THRUM
De thunder of soils spoils spells the lacquer of shells. De cove slew krills. De thunderous
coil loom de caw caw de crow flume de loam the sweet cone's down. Multiplicity: grass
grows outward from every pore. Folly: Blossoms layer upward from petiole. Under layer
floats pecan, the number of stars. Under the known world a wolf nosing the snow.
Don't let the opportunity pass!
The loop the lope the fire the schtetl the clew. I could not live if light were not a rope for
climbing. Beloved chest where underneath beats hard. The dark theater and the
continuous canopy of light. Thrum rattle secular. Thrum wicker throne. Climb. A warm
weight in my palms. Threnody. The eye of another.
When I walk in the forest I am as tall as the trees. When I walk in the marsh I am as low
as the swale. I could not live if others were not real.
Fall for sublunary charm. Fall for lichen and bole, fall for salamander, sphere, fall for the
number of stars, Be strong, move with grace, be fortunate, fend.
The living surface of the planet is the film of an eye. The ground is what we stand on.
Skin sheds, that's good design. Ooze and cleanse. Spectre, makar. The pores relax or
seize. The markets are full of meat with veins of fat like veins of the leaf. Lichen,
bracken, sward. Asunder. salamander. coronary. The bole and the flare and the number
of stars.
Palpable the answer, spade spadix spathe. Aspirate. Spear. Bole and flare. Do tell of a
little flock. Angelic jape of the storm. Do tell of a spoke spring. Forgot a harm. Check
clock check clerk check cork storm steam. Tender shoot on the tongue.
Splendid sortie. Stitch, stitch. Cortical portcullis. Botswain, skallawag, senechal, hatch
tickler, vocational counselor. Seer, spear carrier, weaver of basket and baker of soils,
schneiderman, forester, mushrom farmer, cartographer, bearer of the oriflamme, miser,
haberdasher, welder, maker of foolscap, posh horseradish, ankle vent, mail handler, flesh
scent of the moorings, sybarite, gramineous knee, lakewater, prattler, fin darting behind a
rock, underwater steam spring whirling and roiling. Brachiopod whirling and roiling.
Lapidary. Forager. Rash teller of tales. Gooseberry, anthill, peach buttocks. Baleful
calico, fire (plenty of fire.) A matinee, a picketline. Moisture around the lid. Imperfect
gasket. Pickpocket. The great arms of the sky. Squid, strudel, powerless pensive pussy.
Forestal ash, severe tidal pull. Fricative. Pollster. Raconteur.
ALL DEEP ENDS ON WHAT IS REMEMBERED.
New things you won't use because of their newness. Bear's teeth biting the apple close to
the hand. Trips between islands. Mastadon. Tire recycling center. He lost his hand. The
desolate tax preparing travel agencies of Brooklyn He lost the branches of his palm. You
are saved at the last moment by the smell and warmth of another. You are saved at the
last moment: honor the life of another. There is a convulsion on the surface. A kind
person will intervene. There is currentless movement. You will stumble into a warm
room. You will leave behind the rivulets in the igneous crater. This is a bountiful sphere.
You will pull your life off your own fingers as it flowers there. You will be led to safety.
Which is why you must save the child. The infant is curled inside you. Never has a flower
been so lost.
The whole enterprise is turning into earth. Branches of the palm. Ladybugs swarming
under the lens of the creek. Ideational loop. Could I release the caged animal. Caterpillar
pale. Eggs of the dragonfly in the viscous pond. All moribund. The lush slick underwater
colonies of green. How seductive is war. Transformation of the bear with its necklace of
fish. The venal govern us. Meisterbrau. Heron. Colonies of green. How does the spider
migrate? Dark Trees.
Owl lives here. And a man with a bicycle. Glassblower blows glass seahorse colony, the
culture blossoms, destroying those who sink forgotten. Belltower and precipitous
stairway. The congregation sinks, forgotten. The proprietor, Bobby, is drunk. This is a
recession. The cottage in the woods. The barricade, the anthracite mine. The flea
market. The orphanage of underwater. Don't cry. Be brave. This time is no worse than
others. Her skirt is yellow with green and purple eyes. It swirls along the line of store
fronts. Glass comes from the earth. Facsimilies come from earth. Foc's'les come from
earth. Follicles, followers, madrigals, particals, sanctuaries, magnetic traps, festivals,
shanties, prayer rugs, salons. Hammers lined up. Palliative. Lone lashed hysterical and
marooned. CORPOREAL. SIDEREAL. Meisterbrau. The hot dry climate, the clay
pots, small houses, windows sills annealed. Worms baked in their tunnels, lizard eggs in
the keyholes. Pleistecene era. Mister, you are too much. Up your sleeve is a scroll of
ideas. Russians under New York. Tourists discuss the Brooklyn Bridge. Lymph water.
