Big Cool Torture Brain

An assemblage of subway maps in the alley show the variety of ways that the world can become a representation of our past lives. A jellyfish web of reasons to seek help, reasons to be scared, reasonable assumptions about the behavior of our organ groups. The mainline assumption of painkillers, hamburgers, small talk, deadlines, aggressive panhandling, is that there is an endpoint and a pointed end. A pinprick in space we are trying to stick to. An apple core. As we age we grow outwards from a downtown, a hub and spoke model, into a series of concentric suburbs and industrial parks, and we spend our lives commuting and getting lost in the backwaters of ourselves. Yes, the main reminders of mixing salt, vinegar, chili paste, semen, gasping lotion, nocturnal animals, missionaries, lie in the lie. Live the best lie you can think of. Think of the best lie you can live and make it a real lie. Edge effects are the only thing the eye sees, color saturation kills the ability to discriminate. And we are the ability to discriminate. We are the lie. We are trying to operationalize a system of self-abnegation, of concentric denials. The atomic models of selfhood. The atom-smasher of neutral values, of not sin, of careless reason. Of reasonable people writing off their actions as economic necessity. Self-employed tax-collectors build their homes on hills of bones, on sex, on literature. It is a luxury system, a carriage forest, that carves out the heart, that invents nation, that gives birth to every good thing we know. Every good thing we know is a show. Tender pools of data parse a felt architecture of human family.

Southfacing

for Kim and Pam and Pat and Cathy

---

Midstate Marshlands

Capitol Air is off my back, how sweet this country breathes!

But the rust which mars the longest track has gathered in the eaves.

My Aunt is sick, still sick, on my first visit in a year.

The stem-cell harvest over and more chemo drawing near.

She met me with the faintest smile, a scarf about her head,

another green across her breast; we spoke and we broke bread.

And in her second-story flat which heaters had made dry,

we laid our coats upon a bed, unwrapping with a sigh.

And she, reluctant, shed her scarf, sent slowly sliding down her brow

I saw her head - thin, hard, and pink and, like the rough flanks of a sow,

there was hair, but light sparse hair that showed her head in plain.

And even this would soon be gone before the cool spring rain

which flushes out the Delaware can make South Jersey green again.

The marshlands, as they call them, are a wreckage 'cross midstate;

the juices of old industry lies like gravy on a plate

in greasy reds, cherubic stains of unlatched leaden pipes.

But still, through this hole and through that, long creeping grasses snipe,

and nail-white reeds patch up the land, make virginal the plain,

but each thick stalk, each jaundiced stalk, can't mask its liver-stains.

Aging Cannibals

When the snow stuck to the North side of all the trees

it looked like it was caking to the backs of old men

bent over to pick up firewood.

Breakfast Buffet

Those lightbulbs South of Chinatown, those bellies digesting gasoline

Those unripe organs, jury rigged

Ready stumps nest fat poached eggs

Cubes of cheese, grey persimmons

Heating pads for saline grapes

They gape, in hungry stench of ovens

Clean steel bins of Northern lovin'

Make me fat in trays of vinyl, chewed-out folds hash-browned and gummed

God I hunger for industry, this bridge

is lovely, beyond conserving, there should be nickel binoculars,

even the river slows to watch

its death.

Petroleum Pastoral

On symmetric branches, from the smoothest spires

perch blackhawks and osprey fierce with red,

who gorge themselves on coffee fish,

who swim upstream from airless lakes.

From across the seas in desperate migration

from the fatting lands and the deep rocksprings

come the minnows, squirming to silver glints

where live-bait skim the ocean top.

They know their course from a barreled compass;

separate, pliant, to hydraulic tides,

sometimes rushing forth into the marshes,

schooling and clotting the environs there.

I mourn the petroleum fishes, I breathe their bones

downtown, I see them in brown heaven

hesitating to acknowledge me,

who gave such little recognition this morning

after so much love in the corroborator three nights back.

