Goodbye Cunny Isle, Hello Ocean and The Merest Possibility of Larger Landmasses!

"Cuisine Bourgeoise" by Wallace Stevens


These days of disinheritance, we feast
On human heads.  True, birds rebuild
Old nests and there is blue in the woods.
The church bells clap one night in the week,
But that's all done.  It is what used to be,
As they used to lie in the grass, in the heat,
Men on green beds and women half of sun.
The words are written, though not yet said.

It is like the season when, after summer,
It is summer and it is not, it is autumn
And it is not, it is day and it is not,
As if last night's lamps continued to burn,
As if yesterday's people continued to watch
The sky, half porcelain, preferring that
To shaking out heavy bodies in the glares
Of this present, this science, this unrecognized,

This outpost, this douce, this dumb, this dead, in which
We feast on human heads, brought in on leaves,
Crowned with the first, cold buds.  On these we live,
No longer on the ancient cake of seed,
The almond and deep fruit.  This bitter meat
Sustains us...Who then, are they, seated here?
Is the table a mirror in which they sit and look?
Are they men eating reflections of themselves?



"Days of Disinheritance" by Nelms

As if it was within our power to decide, we've decided,
Time to move on.  Using the ancient processes
Of humanity's vilified cannibals, we shrunk our own heads,

And we belted them round our waists to make it easier
For travel, and to hide the progression of our drooping
Guts, just as fathers before us had used the notorious fannypack,

Just so we've moved on to the use of our heads, new parents
Of new ideas for new techniques better suited to preserve the old ways.

Lighter in the neck, we stand taller, more erect.
With less room in our heads to think
We have improved athleticism for laughter, eroticism, & reflex--

That noble science of the present-tense animals perfect,
Which we've moved to accomplish and all our history remember only to reject.

Of the habits of the birds, we believe we remember the basics,
But not what beauty they were, if they were, or the meaning
Of the beauty, if we should be led to believe
It had a meaning at all.  The lesson we take away
Is survival, and how to trash-up a nest for blessed rest.
Now we've gone through the hard part,

Through the paranoia of mastery
Which makes the world complex,
It's all so simple now, having shrunk our heads.  Not only alive,
We've found ourselves in love with it, or shiny parts of it,
So much so, we somehow want to survive, which is in keeping with.

Like a nest
     Of mirrored mylar and foil,
We grew up without
And without meaning to.

We were friends once,
And listened to mirror each other's tyrannies,
Sympathetic to power,

As the political bird knows
What wind does,
For itself,
And for him.

Now, there's no wind blowing.
And without talking,
There's nothing to listen to;
Nothing given, nothing used,
neocons of the heart.
The mill stops.
The power goes out.
None of the four elements call us
Friend, even the water
Borne in our eyes.

And atop our fear-dry hair,
     Nostalgia immigrates.
To keep the signals out
We wear our tin leftovers from the cheap lunch of compromise,
Parrying the terrible alien-future by claiming rights,
     Fencing our minds into owned property,
Into home sweet home, complete with a lawn gnome.

True, no one wishes anymore to deny health in loss,
And karma, like vending machines & classical mechanics,
Demands, Dante-esque, quid pro quo, the natural law
Of give & take & for all omelettes, eggs must break.

True, our peripheral vision is marginally diminished,
Having shrunk our eyes closer together, as if they
Were lovers moved to commit to split themselves to one,
But losing the sight of the world around us, we gain the world

In front of us, facing us like a pest to be dealt
Cards and lip and poison and food to.  Out of sight, out of mind,
That is the essence of our purportedly redemptive New Testament.

Yes, we can see farther ahead, which, after all
Is exactly where we're supposedly going, not side to side
Like drunk dancers, but straight ahead over the hill
Into the great flatlining savanna acceptably hostile with age.

There we shall grow habits like shadetrees
For the comfort and neglect of our children
And our children's children, should they survive
Like true birds to rebuild without meaning
     Or meaning to.  And the candle of freedom's
Trauma shall light our vigilance,
     Like a nest of mirrored mylar and foil,
And this reflective trash will be redeemed as home,
     The place we fenced the voices out
To move beyond and on past doubt
Into the last outpost of the dispossessed
     Where exile takes the home as truth and debt to repossess,
And on, further still, into the headless days unheeding

       Our days of disinheritance, the nightmare of joy
We dreamed real as apocalypse.