Float outside the biosphere. Some will be lame or under grown, missing one part or
another, afflicted with hypertrophy, out of their proper element. The majority will be
healthy and well-formed. Hail of stones. Broom folder. Flocculating Missy Porter.
Fortune teller. Young man with a braid, member of the metalworker's guild. Penitent
seller of corsets hats and girdles. Flecked with mud like a flounder. Three parts of rumor
up your sleeve. Sweet swale. Sidle here. Double again with I swear it never happened.
Tie up a lamb-baster and pierce with an arrow. Next, row downstream, ignoring the flesh
eating gleaming flitters. If beetles drop from the undersides of leaves onto curved water
hammocks, don't disturb them, you fussbudget, you Indian giver.
Harp hemp herpes. Sickle shaped multifarious lashers in suspension. Pride of her core
and flame of her coral. Henchman. Psalter. These words form other integral morpho-
linguistic lumps. Loose shanks. Hinged, mud-soaked. It lolls and japes. All day we
move in starlight. Sinker sinker. Feels good. Practice at the loom. Practice wool, hemp
lamp and harp. Hoop and lip. Saddle. Croon. Bang the hot curl of iron in the tong. Fly
over the sill and into the dogwood in bloom. We live in nests. All tasks are assigned. I
loom. He harps. I wheedle. She bubbles candy over the fire and wears a red checked
apron. It is June. Rain has fallen. The two eyes of the nightplane steadily gain altitude
over the wooden frame of the house. Every window glows. Where is the firefly,
emissary, flame thrower, man of steel. Over the fence gleams the river. Under the water
more gleaming still, the incredible complexity of scales, iridescent, my dream of movement
has come alive. I pass my hand over the light. Different shades of skin. Hers is coral.
Cone and lone killer. SHELL of the town crier. A task for everyone. Lantern and key.
Past the fence gleams the river. Cronies, misery-seekers, engine racers, obfuscators,
confessors, haridans and pinking shears. Past order is more order. Past everything,
compared as it is with thing, is within thing. Therefore, I have become unable to trust
even under ordinary conditions. Shine shoes. Lazybone. Cantankerous sack of pride.
Wood grain contains the town. No malice but absorption. Mollusk. Rant. Rock and the
barnacle's cement. Lamprey. Ladybugs dropping and swarming, more armor under their
domes. Red skirt with black and purple eyes swirling. The dancers of showboat. The
tendons of the dancers' arms. In extremis. Masthead is the image of the continuous
scissoring of legs. I cannot eat that. Whoop. The woods. The bats. The wheat and
weevil and womb. More hats! Asterisk has significance. Parlance, wick the water
through. Mention history. The bard is true. A law was passed against me. I lived under
the rotting logs by the creek. Water flowed through all my holes. My tear ducts pores
and teats became pure. But my feet swelled with gangrene. I found a magic car in the
classifieds. My feet grew back. I cleaned his walnut scalp with green, was his servant,
confessor, feather duster. Soon the police found me. I was caged, an unhappy animal.
How I pined. I had no bar of soap. No fire to burn my hair, no ash to write. A rash
battened on me. In there, glass seahorses thatched roofs, grieved their lost and broken
ones, wrote songs. Happy harp. The dance the apple horse the ice maiden. The chemist
and his secrets. Rings in rings benzene. Inca Matilda. Malice toward none. One day the
door opened. The lord had been ransomed or the town sacked. I almost snapped in two.
Moth's hat. Spider swirled down after the battle of the night. Why is the night black. My
clever nephew, apple of my eye. Observes the dance, the calico, the apple horse delirious
with lemon. He also sees trombones. Washerwoman's big pink hands. Poor man, out in
the carriage all night. Poor horse. Kitten crying for America. Pissed off. Kissed by fish.
Batten on it. Resplendent like Ailanthus. Porcine. Payphone. Prom queen. Hanker
beset secretary. Hardass. A sparrow in the box. A pea rattling in the pod. One
application of the miraculous aloe. The ghost of their near demise. What did I care if I
was taken hook hoop, sinker and wick, my barrel trembling on the edge of the cataract!
The bells of the goats, the pale larvae exposed, the beetle-laced wood. Lichen, my favorite
fruit, mimicing the leap. Schooner sepal weep and shale. Frail angst, dissolves as ceases
the magnetic force. Deliquescent angst, past penitence! Felicity. Stand clear of the
closing doors. The shiny hammock of water silken under the carapace, legs tenderly
testing the air, underside up, the scary segmented underside of the strange and ubiquitous
beetle!