Sieving the Mind

The pot is coming to a boil.

The pasta is stewing in a thin white froth,

and must be placed in a sieve.

Amazing how the water goes through so unhesitant

while not a single curious noodle slips through.

Thank god for engineers.

It has been a few days since I got back,

three days of seeing you stripped and straight-jacketed,

three days of wondering how much water they would strain from you,

and if any noodles should slip through.

After all, no hospital could be held to the exacting standards of a sieve.

It has been three days since the drive home from Jersey,

with the compass on the car always reading south,

always except when we had to take the beltway around Philadelphia in a slow oval.

It has been three days of wondering.

Three days,

and I am still facing South.

A Tender Resignation

The bottom dropped out

When the litmus tests started coming back positive

And the archangel positively flipped

Started recalling contacts left and right

So I bought stationary with balloons and Goethe

And tied up my wings behind me in a bow

Out of respect that would get me nowhere

Inside, gingerly pushing the envelope

I prepared to tender my resignation.

It stated with a clear throat:

“As the soft-minded

Crabs scuttle into any moist crevice

After shedding their gray-blue cigarette blankets

I am infested with the unemployed

Who nurse sores in my public dens and moorings.

Infected by congenital

Harpes, who plague the night-minds

Of guilty men, sea-sick and passed out on keeling decks

Splintering like dry oak if they are rigid

Or else tied to the yardon as eternal gaping mermaids.

“And so I find myself

Chewing the last of this wiry placenta

Hairless and pinkish in colour

Face wrinkled like a stubborn and bitter Polack

Mouth desiccated and instinctively gasping for nipple

But alone, and by my choosing

Having licked off my scent with a long pebbly tongue,

And covering my tracks in the pure-black excretia

Of my own self-discipline.”

The door does not open

  But the secretary is philosophical.

He smiles at me with big topaz teeth.

I straighten my tie and rehearse straight into them:

“And so for these reasons,

and for others which I am sure are quite evident

I hereby relinquish my muse

And any benefits thereby bestowed:

“1.        I have been writing so much between the lines that there is little to no room remaining.

2.         I want to go to the playground.

3.                  Obscene quatrains have been appearing with some regularity on the back of even my right hand.

4.                  I get teased constantly by astrologists and Cabalists.

5.                  The Maypole is in season; It is intended as a phallus: an image far too painful to visualize.

6.                  If historians were to visualize my past, they would find manifold incongruities.

7.                  I was rejected from Berkley due to the suspicion and paranoia of Balladeers.

8.                  I have personified my dinner and proceeded to eat it with greater enthusiasm.

9.                  I have begun to romanticize obscure and expensive drug habits, such as “absinthe”, for euphony’s sake.

10.              I don’t have a dog, but. . .”

“WhlHhmmmeeeeemhkEeemssgkHH!!!”

The archangel hocked up a complete child,

  And I turned and walked through the door.

I saw a round man large with kindness,

  Dressed in linen, the whole man was the shape of his own bottom.

He spoke generously:

            “I am sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Wilson

            But I thought I should inform you

that there has been an awful inexactitude laid on your doorstep.

I am in fact not the archangel, but a temp,

And tax interpreter from Outer Detroit

An incipient manifestation and general body-double for the great Logorrhean.

I was flown these thousand miles to inform you

That the grotesque acts for which you have been held responsible

Are in fact the work of a vicious carnal puppet

Of the infamous Beringer family

Who has been working out of San Diego’s Turkish garment district.

Your position will be reinstated full of benefits and lubricious vindication.”

I bounded across the room to embrace this unctuous vision

  But his bald head collapsed like cantaloupe jelly between my thin fingers.

I stood in the mess for a second

  Knowing that this must be yet another wicked ruse.

Feeling that I needed to tip the secretary,

I handed him a pack of gum like a downed bomber pilot

Would pay for cabbage soup with lipstick,

  And walked slowly out into a light, sweet rain.