Cage

In the unloaded logarithm of elastic-ballast, I’m in the stupid-room, panting, with a box of things some would name donuts.  Alone or in small groups, the cargo, the woodpile hissed axed out of cedars, is schlepped dilute as a rustle.  I bemoan my lot in the colored oval which I’m painted into, disfigured by friendly madrigals. I gnash my teeth, lightly, but visibly.  I tear my shirt, but it’s a western shirt, so it comes right off, like the words I speak, like every stain I’ve made, especially the spilled coffee ones, which caused this whole misery to begin with.

Inside the cage, I get someone else to strap my own father into a gingerbread-gurney.  He tells me, “If anything goes wrong, you must kill me.”  I’m not surprised, even though he waits to see it.

Soon enough, the cage is solid.  So go tell the shaman we’re ready, until I become the one thing that…uhhh…The chairs are covered in snails.

                                               *

There’s no way.  They’re carving up wood, smashing glass.  Rumor has it you possess certain skills I require:  I need a soul extracted; it won’t bring back the sun.  You got a problem. At least eight people survived by performing surgery on themselves.

Everybody thought it was me.  It’s you…you’re the reason my life sucks.

Get over it. Provenance is better left unimagined, an accordion crumbling into letterpressed feta-ravines graveled with floozy-emergencies.

                                                *

I won’t be able to protect anyone from the beast, or me & LOL.  You’ve never had the pleasure, but you wanted it.  I drive past a rendering plant on my way to work. It is the factory from some horror-flick-inspired nightmare: dead cows go in one end and crude protein product comes out the other. There is a perpetual miasma of rancid fat cooking that surrounds it, and on cool mornings it coalesces alone or in small groups into a visible fog.

Buttshit, Deathcookie: A Performance for Used Clothes

The floor is much the same, maybe cleaner, but not enough to comment on, so I don't, beyond the occasional silent flatulence you weren't meant to hear anyway.  Instead, I retrieve an aim & flame from the pocket of my brown jacket.  I'm the flexi-priest, so I genuflect, for no reason in particular except you want me to at least observe something that's observable to you, which is what performance is.  This all happens in a room that's got paint all over it, and in every corner, piles of used, steaming, fresh out of the laundromat clothes reach near 6 ft.  Chocolate chip cookies are at their peaks, recently microwaved, stenching funny but still good.  Everyone is made by polite entreaty and the civic spirit natural to audiences to put on medical gloves and attempt to go through the used clothes without spilling the cookies or dying, and this we all observe, mutually assuring each other by not even beginning, for some brief time, to wonder when or who calls time.

5 Performances for 3 Chairs

1.

In a stenchy room covered with black roofing felt, 3 chairs of variable durability, texture, color, and overall-personality are in a ring as close to what center as one says may exist.  I sit in the third chair, which you'll know is the third because I sat in it first. A bird is brought out to me in a cage by a designated assistant whom you probably know, IRL, away from the keyboard &c...I hold my face near the bird, near the tiny bars, and press forward deeply toward it, mimicking preposterous compassion for however long it takes to actually feel it and have evidence of feeling it, which I will reveal, removing the cage from my face and showing the audience the red indentation marks on my face, the proof of what pressure I was capable of or what ignorance I could pressure to capability.  I spit on the floor for far too long, so long I want to weep for a reason you probably won't believe.  I light cheap Virgen de Guadalupe candles and spread them around the room and the audience, buttering it in whatsoever manner, and from behind the table you haven't paid any attention to I extract a floppy puppet Jesus and loudly, violently crucify him with duct tape and thumbtacks to the chair which was all this time a toilet, my body.  Since I am ordained and have performed marriage ceremonies, I ask an audience member to approach and hand me the orange-rind I'll use for the rings, for I proclaim that this was my adaptation of "Much Ado About Nothing" and to happy it, I bind myself and attempt sitting on my face, which is a neverending comedy, the slow approach of marriage.

2.