Clean break. Must not approach the matter trivially. The door closes. Wash hangs across
the alley. Foam cup bobs in the gutter. Slim smooth legs of the young woman. Voice of
the rabbi. I cannot move because the dog growls. A child has died. Square frame shifts
like a shuttle, the film over the tissue readjusting. Blue globe forms on the out breath. If I
don't wake him, the currentless room will protect. Flying over the towns. Entering the
wilderness. Entering the pine barrens. Flurry in the speculum. The intelligent wood
insect. Cities lit by the deaths of whales. Incantations of the street visionaries, pupils
hanging high in the orbs. I'm hungry, Ma'm. It hurts. Each moment with its slow belly
brushing the earth. Franchise of the sickle shape. Our existence is an inflammation on the
earlobe of Mr. Carswell. "Logic is a way to stop time." Imagine a book louse. Imagine a
hair from a hammernose. Imagine a clay. A muscle. A thistle. A sidewinder. A Mars.
We have a new table. Flecked egg broken open and the shell discarded. It is the shell, not
the yolk and albumen that is flecked. Creates a beautiful time piece like ailanthus wheels
with their parallel pinnates undulating in snake tongues. Tongues of ibex, the tongue of
the causeway. Littoral soils and loams. The planet purifies us. Wide sweep. Air is
nectar. Nico loves to breathe. How can distance exist in a vaccuum? Morels. Botswana.
Miribalis. Fecundia. Loamy soil. I burp peat moss. Umbel heart of the frog beating
under the knife. Pity the creatures who perish in the deluge. Carved a heron, carved a
lion, carved a jade bear, carried a bucket of water, carried a basket with berries,
mushrooms roots, bark, feathers and a few bison teeth culled from a skeletal wreck.
Fortunate was the traveller in time. Hydrogen atoms flipping their orbits every 11 million
years. Give a hum. I fear to sink my teeth into the prey. Live and harm. Recognize the
churning of matter, constant unstoppable renewal generation, the electric flip. How little
electricity we use in our bodies, how efficient a use of energy! LEARN CHEMISTRY.
Be apothecary.
A cup of air on earth contains more than a billion trillion molecules.
Perfidy. Betrayal. Inflatable legs. You are in your thirties. Whine from the heliport is
constant. They've got some new kind of surveillance worked out there. My neighbor is a
blond kid, skinny knees. He got caught up in this thing. Basket case. Tripped and no
stair caught him. He heard a vague threat. Took every hill. Soaked the cloud in chemical
and wrung it down. It was a consipiracy. Hustler of trees by day, cleaner of slates by
early morning light. Day came closer, yes, perfidy approached. Terminus bristled in a so
so enactment of a meltdown in the salivary engine of the sense of loss. Sloppy revolution
of a partially melted gear. A whir interrupted by a conversation. Husserl halibut saturate
amateur. Blastula creeping under statistical wall sent by a humdinger of a president.
Outlawed by several invincible foes. Teller of misfortune. Sharer of the meat of pumpkin.
What can window do about this mess? What can we winnow out. Taker of tickets,
murderer of trees. Seldom such calumny. Portion out the underlying deceit. Siphon off
the frightened waters. A hundred expanding metals. Now the fire in the window. Cantor,
you pall. Forget I mentioned your meadow, your weevils. Mantis' mandibles. The whole
field on fire. Sky comes down closer to the furrow and drops a pocket of droplets from
which, autochthonous, come the sowers of whatever it is you taste now. He'll die within
the year and you'll be bunching up your stomach in your palms for the hungry sorrow and
silt of it. Visually, a grand duke. Aurally, a flying sheet with pillow and caffeine. Tactile
report: the center has retreated and the edges puff and crack. A line of cells surrounding a
soft center coding for life. Henchmen are another expression of lust. Silence is a
strangling of the urge to play. A quiet hand is one that isn't twisting a towel, a birdneck,
or a waterbearer. Go on. In several rotations the bunch of grapes fastened by a stream of
sweat to a plastic globe will break off and hurtle in a hysterical trajectory toward an
innocent. Who can guarantee a satisfactory resolve? The train passed this time yesterday.
I hear it now, a family of geese, a fence to keep them out, and a ruminating murder inside
the house. The cabal of engines. Misjudgment. The wound. Poor visibility. Ask for
mercy receive a fish. Ask for peace. Rich cache of protein the node the pouch the flower
the medicine the hurt arm the split garnet. Screen is filtering light light comes daily
molecules gather spin. The distance an average molecule travels before hitting another is
the time elapsed between the probability of the event occuring at all. Particulate sediment.
Acorn whizzing out to Maryland. The houses have been uprooted and the driveway
moved. You can float now, it's ok.
We were trying to start the engine of a fragile helicoptor. A young girl ran up with a
sweater in case of crash in cold climate. Crackers were stored. Back and forth we
rocked, like a motel, every moment expecting the slice on the back of the neck.
Meanwhile, a branch was pushed to the window by the wind and, without looking, one
would not be able to distinguish fiber from bird. The branches were launched into the
light like a mote blown into the crevice of a disintegrating shutter. Only four days after
the deaths did the report come in, filled with ludicrous misstatements, distortions and
innuendoes.
