In Five Years...
Le Tigre and Mark Twain
It is a steady job. We live here in seven-second intervals. We sit for seven hours and hold it, hold the word - it is an inadequate inspiration: nine years we've resisted. Of course, the revolutionary week has but a rude and dull sense of a lifelong dream. At once conceived and performed, no one sees prayers extended in this endeavor. I get it. I've been waiting for so long to see why. Your face has happened, because we need to refuse to assimilate more and more of "the divine character" - temptation bids us repeat Oscar's maxim, but he also denies us. Love to - that's the twelve disciples. Raise your hand even if the concluding paragraph does make the correction that we do the same thing over and over, two thousand times a day. Therein we should have a new literature.
We shall never know why you can look me up and down. Striped blankets create an incomplete door, a shadow, a time to dry. She continued to teach and heal. By advertisement she offered "let me see you shake it" on the electric train crossing igneous ravines as water falls, and falls again. She will do the whole of the explaining herself, and has. We may depend on that with fern mist and magnifying glass, present and future. "Dishonest members are to be admonished" hey, look - i'm really sorry. i wish to enlarge a little more on this matter: i like going at the command of Mother-Church Unique, and yet...Iraqi oil fields burn behind tank tracks.
The doctors did all they could, but it was little. (Won't you dance?) I fell off a cliff in the twilight and broke some arms. It's all so precious; that is to say, the chocolate lab on the back of my kayak balances like cumulous mountains. A secret language has to move. Under protection of these preliminaries, I bounced off a boulder, fell, and bounced again. I've got no disease; the children, as well as the adults, spread post-binary geder chores through and through the crops. Croupiers conjecture in the shower. Therein lies the promise that no one gets exploited. And will be, as soon as
The Advertiser
I want to be an old woman - this fascinating business of petroglyphs and alien visits. Who would you choose to watch the sun melt? Enter - the printing press on a sandstone mesa. How it all started: memories of East Texas backroads, mid-Victorian handicaps, and a girl who'd seen the ocean. "She ran off to California - and she never come back." Truths of advertising: they were no easy roads; I'm on fire; to replicate vacant sunglasses increases the selling power of Ladies' Home Journal. Lay down your burden, writing on walls: the advertiser of intangibles will hear your case. Our burial mounds may bulge between rotated crops plowed under bare mountains, or flourish lush on slow trains. It's gonna be a long time before empty highways dodge false hillsides. Tomorrow's friend has condemned crop circles because "an angel loves you." I don't remember how that goes.
I think I'm a housewife. Saint Barbara can't fool me now. She's got curly headed-babies under Coptic towers, and feather quills to open mission doors. "The only bilingual man in the state translated new and old laws," she said, but she lied. Never thought I'd hear a saint lie. Gold-leaf color plates roll off intaglio presses, and grandpa was an ugly man who knew all the ways to tan a hide. Tassajara - the place where they raise beef - the old men don't stop here anymore. The spirit of volunteer service was unquestioned until the natives revolted. Don't let us do it again. Remind me how to cook potatoes, how to sew - you know how this story goes.
Who Are You?
Are you real? / Speak a marble mask, you can use those teeth. / Made by lace collars, buck-toothed chaps pound them. / Where is the line with you? / You can reach before you fall stumble / before brick walls crumble / her pock-marked eyes will run out of air. // Yes, but not always / fall into absurdity. Godless sodomites / exhibit not less over me. // Do it like that.
Is our fighting in vain? What is this for? Little by little I want my body to disappear. To beg the truth. Blood runs down his arms and face. He grasps empty hands below the murky hollows that used to hold his eyes. You look, pass the mouth - it evidences incommensurability like a cave which had been a necropolis since prehistoric times. "Memory had nothing to do with skin," said a feathered snake dancing in stone. Let the outside to be like the inside, and thatched roofs will cover earthen huts. Ideas cannot be proven, nor summed up, and gestures towards primitivism remain intolerated.
Rocks pile into a lion shape. A pyramid crumbles on the horizon. "I'm happy. I'm useless." Four men in loincloths push a block of stone up a sandy incline. "We believed, falsely, that there was this huge group of beings out there, called gods or aliens, who would understand." Muscles ripple down a man's abdomen. He holds his elbows out and clenches his hands at his waist. "Hello? Hello...hello?" A spindly woman in a pointy hat crosses her eyes, grins toothily, and lifts her wrists above her tilted head. Next to her, a wrinkled barmaid leans one elbow on the wooden talble and shakes a sagging fist below her folded scowl. "Bring me sweet dreams, and help me be good tomorrow."
A Nest of Crocodiles
do not believe
what conclusions we can draw
from a nest of crocodiles.
this science of the unknown
for whom shall we vote?
Rome, or Reason?
Who
stilled the pulsations
suffered extreme publicity
chafing at restraints
transformed into army
forbid your capitalists
turned your attention
diminished senseless spoilation
that bondsman is now free
waken us to our own lives
refuse to admit refusal
shelter unprotected absence
take everything taken for use:
do not forget.
A Reducers' Guide
The Reducers' Manual:
the world is born with the word
who was called the tyrants of the elements?
"I wanted to know what happened to me"
is in no way equipped with a life preceding the story
"You wanted to know what happened to everybody"
is not the target with the tale as arrow
i don't doubt that
there is no other time
than that of the enunciation
the process is very similar to
flying around on a prison ship
to see not only what was lost but
what there is still to be found.
