Tuesday, November 27, 2007
‘Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purposes of Understanding’
Listen! Those notes are as tight
“as peas in a pod”… When I indicate
a left turn, I catch her
stovepipes
in the rear view mirror.
In nothing flat,
a rental in Spain
slips from the vendor’s lips. His scuba
cheeks ply the coastal shelves
with a coral blast. Poke me
if he does it again! Glissando
of modern condominiums. I
flossed with a tulip
when she stopped
and mumbled a Caribbean shiver
straight from the watershed
in the traffic. I winched
intensity like a soccer coach. We see
that shambled octave
mopping up the macadam.
But if I bump up the font an entire pixel,
…would that be better? A blind
corner irons out its kinks
in less time than a sunfish
slips
through Perspex.
Monday, November 26, 2007
Browning’s Lost “Giottino”
Out of my stock of natural delights: the bong’s soda water…
A sprung meniscus that crackles around the baptismal font.
It has paving, as well as drainage. It answers to laudanum. Any
variance to the hovel sciences that gives its sack
of damns: the post-violet shades co-opting rank
outlets. I say, “I’ve been ballasted with peppercorns.” (It dries
like love, the silk option, alienated with a full spread. On every
device.) My pockets were sewn closed. A conga line
of denim and nucleotides, famished. Evergreen…
Couldn’t stop. Tone values were massed in. A verdigris
curl at the nails; Mary painted from a plague corpse. Surfboard
encaustics. God the motherfucker. He acted to ensure
a predictive stippling: a slapped-on technology plugged-in
to a ball-park figure like Saint Anthony, outraged
in a hypertensive suit. An encomium to that plastic quality
then unknown. A purer hue skips the theater flats, quietly
along the estuary of Masaccio’s Peter. She’s there too,
in the medallion. A side of beef bays in my sleep. I wait
for his shadow, the thalidomide on a skateboard. A wild riff
stretches the baseline of consecutive ordinals, cardinals.
Give me simplicity. Give me a plumb larynx, straight as a line,
sluiced in a ventricle soup, with gel and sideburns. A twig
on my linen bringing a paler parentheses, like a close-out set,
conjures Ba on her traffic island. I adopted His amplitude.
A glazed mule that tunnels the vanishing point.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
The Sales Rep
I drag my suitcase to the checkout and queue behind a distressed sales rep.
I focus on his ears - funnily enough, they seem to have come unstuck from his head. If
the doorman opens the door again, the strong midday wind will carry them away.
They will be free. Like two Siamese butterflies separated in the operating theatre
of the Amazon. I see them flapping into the canopy, avoiding the giant tree snakes
and ball-scratching monkeys. Meanwhile, the sales rep will have become lost in a world
of silence. The only indication that something’s amiss is the intense humidity
spreading out from his armpits. His first reaction is to check his phone for messages.
I admit to raiding the minibar. I sign the official paper that says I agree with paying for alcohol
and chips. I tip the doorman wavering in the warm breeze. I begin to sink, imperceptibly
at first. Then, more rapidly, as the horizon rises in a river of grass. Panicking, I quickly
grab a mangrove root and pull myself onto the muddy pockmarked bank. I’ve lost
my shoes. Someone is blocking the sun. It’s the doorman reaching into the taxi to hand me back
my sunglasses. (I see myself reflected in their polarized shells, an old man, a throwback,
an extra pair of incisors rippling under my cheeks, a continuous brow wreathing tendrils of dark
through to grey). A large flower opens up ahead and exudes a pornographic stench as I
hit the ramp leading onto the motorway. The landscape changes into a benzene morass
of many colours. Numerous small tufts of dried grass shiver in the wind that fluffs up
mists of salt where the invisible surf drones behind dunes of torn plastic and discarded
white goods. On the hard shoulder, I notice a small band of suited men and women
playing with electronic devices, jogging in a tight formation, sweating like basted calves.
Beyond the flat isthmus, the tide is coming in. Its obscure waters swirl on the floor
of the taxi, tickling my toes through caked socks. I punch open the back window
and clamber onto the roof. Soon I am surfing through choppy waters, the taxi is
prowling the shallows like a manta ray. I begin to wonder how the driver can breathe
when a quick-tacking flotilla of suitcases floats into the tidal zone
like guests at a cocktail party. A small carry-on trolley glides up alongside me
with a tray of canapés. I’m feeling a little hungry, so I grab one as it floats by. I notice
I’m holding an ear filled with beeswax and sesame seeds and a just lick
of duck liver. A voice booms overhead (stout, chill, bright)
calling me to the gate to take my flight. Ahead, I see the same earless man
from the hotel. His phone makes him smile. His phone is a drum beat that speaks
its own language: “My heart against your heart, I hear the sound of unison. A soaring, red sound.”
The Village of the Mad
It was once a bustling market village. But now it’s a ghost town. There’s a man standing beneath an awning, waiting for the rain to stop. He’s waiting in below freezing temperatures. He’s waiting, but there isn’t the vaguest hint of rain.
A farmer is searching for his horse. He’s rummaging through a basket of eggs. Someone has just stolen his horse. It’s market day today. There are thousands of eggs in thousands of baskets. The thief has clearly chosen a good day to steal horses.
In a whitewashed cottage, a man and woman begin to have sex. She asks him if he would still fuck her if she were his father. He stops, thinks about it and tells her that that would be impossible because, one, she is a woman, and, two, no-one can have two fathers. “You’re worried about it too, aren’t you?” she says. Perturbed, the man storms out of the whitewashed cottage.
He comes across a man in a business suit. The man in the business suit tells him that, nowadays, queens don’t exist. “Let’s not argue about it. They don’t!” he says, fucking off, telling him to fuck off!
After Henri Michaux
At Wijk aan Zee
Three sisters carry buckets down to the sand where the seagulls flap and bully at the shore.
The youngest shouts and throws her bucket up.
The mother loses her place on the page.
The seagulls regroup and stand in packs.
The girls point at the wet in the sand.
A shore-break dazzles and rushes forward.
A gasp, and a hand is buried.
A jet ski plods over a song.
A moon is vaguer by the minute.
A Formal Partition
Guru of insecurity –
the poet has only a mortgaged satisfaction. A smut
quenched incessantly.
after René Char
