth movement (you know)—blared. The chorale full-throated. Exultant.
(And in a split screen I saw myself and Alex, the Droog—all “vised-up” too, his eyes splayed open by pincers and locked—hey, wait how did I end up in a Kubrick film? No. No matter.)
Jump cut: The plactivist filled my line of vision. Surely, a shadow, most opaque—a maw of darkness behind … is that a head mirror? What serious doctor wears a head mirror?
No. This was a plactivist. It wore a plague mask filled with cardamom, cinnamon, and durian fruit, which slid about the beak-end of the mask in counterpoint to the faraway calls to: Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.
The plactivist scaled the depth of its shadow center—darkening, deepening, its own anti-matter. It’s own anti-being—black ice incarnate.
How does one weigh one’s soul? How does one quantify one’s shadow—or the intentions of our shadows as they try to flee the pin of our feet?
And then the space lightened. Not limbo—not a clockwork—or an inner circle of hell.
I heard her say plactivist — as in “play and activist, dummy!” But no solace settled, by now my soul was in need of repair.
Then I spied my soul—occupied—as it throttled its own shadow.
“Just in case God isn’t dead, our astronauts carry sidearms.”
I need a dose of antivenin infused blood, call out the Gadsden herpetologist. I need to blowout my synapses. Run the Goldwater films in reverse—where is my gun?
god’s in the tuinal—he filched the dilaudid. Vote early, vote often, says the hip-priest. Better dead than pink, says uncle Justus, Drown the last river dolphin. Beef! More beef.
More beef, more clear-cuts, more carbon, more methane, more beef. See coastal Kansas! Unfurl the flag. Renew your American Mancard.
(Meanwhile, in the best of all possible worlds)
No need for Civil War reenactments— all the slave rebellions succeeded.
“Gratitude is black— Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death. Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.”
the trees the trees the trees the trees— the idiocy of time— the deliberate debilitation the desultory feel of the wrath of my bombast says time
says the melting clock say the hypnotized trees trees in the clutch of the sun full of viral potential full of youth unexamined just a month or two before turning pink think great surrealist pink or is it Christo pink— like the white to the yolk islands of Biscayne bay esto no es rosado (whatta’ ya mean this ain’t pink?)
chock with color amok in strained iteration pushing the dactyls at noon beyond all breaking point speak to me so that i may gaze on your diacritical marks they say profoundly untutored profoundly un-leafed eight (8!) months later a Daliesque giraffe eats a Magritte apple dark in the daylight flecked with snow unloosing bark like crepe paper sandwiches
another extolled birches but i’d rather swing urban environments lamppost to lamppost and land upon a tree in the fall not the early fall variety not second-week September yellowing green in a palsied moment under clouds laden with rain at five o’clock on a Thursday afternoon no—
i’d like to alight on a red maple on fire with its blustery rutilant blisters in the last pang of midlife where de Chirico sits with Man Ray it’s his kind of sky (you know)
“crimester. only crime i’m guilty of trying to play alice straight in crookedland”
She felt transcendent being recognized as thee tamp-yam whisperer. Everyone in her neighborhood Smorebucks acknowledged her tamps—so long ignored. Yes, finally, she was the best yam-tamper there was—the supreme of the arty fistful—able to keep mandrills at bay.
Oh, that young woodpecker there awash in tight sweetener, it pleased her to know such cremation—such pulchritudinous cremation limned the windows eastward.
Then an escapologist, a grand escapologist—a landowner that impaled her cinnamon bulbs once, so she was forced to acknowledge his expedition—such was at her tamp and cranked.
Now she espied that mandrill with the gaudy epaulets screeching at the Monday madwoman. Aspired to be the pinpoint tamper fanatic—frenetic—such charisma, such magnetism.
Here at this mean tackle, barely able to contain her greatness, such a tamp-smith, so unnaturally adroit with the creepers of incisive pack-ology, she made her grandiloquent show. (Forced in that moment as she was.)
That mandrill copied her moves. Looked like the statesmen at her, while moving his eyes in the exact mantle and tamping a ratamacue—so blue, so cretinous—a neurosis rippled through the assembled crowd. Thus, the storied tamp-stamp down—the showdown at Smorebucks—the grand tamp-down terror began.
“she was lovely the way agony in the smallest bursts could be.”
If it is odious and onerous, it is a tear-jerker. If it produces scribe acrylics, the aqua fortis seethes beneath a trap door. If a doormat marks the national threshold, it may be full of off-kilter moments. If it reads like a Russian novel, it is merely breast-feeding for rubles. If we are pilloried near the pillowcases, the archive is a brutalist borehole. If we seek, we miss the show. If, if, if, if, if, if, If.
“I just want to be held, but contingently, the way the mind holds a trauma that failed to take place. Realistic suction, realism sucks.”