"Fears of particular dangers, if only virtual ones, haunt the workday like a mood that can't be escaped.  This fear, however, is transformed into an operational requirement, a special tool of the trade.  Insecurity about one's place during periodic innovation, fear of losing recently gained privileges, and anxiety over being 'left-behind' translate into flexibility, adaptability, and a readiness to reconfigure oneself."--Paolo Virno




"All the Questions I've Asked" by Philip K. Dick



I went to the water.  By the shoals were 7 tents, I put them to my back, & leaned over the water.  The wind blew too hard and the water was too brown.  I couldn't see my reflection.  I pulled the flask & did my duty.  The sun shone on a cardinal-bird's exposed heart.  Dimly, the girls ran the trails.  I picked up the bird.  A cat did?  I went home to the thing I almost wanted to call home, had a cigar, watched the game and moisturized.  I had to drink a lot of water before I could sleep.  Even then I woke with a desert in my mouth.  I took out my journal and wrote 4 questions down while I had my morning coffee:

1.  What if humans were taken over by their component parts, functioning now as conscious entities themselves?

2.  What if humans were made to function as if they were components of another entity?

3.  What if a computer behaved like a person?

4.  What if people were made to behave as if they were computers?

After I wrote all that down was when I went to the window and saw a great plane basked in you, helpless before their closed eyes.
The sun shone on a bird's exposed heart.
And the girls, dimming like craved breeze, sparkled like an elephant's extra-moisturizing noocyte.
Till then I'm yours.
Till then I wrote with my friend Nelms this poem for you.
Here:

"Funny Friends" by Phil K. Dick

Everything's funny, or it isn't, depending.
It's funny how I care for you,
so much I won't bother you with my care, anymore, for now.
We're "grown" now, and what that means

is we can't keep each other from failing,
not because we don't care to, but because
we're too tired to help.
It's not that life is actually tiring,

We're just at that age
we're so terrified of our own ambitions,
we have no choice but to feel we have a choice,
and that that choice must be made irrevocable and now.

Look at us, 
such urgent children

In the disproving face of unctuous death,
still too young to know death

is an indifferent decision
there's no right way to await,

and no right way but any ways
for life to justify.

sacked lunches

snow white and adam and eve
william and walter and gessler

everyone with a job to do
everyone abruptly resigns

fucking apples, y'all

"death fluorescence"

call him carlos
a worm has entered him
to begin to die

one day he asks
was oral sex awesome
for triceratops

when a man is dying
his parasites accumulate bedside
the worm glows blue

the plastic of gadgets
is made of dinosaur carcasses
death gets a dick hard

from san diego to bunker hill

i do not need to see any more mayonnaise enemas
for the rest of my lifetime; put a grip on this knob
and lay a brodie for me, whisper, "remember me"

cosplay a shit sandwich, hereby to bear your buns
amply with egg & oil; peel out of the place, leave
it: "so you're a fugivitve from the laughing house"

heed the sun-spoiled blistering of white puss-like
that becomes your body, for to pretend too real is
it: "i don't care what you do to me, just do it fast"

a bunch of cops, they'll eat you whilst patrolling;
writhe bursting in your mask, there a second skin
in dirt: "yeah, i remember you from somewhere"

Sorry about "Top Drone," guys. . .

. . . it totally bombed.

The New Business

Lucy & Trevor smile at me like a business decision.  I don't know them but we met yesterday in the Ramada Inn continental-breakfast room.  I know a few things.  Lucy drinks her coffee black.  Trevor drinks his milk with coffee.  Lucy likes Pop Tarts cold.  Trevor likes white bread toasted with strawberry jelly.  I imagine them fucking each other into a whippet-with-a-broken-leg-frenzy, but my imagination has been miserably underused this past week.  When I sit down to eat I begin receiving text messages like hamburgers sent from God.  It's Tim's brother; not a lady friend.  Lucy & Trevor smile at me like a Cuban cigar offered to a non-smoker & Lucy says, "Somebody's blowing up!"  She looks at my chest hair and turns to Trevor, raising her eyebrows like a new suburb.  Trevor purses his lips at her like a personal Jesus offering a profound aroma and makes an insect-like sound through his teeth.  Tonight I will fuck them till they both feel like voyeurs calmly playing with shotguns.

After breakfast I drive over a 100 miles to a forgotten town where my friend Tim lives in a singlewide above a dry ravine.  Tim is outside when I pull up, cleaning a handgun on a large, smooth stump.  Tim has a big purple scar down the right side of his face.  Today it looks greenish, like a big junebug.  He doesn't answer any questions about it, ever.

Inside his trailer, on the counter next to his microwave, is a huge noodle of what looks like but doesn't smell like pastrami.  He calls it "the effluvia."  A pink blob the size of a large Saint Bernard breathes with a wet, heavy noise on his ratty couch.  The large rotating fans with tendrilly flystrips blow on it.  The pastrami looks like its sweating but Tim is already chopping fat slices off it with a penknife.  In this light, with the blinds drawn, seeing his face in left-profile concentrating on making sandwiches, he looks a bit like Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers.