After the first performance ends (not that it can, in my experience), the audience plays find the stench.  To play find the stench, I clear myself of the floor and smear onto a corner of the felt-room, vaguely upright, flush not only with the wall.  Swizzle straws are passed around and everyone is told to breathe through them. This makes smelling more directional, more like a game or capitalism or the part of the joke before you felt like laughing.  I don't do anything.  I don't even hide or watch, but I might feel like laughing, it's a possibility, but since writing this I haven't seen the joke yet, I'll still say I don't do anything, I don't even hide or watch.  I don't laugh, but if I do, I'll stifle it, which will be doing something, so, in case, I'll stifle laughter, that's all I'll do, if even, I don't do anything more, I don't laugh, for sure. I've hid the stench.  They're searching for it, under tables, in the banged-up lockers, under my drawings, in the couch, in the dirty clothes, in the paint-racks--but they won't find it.  They'll find stenches, but not the stench.  I've hid the stench.  I don't do anything.  I hope I don't even watch.  I'll go to a chair.  I'll sit in it.  Until everyone gives up.  Because that is what must be done until everyone gives up, I must sit.  Not because that is the game I've made up.  It's necessity, of the broadly ontological kind.  If everyone gives up before I do, which is likely, considering I've decided as the performer to not give up before they give up, I will sit long after they've given up, wondering about the role of willpower and if I have it and if I feel good about having it.  I won't know how to perform this without doing anything more, and I don't do anything more.  I've hid the stench.  I can start laughing when I know I've hid the stench.

3.

The other 3 performances will be revealed by my assistants to the audience to have already taken place, for I cannot reveal them, since I would be lying, but my assistants, by revealing this to the audience, will start off lying, but by lying ensure the truth of their revelation by setting into motion the events that ensue which will howsoever prove all kinds of things falsely and not I've hid.

Nostalgia: A Performance

A small room, no more than 300 sq ft, lit in the back with two 60 watt bulbs, a few candles scattered around, according to taste, somebody's taste, whoever takes charge, partially, briefly.  A bearded man in a stovetop and black fitted clothes accentuating height stares, breathing loudly (hopefully discernibly) out at the audience for at least a few minutes.  When the bearded man, feeling something incommunicable no doubt, begins to take yellow pansies and mexican sage blooms out of his pants, at least two humanoid creatures of indeterminate gender rush the stage from the back of the audience, shrieking ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN.  They continue shrieking ABRAHAM LINCOLN for the remainder of the performance.  Meanwhile, the bearded man in blackstuff stuffs deliberately, choosingly, as if delecting, the pansies and sage into his mouth, filling his face up, recycling it.  The humanoids have aprons with spuriously positive phrases on them, but the phrases are obscured by what could be vomit. When the bearded face is full, the two backlights drop and a projector light falls on a screen. ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN &c... A Windows screensaver appears, and the bearded face hovers over a laptop, intent yet unchewing.  The audience sees a slow start-up onscreen, fumbling off & onscreen, perhaps even other dramatically invigorating actions .  The shrieking continues, now with more animated handgestures, none of which are recognizably semantic.  From somewhere deep behind you and probably no good, this song begins: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDl3bdE3YQA

On the screen, one sees that the bearded face is logging into AIM and surfing via Internet Explorer via Ask Jeeves for Britney Spears pics, nude.  Dear God, it's dial-up.  One can hear...ABRAHAM LINCOLN ABRAHAM LINCOLN muma ABRAHAM LINCOLN mu muuu mnnnnumm &c...Shrieking continues, now interspersed with small pleas, puppysounds.  For a long long long time,the bearded face empties itself of flowers like a flourbag with a small tear or an eye with the same (if eyes could empty the body of sadness), and one pic uploads, pixel by pixel, of some girl slightly resembling some other girl you thought you might could know when famous bent over ruched linoleum, with what might be an oiled snake writhing out her ass.  No one on AIM has messaged the bearded man back, despite his entreaties, and only when the bearded man gets Skype running and receives a video-call from someone more or less boring do the pleas, grown ever frequent, cease to a low whine and the loop of "What I Am" fade out into whatever's left still of silence.

Butter and Sugar Burger

Morning arrives, rays of your hair splayed

across lips cracked with chapping and a single spindle

of fragile spittle, and my only wish is to watch you smile.

Coffee will be black, its new role delighting you:

a new companion for the breakfast has been set;

I introduce you to the new breakfast set:

All the cream and sugar 

are on our buns, and I see you, 

I see you, :-)

Yes.

 

Lena Dunham is Exhausted

Lena Dunham has a million dollars
for advice she will write you, but she can't discontinue
talking words such as, "I like this part
because the yellow scarf provides us a detail
of your character's unconscious desire
to drive the four days to Rancho La Brea
and throw the baby in the tar pit," and, buddy,
she is motherfucking exhausted, okay?

Lena Dunham, I know one thing about you:
you have the resources to probably work out a hangout
with Neko Case, and you should do that--
a woman who carries her epitaph lightly likely
knows nothing of the exhaustion of talking words like that.
 
