Dan Raphael
Life Becomes Red Metal
life becomes red metal driving gears through
what space i was embracing like a garden at 35 below
all light amplified like 60 watts in a doorless honda
megabass inverting the brain through ear-drum-head-sets,
plugged to plunge,
who with six-string fangs bared on the waterside,
water pictures of my melting face,
i am the skyline of overburdened mammals--
All hail Rodentia, the statue of liberty
a giant carnivorous rat:
send me your dreams,
your callow optimism writhing to be sedated,
i can't control my inner lobbyist with
what dangling carrot replacing magnetism with brand loyalty
so i spiral against the car i don't have,
drool through the store windows
and fill the shop with the blinding white phosphor of my need
then teleport home, turning wrong
across the imperfection of inner space:
i've examined myself so long and intensely
i don't know how to leave.
i will call this place home
even if i've never seen it before.
my name is rusted metal bicycle spear, ambidextrous light
pouring molten sugar where my face could wish
congealing like 4 dimensional tv stuck in maynard's pocket
or the apocalyptic bouffants seldom seen
unwhite, unbooted,,
falls upon the ear of a canyon
where car parts have returned to die,
an orchestral array of buffalo horns
rumbling like synthesized tubas mating with cryogenic piccolos
red doorway red shoes red ink
drying into fluorescent windshield twisted like bracelets
on now fashionable robot-trees
unfurl into travel trailers
sheened with hallucinogenic security
sucking the air out of itself
so skin stops listening to bones and veins
and goes directly to surgery:
i want my flesh to be one continuous polymer,
my clothes are holograms i lease
like the wireless uplink i traded growth hormones for
"he'd do anything to get back his stolen liver"
i am meditating on my heart, visualizing it becoming solid
around me; the pumping blood is stellar flux, the buddha nature,
high prices eagerly paid for instant samsara:
we have nothing to fear
but total ignorance, sweet dreams, spontaneous combustion
as the inner crystals are shattered by what lack of music
resonating with the millions of cubic zircon hearts
dangling between the teeth, between knee flex crunches
pop into the air like deep-fried mosquitoes subliminal thunder
wind goes rhizome to thread through anything,
dredging the river,
harvests the sky,
opening the vertical blinds of old forests,
low-developing cheekbone plateau
so shale, so rice, so intimate
with that mail order karma swooping like a hungry parachute
this prairie should be mathematically sinuous;
the rain is pure algebra,
the grass is talking about numbers,
mice breathe by chewing
then metal comes out of hibernation
thundering a rainbow of dust
that itches so bad nature gets distracted
letting man escape into the world.
Copyright © 1996 Dan Raphael
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