Translated by Christopher Nelms
At last, without a trace of a haircut, storms gather across the red horizon, split like papayas tied in a bonded game of Scrabble.
A horse galloping riderless, sparkheeled & in trivial pursuit, blinks like an eye stabbed with rain across the lust of the mesa. By this we know it's somebody's game & somebody's insurrection waits beyond some pass or strait like a cheating hand flush with rich red gold & a mouth.
A small child, handless with breath, enters the dust diamond drawn round you like a shaman's shawl. You bend to him & speak a language without chins. From your teeth a color vibrates to him until he wraps it in a knucklesandwich he can save for later more shore-starved days, when the trees shall shrink back into the earth like green snails salted with ecological apathy.
A small child, shambling, enters the water, crystallizing their overcrowding pity into a statuesque protest.
The child disrobes, shudders, and spits like a lieutenant into his own hands. He gives a mysterious, moist standing ovation and goes under, bubbling like a carbon-dated suicide-wish.
Amazed, the crowd assembled on the slick rocks muses loudly, rhetorically of squirreled away alka-seltzers pocketed in the child's cheeks. Minutes pass like refugees admitted with minimal fuss into another country wartorn beyond bureaucracy and borders, but the spectators' breaths stutter & jam, engrossing them into a panicked timelessness, as if an enemytank approached & all their guns of a sudden defected, spitting out fireless candied bullets, preservative & cold.
The bubbles continue to rise, breaking like Easter-headlines across the eggshell-tension of the water, diffusing into ever diminutive ripples. At last, the child rises to the surface to the empathetic intake of air rippling like poverty-rekindled nationalism through the crowd. He has a strange, smeared look, like a new chain-motel's decor. Into the water, the crowd, fervent with feats of paused adornability, throw silver chains, rookie cards, & hymens torn back together by rococo plastic surgeons. A rain electrical with hydrolized Vyvanse falls on the supplicant hands, hands, like dolphins, filmed in their showy hunger to convince a superhuman intelligence that their tricks analogically display a xenomorphic kinship.
The desert becomes suave with snails and greens its toupee with outre jokes. It has become a form of women's basketball--competitive in a new, exciting way.
Like a dance-broke vase blank with another's trod trash, the small child passes into the new childhood of a young man. What shall the day eat but its own blue toes?
This young man sat in the orange grove
Hugging all the turtles with hard concert tickets.
To the turtles on the highest branches
He threw breaking ampules of pure fresh coconut water
Perfumed with roses, whiskey & forgiven sins.
No one came to him in an atmospheric way,
But instead they came like the sound of distant thunder,
Neither to be feared nor loved nor questioned--
Like the archetypes of deaf-mute pilgrims
On their silent way to Protestant Work Ethics
And increasingly ergonomic rolling chairs.
What shall the day eat but what waking you decide is eaten?
Leaving the orange grove, the young man
Sought out joy in a historical city.
He remembered a fortune he'd eaten years ago
From the bark of the trees.
It said: "History has a logic
Only when subjectivity rules it, only when
The emergence of subjectivity reconfigures
Efficient causes and final causes
In the development of history.
The power of the proletariat consists precisely.
Like a missionary or vampire, capital touches
What is foreign and makes it proper, like syphilis
Carried worldward on the bloodied flagella of zephyrs.
What is joy? Ask the Third Modern Bureaucracy,
And it will say every planet on the nation hates America
For asking not only what is the working class
But for asking first, what would a true working class
Poetry or art look like?"
Why should the day eat, fast-aging its communications like cheapened cheese?
Outside the grove, the young man bought himself
The clothes of a lost-paradise narrative
And began investigating joy with hermeneutic tools
Bought at one of the many home & garden improvement centers.
With a hammer, nails, & cut wood
He sculpted a new rapper based on Eminem & Kool Keith.
He wrote inside his hat,
"Personally, I need the conviction, the fearlessness to experiment--in cooperation, collaboration towards a vision of joy, of a world of laughter, beyond fear and punitive despair--take Kool Keith, Eminem as models, sci-fi in its sovereignty of joyful theurgy, world-building...Your mind is the best studio you'll ever have. Also, build a new couch. Your old one has a gross-out patina."
He placed the rapper in a vast field of toothy-grass.
He powered him with 17 windmills
And a complex pnuematic system which required
Equal parts wind, virus, and raw meat.
A rope was connected to the new rapper
Transgressive in his willingness for mutual humiliation,
And the young man tied this rope around the hard ox of his own neck
And began to bow, deep, deep, deep into the lick-cleaned plate of the day,
When he bowed, the rapper bowed back.
Soon enough both rapper and young man
Were bashing their faces against the heirloom of the ground
And when the blood began to flow from the young man's forehead
It sowed its way into the toothy grass like a new taboo
Until the grass became one towering butcher knife
Toteming like a giant Doric column to support the weight of the sky.
Like a stomach with the sudden lip-gash of a mouth
Grown tearfully prosperous with communicable pain in laughter,
If the sky fell now it would impale itself
And die over the rhyming plains and mountains.
The sky had to admit then that another's militancy kept it most upright,
And in thanks released a rain of sunglasses & pulped oranges
Upon the furiously bowing rapper & young man.
The sunglasses kept the thirst from spilling out their eyes,
& the orange rinds were stitched like flat-tire patches
All over each of their orifices.