 

Milktent TM

Make your little one feel good again, full
and snug as a bug in a rug and suckling.

Why cut the critical umbilical of the nip
when for months yet to come you can tuck him in?

Shh.
Shhhhhhhh.

Tents are for sleeping, when the stars are scary
Mommy makes a milky way so you will not die awake.

Trinity-Thoughts by Manti Te'o

1.

I sat inside it, locking the skull in.  There was a corpse of ivorystains all over the pads, and I was hit, rocked to and fro, until the building I boned into myself shut down, but I had faith, I had so much faith, and they were there for me, but could never understand how to lose, how to lose like I did, all that smeared light, in one day, for good, with that dust that’s not fair but that’s the way it is…

2.

Who was inside you, or what inside you was whose?  You’re the leader, so lead, but it’s so demoralizing, here, wherever, to feel jealous of what’s not that’s growing inside until you’re so not whatever you can be wherever, which never is no more than nowhere.  I lost everything I loved and still played, maybe only because of that.

3. 

“Why did the small yucky man say that?  He’s joking right?”  Fuck you and shut the fucking fuck up you comfy fuck.  You’ll fucking die you’ll fucking die and you’ll never understand you can’t you can’t get it closer to you and I can’t, and I fucking can’t…

The In-Between of Frames: Organ and Ouroboros

Second only to the art itself, the most tragicomic aspect of art receptions is undoubtedly the audience. As the old joke goes, one often can't see the art for all the patrons. Occasionally, however, viewers get to be just that, and do share the experience of an artwork or two.

During a recent pair of joint exit shows at Lamar Dodd—“The Triumph of American Painting” and “Minimalish” (we'll kindly pass over the preposterousness of the former title)—a curious thing was overheard while taking in the work of the exhibitions' two finest artists. In both instances onlookers commented, more than once, on the framing of these works. It was a particularly striking conjunction considering the very different nature of the pieces. And in both cases this consideration of frames coupled with attempts to, in one way or another, organize or explain the works.

What relation does the frame, whether the standard white of the gallery or an entirely more elaborate structure, whether metaphoric or literal, what relation does it bear on the meaning of an artwork? Let us take this happy opportunity to explore a few possibilities.

Some Beasts

4 Musical Saws

1.

An old saw: I never planned it.  You can’t with all the rust, which grows unexpected, more goiter than child, more loiter than wild. That’s how it went, least.

2.

I sat down on a wooden thing upon which the holidays needed me to play.  Without some trite thing to rest upon how take flight? A gull needs a rock, a hull needs a dock…dear God…I…so many candles mean to burn…

3.

Practically, the bow’s made of hair, and to make any sound, much less music, you have to go across, cut your hair, exchange to translate changed.

4.

At most, I made a saying:

cut old, bend new,

sound's found.

Scarecrow Says, 5 Rights Make a Right Turn

1.

At night, things were usually usual.  The stars came out, queer, out of the toy closet, playing straight-faced a gay hand.  We’ve all been there, more or less, distant, but seen from our pasts.  Most people except the ones closest to them, weren’t surprised, and they still had to use lorgnettes and had lap dogs, and were wrong.  Especially about desire, the falling stars.  If you say, it’s drama, disastrous…It’s us. I love kissing you. 

2.

The closets were toys and he took a hammer to’ em to see how they worked.  They played like mirrors that took the stage together, determined to change the ballet and dance a different end and be free, a bit, once again.

3.

Who’s the puppet of whose lips? What pain, binary, single bit?

4.

For a long time you’ve become, and for a time escaped. To play in disaster a jug and spoons upon your knee, the stars came out anew, with a fresh leash but through the cradle on the same painted wheels. Stonewall 'em all. Wear a muzzle of live microphones astraddle your jaw.

5.  

It's an old song, but it's standard, and belongs to you when you share it.  It's not for me, but I want you to have it.  Propose. Anything goes.  God knows, I won't oppose.

Oz Skaggs & The Soft-Rock Heartbreak

Oz Skaggs met muddy Dorothy under the house, cradle-crying over a bright squirrel.  They couldn't talk much: the monkeys came, bearing soda, mud, and avocados for their tin baby.

"We were always sweethearts," Oz Skaggs said, "Breakdown dead ahead.  Look what you've done to me, lowdown, Miss Sun."