Tim puts Miracle Whip & slices of tomato on the sandwiches.  He drags two stained fold-out chairs across the linoleum and places them in front of the blob, right behind the fans.  The sandwiches smell putrid, curiously earthy, as if he'd pulled a week-dead buried cat out of the ground and dipped it in honey and bacongrease.  While we eat, Tim points out to me where all the orifices are.  I take careful note, scratchily diagramming them into a pocket Moleskine.

When I get back to the Ramada Inn, Lucy & Trevor's Lexus is gone.  I figure they must be out for a late dinner at one of the chains that stretch the next two miles north to the interstate exit.  Two girls in bikinis are swimming in the pool, and two more in bikinis are lying out in the sun on their stomachs, tops untied, hair rucked up in ponytails to lie like sleeping cats atop their skulls.

I get the bags out of my car, turn on the cold water in the tub, and make a few trips to the ice machine.  The sun is going down and by the time I'm done icing the merchandise & step outside my door wearing swimtrunks, flip-flops, & a Fudrucker's shirt, Lucy & Trevor are pulling into the parking lot, clicking off and on their headlights in greeting & giggling their way out of the car.  I wave.  "There you are," Lucy drawls, "Look Trevor, Greg is staying another night, and he's going swimming too!"  Before Trevor can say anything, Lucy turns toward Greg, her face twisted in mock, self-assured supplication, "May we please, please join you?"  "Of course," I say.  I take off my shirt and walk to the pool, now empty.  From behind Trevor yells, "Great! I just bought some beer!  We'll ice it and join!"

To my despicable unsurprise, Lucy has a better body than her Target-bought business casual outfits suggest. She wears a lime-green bikini & with her bobbed pale hair, Natty-Lite-blue-eyes & pale skin, it accentuates her shadows and the curves bright daylight whites out.  She does a few laps walking around the pool, dipping her feet daintily, complaining of the "cold."  I tell her to take the plunge and wade out into the deep.  She slides feet first into the pool and comes up giggling, teeth very white, pushing her hair back.  Trevor arrives in a heinously ugly pair of brown and magenta swimtrunks.  He puts the cooler next to the shallow-end ladder and does a hysterical cannonball, to no one's surprise, from the diving board.

I get a beer and sit on the edge of the pool.  There's a warm breeze and my hair & shoulders dry quick.
"So tell us Greg," Trevor asks, "what brings ya to our neck of the woods?"
"Yes, Greg, do tell," Lucy coos, circles, and pinches my feet under water.  "Do tell."
"Well, I got a friend lives pretty close to here.  He's an old buddy of mine back from data analysis days, and he's always been a pretty good tinkerer.  Know that app that lets you see who's in your area willing to barter & trade & what for?"  Lucy looks confused, but Trevor perks up.  "Yeah.  Yeah! I've used it before!  Stuff I know's an asspain to sell I'll list it up.  I like to trade with the local farmers so that way helps me meet 'em, get a little rapport hopping.  Traded an old grill when I upgraded for some honey & mead.  Traded some old bangup buggy ATVS for some veggies.  Farmer send me a package once a week got peppers, tomatoes, carrots, whatever's seasonal fresh."
"Yeah, we worked on that app together."
"O wow," Trevor says, pulling himself out of the pool, popping open a beer.

In the hotel room, Trevor stands over Lucy on the bed.  His legs are wide and his arms are locked against the wall.  Lucy has one hand out choking his cock and I'm fucking her while I massage his prostate with my ringless ring-finger.  Trevor can't control himself, to no one's surprise, and he comes with measly substance on the wall above the headboard.  A tiny drop of cum falls on Lucy's forehead and I push Trevor off the bed.  He falls like a drunk stork to his side on the floor, knocking the lamp & phone off the stand.  I take advantage of Lucy's surprise and punch her twice in the nose and box her ears with a hard clap.  Babbling, Trevor is up, pulling my arms from behind.  I fling myself backward on top of him and catch a hard knee in my buttcheek, but I throw my bows back, gain the advantage, put him in a headlock and watch him pass out trying futilely to do a pushup with all my weight thrown against his back.  Lucy's out cold, but her nose is gushing.  I get out my duffel bag, unwrap the needles, and inject them both with sodium thiopental.  I tie them to the bed, dress, get more ice, and crank the TV loud.  I fill the tub with the merchandise up again with ice.  I put a bag of ice over Lucy's nose & I wait.

When I hear the merchandise emit a high whistle, almost like a distant teakettle, I begin to perform the tracheotomies.  The best position for a tracheotomy was and still is one that forces the neck into the biggest prominence. I restrain them with some pantyhose, duct tape, and load cords, and lay their heads back on stacked pillows I use as a fulcrum.  Everything goes pretty well, mostly.