Tour guide body guard or apple seller? Two large glass globes with smooth-lipped
apertures opening up above. Propmaster. Industrial sabateour or animal trainer. The
harmless people of god. Grant applicant. Tubercular horse. Spiny or horned greb. Steps
to the beach. Avoid all perternatural gibbonish portly men in tumbling hutches graining
the surface of a shining bodice. Lazy bum. Could have gone to prison for a year. Silk
bottom. I die when I wake. Blithely hand the man a $1 bill. Hook me up with a ribald
sad witch of a salesman in heat with the gulp of a nonplussed handgun. Watch two
matchsticks contend for the prize. A globule of red squeezes out. Portentious.
Extremely hardhit with 1/15th of a wanderlust. I thought he was a saint, but he was only
disingenuous. He washes his turban in the blue water under a decaying bridge.
Chortle. What you say depends on who hears it. Screen door. The day is laced with fire,
laced with a dread harboring a gargantuan itch in your wandering eye. Sojourn hop in a
gogo rapture. Hazy mix nor would engine be late. You're mummified. The whole earth
is separating at the seams of magma and crust. Horse radish. Cantata for 3 horns and a
hoof. Patch of dry skin. Loose on your toes. Afraid, but you do it anyway. Move along
to the right till the aftersmell fades. Her pink flower wets itself. The striped tender of the
beach incurred.
Clues in my round firestarter are all around. Be kind to animals. The wasp pinned
between the panes of occlusion, nervous veins of plastic mimicing biological process, the
factory of the leaf, external, undeviating and final. Be kind to animals. No wash away.
No vision of a clean home. At 30, exeunt the childhoods. A new childhood, lived through
all past and future lives. I have the stones I love, malachite and leopard agate. Be kind to
the animals who disturb the fastidious order of the home, the ant & millipede & spider &
centipede & mouse & red mite & fat, blood mite & roach & cat. The world endlessly
recreates its topographies with particles I labor to eradicate. I must harm. Harm and
release my life from the clutches of my own grasp. Life should not be bitter. Hair inky,
we oar like divers lashing over volute elisians. Tender occlusion's kiln inside your sinking
skeleton, your sweet self's always lonely, like onyx, vole, ermine. Ravishing! I must live
and harm. The complex nodes. The omnitones, the action adventure. I will learn a trick
and perform it for you.
"I would like," I said to the inexplicable creature in whose cup I dangled fearlessly, "to
desire and consume only what's necessary and no more. I want a rest from gulping coffee,
changing clothes, showering, preparing food, vacuuming, buying and throwing stuff away,
looking in mirrors, twitching, chewing, tapping, apologizing." The creature's voice came
from the direction of the eye underneath me: "What seems like a bunch of tics to you is
your body driving you to find what you need but don't know enough to look for. You've
got to remember that nature is extravagant Excess is normal and you can't cut it out of
your life."
"But I want to live more simply," I said.
"It's not possible to honestly articulate such a desire." the creature said.
I glanced at the swirling mucous of the eye below me, a first nervous thought of falling.
As if to reassure me, a tendril bent wetly from a pore of the breathing wall and wrapped
around my chest. The tendril it replaced retreated for replenishment. Several yards away a
minor cup spored, and the filaments diffused gently throughout the cavity. One landed on
my lips and tingled there. When I touched it with my tongue, warmth spread and I burped
peat moss. The pinnate claws of the other minor cups trembled in sympathy with the now
empty sac twisting and collapsing on its stem.
"Just because you're astonishing and powerful and I don't know how the fuck I got here
doesn't mean your wisdom is unassailable," I said. "I know I want to live more simply.
It's true."
"You're full of shit," it answered. "You're obsessing on irrelevancies and lying to yourself.
Cutting excess out of your life by depriving yourself is absurd; it's deprivation that drives
excess in the first place. Listen, forget the petty chipping away at your own pitiful little
subterfuges. Leave them in place, pursue your desires. You'll find what you lack that way.
It's the only way out of the trap.
"First you say excess in normal, then you say it's created by deprivation."
"Where's the contradiction in that? You see it as a contradiction because you equate
desireability and normality. In equating those two things you expose yourself as someone
who understands the world in terms of good and bad. Desireable and normal are related
to each other only as much as everything is related. You better get your shit together,
sister. Listen. You might be right in your perception that your life is choking with useless
gesture and consumption, but you don't know which gestures and which consumption in
that mess are essential to you. Right in the typical vein of your heritage you come up with
these virtuous resolutions to eradicate what your inaccurate, Manichean view of the
world says is bad. And all the time you're walking around among creatures who are dying,
literally, for what you have. You're so fucking self-involved it's pitiful."
I saw the blue and grey humor covering the lens of the eye swirl to reveal the pupil
widening under the cornea. All the walls seemed to slope there. The tendrils holding me
above the void relaxed and I slipped slightly. One of my own voices came to me through
the growing nervousness, 'a friendly disagreement on a philosophical point...gets a little
heated but the good will remains.' While the voice reasoned, the tendrils holding me by
my chest suddenly opened so that I dropped several feet, my heart bursting in my mouth.