A glow as of a weaponized buckskin sugared with anthrax
Rose from the bowing bodies creating a cloud
Of wedding rice electric with cocaine & atomized white chickens.
Across the land in a 5 mile radius
Balls of electricity roamed like crittery ghosts
Crashing a catered DOMA-smashed wedding.
They ate the land and as it passed through the fiery jelly
Of their phantom GI-Joe tracts,
From their thunderous sphincters convulsing snow like 3D printers
Came an exact scale-model of the hunt-eaten land
White as the 1893 Chicago World Fair,
Only less expensive and with more murderers
Holding permanent markers in hand for spontaneously combustible graffiti.
Like a chicken obsessed with viral death,
Doors opened everywhere
Leading behind eyes to impossible gardens
Grown inside the flow of vigorous waterfalls.
Like an executioner obsessed dolefully with merciful claws,
Everything was new excepting the painful acceptance
Of the exception of the continued pain of the new.
In the new white city, a murderer marauded
The streets with architectural graffiti.
A scene grew on its pages until its letters
Caused this to take place in the city-wide
Theatrically converted sculpture-garden.
(Insert the scene)
After all the emails had grown ancient
In just two days, they found themselves
Buried under a forgotten stripmall.
A tornado furious with its own future had swept across them
And buried their storefront signs deep in a red-data-dirt
Of abandoned high-stake poker games.
Through pain, through humiliation, a peace, a glass of lukewarm water, a flower, a blank page, like a new face passed on the street--no, you can't keep it, you can't even have it, but you rise up to it, you celebrate it with momentary desire, you are a breaking vase of water and the water is behind your eyes, your eyes are a clear glass and the water behind your eyes is clear glass softer than a jellyfish reading water from a book and the glass is like water all around you but still you are inside it, against your body so much that it is become your body, & yet, it rarely happens...
This young man was pink with clear water behind the eyes. When he met another person who didn't know how life was supposed to be he felt a great foot swimming in blue inside him. He felt a flower, celebrating its own vase by trying to break it open into a great black opacity. Magic, the young man hoped, would prove to be real, real in the way a death sentence is real outside Russia & governors' stays. If life is not murky, endless waterfall of half & half, & not skimmed, who wants it. Who wants not to drink the fat down? Magic never occurs to those concerned with the self's longevity of continuity.
Every metaphor's a chance to think for once again. Along such a string, you have the knots for thought's DNA. A poem is the life-minded mind's clone, but it is only a clone of a ship, and like a new friend, you see him as more a clone of you than you of him, & vice versa. Such is poetry--vice verse; but of course, not really, since there are no virtues to be the vice of the vicious.
Thus, if poetry is ecological, its model is a ship in a bottle, and that ship is friendship, ideally. To avoid scurvy, the poet finds a lime under every stone, bows unto it, and practices hacking the code right out of it with a poor-ass karate chop that sculpts faces of food into the land for all pilgrims to touch.
A poet is concerned with cooking up edible Rushmores, and probably everything else which is more but never less than real delight in S'mores, snores, and even stores' gores. I get sores just kissing the hope new beauty goes herpetically viral, like a contagious landscape sick with quicklimed pirates healthily robbing children of their parents' utilitarian plans. Let the babyboomers snore away the days in the deep mono-sound they've contracted in marrying their infections to a single-other. Let the boom-mic fall into their view and peck the tops of their heads with an electric kiss. Let them wake to a percussive muffle revealing their true cheap production-value in the most epic B-grade documentary of torture-porn in America.
A prank is like a fresh baby, hairless but wailing to eat the life-river from your very breast, and for that it must be allowed to grow & incubate not only its own heat-death but yours as well. Within a prank's conception, you should already smell the teeth of death in its potential hair burning; you should wake to its cry in that deep shampoo of your peaceful nights and walk to its crib and string your own face twirling above him like a mobile circus which renounces your pain by the grace of free tickets. This is the side-door you can sneak through, which you have to sneak through.For the Theatre of War has closed all official entries, sinapistically copy-pasting data like traction-casts over its anus for fear of your pegging. Look closely, all the artists are Theatres of War, a monolith of vaginas walking around with plaster-casted dicks worn as chastity-belts painted chrome to look like loaded pistols. The prank you incubate must be a ripped apart baby of flung paint-thinner. It must corrode what it touches but also chew new holes in its own body. Be a mouth with teeth of acid and kiss the world all over. Become the hole you make shoveling the world back into love. With no love lost, conservative chemistry remains sovereign. Much love should be lost and will be, for so long now we have called hate love. That hate we masquerade we shall spill on altars of recursion. The future is lipless and shall not be read even by the deaf gifted with that silence.
Tomorrow we shall rise and find the old buildings crumbling like plaque between our teeth. We shall breathe wordless into the wind and our bad breath shall stink a new ethics into the sanitized weather which washes its hands like a creeping fog of Howard Hughes dissolving in singlemindedness upon the ground. The future shall darken into a tornado hot and bothered by our willful disfigurements, and across the membranous ground it will travel exploding the IEDs we have littered the land into eroticism with, and swept clean, the land shall be us, a world-sized skeleton of discretely general erogenous zones, pulsing, with every touch, messages into the void of space. Perhaps something other will hear, perhaps it will only be us, for we will be other, or perhaps we shall hear others pulsing through the stars towards us, who having ears never heard them, but now deaf to all but pleasure hear their cries scream like mortars across the universe, coming ahead of their own sound to destroy us into the beyond yet again.
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