The merchandise doesn't have a name yet, but Tim likes to call it, "The Anthem."  I've meditated for weeks on why & I can't figure it.  I thought seeing what it did might make his nickname clear, but it didn't.  Much has become clear this afternoon however.  Suddenly, I hear that wet, heavy breathing.  I put my mask and gloves on & go get the merchandise.  I let it move across the bed.  It takes twenty minutes to diffuse and cover Lucy & Trevor, and in another fifteen minutes enough pheromones have entered the air through the mask that I'm hard again and thrusting slowly into the ninth, middle-lower orifice.  The special detector we've installed in the masks are counting up a higher productivity than Tim has yet recorded.  Slowly other boldly colored orifices rise on stems from the bed like weird plants near ocean-floor volcanoes.  I do what Tim taught me and feed them anything I can find--coins, lint, condoms, jewelry, clothes, the lamp, the telephone, soap, shampoo, towels, the empty beer cans...The level of output is staggering.  I go into the bathroom and close the door.  I don't even know how to describe the sound but it's sort of like taking your car through a carwash.  Enveloping, but not really all that loud, except this sound had a weird high frequency to it.  I record it on the phone and bookmark it for further discussion.  It smells like burgers fried with doghair & rosewater, healthily decadent  I wait a few minutes after the smell hits me, as per Tim's instructions, and I open the door.  Everything's clean.  The Anthem wheezes on the bed, shrinking itself off the output, evacuating its own vocation.  Trevor & Lucy are gone, but if the Anthem worked I can get them back at anytime.  

The output takes me a few hours to collect and mold.  It diffuses when it comes into existence, spreads out in meaningless shapes, and though it looks like there's some way all the pieces are supposed to fit together, you can't figure it out.  The angles don't make any sense.  I follow Tim's advice and breathe on the pieces to soften them and then I just roll them up into one big piece, the best I can.  I pack everything and go.  

Out in the night, I drive north for hours, speaking into the recorder.  Somewhere in upper Virginia I come to a rest stop and get out for a piss and a stretch.  It's a little after 4 am and there are mostly parked semis, a few sedans, some young couples waiting for one or the other to get done with the bathroom or discussing a snack from the machines.  I get my business done and ride on.  A half-hour before dawn I reach the renovated courthouse and do what Tim told me to do.  I write a note for S. and Brown on the merchandise, bag the output, and leave to find a cheap hotel.

White fog hung low and crept past her window.  The crickets loudened and an owl hooted.  In the brush outside a small animal scurried, skittling leaves in its mad scramble.  S. was involved watching a moth trapped in a lightbulb.  The moth flailed near the tip.  Its wings flapped, beating a tinny sound, making the yellow light blink.  S. sat on the edge of her bed taking off her shoes and pantyhose, watching the struggle, wondering how.  Then there was an electric pop and a blue light stabbed the yellow into black.  S. waited until her eyes adjusted, and with bare feet, padded across the floor to the utility closet.  She got a new bulb and returned.  When she had replaced the bulb, she broke it open and pulled out the charred moth. She went to the window and let the fog grope in.  She dropped the burnt moth out and quickly shut the window after making sure of the delivery.  Outside the room S. stored herself in for the night, dust piled itself into ziggurats on top of the mantelpieces and roaches hurled their young down the steps, playing at sacrifice while other dusts cultured themselves in the petri-dishes of grandfather-clocks. 

                
Two and a half miles northeast of the courthouse, in Golden Finch gated community, Brown listened to the crickets louden and raised his chin toward the sky.  He threw the cigarette on the sidewalk above the streetdrain and blindly, looking into the noise of the dogwood, scraped his boot across the sidewalk pulling the cigarette onto the street and kicking it into the drain.  The wind he could feel passing his jaw didn’t match the strength of the wind he saw marionetting the dogwood.  A gloved feeling came into his stomach, a feeling of latex-fingers attempting to palpate the outside air from inside his gut.  He imagined a doctor inside him, one who tried to hold the air’s tongue and depress it with a popsicle stick, checking to see if the body of the outside world revolted against itself.  He could see down the street for a little over a quarter-mile before the streetlights went out.  In the dark were big mounds next to what looked like hulking beasts, figures which the daylight would show to be big red mounds of clay and dirt scraped into hills before Caterpillars.  Dark houseframes made curious geometries behind the machines.  Picking at a piece of food stuck in the receding gum below his left incisor, he walked into the dark end of the street, bowlegged, feeling the need for a looming.

"Where's Nick?"

What if. . .
the Rapture came
and the only soul
Raptured was Nick
and no one
knew it. . .?