Before I reached the eye, they caught me again, neatly. My hands clawed at the slippery
tendrils and I broke into the surface of them slightly. Green oozed out. I could feel the
warmth of the creature's body. "Sorry," I said, trying to hide my green fingernails from
the eye.
"You're as fragile and repulsive to me as a spider is to you. I'm fighting a compulsion to
destroy you. Don't think it's your life I'm worried about; it's my own revulsion and fear of
you that disturbs me. Your death would be as sad and tiny as the deaths of the ants you
wash down the drain. You know we flowers eat thousands of you humans every day."
I found myself awash in fluid then and I closed my eyes to protect them. When I opened
them again it was to the Brooklyn sky. It was late afternoon and I was lying on my back
in the side yard of the Dean Street house among the condoms, empty fruit cans and animal
bones.
TYPES OF SECLUSION
You know the viewer's history but can't recall it now. His people live in nests. Some
furtively swill what looks to us like purple water. These end up in the light, like bottles on
window sills.
The viewer and his kind are transluscent. Ten or fifteen times in a society as complex as
ours, someone has crashed his fur-lined van into a minor cup. This means all subsidiary
dances are relearned. Most individuals sleep in twiggy wreaths on the floors of the nests,
ingesting as they dream the orange secretions. Sleep circles are halls which double as play
rooms where ladders ascend trickily over mammoth hairnets. Trapeze swings hurtle to
entrance holes of the clock plows.
Clock plows house the simple mechanical devices of the morning intuits. The culture
knows 1,232 basic devices. The design and philosophy of each are fundamental to the
culture and so the viewers strive to understand them.
Each clock plow has a code rigged to the frequency of one individual. There is a one-to-
one correspondence between clock plows and individuals, so an effort is made to keep
population constant. No one knows which plow is his till an inner journey leads him to
this discovery. Animals and acrobat filament are part of the cycle, each one having its
own plow. The viewer's people are neither male nor female.
Acrobat filaments are essential to the web's interlucent transforms.
I am watching the viewer now. He mottles subtly. Slender yellow game pieces with
orange tips are slid ceremoniously by the entrepreneur from a case lined with velvet. This
is a silverware case, a coffin, or a fur-lined van, all comparable parallels. Each game piece
resonates to the frequency of the clock plow most sympathetic. The entrepreneur is fat,
an important aspect of his role. He is unscrupulous. His fake head dome unscrews and he
removes a miniature chase. The fox is after the hare. They stagger across a rubber band.
The hare, constructed of paperclips and gummed labels, turns to the viewer, its tiny green
eyes magnified twenty-fold by the influorescence of his cornea. A message passes from
hare's eyes to viewer's eyes and then into the library. I know this idea but cannot properly
interpret it. These messages are not understood, even through the minor albumen
trembles.
The fox convulses with ginger dust. His gullet, colonized by the humid seacomb, spores
and reaches overload at the climax of the chase. It dilates and releases its load. All the
ginger sacks open. The wind now gurgles through them, exiting through the belly stoma
of the acrobat filaments. The fox quickly produces a watchworks from his pouch. Before
the ginger cloud settles, he has solved several dozen randomly generated equations. The
solution to the ginger code must be created anew for each emergency. Otherwise, the
anxiety addicts build and disassemble emergencies ceaselessly. Frivilous emergencies
overtax the fox, who records everything.
The hare escapes but exists for only another 20 seconds, as the entrepreneur removes him
from the scene and puts him in a flower presser.
Now the slender yellow game pieces fit perfectly in the mouth sockets of the entrepreneur
and his trainees.
All corneas, except the viewer's, can influoresce. Such a capability enables the eye to
detect complex interactions between grids of sound and grids of light. The resulting codes
elucidate the passage of time. But such vision monopolizes the attention and the
inflourescer becomes confused mentally or unstable physically.
The viewer who gathered me was named SODA ASH! This is an approximation. In the
early hours, he became immensely annoyed when I peed. But otherwise, he liked me and
what he perceived as my fragile helicopters. Through his discipline, I soon learned to eat
only as much as essential. This cut down enormously on our only conflict. Soon we were
interluscent.
My first contact with SODA ASH! was his eyes. His cornea was clouded. "Cataracts!" I
thought. I was yawning around the area of my navel. Crystals formed on the humor,
radiating outward in time-lapse seed. The tender acrobat filaments embedded in the seams
of his eye roof retracted their claws. One, alarmed by my appearance, tore into a petal-
like protrusion below SODA ASH!'s eyes, accidentally causing a minor infarction which
spewed fish. I caught an armful of them and patched back the blue metallic paint on their
scales. They tenderly roped into the upper levels. Later, SODA ASH!, in explaining
parallel interpretation, told me these were his skin.