Dorothy couldn't speak.  It was so hard, so hard to speak from the cradle, especially against the mobile.  Did he understand that?  Did he understand that?

Br'er squirrel didn't lift his paw to change a thing, or stop any motion, even to play dead, since he was dead. Meanwhile, Tin-Baby had to spitshine himself.

I don't know how we got here.  The tears are like stew fanned out cold.

Tin-Man At the Birth of the Internet

The tin-man sits on a shitload of black paint next to a dog made of soft onions.  He puts his head in his hands, almost (his hands hold the forceps), and chews a tough stringbean wrapped in squirrel-jerky.
The dog starts pissing himself so he can get the stew going.

From the blue, blue sky a warped ceiling fan descends gradually like a Google-meme-statistic.
Kittens start doing cute things.
Ordinary people have amazing talents.

The tin-man pulls out the onion-eyes of the dog and funnels in black paint with a folded newspaper waterproofed with silly putty.

The stew boils over enough to batter & feed the blue, black sky.

There's a bicycle in the roar of the warping ceiling fan so big the Tin Man weld-putties it to himself with sillied words--a necessary garnish.

Ballad of the Tin-Man, Bachelor Reality-Show Edition

I want to wear hairnets
in my shoes.  A girl will please, please shake
herself out onto my turtleneck
like granulated sugar.
May a small inkpen full of red-ink
be the umbrella that threatens the citizenship
papers of the rain or how
this all sillily sounds?

I hope the new shoes come, sugared.
I hope atavistic orange juice falls grassward
out of the victorious talon of my smile.
Let my eyes be pinkened swirly straws
every lady & tramp suckles Diet Coke from the skull,
mindful of the way a little too sweet
holds out its hand, palm up like a passenger bus.
I've got spilled milk-stains on my heart's workbench
you kindled with old shit to a grill.

A spoon made of sugar and cold shivers
died lightly in the cornea-tear, caulking
soda & red mud in the shape of a halved avocado
inside the tin-man's chest cavity.

Ice-cream got the scoop, fell out,
& sold the story to Entertainment Tonight,
and then I saw myself on TV, unable to cry
having to chew the dirt I needed to mud
the avocational heart I wanted moist & red.

How To Journal #4

If you keep on returning home, it means you're leaving it too, and though that might not be your fault, I don't see why guilt can't play a juicy role here.  What I mean is, willfully picture it--this thing which is probably you but certainly looks a little better than you if you're honest about it is on a stage and it looks almost exactly the fucking same as the rest of the damn time you got your hand-screened eyes open looking at whatever it is that's currently boring you, except there's less people and you're less bright--that's how it is in a dream, less people than in real life, but we're not talking about that, or at least not in whatever way you want me to be salacious about the ethics of treating people not like objects--eh, I fucking lost it...I don't know where this was going, but I do know how, poorly--I always go poorly even when its going well which just means it's producing irreplaceable fuel to be consumed or even water--I hear that's running out too.

How To Journal #3

Not sure why I’m doing this, since it won’t mean anything.  O yeah, now I remember, I’d hate for it to.  Anyways, I ate a sandwich. It was all downhill from there, except I had to keep walking uphill most of the damn time, even when my feet hurt.  Eventually, needing others, no one calls you back.  Still though, there's nothing you can do with that statement, & you'll get there, largely worse for wear, but that was always true too, in the eventual sense, after all, it being winter--warm coffee, fires & so on--thermodynamics is more apparently whatever it is you won't argue to agree with me on.

How To Journal #2

I'm unable to amuse myself, or no longer, in which case I'm unwilling, slightly, to believe in remembering I ever was. I mean, I'm able & mostly believe I'm bodied--things appear to happen with some sort of intention on my part, and the others, my "functions" go on as usual, perhaps even, these days, more frequently--in short, I could go to the shower right now & think about some lady unto whom I cower ever so strongly against myself towards and various fluctuations across her flesh made tidal with pendulous mutual motions & I could slather out some shampoo & stroke--but I don't want to.  I'm saving it, like money for the kind of vacation that's the kind of fun of only by paying for it.  That feels stupid though.  I don't understand what's gaining & why it's not losing.  I wonder where's my trauma, but not too loud.  I wonder if as a baby I ate & defecated at the same time.  If anything's natural & frequent, or frequently natural, I'd bet that's it, since i can't understand how a bet's any different than a not-bet, which as I said, I don't think so much as can't feel exists.

I hate this is the truest thing I can say right now.
People are rotten everywhere.