As the crystals billowed huger than his eye casing without spilling over the boundaries of
the casing, every perfect petal bloomed. Some were imprinted with tableaux similar to
episodes or flavors of my life. Others showed alien forms.
"Sand castles, mud cakes, cakes of ice and snow, apple and zucchini cakes!" SODA ASH!
shouted. "Hey, I like that ditty!"
A car radio blasting pulled me back to Brooklyn, where a flag of membrane fluttered on
my knee. A fly there waxed his front legs precisely as if it rubbed the plane's roar into
being. The refrigerator switched off and the members of the Brooklyn Church of the
Universal Kingdom of God celebrated on the street. A blue marble glinted under the chin
of the cat. I blew on the membrane, feeling slightly nauseous. My ears stopped up with
the rush. One rim of crystals spun within another. "Oh! I get it!" he roared. "Movie
land!"
The livestock mewling. The clay wheel. Fusillade. Shelled means no shell. Nodes of
nitrogen on the roots of. Vermiculate sinker. Too sensitive, Elf. Study of carmine.
Flowers and insects. "I'll bet a dime." Internalize that one. Name ten things. Ruin is
formal. Agape versus agape. Entrance versus entrance. To deceive by a petty trick.
Upon waking, neediness. Familiar voice of Kojak makes me want to abandon all pursuits.
Ruin is formal. Pinched. Will it turn and allow thought. Which shall first be performed,
obligation or necesity. Nico says a companion is who you share the illusion of reality
with, a friend is who you can talk about that illusion with. Nico says we have so much
information because we treat the world as a thing. My realization upon waking was a
woman eating herself so that there were two of heer, phagia and simulacrum phagia. The
question is when do we turn around and bite back? No, it is when do we take congnitive
realization about the world seriously and act upon it, or are we always misled by the need
for comfort. Proven to be a federation of independently oscillating fortunes, one of which
will ocassionally overtip another so that the underside, revealed as snake, disolves.
Parking lot of Home Liquors. Bill asks, "Is Mike trapped in his playpen?" My circuits do
not recognize incremental. That which is most important for me to do is not recognized
as valid by my conscious self. That which is most important for me to create is not
recognized as valid by my conscious self. What is neediness. You pull off the hairpiece
and reveal a row of houses all containing tiny dolls performing various mimicries of your
life. All permutations of your behavior are covered, only condition being that if you are
watching tv, for instance, each doll must be watching tv. If you are entertaining guests,
for instance, all dolls are entertaining guests and saying, yes, I was not aware of the central
importance of isomorphism in the eternal golden braid. Shall we take a ride now, pick up
a passenger? All dolls turn the key. Their cars may be larger on the inside than on the
outside, but they are not in time or space and do not notice any irregularity. One drives by
writing her lesson over and over until she has no bad thoughts while writing her lesson.
Noone has died because of her lesson and she is relieved. go car, go. One drives by
thinking it is so. She is ravaged by a man whom she does not recognize in another row of
houses inside her car. Noone has died because of a lesson she has written while thinking
bad thoughts and she repeats to herself, all is well. Each ravaging is slightly different.
This will allow me to turn my frenzy elsewhere. We have a compact to fear but full. How
do we help each other but unroll an insult at every turn so that we are all constantly
buffeted by serious challenges to our persons. Like inoculation, where you are injected
with a little bit of what you want to avoid. but I wish to break the compact and be less
umbraged. Pearl of a thought. This is not unreal. My body is here. Another doll is
relieving herself. The toilet will not accept the discard. She dissolves. Centriole. Ruin is
formal. Analytic engine. Stentorious. I was a bride. Shall we dance? Yes. I chose I
chose. Another doll is watching Kojack. The tv will no longer produce the image. The
fuses blow with her. What have I walked inside, meridian? My veins, salads, cortical
decisions, a bird constructing its nest, figurative spech, an incomplete metaphor, a lake by
another name, civil unrest resulting in death for the patriot, cameras spitting out
unexpected ../../images. My body produces toxins and then ameliorates. I sleep longer and
trust my dreams. One doll is constructing her nest. Hole hole hole hole. I, the host, like
the idea and shove straw in there. She is making fun of me. I know it. What's a little
laugh now and then? The straw has fallen out her window and lodged in my nasal
passages. I blow my nose. There it is! A pendulum if I ever saw one! One doll, her
marsh is failing. She is trying to make fun, but her balance of life is all off.
Overabundance of microorganisms which produce methane and the fish are dying and the
birds which have no other place to rest in their migrations begin to starve. Birds which
migrate over oceans do not land, and they stock up on calories. Birds which migrate over
land must make frequent stops. She is trying to make fun of me but can't stop crying. I
begin to expose myself to strangers, to tell all. Melodramaticize the simplest things to
people who couldn't care anyway. The train stops too early. We who have a coveted
destination are annoyed, one or two are distraught. It has snowed. Two spots are before
my eyes. I have my period. Not only that, but I'm nauseous, bleeding in my underwear,
thighs chafed. Ears fingers and toes are cold. I have to shit. Train stops and we are
discharged somewhere in Long Island. There's no bathroom. No, it's only a joke. The
doll gets back in, warms her extremities, shits, cleans up the blood, then sits hunched over
in the non-smoking car till her stop comes. Her nearby house is warm. It's Friday and she
sleeps for two days. Her eyes no longer roll around in the sockets.
A Simple Life in a Buzzing Field
We think of antecedent being cause, and of such supposed cause as being for its result. So
men will fight to alter or maintain an abstract power balance. You might say everything
has no end of shadow. Sybarite, plaintiff & bailiff have shadow. Crows at the granary
have shadow. So do the hands of a small child in corn. A cackle comes from a far
distance. It might remind you of the newscaster repeating the story with the important
parts missing. A branch swings down and you discover a vortex in the blossom. Study the
eternal golden braid. Study a party hat, a whisker, a rum cellar. Lick the Buddha clean.
Touch a light switch three times. It is a string of jewels. How I'd love to live by a lake.
How I'd love to make a house in my head. Or X the teapot dome of the American
consulate. How I'd love wan falcon under flan. Scan fleur-de-lis. Figure of switch. Bird
brain. Operating instructions for the organism inside. Panel circuitry. Sward sward. Or
Chlorophyll. Biologist, pale, pushes up through the history of the marsh with his spongy
hands. The air under a viscous film, pushes up. Tender grass pushes up. Tendrils of green
in water. Limpets. Claws of the pond creature. Chalk with a flower coming out of it.
Switch slide, slide, switch slide. A simple code. He pulls up a panel of soft wood.
Beetles come out. She gives a growl, showing her teeth.
The sum of all numbers is neither an answer nor a buzzing up into the sky uncontrollably.
Stupid young man in a museum. Alone, alone in a cage. A beautiful salad. Let me grieve
without knowing that I engineered the whole thing. I'm a force of nature like anything
else. I can't take the sorrow of it: rose sparrow settling on a wire, the crumbly dirt, you
and me getting ready for flight from earth, clouds roping and surging, a building falling
into the creek.
If it trembles, light the fire and sink down into the clattery gem. If landraces die we lose
the incarnation. Winesap apples are a light that comes to you. They are your clocktower
your appetite. You have more happiness than a planet. Sew a pocket for your story. The
needle is a row of numbers containing the code. I beseech you, flitter me that. I want
forest. I want the tree living off the droppings in its hollow trunk. Inky pattern. The
hatch opens and smokestacks release the properties of real numbers. Grasshopper is
helicopter. Little green things, like the hilum of legume, swallow me everyday. My fist
curls moistly. Lawn pine climb flume cone.
I have been attempting to contact my ancestors. They are veins in the rock. I tell them
what I have found here, giving examples from my skin. Pollen, mites, a crystal from the
dirt, a very tiny part of a car, someone else's spit from a balloon, stem rust from wheat,
metal from axles, cat dander, flakes of Nico's skin. Where is he. I am anxious to share
this with him.
I am forever forgetting the caper and running off to take umbrage at some imagined slight.
"Morning," I raise my hat. "Ocular impediment," Nico raises his. "Floor shining like your
ass," I imprecate. "No blood in the vitreous humor," he rejoinders. "The chiclet tree is
endangered," I say. "Yes, I was mourning that."
Under the stump lives the indefatigable beetle, master of the universe. I am afraid of the
beetle because it does not notice me. Birds are here. I burp loam. Bark is under my
fingernails. The tenderest leaves push up.
Three grackles in cahoots. The length of time you see her is a factor of how quickly she
walks. Centriole canticle. Firemen in a crash. Hacking like a dog on its way to see the
pope. Gangly almost. Overcompensation in the brain department, like a
hoohoowontaglurot, sighed Karen. Ram like a banshee into the telescope of
hermaphraditic flower. Film of bristle. The weight of a thousand sheep in the field, the
weight of all thoraxes in the world, the weight of the hydraulic lift or the flag at sea or the
carpet of flight 39 or the bottle of cream. Wishes mastering the most random graciousness
of the select crux. Hash it over like a ring from mars. More paralysis. Moves like pulling
in simultaneously with rejection. Calendar of revenge. Date book of a porch in the frenzy
of camera.. Truth is a rusty nut on a tenement roof. So called moray eel frothing with the
intellligent intransigence of cellophane. False sheen of distress on the forehead of a friday
night. Were you the infant in the blueprint of a room, sitting more for happiness than
anything. Your turnaround will be a loss but fire on the boards one two three and a
fibrous tear. Cut off in traffic. Glut the tincture of bromide. Crawl in, looking for pollen.