But I've never been there, & even if I had I wouldn't know; but I just apologized for it--can that count?  If I can count, maybe you can too. Then we'd get to higher numbers on a newish scale we could pretend for a limited time again to value knowing the value of.

How To Journal #1

Examine thy work-muted self:  How ya feelin & stuff rite now?--Floaty, groaty.  Sore in the footsies, where ass & legs rub repeatedly--also--better now--in this--in being writing--oscultating my unprofound sotto voce laryngiticially de profundis--Few things better than this ham & cheese melt w/ the soft, warm glassblown light outside--arugula crispy, bitter under light, hot sweetbuttered walnut wheat--with a few sauteed mushrooms & a layer, thin of spicy mustard--Life has more sandwiches than love, & that's a thought more unpleasant than it really is.

Memento Mori: The Freshmaker

Well here we are
In water, still smelling ourselves
Submerging into emerging
Gases--that's all to say
I just farted while swimming
And the bubble broke wind across my face
Like one of those epiphanies
About the body always dying & suchnots

Neighbors Be Doing Shit

Now who knows, I might just end up getting almost riled up and go down there myself, pretending like I care?

Family Dinner Politics

A room full of craven sunflowers.  It's aloft,
But not a loft, not being so expensive,
But certainly high in other,
Not only illegal, costly and dear ways.
Snot.  That happens.  But the silverware
Is taken out like a South American "dictator",
Handled exactly "like it should be,"
Careful around the throat of its utility,
And then ol' Dadbag wheels in
Wetting his slanket to make a sharp point
To the diplomatic kiddies about age, mortality, and most
Likely perceived, half-forgotten feelings of
Sacrifice and ingratitude.
Then I can't really remember what all happened,
Everything getting sacrificed and all,
But even if your mom's super-dead,
She was there too, and snot--
You watched it all played out,
At least once again, which always,
Though one can never & because
Be too little sure, feels like perpetuity.

Body Morals

I never thought I'd smell
This awful so consistently
& still be in awe at it.

"Meet"

to the Georgia Gym Dogs

 

The human body is a sieve

long after fractions of seconds have marked the place

you continue to press yourself through it

What of its consequences

this philosophy of foreshortened torso and stunted blood

without which all would fail

Was ever this object only

ever destined to break the space of the world apart

not somehow essentially tautological?

You have taught me what

and where movement frames the point of the hinge

and the radius of muscle completes us.

Natural

Lightning through the wood of the bat--my youth, that shrimp toast, left me struck outside like an old tempura of a shoe in some sort of right-field insinister as in rain. I sat next to the dug-up out-window there, sniffing my socks through a red child’s telephone dial, and I wanted to call you and see if the smell fell to you linear-cracked across the meaning of my words.  You weren’t there, or at least not in the kind of way I’d remembered, but I stunk and stunk.  And then your highness came to me, low as I was, and the bureaucratic height of the paper-shredded years got craggy and goat-merded with atavisms since we last spoke, I dunno, I didn’t look down, but there it was in plain, saved, hard-driven view, fitted just like a wall against every door and just a little too tight to allow any opening.  Tacking it all over, I ran out of paper trying to entice the old goats to eat a tunnel big enough for me to shepherd my starving through.

Emoticould

Emotican't

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;)

Mammogrammars

The false-positive, it would be

a back-formation constructed

only to freak you the fuck out.

The past-participle

is the mother you will not have been.

Yesterday morning I made porridge

with blueberries I picked without you

This morning I will make pancakes

with the handfuls that are left.

This will be the ellipsis,

your hand negotiating a space between,

from chipped plate to teeth.

When the time comes they will tell me—

declarative.

Against which I promise to insist:

Like Halloween in Athens

On Halloween I got in bed at 8:30pm and read a book called The Silver Crown.
The book is for children, but in the first twelve pages a house burns down and a cop gets shot in the face.

If you live in Athens and it is October, people will ask you, “What are you doing for Halloween?”

Tell them you are at home in bed and cold and alone; you could use a snuggle.

I’m not convinced people in this town snuggle enough, especially not on Halloween.

Some cool guy dresses like Max Headroom and spoils the mood for everyone.

Denizens of Athens, love is not enough: read a book out loud to your lover,

for love is not enough: read until the cop gets shot in the face, then snuggle up.

When your lover complains, “I don’t want to cuddle after the cop just got shot in the face,”

whisper seductively, “You are just like Halloween in Athens,” and watch the magic happen.