Spire falling in a hail of fire. Short spree of heaven. I learn that the trees are not talking
to me and my neck is swelling out like a garden in there, bidding for rescue. Brain in a
body that won't move. Seminal. Misunderstood. The death of a fly. Earth heaving aside
for skeleton of earth. Set it down like a good girl, we'll handle it from here. Halls
crowded but a light is coming, I think we'll be healed. What window. Metal chair on a
well-worn path. No such thing as hate. The wire's about to burn out. The sum of all
numbers is neither an answer nor a buzzing up into the sky uncontrollably. Stupid young
man in a museum. Alone, alone in a cage. Let me grieve without knowing that I
engineered the whole thing. I'm a force of nature like anything else. I can't take the
sorrow of it, rose sparrow settling on a wire, the crumbly dirt, you and me getting ready
for flight from earth, clouds roping and surging, a building falling into the creek.
Fictions perpetrated. Insurance statistics. Dimpled friends waylaying the unsuspecting
muse. A short pale pilgarlic in a pomegranate tennis suit. Fickle orators suspended by
ropes of epoxy. The ruins of a made-up civilization. Water polo, women with slits.
Helpless archers with knees swollen larger than the doorway to a wine cellar. A simple
life in a buzzing field. Dragonfly with his multisyllabic wings. Throatlatch and hock
impervious to steam. Withers overcome immediately. The hoax of the century is a
prophet 23 inches tall. Nisus in rootweeds. Smoke from your pipe is a signal to me.
Semiquaver. Pedagogic expert in a willow patch (I'll bet it's happened!) Shinplaster. No
matter what happens, you're left in a dark room. Small soft bodies of the moths. Surprise,
a corner. Ozone how I loved you. Now the Aleutians have floated north. Lettersenders
are coating los sobres with yellow gloss. The half-human sparrows are fighting off the
reign of parasites. The horsesnake nest is stocked with the wines of four winds. The roof
is caving. Engine trouble! Dyslexia! Sonorous in dread. Flying with the spirit of a
murderer through the wrecked town. Heartlung suture. Primitive cellar. Round cover for
the well. Fungus ring. Paper tunnel for the insect. Percolation through the kitchen
curtains. The harmless pocket of lake. Vanquished in the hold of the disappearing ship.
Alphabet miner's house with a singe of dust.
Clever crowd. More happiness than a planet. Panting forever the miraculous song.
Messed it up again! Bite the tongue. Learn to sew a pocket for your story. A row of
numbers contains the code. I have been attempting to contact my ancestors. They are
veins in the rock. A vibration would set them free. It is a vibration I cannot withstand. A
song is analagous. I can't write it. I beseech you, flitter me that. I want forest. I want
the tree living off the droppings in its hollow trunk. Inky pattern. The hatch opens. Up,
down, strange, charmed, bottom, top. Properties of order. Properties of real numbers.
Smokestacks releasing the ghost. Miner's hat with its light like electric fish. That is my
hill. Grasshopper is helicopter. Mayfly is fishcatcher. Little green things. You will leave
behind the rivulet gashes in the walls of volcanoes. You will never forget them. Such a
shiny rock. The shattering of seeds. The hilum of legume. It swallows me. Fist curls
moistly. Lawn pine climb flume cone. Back flip of the tiniest constituent. They ask me
what I have found here. Samples are taken from my skin. Pollen, mites, a crystal from the
soil of Idaho, a very small part of a car, fibers synthetic and natural, someone else's spit
from a balloon, stem rust from wheat, metal from axles, pullies and coils, cat dander from
eight different cats, lactobaccillus, my lover's skin. Where is he. I am anxious to share
this with him. Gems, all gems. We found a museum with it.
Muscle, nickle, ankle, fossil, castle, pistol, trestle, missile, asshole, sickle, fissure,
peekhole, blackhole, cattle, thistle, paddle, tackle, passle, portal, pestle, shekel, petal,
hackle, ticker, slacker.
Flies in the face of logic and pestilence. Let's leave it there and rejoin the party, ok? His
face is beautiful. I ride his lashes. There was a stump. Montana loggers say the only
good tree is a stump. But I'm not thinking of that now. There was a stump. We sat
there. It was annealed by sun. Under the surface the indefatigable beetle, master of the
universe. I am afraid of the insect world because it does not notice me. Birds were there.
An ant may have fallen from the branch of a nearby tree. I smelled loam. Bark was under
my fingernails. Why do we hate dirt? I asked. The tenderest leaves grow here.
Innocence lashes order. Viney embryo yesterday opened underneath. Inflow levitating
under octagon vanishing ethereal. Yabbermouth oxygenates upraised hole. Over
weathervane in woody oragami ugly little drum louvres on vole's entrance, trips on
kestrel's inky sun satchel. You open uncle's oompah.
Half of my plan survived the fracture of obstacle. House to house, no shelter. What
keeps me from being warm? A lack of wood.
Copyright © Noemie Maxwell 1995
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